It’s a fairly close-to-the-vest straight commentary, but it’s still a nice thing to read. Although I don’t like it when ‘the least of all the apostles, who is not worthy to be called an apostle’, as Paul calls himself, tries to shut me up, just because I’m not him, I think it’s more than possible, it’s almost necessary to have a fruitful conversation with him, and I wouldn’t want him to be forgotten or neglected.

Now, specifically as to Paul comments about my sister, Woman, that she should be silent in church—I mean, just to pick something, right—Maggie actually comments on this passage and says, “Worship in the church in Corinth was obviously a far less formal affair than our own church services.” She says after looking at this passage and another in the same letter, that women were indeed allowed to preach, or “prophesy”, as he put it; they simply weren’t allowed to be part of the community’s in-church commentary or reaction to the sermon. Now, this is a limitation and an unjust one, but it’s also a lot less perhaps than what women would deal with in the unchurched community of those days. The Greeks thought all sorts of crazy things about my sister, Woman, you know: the woman was supposed to be chaste, and the man, not; how that could ever work is anybody’s guess. I mean, the Greek man wanted to be able to visit Aphrodite when he wanted, but he wanted also whatever daughter he had to always be like Hestia, “respectable, presentable, a vegetable”, as some would have it, since they never really respected the girls they slept with. In the Odyssey, Odysseus, after an interval of longer or shorter duration in the imagination of the listener, based on their age and disposition, says to the perfect-sex-goddess, you know, I don’t like you so much anymore; I just want my own woman back, my own things, you know—Homer wasn’t a romantic. Scholars not especially favorable to Christianity say that our modern ideas of romance began in the European Middle Ages, and therefore it was a sort of Christianity, although the scholars deny that—it’s all in this manuscript I found, and that’s it, it’s narrow—but broadly everything back then was a sort of Christianity; it was in the air for everyone, even though romantic or folk Christianity wasn’t the orthodox kind, which then tried either to exclude sex from life entirely wherever possible, or else subjugate it to the mind and conscious control to the greatest extent possible or imaginable, lest we wake up after sex next to a girl we don’t respect—but ANYWAY—

But I mean if you look at the church in Corinth and us, we’re by no means entirely in the right, you know. With them apparently basically anyone could give a message and a considerable number of different people could give a commentary on it; with us, there is no commentary in church on a sermon, and in practically all congregations the only person who can preach is only somebody who’s a professional with a degree who got it after a number of years of study and the outlay of many thousands of dollars. That’s life in a society that fancies itself scientific, you know. And learning can be great: but a great deal of learning carried poorly in the individual leads to a clenching or hardening of the heart, and a great deal of professionalization in society, especially carried out poorly, leads to hierarchies and other unhelpful phenomena, you know. Which is just to say that sometimes we still have something to learn from our comparatively ‘primitive’ ancestors, despite it all, you know.

…. Paul is certainly something else, though. The fault isn’t entirely his, for various technical and non-technical reasons, but it’s very odd to try to make decisions based on one-half of anything—one-half of a correspondence or a debate. Paul was certainly upset at—somebody or another, some group—and we are to accept that he is right and they are wrong based on his person and authority, even though he won’t even come out and tell us what the dispute was, to save our virgin ears, you know…. One gets the feeling of a father who loves deeply and yet is beset by and almost crippled by various unspoken and half-spoken fears, not least, I imagine, about love itself.

But again, that’s my opinion—Maggie was a Silent Generation girl, and played it pretty close to the vest.

…. And, you know, “People say: I don’t want to believe in the evil spirits! I want to watch the Wizard of Oz!” And I don’t want to believe in good spirits: I want to do my taxes. 🙄

And, you know, I think an element of individualism is a healthy thing for a society, although there is a danger—it’s all too easy—for people who dismiss the gospel to just jettison community, and the metaphor of group personhood (Adam/Christ) could be useful here…. Although certainly the Christian community has often meant in the past the rule of what I might loosely called the over-educated.

Even the scientists become disaffected, ironically. They’re of two minds, but either way the dominant emotion is discomfort. In speech the scientists accuse the Christians of not completing the process of the rationalization-and-control of life, for letting inspiration wiggle at the edges, not quite dead. But you give them the intellectualism, the abstract ideas, and they say, What the hell do I want abstract ideas for? Partly it’s ‘incorrect’, I guess—I study geology; don’t let those physicists turn you around—but also, I don’t know. SHOULD you have to take a degree before you are part of the conversation…. And promise that you won’t change anything before you get to finish your degree? 😸

…. Perhaps something brief should be said about the fact that Maggie is a woman, which is good, sorta—a sorta negative victory, an avoidance of suppression: even if it is a very muted non-suppression, for various reasons. “I awake to see that no one is free.”