Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Wednesday July 29, 2009

Blessings and curses

By Jim Taylor

Ancestral memory
        We humans have a fascination with fire. We will sit for hours, staring into a campfire, sharing stories. We barbecue over artificial fire and gather in community as we feast on charred sacrifices. We build kilns for pottery and smelters for ore. We weld and braze and solder, cauterize and sterilize, incinerate and bake…
        Perhaps we remember, deep in our DNA, the fire was the first of nature’s forces that we tamed. Distant ancestors brought a few glowing embers home, added extra fuel, fanned flames into life, and suddenly had light and warmth.
        Perhaps we also realize, at some subconscious level, that blessings and curses are closely related. Fire can keep our homes comfortable; fire can destroy our homes in seconds. We cook with fire; we can be cooked by fire.
        And we also know that the absence of fire can mean death, especially in frigid northern winters.
        Perhaps we recognize, intuitively, that too much fire and too little fire are equally hazardous to human well-being. Only the right amount, somewhere between the two extremes, is beneficial.

Avoiding extremes
        The same principle applies to other factors. The right dosage of medicine brings health; too much or too little brings death. Too much water drowns; too little dehydrates. Too much food causes obesity; too little, starvation. The principle applies even to love – too little results in neglect, too much smothers.
        Like Goldilocks, we need to find a middle ground that is “just right.”
        The dilemma has always been to determine how much is “just right.” How much gasoline do we really need to ignite in our cars? How much fossil fuel do we need to burn to generate electricity?
        Even life on this planet depends on just the right mix of gases in the atmosphere.
        Generally, we have tended to assume that if one aspirin is good, two must be better. So we seek more horsepower. More appliances. More money. More control.
        Forest fires demonstrate that even good things, taken to an extreme, may not be good for us.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



The column on “Childhood Rules” seems to have struck a responsive chord. Jim Henderschedt sent along these thoughts: “I enjoyed your Soft Edges today and thought you might enjoy another set of rules. A past pastor of our church once used them in a sermon and I thought they were so good I got a copy. They are the Child’s Rules (or Laws) of Possession:

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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