Why me?
That was basically where we left off last time.
There are a lot of different directions I could go in talking about this. So I'm going to skirt around it for a while and tell a story from my childhood and maybe not actually end up addressing Why Me at all. I'll try to end on Pathos and its relevance to me, this project, and Rob.
My dad had a couple stand-up comedy tapes when I was a kid. I think a Bill Cosby and a Andrew “Dice” Clay. Not exactly the kind of thing a grade-schooler should be listening to. But informative of the kind of person my father was, maybe. Anyway, by fifth grade, it was pretty clear what my interests were: K*Nex and stand-up comedy tapes.
I didn't have very many. I had more CDs – mostly Garth Brooks – that didn't get as much rotation. But I had maybe three or four of this Christian motivational speaker, actually. I thought he was a comedian, because we also had a couple of his VHS tapes, and they felt like stand-up to me! Ken Davis is his name. Let me see if I can just find the routine I'm going to describe. It'll be less brutal for you to suffer through.
Eh. Too bad. Not the part I want to talk about.
He's talking about Moses – specifically about Moses's conversation with GOD in the guise of the Burning Bush. Everybody knows the story. (It's interesting to think that Moses probably actually was burning bush up there – the Hebrew people seem to have a long and happy relationship with cannabis – but that's besides the point.) And GOD says to Moses that he wants Moses to free GOD's people, right?
Moses doesn't just blithely agree and go about rescuing Israel, right? Not according to the actual text. Moses asks Why Me. Oh why, oh why, oh, Why Me, GOD? The answer seems to be because Moses had a particular set of skills. And those skills made him a nightmare for a person like Pharoah.
Liam Nieson in – Taken Out of Egypt: the TRUE Moses Story.
I'm actually not joking. It doesn't take especially difficult mental gymnastics to realize that if Moses is who and how he was portrayed, he was educated as an Egyptian noble. Which meant, as the younger son, he was more than likely trained as a temple priest. If he saw a slave – that is, a person of a conquered people living and working in Pharaonic Egypt – being mistreated, he would be educated and well within his rights into intercede on the man's behalf. Not just because of his birth position, but because of his status as either a priest-to-be or in practice.
Actually, it really is an epic story, if you really imagine it in cinematic terms. And I know that animated movie tried, but... eh, strip the story of its propaganda and what it means for me and you, huh – and in this context, what it kind of means to me. Moses runs away to a small tribe that are related to his mother's tribe, in the wilderness. He is in exile. Does he hide his identity as former temple priest? He becomes a shepherd. No tribal people would let a priest tend sheep. He would have immediately been given status within his cousin people. That's how that works. Historically and continually.
Just look at rocket technology and I— What is it lawyers say? Something about their case.
Whatever.
So, anyway. He's in exile. He's a former priest-cum-shepherd and he's up on a holy hillside and he's burning a little bush, if you know what I mean. Which he would have been. It's not really that scandalous at all.
In fact, if you'd like to think of it this way – I do enjoy thinking of it this way – he was educated and trained to burn bush. It was his profession.
And then he sees a vision of a being calling itself the GOD of his mother's people, and as a proof of its existence it says to him only, I AM THAT I AM. So what does he do? Does he just go along with this bush's demands?
Hell no. He argues with it and asks it, But Why Me? And GOD repeatedly tells Moses that he knows that Moses is flawed and insecure – because GOD made him flawed and insecure.
So let's stop with the story as it's written for a second and think about what actually happened. Ken Davis pantomimes the scene to comedic effect, playing Moses as kind of a bumbling idiot. But if you take that pantomime for what it is, it looks like a person who is stupified on some intoxicant. And if you've ever taken LSD, the wooblies – as I call them – where your visual field kind of makes wave patterns, would absolutely make a stick look like a serpent once it wasn't in your hands and the reality-testing functions of your brain weren't working properly.
Skip over the details. Whatever else happened on that hill, Moses had a profound spiritual experience and was left with a life-long, consuming compulsion to “free” his ancestral people.
We see these kinds of compulsions all over the place. They don't have to be religious. But they often are. Profoundly. Harriet Tubman is the name that springs immediately to mind.
Am I a Moses or a Harriet Tubman?
We are taught that humility is possibly the greatest virtue. I was, anyway. So how does a compulsion like this reconcile with humility? Knowing that one thing is right, but accepting that you could be wrong?
It seems impossible. I'm not sure – I'm genuinely asking.
I'm going to shift gears, now.
I have noticed, in recent years, a particular kind of circularity in my life. Ideas, concepts, recur, sometimes over long periods of time, but they come back into my life. Often developing over decades, like how the planet Venus traces a beautiful pattern in the night sky.
One of them is that question I keep repeating: Why Me.
And that brings me, I think, at last, to Pathos. See, Moses was worried that his speech impediment would impede him – or that his fear of crowds would frighten him – or that his brother Aaron was more popular than him, what if people didn't listen?
But GOD doesn't care. The compulsion, whatever it is and wherever it comes from, doesn't care. If I were trying to reach an artist, I would say that the inspiration doesn't care. The inspiration wants out. It wants the deed to be done, the craft to be crafted, the making to be made. And I think that's a mistake we make when we think about religion today, but especially when we imagine the religions of yesterday.
Our gods are what we worship.
Rob wonders to Peitho whether it wasn't the act of worship which first made the gods. Before I read this for myself, I'd never considered it. But may be. Without the act of ritually returning to the typewriter, a novel will never be born. The god that lives within that text will never be birthed. I don't know.
I still wonder Why Me because I know that I don't have answers. I just know that the questions I see being asked around me around good enough. Not only are they not the right ones, they aren't deep or probing enough.
So, indeed – why me?
Maybe because I have taken notions such as honor and duty, as being bound to one's code, to one's word – maybe I took these things too seriously when I was foundational. Maybe I didn't start to get bitter about how the powerful are always those willing to most debase themselves – maybe it wasn't until my life became more than like Job's that I began to wonder whether we shouldn't curse our GODs.
Maybe we should smash our idols and start from scratch.
Abraham did it.
Jesus did it.
Hell, even Joseph Smith did it.
It can be done. But to what end?
And who benefits?
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