Gideon

THE BEST THING THE JUDGE GIDEON ever did and the worst mistake he ever made came within moments of each other.

The best was when the Israelites asked him to be their king, and he turned down the invitation. Like the prophet Samuel years later, he knew that the only true king the Israelites would ever have was Yahweh, and he told them so. If he had any secret hankerings for personal power, he managed to squelch them. It was a noble move, and when you consider all the trouble Israel had with kings when it finally got them, it showed amazing wisdom and foresight.

And then the mistake. All the boys were wearing gold earrings that season, and when Gideon asked them to contribute them to the cause, they cheerfully agreed. Somebody laid a coat on the ground, and as soon as the earrings were all tossed in, Gideon added some more golden gewgaws he'd taken from the enemy, things like crescents and pendants and collars for prize camels. By the time he was through, he had a great glittering pile out of which he made an ephod. Nobody's quite sure what an ephod was in this case, but it was apparently some sort of religious objet d'art that Gideon thought would remind everybody who their true king really was. Only that's not the way things worked out.

Gideon's mistake was to forget that the second of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" (Exodus 20:4) and that it's not by accident that it stands that high on the list. As soon as you've got a golden god you can shine up and deck out and push around like a doll in a baby carriage, you start thinking God himself is somebody you can push around too. The next step, of course, is that you think the graven image is God, and by that time it has about as much genuine religious significance as a rabbit's foot or a charm against the evil eye.

Instead of looking at the ephod and thinking about Yahweh, the Israelites started kowtowing to the ephod and hardly giving Yahweh the time of day. After Gideon died, they started kowtowing to the kinds of things you win tossing hoops at a carnival, and Yahweh was all but forgotten.

Poor Gideon. He might almost have done better to let them make him king when they wanted to. At least he would have been able to keep them on the right track that way, and they would have been able to keep their earrings, and Yahweh would have been able to keep in closer touch with his people than for their many long, sad years of god sampling was possible again.

Judges 8:22-28

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Ghost

WHAT KEEPS GHOSTS GOING seems to be usually some ancient tragedy they can't cut loose from or some dramatic event they are perpetually reenacting or some unfinished business they never seem able to resolve. They are so shadowy that it's hard to believe they exist. Some of the more spectacular hauntings—cups and saucers flying through the air, midnight wailings, a haggard face at the window—suggest they may have grave doubts on the subject themselves. It seems to be that if they can only make somebody's hair stand on end, possibly their own even, it helps convince them they aren't just figments of their own imagination. They prefer deserted places because they feel deserted. They disappear at cockcrow because the idea of seeing themselves, or being seen, for what they truly are scares the daylights out of them.

If you want to see one, take a look in the mirror someday when you yourself are feeling particularly haggard and shadowy.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Gentleman/Gentlewoman

BY ONE DEFINITION gentlemen and gentlewomen are people who have gone to the schools and colleges everybody's heard of, don't talk with their mouths full, avoid using like as a conjunction, don't make scenes in public, and so on. They are apt to turn up in such places as country clubs, the society pages, and restaurants in which proper dress is required. They may commit murder from time to time, but they rarely end up in the electric chair. If a child of yours marries one of them, you figure he or she has done all right. If they're usually no better than other people, they are usually no worse either. Or if they are, it at least doesn't show so much.

But there are gentlewomen and gentlemen in another sense who may be none of the above. They may speak atrocious English and get their clothes at rummage sales. They may leave their spoons in their coffee cups and douse their french fries with ketchup. There are some of them who, if they turned up at a country club, would be directed to the service entrance. Some are educated, and some barely made it through grade school. Some are captains of industry, and some pump gas for a living. But whatever the differences between them, the common denominator is even more striking.

Gentle is the key word, of course. Their table manners may be appalling, but their courtesy is instinctive. They let you take the seat by the window or have first go at the morning paper not because it's in Emily Post, but because it's in their nature. They seem to be born knowing when to come around and when to stay away. If you have them over for supper, they know when it's time to go home. Their wit may be sharp, but it never cuts. Even in private they don't make scenes if they can possibly help it.

They have their hang-ups and abysses and blind spots like everybody else, but when Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek," if it wasn't exactly them he was talking about, the chances are it was people very much like them. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words 

Gay

THE WORD gay in the sense of homosexual seems to have come into use somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s for reasons that are obscure. It was an improvement over the various terms that preceded it, but the choice was not a happy one.

In the first place gay in the original sense of lighthearted and debonair seems no more applicable to homosexuals than to anybody else, and in the second place people rarely use it in that sense anymore for fear of being misunderstood or snickered at.

The result is that we have virtually replaced a lovely old adjective with a peculiarly misleading one and incidentally ruined some of the best lines W. B. Yeats ever wrote, in which he said of two old Chinamen that "Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”

It is nice to have more or less gotten rid of the likes of faggot and queer, but one can only hope that eventually, along with everybody else, homosexuals will be referred to simply as human beings. 

-Originally published in Beyond Words 

Game

GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BUILD CHARACTER. The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton and all that. Healthy competition is supposed to be good for you.

Is competition ever healthy—the desire to do better, be better, look better than somebody else? Do you write better poetry or play better tennis or do better in business or stand in higher esteem generally, even in self-esteem, if your chief motivation is to be head of the pack? Even if you win the rat race, as somebody has said, are you any less a rat?

Who wants to win if somebody else has to lose? Who dares to lose if it's crucial to win?

"Ah, but it's not winning that counts. It's how you play the game," they say. Maybe neither of them counts. Maybe it's not competition but cooperation and comradeship that build the only character worth building. If it's by playing games together that we learn to win battles, maybe it's by playing, say, music together that we learn to avoid them.

There are moments when Saint Paul sounds like a competitor with a vengeance, but there are happily other moments as well. "Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us," he says (Hebrews 12:1), where the object is not to get there first, but just to get there. And "Fight the good fight," he says (1 Timothy 6:12), where it's not the fight to overcome the best of the competition that he's talking about, but the fight to overcome the worst in ourselves. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words