#234 The Carpenter's Son

The child stood in the shed. The child went mad,

later, & saned the wisemen. People gathered

as he conjoined the Jordan joint

ánd he spoke with them until he got smothered

amongst their passion for       mysterious healing had.

They could not take his point: 

—Repent, & love, he told them frightened throngs,

and it is so he did. Díd some of them?

Which now comes hard to say.

The date’s in any event a matter of wrongs

later upon him, lest we would not know him,

medieval, on Christmas Day. 

Pass me a cookie. O one absolutely did

lest we not know him. Fasten to your fire

the blessing of the living God.

It’s far to seek if it will do as good

whether in our womanly or in our manlihood,

this great man sought his retire.

 

John Oliver, the British-born comedian/political commentator, made a stir on the Web this week with his TV show commentary about American televangelists and the incomprehensible sums they pull in from their followers, and the tax exemptions they are granted because they set themselves up as the head of a “church.” For example, a televangelist named Creflo Dollar started a fundraising campaign through his televised ministry to raise 65 million dollars for a private luxury jet. “If I want to believe God for a sixty-five million dollar plane, you cannot stop me! You cannot stop me from dreamin’!” This statement made Creflo Dollar the target of the kind of massive blowback the Internet has the potential to focus, and it can be devastating. But the only real problem with Creflo Dollar’s dream of a Learjet is that he took it a step too far. The issue wasn’t with the substance of his campaign, it was simply with the audacity of its scope. Sixty-five million is serious cheddar. But these televangelists tap into a deep-seated vein of Americans’ need for fundamentalist reassurance, and being Americans, they monetize it with an astonishing greedy chutzpah and are celebrated for that. Publicity and money correlate. It’s truly remarkable. A select number of them routinely get exposed in sex scandals, money laundering scandals, all sorts of imaginative hypocrisy. Sometimes they weep publicly and are forgiven by their flocks, sometimes their careers are ruined, sometimes they go to prison. It keeps on going because the current of need for this kind of thing in the American psyche is so far deeper and so far vaster than any single hypocrite preacher man. But the smart ones keep their noses clean and use the media to garner massive fortunes. In the name of Jesus.

The people who give to the Creflo Dollars of the airwaves their precious, hard-earned money must mean well, but it’s safe to say that most of them are not thinking too critically about why they’re doing it. They might be desperate or sick, looking for a miracle (or trying to buy one, good consumers as they are), or they may actually be true believers, or most likely they get caught up in an exciting televised evangelical moment and they make that phone call now! Well, you don’t have to be a Franciscan or a biblical scholar to realize that Jesus’s true message probably isn’t stepping up front and center in these transactions. B. sums up the message as well as anybody: “Repent, & love, he told them frightened throngs, / and it is so he did.” Admit you’re a sinner, repent for it, live a life with love at its center. This is actually not that complicated. Sin, though, yanks us in all sorts of complicated directions, and the complications include intricate, finely tuned systems of hypocrisy, lies and distortions.

B. here is asking if any of the members of the throng, either today or back when, really do follow Jesus’s teachings. In the kind of move I’ve come to expect from The Dream Songs at this point, he backs away from an answer: “Which now comes hard to say.” Asking the question is as far as he’s going to go, apparently. It’s why I love DS 46 so much: Berryman dares a response in that one, and it’s great. There are layers in it that reward contemplation. But after that top forty hit, so full of sardonic wisdom—a bolt from the blue—he got shy. And I think that to merely ask the question after that performance isn’t quite enough anymore. What do you think, Henry? But, nope, not this time again. Henry’s response is to crawl back into his burrow, or into his grave, however you want to see it. He’s a smart guy, and he has his antennae out for all kinds of philosophical scents blowing on the existential breezes of existence, but he’s a coward in the end. He admits it, too. That’s what really kills me. It offends my sense of philosophical duty.

That being said, there is an implied answer, plain enough to see, so maybe I’m not being fair. Of course Jesus’s message has been misrepresented! Yes there are true believers living out Jesus’s message, but then again there are televangelists out there, preaching in Christ’s name, buying Learjets. The very substance of the New Testament itself was subject to political maneuvering in the early centuries of the Christian church and into the Middle Ages. Some stuff was denied canonical legitimacy because it had become politically unorthodox. And somebody remind me, why did Revelations make the cut again?

The ending of the poem is obscure in that it’s not clear who B. is referring to as the one who followed Jesus’s teaching to repent and love. “Pass me a cookie” is a snide, partially dismissive, partially self-deprecating, partially reverent reference to the communion host, so B. might actually be referring to himself as the one. If so, that would amount to a statement of faith, if a fairly grandiose one, but it’s pretty ambiguous. It’s more likely a “might as well go with it” gesture, not so much out of faith, but out of covering one’s ass, just in case all this Jesus-y love-your-neighbor business turns out to be the real deal. Can’t hurt, at any rate. Somebody might go ahead and remind him that God, omnipresent and omnipotent as he supposedly is if He’s really what we say He is, or what He says He is, God can see through that little ruse pretty quick. Well, look, we know what’s going on in Henry’s heart by now: Competitive scrambling for the ersatz immortality of literary reputation, a serious psychic wound that so wounded that (if we’re to believe him) something critical was killed off in his soul, replaced by permanently adolescent appetites, alcohol addiction, and self-absorbed narcissism. Something compelling about it all though. But hey, at least he’s trying in this one. John Berryman is no St. Augustine, though. But who is? Asking an important question with no intention of trying to answer it is nothing but a pose in the end. But maybe it’s a necessary step. Maybe the answer is contained in the question. If so, then it’s a dark answer, with fine bourbon and contoured seats, up in the cirrus clouds.