Re-Reading: from Swift to Solomon

by Rick Dietrich

One of the delights of living in a small town — and living in town: I walk to work. Monday morning is a particular pleasure. I get up. I walk down the stairs. And after breakfast, I walk down the little hill on Berkley Place, then down the greater hill on Frederick Street to First Presbyterian Church. I do ascend six stairs into the Frazer Building. But the rest of the morning is more downhill — in the best sense: I’m on a mental and emotional bicycle, or sled. I’m almost flying.

Because it is on Monday morning that I read the lectionary passages for the coming Sunday and decide which I’m going to preach from. (I admit there's always the possibility I may preach on none of them, but it's a small possibility.) Actually — this is the downhill joy of it — I don't read these passages. I re­read them.

Rereading means coming on old favorites. This Sunday, for example — I’m writing on September 12 — there's that wonderful passage from James where the tongue catches on fire … from spite! Dipped in hell, it sets the earth ablaze. I read it again, re-re-read it, thinking Swift must have loved this.

I’m thinking about Swift, Jonathan, because I’ve just finished re-reading Gulliver's Travels — for about the fourth time, if you count the Classic Comics' version. I had taken one of my beaten-up copies with me — of the book, I promise; I’ve lost the comic — on education leave, just thrown it in the box to make it a half-pound heavier; and there it was just as I was growing weary of the piles of theology and intellectual history I’d laid underneath Gulliver as foundation.

What great fun — the petty Tom and Tomasina Thumbs of Lilliput that Gulliver offends by putting out a fire, the earthy Brobdinagians, who could contribute so much to our Book of Order, precisely by contributing so little. For "no law of that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. . . . And to write a comment upon any law is a capital crime." The musical mathematicians of the floating isle of Laputa with nary a practical thought in their head, but intensely interested in politics. And the terrible Houyhnhnms, completely ruled by reason.

I had forgotten how terrible they were, perhaps because I remembered too clearly how wonderful Gulliver thought them and how much he came as a result to hate humankind, because we are unreasonable. The Houyhnhnms are no doubt right about that. At first they deem us completely without reason, then after Gulliver acquaints them more particularly with our history, they decide … I found this underline in my Riverside edition, and I underlined it again: they decide we are rather "a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident [they] could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us."

Fair enough. At least, it's difficult for a Reformed theologian to lodge too vigorous a dissent. But the Houyhnhnms are, I find anyway, a sort of animals to whose share some small pittance of compassion had fallen, which has been sufficiently ignored to fall completely out of use. The Houyhnhnms' hearts now pump only blood. They are only calculating and in no way wise.

Which brings us as we come to the end of our run to Solomon, whose story I found myself re­reading the week before I went off to read theology and then began to wane and thanked God I’d packed my Swift. The Old Testament lesson that week was Solomon's appeal to God for wisdom, though the lesson did lead me forward through that whole delightful narrative (in 1 Kings 1-11). The petition comes early in the story, which tends to make its own way downhill thereafter. But at this point Solomon has only just succeeded David through the machinations of Bathsheba, his mother, and the prophet Nathan, both of whom have been re-reading Machiavelli. Solomon has kept himself away from that intrigue, so he can love the Lord and walk "in the statutes of David his father." He has walked as far as Gibeon to offer a sacrifice to God, who appears to him there in a dream. What does the new king want, God wants to know: "Ask what I shall give you." And Solomon asks for "a listening heart," if I read the Hebrew correctly. (For some reason NRSV translates this "an understanding mind" [3:9]. One of you Old Testament scholars can explain to me why.)

The thing about calculation is that it is only self-interested. The Houyhnhnms exile Gulliver, set him adrift on uncharted seas, because they can see no advantage to them in his remaining. Calculation is only self-interested, but wisdom listens. In a sense, it reads and re-reads and re-reads with delight. Then it listens some more.

Rick Dietrich is the Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Stranton, VA. For more from Rick log onto Theologic Al's Bar & Grill