Reading Ram Dass’ book on the Gita, which is problematic, of couse, because hes an old hippie, and hes not a scholar, a hobby hindu, but early on in the book, he tells a story:

Krsna, at one stage of his incarnation as an avatar, was a beautiful young boy….there was a great student of the Gita, an old man. He was so intent on studying the Gita that he had stopped doing all of his work…soon he and his wife were w/o food. His wife was v. harsh w. him saying, “you have a duty to go out and bring food home for the family.” She kept pressing him, making his life v. difficult, but hed just go off into the woods and study the Gita every day. One day, as he sat in the woods studying the Gita, the old man came across a line in the book in which Krsna said, “If you offer all of your devotion to me me, you need worry about nothing in the world. It will all be taken care of”…

Ram Dass, Living the Bhavagavad Gita, 3

I am going to paraphrase here, because paraphrasing is a way of indiciating that one understands the process,

The man, underlines the line, with pencil. At the same time, in town, a young man arrives and delivers months of provisions to the mans wife. The mans wife notices that the young man is bleeding, straight across the chest, one line, like the line that was undercrossed in the text. He had write on the body of Gd, w/o realizing it. His writing on the body of Gd had done damage.

I know that this is a trust story, a do not doubt that the providence of Gd will take take care of you, and I could write about that, but I wanted to think about something else.

I didn’t go to groups today, because I have been struggling with my role in them, and I am good at making stories up, at indiciating that history or traditon can be used to indicate what is really hapenning—so I told the scm story, and the compline story, and the excommincuted from the church story, and positioned it somewhere b.w not understanding and damaging in order not to trust…and the storis provided a refuge, just like the gita provided a refuge to avoid thinking of things, the doggy paddle in an ocean of doubt and exhaustion…you paddle in one place, because one is not convinced that action does anything, and because the boat will come.

Lent is next week, and lent is all about the violence that one does on the body of our lord, and the language that is used to inflict that violence, the lirturgy of violent text on living bodies renews itself, and because we are the living flesh of Christ, it is renwed on ourselves.

The stories we tell do not rescue us, they are place holders, the theories we use to build bridges, rot. What we do to the texts that save us, we do to the texts of the divine and the human.

Ignoring others stories, cynically dismissing others voices, being amusing instead of being hard, denies the real living power of words, the words that wound krsna or Christ. What happens if I use my words not as clever constructions to prove my cleverness but to express my regret or sadness at the violence of myself on others and vice versa.

(and i think the miracle, is not the full larder, but even wounded, even with that line of text bleeding the belly of a loving gd, he still feels obliged...)