The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh. In Hebrew literature, nephesh means throat. Whatever else we make of words figuratively, and there is plenty to make of them that way as I’m about to show, we take literature literally for the same reason we take music musically. We start there so that it can take us somewhere.

The Hebrew language is earthy and imagistic, thick with metaphor, and nephesh is characteristic Hebrew. Think about your neck. It connects what thinks with what feels, to say nothing of everything else. Your neck or throat is where the wind goes up and down between your nostrils your mouth and your lungs. It’s a place where everything comes together. Everything has to go between the head and the body. Cut your neck and it’s all over. There’s nothing. No nephesh no soul, no ‘you’. Notice that the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the invisible. It’s visible. It’s the neck, the throat.

On 22 May, 1986, my first child was born at 3:42 in the morning. After a long day prior of contractions and a longer night of labor, when our nurse and our obstetrician recognized that the baby was in severe distress, they rushed blessed Victoria and me too into the operating room where I watched my son Evan delivered by emergency caesarean section. When the coast was clear, I went out to a waiting room and closed the louvered doors of an old-fashioned phone booth to call my parents. The phone rang once, and again, then my father picked up and said hello. At the sound of his voice, all that I’d wanted to say I couldn’t say. I couldn’t speak. Something was stuck in my throat, and it was this recognition: All my life I thought I knew my parents loved me, and now I know I had no idea.

In the English language there are idioms that have nothing to do with Hebrew. Stuck in the throat isn’t one of them.

In response to a school assignment to write about his favorite place, Evan wrote:

Evan 11/28/94

My favorite place is with my Grandma and Grandpa, and Mom and Dad. I like it because Grandpa goes hunting and brings back deer meat.

The sound of my Grandpa’s house is logs crackling in the fire. The smell in my Grandpa’s house smells like Japanese cooking. It smells like Japanese cooking because my Grandma is 100 percent Japanese. Her cooking tastes fabulous!!! When I am with my Grandma and Grandpa, and Mom and Dad my heart is happy.

12 December 1991 — Evan entered kindergarten this fall, so one day early in September I found myself rubbing my eyes at a dizzying array of grade school backpacks — fluorescent green and pink, periwinkle and lavender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bags, all of them trying hard to look enticing but all of them shining on my retinae as the price to be paid for growing up. My son, they tell me, needed something to carry his papers in, so it fell to me to get him a backpack, the harbinger and first installment of that baggage for which children are so famous and beautiful for not wearing. By dint of will I chose one, a black one — the zipper, the straps, all of it is black — the good reason being that it would be easy to spot amid the neon, the real reason being that when you consider what it is a child leaves behind to go to school his outfit ought to be funereal.

I’m shamelessly overprotective. I know. I am a sissy. But Lord, What am I doing? seems a fair question to ask when you look into your child’s eyes and see not only tears but terror.

A couple of weeks ago we were lying in bed and Evan asked me, “Daddy, who came first, the Indians or God?” I started to say God but not wanting to have gone to school for nothing I thought to tell him that God came first except that God doesn’t have a beginning the way people do, that time and space are beneath God, God being above and beyond it and all that. I didn’t expect him to understand this any more than I myself understand it, so I just said, “God did.”

But God isn’t above and beyond it. Not anymore. Think of it. The message of Christmas is news that whereas from eternity he was timeless now, over there in Mary’s womb, God hunkers down in time. The Unconditioned Being becomes conditioned. The Infinite who could have said humbug to our flesh and our finitude tries it on for size. He takes on baggage he’s supposed to be famous and beautiful for not wearing. Unless it were true it would make no sense at all.

23 June ‘93 — We took the train to Boston today to meet Joel [a brother-in-law] and Joshua [a nephew] at the New England Aquarium. On the way home, Gabriel and Evan were sitting on opposite sides of the aisle in front of Victoria and me. At one stop as some passengers got off, we noticed that Gabriel was patting people on their arms as they passed by him. Victoria leaned forward and whispered, “Gabriel. What are you doing?”

“I’M PETTING THEM, MOM,” he matter-of-factly replied.

“What!? [incredulously] Gabey, you shouldn’t do that, son.”

“I’M ONLY PETTING THEM, MOM,” he explained.

We overheard Evan telling Gabriel to go pet someone in the car behind us, the purser whom Gabriel mistook for the conductor.

“Go pet him!” Evan urged.

“NO,” Gabe said. “I DON’T PET ABDUCTORS [sic].”

Then a big ruddy Norwegian came up the aisle. Gabriel saw him approaching and didn’t pat him as he walked past. Evan asked Gabriel, “Why didn’t you pet him?”

“BECAUSE I DON’T PET THE ONES WITH RED BEARDS.”

He was born 22 May 1986. Technical difficulties prevent my posting the oldest and first photo of Evan, an ultrasound polaroid taken in October, 1985. The next post [above] is the counterfactual, the most recent photograph we have of him. There he is in Fort Knox, Kentucky, making sure a .50 caliber machine gun isn’t suffering technical difficulties.

I spent the first hour of the morning looking at his baby pictures. Pondering him, thinking of what an outstanding young man he is, I remembered something else delivered in May, 1986: a commencement address given by David McCullough. That fine historian and wise man encouraged the graduates of Middlebury College to travel internationally — to go to places like Florence and Edinburgh — “because I think afterward you will see and understand your own country more clearly.” He then encouraged them to travel across this country, and he named many places, some of them — Monticello, Illinois, Kentucky, Antietam, and the Brooklyn Bridge — places where Evan has had his “boots on the ground”. “Look at people when you travel,” McCullough said. “Talk to people and listen to what they have to say. Learn to listen. So few ever learn to listen,” he told them. “Patriotism, love of country. Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along and furthermore, doesn’t care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this country, nor are they interested.” And he concluded, “Try not to waste too much of your time chasing after success. Success is fickle and very perishable and largely beyond your control. Attainment — excellence — is the thing to strive for, believe me. It will belong to you. Choose your work carefully. It will shape you, it is what you will become. Take your work seriously, but not yourselves. Go with confidence. Prize tolerance and horse sense. And some time, somewhere along the way, do something for your country.”

Evan is to that speech a beau ideal. Twenty-three years ago they were delivered, a coincidence of their similitude. My son is a man cut to the measure of good words spoken among the granite of Vermont.

Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When my son Evan took a course at Wheaton called “Classics of Western Literature” he asked me what I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I said I had met Beatrice, actually, and it turns out that her name is Victoria. The way he and his roommate kept their room, I added, would remind his mother of Dante’s description of hell. He smiled and changed the subject, saying he had also read again Augustine’s Confessions — he’d read it in high school — a book which he knows to bring up is to get me started.

We live in confessional times. Secrets once deliberated behind closed doors, sins once examined between priest and penitent, crimes once addressed by blind justice — all have become fodder for newspaper features, radio shows and TV news and programming. Victim and offender alike think nothing of appearing together on Dr. Phil or Oprah or 60 Minutes.

The guiding premise seems to be that if people tell their story — with enough anger, passion and candid details — they forget the past; they will have justified themselves before and/or absolved themselves of whatever burden they’ve laid at the public’s feet. Even a Christian is encouraged, above everything else, to tell his or her own story, as if its very uniqueness commands priority over the story of the faith.

By its very title, St. Augustine’s Confessions ought to attract a wide audience, promising as it does to be a tell-all book of the same genre as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Many of us who opened it first as adolescents scanned through it quickly in hopes of discovering salacious revelations and lurid stories of low life in pagan antiquity. Little did we realize how much we mirrored the young Augustine by these very expectations!

The Confessions ought to be a handbook for the would-be storyteller, but it isn’t. Not that there isn’t a story contained therein: Precocious army brat from a small town, gifted student with a penchant for public speaking, academic forever exploring different life-styles. But given the stories that now assault us, Augustine’s is pretty mild stuff regarded simply as story. The stolen pears pitched at pigs, his fondness for Latin literature, even his mistress (more like a common-law wife) from whom he parts — these hardly seem to us the black-as-night sins which Augustine depicts them to be. Comparatively, the outlines of Augustine’s story differ not all that much from those of many a clever graduate student pursuing a tenured-track job at a small college.

But Augustine’s purpose in sitting down in 397 A. D. to pen his Confessions was not primarily to confess his story — at least not to start, not at the beginning of the Confessions Book One wherein our hero is introduced. We need to flip ahead to Book 10, the point past which most bookmarks never venture. Read quickly, Book 10 offers us a dry, philosophical tract on human memory. Studied closely, it provides us with the wondrous key by which to comprehend Augustine’s overall purpose.

For Augustine, memory is much more than the simple ability to recount past events. Memory is best pictured by several different metaphors: the abyss of human consciousness, a vast warehouse from which we can call up a variety of past impressions, even the stomach of the mind. Augustine tells us, “I find in memory what I have to say and produce it from that source.” Memory is a land to be entered, explored and inhabited.

But, most important, memory provides Augustine with a ladder and road to God. In exploring the mystery of what we remember, Augustine exclaims, “As I raise above memory, where am I to find you? My true good and gentle source of reassurance, where shall I find you? If I find you outside my memory, I am not mindful of you. And how shall I find you if I am not mindful of you?”

As Augustine recounts his story, what is most significant are not his individual, sinful deeds, as important as these may be. What is most significant is that these deeds come to assume a shape in the telling. And this very shape comes to witness to God’s gracious existence. God may not be contained in his memory but, by reviewing his memory and rehearsing his life, Augustine discovers himself moving toward the mystery of God.

What is radical, then, about Augustine’s Confessions is not the story he confesses. Augustine did not write to catalogue his sins; that is, to tell all. Others in Late Antiquity wrote “confessions” — life stories about their moral progress from Point A to B to C. They were often more graphic in their depictions of sin than Augustine. What gives the Confessions its radical power is that Augustine is concerned not to move neatly from Point A to Point B, from tempestuous sin to placid redemption; instead he rejoices to remember everything, to remember correctly before God’s eye. Light and darkness, sin and redemption, immortality and corruption become wondrously juxtaposed before God’s gaze. Thus, Augustine can immediately follow a vivid account of his mother’s almost beatific vision at Ostia with a dark account of her stroke and death. The woman whose mind was lifted to the very frontiers of heaven is the very same woman who “explained her thoughts in such words as she could speak, then fell silent as the pain of her sickness became worse.” His writing that recounts her dying and death give us some of the most heartbreaking sentences in any literature.

The Confessions is not a seamy exposé addressed to a prurient audience; from beginning to end, it is a prayer addressed to God — a prayer for the Holy Spirit. And in being found by the Holy Spirit, Augustine discovers a truth at which every saint seems finally to arrive: Unlike the New Age pabulum which passes for spirituality, the Christian life is not a matter of forgetting, of moving smoothly onward and upward, of letting the inner child blurt out past mistakes in order to become the master of your own story. The Christian life is a matter of being able to discover and confess, confess to God, that in Christ we are enabled to remember all things; and that all things, good and bad, come to possess, through Christ, their glorious unity, even a sacrifice of praise offered to the Most High.

Evan updates are oft requested. Here’s the latest, by way of his reply to his Uncle Sean, a former Army officer. Evan copied this to me. Reading it, you’re reading someone else’s mail. That is what we do when we read the Bible. It is certainly what we Gentiles are doing when we read the Old Testament. More about that later.

________________________________

Sent: Tue 5/12/2009 9:36 PM

Re: FW: Army Ten-Miler April Update

Sean,

The butter bar training is going alright. I spend a lot of time in the field, and a lot more time working on OPORDs. The pace is very demanding. When in garrison I typically am having an OPORD several nights per week and quizzes thrown in as well, sometimes on the same nights. The field is more my element, and I prefer being a set of boots on the ground as opposed to a pogue in the classroom. I’ll be here at Knox until 9 July in Mounted Officer Basic Course. After that, the schedule is not exactly certain. I will definitely go to Airborne School (again) for 3 weeks. The other two courses that are up in the air are the Army Reconnaissance Course (ARC) and Ranger School. I may or may not attend those simply because my brigade combat team deploys to Afghanistan in either August or September to move out and draw fire. If deployment were not so imminent, I would definitely be going to ARC and Ranger. I still may, which would probably reduce my time in theater from 12 months to more like 8, and mean I’d probably deploy around December as opposed to September.

Hope all is well in West Chester. I’m glad Sean Jr. chose to go to Wheaton. He will be in good hands academically, spiritually, and professionally. Lieutenant Colonel Anderson is a true servant leader and a model of Christian officership at its best.

As for the Army 10 miler, I’d love to run it at some point. I have a buddy who is an Engineer and a West Point ‘08 grad. He and I were talking about training for a marathon once we get to Bragg (we are in the same brigade). I’m always up for a challenge though, and hopefully I can run the 10 miler at some point in the near future. See if you can convince my old man to do it!

Evan Ellsworth
2LT, AR, USA

_____________________________

‘butter bar’. A 2LT rank insignia is a single gold bar, hence the nickname ‘butter bar’.

OPORD. Operation Orders.

The Lord Bishop of Winchester, arguing in favor of the second reading of *Intoxicating Liquor (Sale to Travellers) Bill, H.L.* in the House of Parliament, 21 March 1901.

I now pass to the Bill before your Lordships. Perhaps for a moment I may remind the House of what the existing law is on this matter. Throughout England and Wales there is virtually a large measure of Sunday closing obligatory upon licensed houses…. When Parliament enacted that public-houses should be closed to that extent, it was quite obvious that some provision had to be made to meet what might be the legitimate needs of persons traveling, either by road or by rail, or otherwise. Therefore, in the Acts of 1872 and 1874 it is provided specifically, not that a traveler, but—mark the phrase—a bona fide traveler, shall be provided with refreshment if he is more than three miles from home and applies for it, or if he applies for it at a railway station when starting by train or arriving. It is of some importance to notice the actual words. The Act of 1874 provides that its provisions “shall not preclude a licensee from selling liquor at any time to bona fide travelers”—who are defined as having lodged three miles from the place of sale—nor shall they “preclude the sale at any time at a railway station of intoxicating liquors to persons arriving at or departing from such station by railroad.” …

The law is meant to provide for the necessities of those who, from business or pleasure, are traveling on Sundays, but, as a fact, instead of people getting drink because they are traveling, they travel, if you can use the word, to get drink; in other words, they travel in order to evade the law which would otherwise press upon them. That seems to me a travesty and a mockery of the provisions which were laid down by Parliament for the comfort and convenience of those who might be traveling on Sundays…. A solicitor in Brighton, who has acted for the county police for ten years … said—”I think I should abolish the bona fide traveler. I think the law at present operates most undesirably. A great many of those persons who are served as bona fide travelers are in no sense of the term bona fide travelers, but merely loafing about for the purpose of getting Sunday drinks.”

_____

At the end of the 19th and the turn of the 20th century in England, in railway stations across the United Kingdom, signs were posted at the entry of a place that served liquor: “These rooms are open on Sundays only for the use of bona fide travelers.” By order of His Majesty’s government, I could enjoy a beer on Sundays at King’s Cross Station so long as I wanted to be somewhere else.

While in Harbor Springs this summer, Victoria and I, with Evan and Kristin, were guests of Kris’s parents Andy and Robin Torok, who took us down to Tapawingo in Ellsworth, Michigan. (The New York Times has called Tapawingo America’s finest French Country Inn.) Andy ordered for the table bottles of 1989 Château Margaux Premier Grand Cru Classé and 1989 Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande Grand Cru Classé, Pauillac.

“The wine and the food in my life aren’t ever going to get much better than this,” I thought. But it wasn’t merely what we were drinking and eating. It was the mise en scènes in which we enjoyed them. I don’t mean just the décor, the garden and the lake. It’s that Andy and Robin aren’t loafing about for drinks. They are bona fide travelers. Whether we’re in the District at Ristorante i Ricchi, in Los Angeles at the Jonathan Club, in Harbor Springs at the New York, or in Ellsworth at Tapawingo—whether we’re consuming a ‘Big C’ at Clyde’s in St. Ignace—they enjoy pleasures as casual accommodations on our homeward journey. As much as they love America, they desire a better country, too. So do I.

Life is not what the Roman poet Juvenal lamented as bread and circuses. So when we raise the wine glass to our lips, let it be a toast to that day when we shall drink with Jesus the fruit of the vine new in our Father’s house. Let us remember our heavenly country.