Torah

Larry Niven Calls This “The Funniest Prayer in Literature”

TUCKED INTO MY INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH siddur (prayerbook) is the following supplication. It’s there to keep me riding the trail of Faith without falling into the trap of thinking I know everything — or, really, anything — about that-which-some-people-call-God. Ladies, gentlemen, friends, Romans, countryfolk, I give you … The Agnostic’s Prayer, from Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness (© 1969):

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.

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Living, Writing

Street Light (Fourth Indigent Sketch)

HE WAS A FLORID, BEEFY man in his mid-to-late 30s, perched on a high concrete bench in San Francisco’s lunchtime-crowded Justin Herman Plaza, and wearing a grey beltless trenchcoat tightly buttoned up to his thick neck. Every minute or so he loudly proclaimed in an operatic baritone:

“What a friend we have in Jesus.”

A minute went by.

“What a friend we have in Jesus.”

Another minute.

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Food, Living

Why I Love: Grocery Shopping

IT’S THE ANTICIPATORY PROCESS OF scrawling ingredients on a shopping list. It’s the simple pleasure of browsing a well-stocked and -stacked produce display. It’s the ritual of interacting with the people at the butcher/fish/cheese counters. It’s the Dad-inspired satisfaction of saving a few nickels here and there. It’s the smell of the various aisles — even the one with laundry and dishwashing products. It’s browsing three different stores: Safeway for staples and housekeeping supplies; Sonoma Market for meat and produce; Whole Foods for croissants, frozen fruits and spices. It’s the structure it gives to my days.

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Crit

Words to Bring Back: “Pellucid”

– Definition: adj. Permitting to a certain extent the passage of light.

– Used in a sentence: O, for a more perfectly pellucid presidency*!

– Why: I’m in favor of this one strictly for the sound of it; the feeling on my tongue as I shape each obscure syllable. (Plus, it makes a nice alliteration with “perfectly” and “presidency.”)

Living, Writing

Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor Sudden Car Door

BOMBING STEEPLY DOWNHILL ON SAN Francisco’s pedestrian-thick California Street while screaming “No brakes!” was just another day in my brief life as a late-1980s bike messenger.

I had gotten into “the life” by happy accident. Having been fired from a Berkeley print shop whose required competencies were far over my head, I was at a loss as to what to do next. But not for long — thanks to my erstwhile roommate and pagan-brother, John “Wheels” Wheeler.

“You might consider becoming a bike messenger,” he told me. “You could even use my spare bike.”

Who could refuse an offer like that?

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Lord, I’m walking Your way. Let me in, for my feet are sore, my clothes ragged. Look in my eyes, Lord, and my sins will play out on them as on a screen. Read them all. Forgive what You can, and send me on my path. I will walk on, until You bid me rest.”
—Shepherd Book

Torah

365 Names: “The Presence”

THE PRESENCE is a more experiential-than-otherwise Divine descriptor. It attempts to portray the ineffable (nameless/wordless) quality of that-which-some-people-call-God, or what Freud’s friend Romain Rolland termed the “oceanic feeling” of being One with the Universe. It has the advantage of being both non-dogmatic and non-dual; there’s nothing to argue about, only something to feel or, if you prefer, to see. That’s certainly bad news for people who like to write about such things, but much easier on the rest of us who don’t (or don’t choose to) understand the reference. Right?

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