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 Chinese men 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 

Games

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  

Gabriel

SHE STRUCK THE ANGEL GABRIEL as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he'd been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.

He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. "You mustn't be afraid, Mary," he said.

As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.

Luke 1:26-35 

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words  

Funeral

IN ARAMAIC talitha cumi means "Little girl, get up." It's the language Jesus and his friends probably used when they spoke to each other, so these may well be his actual words, among the very few that have come down to us verbatim. He spoke them at a child's funeral, the twelve-year-old daughter of a man named Jairus (Mark 5:35 - 43).

The occasion took place at the man's house. There was plenty of the kind of sorrow you expect when anybody that young dies. And that's one of the great uses of funerals surely, to be cited when people protest that they're barbaric holdovers from the past, that you should celebrate the life rather than mourn the death, and so on. Celebrate the life by all means, but face up to the death of that life. Weep all the tears you have in you to weep, because whatever may happen next, if anything does, this has happened. Something precious and irreplaceable has come to an end and something in you has come to an end with it. Funerals put a period after the sentence's last word. They close a door. They let you get on with your life.

The child was dead, but Jesus, when he got there, said she was only asleep. He said the same thing when his friend Lazarus died. Death is not any more permanent than sleep is permanent is what he meant apparently. That isn't to say he took death lightly. When he heard about Lazarus, he wept, and it's hard to imagine him doing any differently here. But if death is the closing of one door, he seems to say, it is the opening of another one. Talitha cumi. He took the little girl's hand, and he told her to get up, and she did. The mother and father were there, Mark says. The neighbors, the friends. It is a scene to conjure with.

Old woman, get up. Young man. The one you don't know how you'll ever manage to live without. The one you don't know how you ever managed to live with. Little girl. "Get up," he says.

The other use of funerals is to remind us of those two words. When the last hymn has been sung, the benediction given, and the immediate family escorted out a side door, they may be the best we have to make it possible to get up ourselves. 

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