ICHABOD, THE GLORY HAS DEPARTED - The antidote trusts the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. John 16:8. Isaiah 55:8ff. Romans 10.
I challenged a Lutheran librarian to read Moby Dick, or he volunteered. I did such a good job in encouraging another reader that I decided to read the novel again.
One stuffy reviewer said it lacked humor, which made me laugh. The novel is packed with humor, without trying to be funny.
Look for the Easton Press edition in used book stores. They used it as bait to get readers to join their series of classics.
"To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee." Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Last Chapter.
PS - Going to Melville's home and reading the book again encouraged me to finish Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant.
Note the use of "thee, 2nd singular" which would have been confusing if "you single or plural" had been used.
I got in trouble when caught reading way past my bedtime. Teachers scolded me for reading ahead in the textbook and pointing out errors in the textbooks. One was that we were running out of coal. The other was that rockets could not go into outer space because there was no way to thrust against the vacuum.
I answered the FB graphic, writing, "Yes. I was saddled with scholarships in college, seminary, and doctoral studies."
I blame my mother and my grade school teachers. Mom read to us every night. I remember my sister bawling her eyes out when Lassie came home. At Garfield School, now a condo, the teachers read to us - and we loved it. I remember The Secret Garden.
I bought my own Bible and read it cover to cover.
Today I finished Jan Karon's At Home in Mitford. Recently I read Sinclair Lewis novels suggested by our Lutheran Librarian, Alec Satin.
It's no wonder that those who love Luther's works and the KJV are still avid readers. I expect the percentage to continue decreasing. Years ago, I was teaching undergraduates and giving away my extra books. They grabbed them and thanked me. They even participated in a prize - an almost complete set of Mark Twain. One student asked if he could have my own beaten up leather copy of Moby Dick, which I was giving away - but only to a Melville fan. The next week he burst out thanking me because he was enjoying every paragraph.
My four-hour class of honor students did this during the two mandatory breaks - they pulled out books and read them in silence, never running off to get food, which all other classes did.
Suddenly, one day, students acted as if I had brought cow chips to class. They were perplexed that I would give away books to read, my favorites from the overflow at home.
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| From the movie, starring Gregory Peck, with Orson Welles as the preacher. |
What could be more full of meaning?- for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 8
I must have been 8 when our family went to see the 1956 movie, Moby Dick. The whaling scenes were thrilling and terrifying, but the pulpit scene was puzzling and dark.
We visited Melville's home, where he wrote the novel, where he viewed the mountain's shape from his study as a whale breaching the surface of the ocean.
The Lutheran world is like this drought. Nothing much is expected when the forecasts insist on too much sun and too little rain for the future. Many people are watering just to keep the plants alive, and they catch glimpses of the hardiness of Creation.
Rainwater is a precious commodity now. Name With-Held likes to kid me about my rain-barrels, poised to catch every drop from the roof. They are bare, except for a few dead leaves and two filled with stored water for safer watering.
One inch of rainfall will green up the grass, revive all the plants, and give animals a chance to drink and bathe, often in the same water.
I am starting to see genuine expression of love for the King James Bible. I read a little about its history each day. People write to me about their long-held love for the KJV.
One author answered why Moby Dick - a strange novel - continues to be praised in American literature. The novel expresses the music and poetry, the grandeur of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Our English language comes from only two sources - the almost anonymous scholars of the KJV and the Earl of Oxford, pseudonym - Shakespeare.
Today's children are sheltered from both and will largely grow up discussing social media stars, ignorant of the skies above them and the libraries abandoned but close by them.
Quality has a way of lasting, because that is a property of God's Creation.
“In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers....
“...being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.
“Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet- ‘out of the belly of hell’- when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean- Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding.
“And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“...Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath- O Father!- chiefly known to me by Thy rod- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
Chapter 9 - The Sermon
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| Orson Welles as Father Mapple in "Moby Dick" |
“In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers....
“...being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.
“Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet- ‘out of the belly of hell’- when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean- Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding.
“And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“...Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath- O Father!- chiefly known to me by Thy rod- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
Chapter 9 - The Sermon