Church

[prog]

So I had a fun & creepy dream this morning after I shut off my alarm by turning on the radio, which (since my radio dial is permanently welded to WBUR) was doing its weekly broadcast of some church service. My dream was simply the fabrication of a visual track to attend the audio input. So, I sat in church all morning.

I think that the church iRL is Unitarian Universalist, and since I have never attended a UU ceremony in the waking world, my dream-self had a bit of sport with envisioning it. I most strongly recall that the whole place had a heavy death-fetish thing going on, highlighted by the fact that the priest had small shadows cast upon her face as she spoke, giving her the semblance of empty eye sockets, bare cheekbones, and exposed teeth. The shadows came from some contrivance of projected light originating from the rear of the church; oddly, the projectionist seemed to have trouble keeping the shadows stable, and so they wiggled and crawled around the priest's face -- independently of one another.

I woke up to someone reading the story of Jesus' baptism, and my first conscious thought was: what exactly happened, there? IIRC, when someone in Scripture is "filled with the Holy Spirit", they cease to act normally for a while; they've been pinged by the Divine and follow unknowable orders. And lo, Mark writes how, in Jesus' case, "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness." But: how, exactly? Did he flip out, zapped by the VALIS, and run whooping off into the desert as soon as John T.B. pulled him from the water? Or was this a trial he knew he'd make, of which the baptism was the final, calculated preparation (but which observers might not have expected)? And did anyone go with him, and huh huh huh? This is the first time that I've been presented with this story since high school and maybe before, and I guess I'm just disappointed with what now strikes me as weak narrative.

Comments

New Testament weak narrative

[(Anonymous)]

So I've started reading the New Testament recently (don't ask me why, I can't explain) and the strongest response I've gotten so far is "weak narrative." Things happen with no apparent meaning. Things that should be described in detail get mentioned in passing. Things happen in arbitrary order. It's just a big mess.

The Old Testament (well, Genesis and Exodus, anyway. I haven't gotten farther than that.) seems much more structured. Things actually follow from each other.

That's my response after reading Matthew and Mark, anyway. It looks like Luke may be more structured. Perhaps this just means that I don't understand what I'm reading and if I tried harder it would make more sense. I dunno.

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