Why did my daemon make my All-Saints entry a Thessalonians recap?

Here's the next page from my book of 298 Drawing Prompts. (The previous page appeared sometime in October.) The prompt for this present pic was "Your favorite superhero".

Dear diary,

I’m sorry, holidays make me nervous, and I write this on the highest holy day of all, Halloween, so pardon the confusing clunkiness and stupidity of this entry.

Also, I don’t plan on talking about Halloween at all. I’ll talk about other things — whatever happens to pop into my mind. I shrink from being topical or relevant. I’m only trying to placate my agitated nerves by diverting excess energy into aimless rambling.

Let me start by trying to give a simple summary of the contents of the letters of Saint Paul. Around the year 51 ADD — that’s just fifty one years after time itself was recalibrated, which is why we call it “ADD”: “Anno Domini Dada” — Paul wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians. Actually it wasn’t addressed to ALL of the people who lived in Thessalonica, only “to the church of the Thessalonians”. So they had churches even at that early date. Now here’s a rundown of Paul’s letter:

1

Nothing much of interest is relayed in the initial chapter. Paul basically congratulates the members of the church for converting to his superior way of thinking. In verses 9 and 10 he says

you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

So it was apparently central to Paul’s teaching and very important to him that people stop worshiping idols. He does not see his own God as an idol: his own God is “living and true”. I wonder why.

Also he taught his converts to wait for God’s Son Jesus, who was previously dead, to return. So Jesus died, then he returned from death back to life, but then he left again, and he’ll return again. Where did he go after returning from death? Once you’ve visited death, you’ve experienced just about everything. Oh, now I see that he tells us where the Son currently resides, right in that first clause: heaven.

So if we make a travel map for Jesus, it would start out on Earth, as a living person, then it would go to death, and then make a U-turn back into Earth, and then up to Heaven; and maybe we could add a dotted line after Heaven back down to Earth, signifying that he plans to return. But why would anyone want to return from Heaven? Once you’ve visited Heaven, you’ve pretty much hit the jackpot. Maybe Jesus really likes us earthlings, and he’s willing to leave his mansion for a few moments and return into the terror-sphere to rescue us, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tried to do when he came down from his mountain. Alright, so we’ll see how that goes.

Lastly (still regarding the above-quoted passage), Paul has taught his congregation to believe that there shall be an upcoming “wrath” here on Earth. Whatever that means. Scary stuff. (I assume it’s safe to say: No one wants to suffer wrath.)

2

Then in the next chapter, Paul asks the churchgoers to remember how he did not come to them expecting to be fairly compensated for his services, unlike some passerby who washes your automobile and then hands you a bill for “services rendered” which claims that you owe him umpteen zillion dollars; instead, Paul treated his converts like a nurse treats her patient — he just healed them free of charge.

Also Paul emphasizes how good it was that the church folk accepted his message readily and with a pure heart. That’s what I get from this second chapter of his letter.

3

Then in the next chapter Paul talks about how he sent his friend Tim to the Thessalonian churchgoers, and how everything worked out well. It’s a very dull chapter.

INTERMISSION

At this point, I realize that this idea of trying to summarize all of Paul’s letters is unappealing. I’m not even done with the first one, and I’m already annoyed. So I’ll limit my scope to the present epistle alone. I’ll highlight a couple more excerpts that spark my fancy, then I’ll say sayonara.

4

Paul tells his converts to “abstain from immorality” — whatever that means — and he says to do this

so that each one of you shall know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God.

This just makes me recoil. What would this look like, if we were to view an instructional video from Saint Paul’s cinema company? How would he represent the act of “taking” a wife “in the passion of lust”, versus the “correct” way of “taking” a wife “in holiness and honor”? — For I can’t understand any of this until you show me a movie. I’m primarily a visual learner.

Then in the end of chapter 4 Paul gives his opinion on the fate of “those who are asleep”, meaning those who have died before his Christ had a chance to return to Earth. Apparently it seriously challenged the faith of those early churchgoers, if anyone from their congregation actually died. Nowadays, churchgoers die all the time — we moderns would actually be more freaked out if a churchgoer lived long enough to see the return of Paul’s Christ: for we expect that Christ will keep avoiding us (standing us up) until most of us are gone, and maybe only after the last church member is taking her final breath, Christ will hasten back to Earth, like someone who is late for a business meeting that he secretly didn’t want to attend. Paul says:

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive…

(tho Paul is dead now too, so he’ll be part of the first group, if his exotic bet ever does pay off — that is to say, if his prediction comes true)

...then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them [the dead churchgoers] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.

I hope that Paul is wrong about all this. I don’t like the thot of living in the air, forever and ever, with his Landlord Christ. Cuz I have a fear of heights: they give me vertigo. I’d rather live on the ground, with the Devil. So every day that passes is a good day for me, as long as Paul’s Flying Jesus remains a no-show. I’d be happiest with a weather forecast that promises “Zero chance of Christ” from here to eternity. Then we could maybe establish a heaven on earth.

5

Next (in ch. 5) Paul explains that this event that he just predicted will occur only when the whole world least expects it. He therefore recommends remaining super-alert, and waiting with bated breath for the return of his Uber-Adam.

I like a couple of things that Paul says near the end of this fifth and final chapter. In verse 15 he advises the churchgoers

See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.

So if Paul had been president of the U.S. during the 2001 September 11 tragedy, he might not have said “Let’s fight terror with terror.” But, it’s true, I don’t know with absolute certainty every single decision Saint Paul would have made, had he lived for one thousand nine hundred and fifty more years after addressing Thessalonica. He might have changed his mind; he might have made amendments to his theories.

I also like verse 19:

Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything.

Do modern churches follow this direction? Do modern churches “quench” the Spirit? Do modern churches “despise prophesying”? What does it mean to “quench” or “despise” the spirit of prophecy? Does it mean to reject Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the poems of Emily Dickinson (etc.) from inclusion in the divine canon, and instead to announce “No further works shall be permitted the label of ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’: God is done writing now; the King James Bible is his ONLY poetic work.”

I’m not sure if this attitude of the modern church constitutes quenching or despising the Prophetic Spirit ; so, let us “test” it, as Saint Paul recommends. ...Yet how do we go about testing it? Maybe we could start with reading aloud all these writings in church, and seeing if they sound passably similar. And then we could proceed to compare and contrast all the other masterworks of literature, for the apostle does say to “test EVERYTHING.” (Here I admire Paul’s enough-or-too-much recklessness; for it would make church into a vast reading-room!)

Finally, I like 5:26, two verses from the end:

Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss.

I understand that this is a simple tradition fastened to the context of that particular point of spacetime, but it’s nice to imagine believers kissing each other so holily.

CONCLUSION

Now I’ll give the last word to Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation of a snippet from the fifth teaching from The Bhagavad-Gita.

Learned men see with an equal eye
a scholarly and dignified priest,
a cow, an elephant, a dog,
and even an outcaste scavenger.

Men who master the worldly world
have equanimity—
they exist in the infinite spirit,
in its flawless equilibrium.