I did not hide out in the chicken coop. We have not had chickens there in several years, and their ghosts linger like dust-clothed cob webs. To be exact, that is all there is now, ghosts or no, so I went to the cabin in the UP, my usual get-away from normal life into a truly more normal life, to escape the hullaballoo of the election. As feared, the mess continues to this day, but no matter. Something odd, something like ghostly cob webs, infested my mind while I was up there. I would say I do not know why, but I do. It was a gift of sorts. I know this because the Bible is full of such gifts.
“I will attach tendrils to you and have flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am Lord.” This is a Cliff-notes version from Ezekiel, chapter 37, where the prophet Ezekiel has a vision from heaven, one in which he is visiting an ancient battle field where all the bodies have turned to dry bones in a desert land. There the Lord has him prophesize over them, to tie the bones together with sinew and cloth them with bones, and then invest them with the breath of life from God, who alone possesses such means. Thus, we see that the faithful of Israel shall be raised. But we also see that we are totally dependent on Lord, for what exactly is this breath of life but a gift beyond our understanding?
So it was that, in the short days and long dark evenings in the cabin, an understanding came upon me. It came upon me by an odd sensation of my own bones clothed with flesh and stuffed in places with the squishy guts that give material sustenance to the form. That is what I am, it said, that and that alone in this world, and that is all we will have if we do not grasp the meaning. The sensation told me that the substance of the body, and yes, the brain, only cloth the breath of life that we are given; and that this breath of life is only the spark flowing from the flame of the soul, formed in a world beyond the senses and common meaning. We are meant to grasp our dependence on God through the mortality of the body. That we do not shows a willful ignorance and stubbornness, or a willful distraction, but always willful. As Ezekiel would say, only a fool refuses to see that mere substance does not have volition and thought without the divine spark.
Such was my gift via Ezekiel, which came via three detective Books on CD that I listened to in the long ride to and from and in the long darkness in the miles above. The attitudes of the authors towards the world were strikingly different. One, Holy Ghost by Lucas Davenport, showed the American world of the Midwestern small town as a largely friendly and egalitarian place spiced up with eccentrics and cursed by occasional flare-ups of violence, sexual impropriety and greed. Davenport’s world is largely my world and I usually share that view. Randy White’s book, Mangrove Lightening, takes place in Florida, where evil is laid upon evil built tall and grown rotten through the decades and centuries. There have been smugglers, murders, horrible rapes, slavery and abuse of every sort, covered by a tattered veneer of wealth and majestic palm trees. At the root is pure evil, and it not only hovers over the swamps and gators and rusting moonshine stills like putrid mist, but lives on through the bodies of the susceptible for generations. Evil does not just disappear; it must be killed by a dagger through its heart and consumed by the creatures of the swamp, the base living elements of life. But for good or evil, we are more than bones and more than our possessions; we are, in fact, the pure spirits that we have colored, glorified or corrupted, through our actions on earth.
Then there is the final, which I have not quite finished: Robicheaux, by James Lee Bank. This takes place in southern Louisiana, Cajun country, which is not as picaresque as we might have imagined. Here, Banks tells us through his Sam Spade-like main character, Det. Robicheaux, that the world is a complex layer of prey and predator and bottom feeder. The prey are the poor working-class folk who can only react to a world that is run by the wealthy and powerful predators, the dirty commissioners and gangsters and corrupt politicians who rig the game and keep the ignorant poor, ignorant and poor. The bottom feeders are the button men, the corrupt cops and hired killers and thugs who enforce the written and unwritten rules that keep the predators on the top of the food chain. Around it all, as in White’s world, is the swirl of history and the ghosts who roam through it, investing and infecting the living with the deeds and needs and desires and heartbreaks of their own time in the flesh. There needs to be a cleaning out, a renewal, and reset button, but done by whom? Where are the noble ones free of the aches and desires of the past who might purify the temple and bring us a bright and fair world in the here and now?
In the first novel mentioned, Holy Ghost, we are able to continue our lives in happy small town middle - America, in no great need of spiritual aid, as most everything runs pretty well and honestly. Here it is not greed but lack of need that blinds us. That is fine: such books, after all, are only entertainment. It interests us and makes us laugh or pause to figure out the clues, and afterwards we are allowed to go to bed without horrible images. But in the latter two, we are forced to confront our greater reality. It is not only not always fair, but fundamentally crooked, slanted towards those who run things, and who run things for themselves. That is not all, however; unlike a Marxist diatribe on class warfare, in these novels we are confronted with supernatural evil that is so indelibly stamped into human society and human history that no human force could possibly cleanse it. We are, then, given, as all humans have since Eve and Adam, a world mired in original sin, one that we cannot raise from ourselves. And, as in all murder mysteries, we are forced to confront the ultimate result of original sin: death. The corpses rot, the armies of the confederacy and the mobster gangs putrefy in unmarked graves or cement overshoes, and thousand and millions are killed throughout history as the pawns of the powerful or as evil ones killing other evil ones, all in a vicious cycle of never-ending pain and sorrow and vice.
Phew. See how mere murder mysteries far removed from spiritual classics and the Pentateuch of the Jews lead us to grasp Ezekiel’s truth: that our bodies die, but that there is something more animating them that remains. It lives on to influence history in a way that is removed from the normal processes of material existence. Its very being clashes with our myopic view that we are alone, subject only to natural processes. More, it tells all who wish to listen that we are created from something far greater than ourselves.
All three novels speak of the evil that moves on and on through this world, needing a courageous hero to undo it one stitch at a time. But this is not enough, for it continues to grow elsewhere. We intuit from the novels that we need a superior supernatural force to help us. Ezekiel tells us that this force is God. But in his history, this saving grace has always been temporary. Zion falls again and again, as does the Temple. What is necessary, then, is a hero who is both here among the living, and also gifted with supreme supernatural powers. For Christians, this hero is Christ. Whether that was contemplated or not by the three novelists is not important. What is important is that, through their stories, they came to the same conclusion: that we need a super hero in tune with a supernatural force to eliminate the horrors that plague our world. Even the small-town Midwestern detective knows that luck and coincidence – those forces beyond our understanding and control - are necessary to solve the crime and temporarily remove evil.
Sherlock Holmes, as the quintessential materialist, never reached for divine assistance, but even he found that he could not truly kill Moriarty, the face of evil. We are nothing but sinew and bone in our corrupted view, but the crime novelist, he who deals with life and death, has learned from this that there is so much more. It is a gift to feel the bones of the body and realize the domain of the corporeally dead, for with that comes the wisdom that there is a greater force. With this, there is hope that the course of evil that seeps through everything as if timeless and immortal may someday get that stake in the heart and be devoured by its own earth-bound elements. Once we know what we are and where we are from, there is always hope, for that which made us can always remake and renew us.
I did not hide out in the chicken coop. We have not had chickens there in several years, and their ghosts linger like dust-clothed cob webs. To be exact, that is all there is now, ghosts or no, so I went to the cabin in the UP, my usual get-away from normal life into a truly more normal life, to escape the hullaballoo of the election. As feared, the mess continues to this day, but no matter. Something odd, something like ghostly cob webs, infested my mind while I was up there. I would say I do not know why, but I do. It was a gift of sorts. I know this because the Bible is full of such gifts.
“I will attach tendrils to you and have flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am Lord.” This is a Cliff-notes version from Ezekiel, chapter 37, where the prophet Ezekiel has a vision from heaven, one in which he is visiting an ancient battle field where all the bodies have turned to dry bones in a desert land. There the Lord has him prophesize over them, to tie the bones together with sinew and cloth them with bones, and then invest them with the breath of life from God, who alone possesses such means. Thus, we see that the faithful of Israel shall be raised. But we also see that we are totally dependent on Lord, for what exactly is this breath of life but a gift beyond our understanding?
So it was that, in the short days and long dark evenings in the cabin, an understanding came upon me. It came upon me by an odd sensation of my own bones clothed with flesh and stuffed in places with the squishy guts that give material sustenance to the form. That is what I am, it said, that and that alone in this world, and that is all we will have if we do not grasp the meaning. The sensation told me that the substance of the body, and yes, the brain, only cloth the breath of life that we are given; and that this breath of life is only the spark flowing from the flame of the soul, formed in a world beyond the senses and common meaning. We are meant to grasp our dependence on God through the mortality of the body. That we do not shows a willful ignorance and stubbornness, or a willful distraction, but always willful. As Ezekiel would say, only a fool refuses to see that mere substance does not have volition and thought without the divine spark.
Such was my gift via Ezekiel, which came via three detective Books on CD that I listened to in the long ride to and from and in the long darkness in the miles above. The attitudes of the authors towards the world were strikingly different. One, Holy Ghost by Lucas Davenport, showed the American world of the Midwestern small town as a largely friendly and egalitarian place spiced up with eccentrics and cursed by occasional flare-ups of violence, sexual impropriety and greed. Davenport’s world is largely my world and I usually share that view. Randy White’s book, Mangrove Lightening, takes place in Florida, where evil is laid upon evil built tall and grown rotten through the decades and centuries. There have been smugglers, murders, horrible rapes, slavery and abuse of every sort, covered by a tattered veneer of wealth and majestic palm trees. At the root is pure evil, and it not only hovers over the swamps and gators and rusting moonshine stills like putrid mist, but lives on through the bodies of the susceptible for generations. Evil does not just disappear; it must be killed by a dagger through its heart and consumed by the creatures of the swamp, the base living elements of life. But for good or evil, we are more than bones and more than our possessions; we are, in fact, the pure spirits that we have colored, glorified or corrupted, through our actions on earth.
Then there is the final, which I have not quite finished: Robicheaux, by James Lee Bank. This takes place in southern Louisiana, Cajun country, which is not as picaresque as we might have imagined. Here, Banks tells us through his Sam Spade-like main character, Det. Robicheaux, that the world is a complex layer of prey and predator and bottom feeder. The prey are the poor working-class folk who can only react to a world that is run by the wealthy and powerful predators, the dirty commissioners and gangsters and corrupt politicians who rig the game and keep the ignorant poor, ignorant and poor. The bottom feeders are the button men, the corrupt cops and hired killers and thugs who enforce the written and unwritten rules that keep the predators on the top of the food chain. Around it all, as in White’s world, is the swirl of history and the ghosts who roam through it, investing and infecting the living with the deeds and needs and desires and heartbreaks of their own time in the flesh. There needs to be a cleaning out, a renewal, and reset button, but done by whom? Where are the noble ones free of the aches and desires of the past who might purify the temple and bring us a bright and fair world in the here and now?
In the first novel mentioned, Holy Ghost, we are able to continue our lives in happy small town middle - America, in no great need of spiritual aid, as most everything runs pretty well and honestly. Here it is not greed but lack of need that blinds us. That is fine: such books, after all, are only entertainment. It interests us and makes us laugh or pause to figure out the clues, and afterwards we are allowed to go to bed without horrible images. But in the latter two, we are forced to confront our greater reality. It is not only not always fair, but fundamentally crooked, slanted towards those who run things, and who run things for themselves. That is not all, however; unlike a Marxist diatribe on class warfare, in these novels we are confronted with supernatural evil that is so indelibly stamped into human society and human history that no human force could possibly cleanse it. We are, then, given, as all humans have since Eve and Adam, a world mired in original sin, one that we cannot raise from ourselves. And, as in all murder mysteries, we are forced to confront the ultimate result of original sin: death. The corpses rot, the armies of the confederacy and the mobster gangs putrefy in unmarked graves or cement overshoes, and thousand and millions are killed throughout history as the pawns of the powerful or as evil ones killing other evil ones, all in a vicious cycle of never-ending pain and sorrow and vice.
Phew. See how mere murder mysteries far removed from spiritual classics and the Pentateuch of the Jews lead us to grasp Ezekiel’s truth: that our bodies die, but that there is something more animating them that remains. It lives on to influence history in a way that is removed from the normal processes of material existence. Its very being clashes with our myopic view that we are alone, subject only to natural processes. More, it tells all who wish to listen that we are created from something far greater than ourselves.
All three novels speak of the evil that moves on and on through this world, needing a courageous hero to undo it one stitch at a time. But this is not enough, for it continues to grow elsewhere. We intuit from the novels that we need a superior supernatural force to help us. Ezekiel tells us that this force is God. But in his history, this saving grace has always been temporary. Zion falls again and again, as does the Temple. What is necessary, then, is a hero who is both here among the living, and also gifted with supreme supernatural powers. For Christians, this hero is Christ. Whether that was contemplated or not by the three novelists is not important. What is important is that, through their stories, they came to the same conclusion: that we need a super hero in tune with a supernatural force to eliminate the horrors that plague our world. Even the small-town Midwestern detective knows that luck and coincidence – those forces beyond our understanding and control - are necessary to solve the crime and temporarily remove evil.
Sherlock Holmes, as the quintessential materialist, never reached for divine assistance, but even he found that he could not truly kill Moriarty, the face of evil. We are nothing but sinew and bone in our corrupted view, but the crime novelist, he who deals with life and death, has learned from this that there is so much more. It is a gift to feel the bones of the body and realize the domain of the corporeally dead, for with that comes the wisdom that there is a greater force. With this, there is hope that the course of evil that seeps through everything as if timeless and immortal may someday get that stake in the heart and be devoured by its own earth-bound elements. Once we know what we are and where we are from, there is always hope, for that which made us can always remake and renew us.
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