My dear friends –

My father—many of you have read me write about him quite a lot–was a biblical scholar. He taught in the English Department, and so he taught the Bible as literature. A fan of the poets Milton, Hopkins, Pope, and Donne, among others, he was interested in the ways in which the Bible informed the development of English literature over time. (He loved the Divine Comedy, as well, Dante’s masterwork. That, of course, is in Italian, and a story for another day.)

He studied the Bible—the parts of it that seemed relevant (as far as he was concerned) to the development of English literature—vigorously. Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, important books in their own right, got no play in my father’s classes. While they are essential to understanding the development of Judaism, he did not believe they were fundamental for the allusive development of English literature.

The Fourth Gospel, that of John the Divine, or John of Patmos, he went over and over and over, deciding how and where to put it in the syllabus. Where would it be most effective and affecting? How could he show the ways in which that mystical text had been used throughout the history of English literature, after the development of the King James Version of the Bible.

Why King James? Why not a “better,” “more faithful,” translation, or one that paid more attention to, say, gender inclusion. Or one like The Message, that is clearly a paraphrase, but gets the point across?

But why? Why King James? (And it wasn’t just because James was trying to get the bishops off his back for being queer, though that’s true too.)

Because he wanted to know about the influence of the Bible, and the version that has had the most influence in the life of English literature, and probably in the lives of most non-Christians, even, is the King James Version. Try this on for size:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…” Those opening words at so many memorial services? Straight out of the King James Version. My former senior pastor at All Souls in Washington, DC, the Rev. Rob Hardies, tells a story about how early in his career, he read a more contemporary version. It went over like a lead balloon. And his mentor told him afterwards what a mistake he’d made. The comfort of the King James version of the 23rd Psalm brings, even to people who are not believers, cannot be overstated.

And speaking of non-believers…my father kindasorta was one. That is to say, he certainly did not believe in every jot and tittle of the Bible. He was never wrapped in any kind of literalism. He was interested in beauty, effect, resonance, and to a certain degree, history. It was only when his mother died that I ever saw him concerned about someone’s immortal soul, worried about all the ways he may have failed her, about the nature of God with respect to someone who was dying. He even clutched a rather pointy cross pendant in his hand as he sat by her bedside.

But he was clear when he knew he himself was dying that it was the end for him. That his consciousness would be snuffed out like a candle. Poof. That his life would be reflected in his deeds, and he never believed that those were enough. Never enough. But he had a certain peace, if not quiet, about him, with respect to his coming death.

But I digress. I have his copy of the King James Version on my desk. It is sturdily bound in a lovely box it slides out of – what are those called? It’s not a dust jacket, because it’s made of cardboard, but it keeps the book safe. (Shout out to Cris Livecchi, the best book-healer ever. Let me know if you need his direction.)

Because I have the book from which he taught, I can see what he thought was important. The aforementioned Fourth Gospel is marked up in pencil, highlighter, and pen. The shock! But there were apparently notes too important to wait for getting back to a pencil. The highlighter and pen were rare, but still notable. Other marked-up books include Genesis, Judges, Ruth, Isaiah, some Psalms, the Song of Songs, Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, Revelation…But Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, even Daniel, hardly at all.

He loved the Bible. He loved it passionately as a collection of strange and mysterious books about a whole range of subjects. He loved it and he recognized it as a library of texts. Not something coherent or something designed to go together, except here and there, quite loosely. He recognized the violence particularly against women and the way that the “Asherahs” were evidence of the sometimes struggle sometimes harmony with goddess worship.

He recognized it as a quilt one might pull over oneself against the cold of life. But nevertheless, a quilt made of many things, some velvet, some wool, definitely not washable, and worn thin by generations. To illustrate, toward the end of his life, he took a label from one of his pill bottles and put it on the spine of the book where the old and venerable text was held together with duct tape.

The sticky label said, simply, in large, block letters, “MAY CAUSE DIZZINESS.”

The sticker is now on the title page. May Cause Dizziness.

Certainly the Bible may cause dizziness. Certainly. If you try to treat it as a single document and you have any understanding of how it is stitched together, it will cause dizziness. If you cease trying to jam it into the strictures of fundamentalism, it will cause dizziness.

But it is not only the Bible that causes dizziness, but the whole of the spiritual life.

Dizziness is built into the spiritual life. Now, the etymology of “dizzy” reveals that it meant “weak, foolish, or giddy,” in Old English. And that before that, “giddy” or “insane” comes to the forefront out of Old German. I am going to make some flights of etymological fancy here. The form for “giddy” was “god” + “y.” that is to say possessed. The meaning usually meant possessed by some kind of spirit…but look back at my father’s sticker and the realities of the spiritual life.

May cause dizziness. May cause giddiness. Giddiness as we use it now, as well as from Middle English where it means a combination of “insane”; and “possessed by a god.”

The giddiness/dizziness my father believed the Bible could cause can certainly come off as foolish. The spiritual life, the doubt, the struggle, the deep dives and surfacing, the spinning around as we look for a north star to guide our search…It’s all quite disorienting, unbalancing, and can make us look ridiculous. Foolish, with or without a Bible.

It is baked into the spiritual bread. It WILL cause dizziness if we allow it to. It will have us writing things we never knew we thought. It will give us the power to make art we never knew was in us. It will transform our capacity for compassion if it’s doing its job.

Today I’m, as Dar Williams says, “resolved to being born / and so resigned to bravery.” I resolve to being immersed in the spiritual life, and so I am resigned to the possibilities of possession, giddiness, foolishness, and most of all, to a bit of dizziness, now and then.

Blessings on your dizzy ways, friends-

~Catharine~