Digressions of a Dilettante

Digressions of a Dilettante
Vignettes of Inanity by Bud Hearn

Friday, March 25, 2016

Mystery of the Empty Tomb


Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, unto a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him…but some doubted.” Matthew 28:16


Not even Poe could have concocted a narrative to rival the mystery surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus. The enigma and significance of the empty tomb still baffles us today. Is it myth or fact?

Let’s take a little stroll through Christ’s Cemetery on St. Simons Island, Georgia. It’s early, the first day of the week, a cool, sunny day. Spring is abundant. Our spirits soar.

Bare limbs blossom in colors: green, red, pink, white. Daffodils decorate the grounds. The meditation garden is ablaze in watercolors of azaleas. Spring is making its resurgence after a comatose winter.

We come upon a crowd gathered around a fresh mound of red clay. The scene shocks us. There, in front of our eyes is an open grave. The heavy vault lid has been removed. Inside is an empty coffin.

The group murmurs in low, hushed tones. Someone asks, “Have you heard the rumor?” We reply, “What rumor?”

They repeat the story. “We arrived here early and saw two diaphanous apparitions in shining garments sitting on the edge of this vault. They seemed to speak, but no sounds emanated. We were afraid.”

“Yet we all recall hearing a voice say, ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.’”

They then disappeared. We’re still confused and a bit frightened. We were left here asking each other, What does this mean?”

How would we react to such an event?

As we approach Easter with its pageantry, its drama, its ideals, its passion, its emotion, it’s easy to become one of the crowd. There’s a lot to synthesize. As in year’s previous, it leaves us again with mixed emotions---hopeful, maybe confused, but often doubting and going along with the crowd.

Like nature, we yearn for renewal, too. Not just at Easter, but daily, to leave the tomb of self and experience the ‘more’ we know is out there but somehow seems just out of reach. Tennyson expressed our feelings with lines from In Memoriam, his epic poem: “That men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.”

But how do we capture the essence of resurrection? How can we allow it to regenerate our own lives? Even with the mention of the word we sense the feeling of incredulity. It’s difficult to imagine the reality of God’s promise.

We have stood at the red-clay gravesites of too many friends and family members, not to mention witnessing the ravaged consequences of violence in our streets and the blood of countrymen that cries from the dust of other lands.

But for now we’re looking down into this empty coffin. Doubt takes control of our minds as it leaps to plausible conclusions to this conundrum. Grave robbers, somebody says. But who? Friends, family? But why? And what would they do with the body?

Slowly we all disperse, leaving this strange spectacle of an empty grave as we found it. No answers, only questions and speculations, off to repeat to others the details of this extraordinary event.

Now here we are this week, another Easter, another opportunity to vicariously re-live the drama of Jesus’ resurrection. Are we any closer to an explanation of the empty tomb today?

Oh, yes, we want to believe it’s real, not an elaborate myth like that portrayed in Coppola’s film, Viva Zapata. Hollywood contrived an interesting parallel when Brando’s character, Emiliano Zapata, a revolutionary, was murdered as a heretic by the ruling junta. His dead body was displayed, then it disappeared. He morphed into a myth, his resurrection a living fable. Only it was a movie.

Our minds struggle to grasp this ephemeral concept of life after death. Logical conclusions evade us. But then someone mentions a word…faith. Our ears perk up. Tell us more. Help us understand this evanescent miracle of resurrection.

We want to believe. Yet we find ourselves like the man who asked Jesus to heal his demon-possessed son. Jesus told him that if he could believe, all things were possible. This father’s words are our own: “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

Easter is our opportunity to allow faith to blossom again and join the Heavenly Choir in singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, “He is risen indeed.”

Bud Hearn
March 25, 2016


Friday, March 18, 2016

The Butterfly of the Moment


Name it and claim it. That’s the preacher’s promise. Alright. Here you go: ‘Free Time.’ Now, where is it? That’s the question. What’s the answer?

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‘Free time,’ what’s that? I ponder the question while washing dishes, up to my elbows in suds. My free time has been mortgaged to the mundane.

My work product is subject to inspection. The accusation of being labeled a domestic Pharisee, one who washes only the outside of the pots, is a reputation hard to live down.

Such chores are best done in a dark laundry room where Munch’s painting, The Scream, sets the tone. Certainly not one with a view of the glistening, sunlit pool, a mirage that mocks my low estate. Free time is written all over the scene.

Some suggest that free time can be found anywhere, even washing dishes. Nonsense. I’m not convinced. Free time and labor cannot co-exist. Or can they? The Heavy Hand Judge pronounced this primordial curse on our progenitors when He sent them packing to the back alleys outside Eden.

Maintenance is real. Add up the hours, see for yourself. Life overwhelms us. Beating back the onslaught of nature and the ills that flesh is heir to is so daily. Not to mention trying to keep up with the Kardashians and enduring political campaigns.

So where’s free time? Thorstein Veblen attempted to consecrate the concept of leisure, railing on the Vatican to elevate it to sainthood. The perfecting of this idol has long since been an American art form.

Emerson and his Harvard elites enthroned the nebulous concept of transcendentalism as some sort of ‘be all, end all’ in the pursuit of free time. But what did all that heavy thinking get him? Poor health, that’s what.

Like most Yankees, he eventually migrated south. In Charleston he recovered. Seems the thick humidity dulled his senses. One evening on the Battery he experienced a transcendental epiphany while eating shrimp and grits, the absolute apotheosis in the use of free time. He abandoned meditation and lived happily ever after.

Epicurus had his own entourage of Greek groupies. He advocated pleasure as the highest good that should dominate all free time. But he got crossways with Aphrodite by admonishing the Greeks that the benefits of eating were preferable to the benefits of love. He would be a gilded shrine today had he realized one simple fact: a combination of the two is the epitome in the enjoyment of free time.

Yoga promises an out-of-body freedom from the ravages of time. Gurus with online degrees swear by the ‘down-dog’ pose. If held for ten minutes, they guarantee it will produce nirvana, an enlightened state of mind.

They’re correct. Try it. But remember, the Sanskrit meaning of nirvana is ‘blown out,’ which is what will happen to your shoulders. An aged Grand Cru and saucer of escargot is a superior and safer way to achieve the same enlightenment.

I suppose free time is possible in athletic obsessions. You hear a lot about the so-called ‘runner’s high.’ I’ve had the experience. It’s a mental delusion when your brain sees automobiles as phantoms, fogs that you can run right through. Following that advice will assure you of unlimited free time in the ER. Avoid it.

Athletic pursuits for free time have their benefits. They’ve spawned profitable career paths in prosthetic orthopedic medicine. Which is not medicine at all, but more like a patchwork repair job to arthritic bodies. The preferred training for this profession is a degree in auto mechanics at the community trade school. It’s more art than science. Beware.

Alas, free time comes with a string attached. It’s only a loan, a short-term one at that. Interest must be paid. Which usually comes in the form of cutting the nap short. Blame the Puritans for the hangover of the collective guilty conscience.

Boiled down, free time is less a sense of place than a state of being. It’s possible anywhere. It’s a yielding to the present moment in whatever condition it finds us. Even washing dishes.

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As I head out to the pool to find my nirvana, I hear a voice call, “Honey, would you do me a favor when you have some free time.” Some things never change.

Free time is fleeting. Take a slow walk in the garden of your life, pick some flowers and let your net capture the ephemeral butterfly of the moment.


Bud Hearn
March 18, 2016

Friday, March 4, 2016

The Leaves Let Go


March is the prologue to spring. It’s the month when the Great Silent Voice speaks, “Time’s up, release without remorse and make way for the new.”

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Nature has a different set of rules for the live oaks that canopy the islands of coastal Georgia. They’re programmed to shed their leaves in March, not November. It disguises our winters. We like that.

But now, last year’s leaves have run their course. Their grip on the Great Mother oak relaxes. One by one, without complaint or coaxing, they begin their short but final journey ‘home.’ Mission accomplished, job completed. Now freed from their work, the transients collectively head south for their permanent retirement.

The enormous oak Titans suddenly stand naked and exposed. But only for a few days. Their spindly skeletons stretch skyward, communing with the winds. Redwing blackbirds give stark contrast to the sky as they bark orders from the barren branches.

Sunlight shines profusely on the warm ground below. The Great Silent Voice speaks again, “Make haste, my small children.” The vegetation undergrowth below immediately springs into life. Somehow it knows its hour in the sun will be short.

Nature is consistent, operating a tightly organized process of life. It makes all appointments on time. Hard on the heels of the leaves’ departure, small green hints of life, barely visible to the eye, begin incipient life. Almost overnight the oaks emerge fully clothed, bathed in a verdant wardrobe.

In a short time, the fallen leaf carpet becomes compost. The Voice speaks softly to these fallen workers, “Sleep on, you have served well. It’s time for another to bear the burden. For you to cling beyond your appointed time would render you a dull, lusterless relic of the past, an antique of a bygone season.”

Leaves listen, don’t argue. They instinctively know that new life requires them to move on. They’re innately schooled in photosynthesis, knowing that when their green morphs to brown, their ability to synthesize food is terminally impaired. They’ve become useless. Unlike some politicians, they know when to say, “Enough.”

Oak leaves don’t think. But if they could, would they have a self-esteem problem? Would they look around and see billions of other leaves and say, “O, of what value am I, just one among so many, and a little one at that?”

And if the Mother Tree could answer, it might say, “If not for each of you, I could not exist.” Is this answer sufficient to solve low self-esteem? One wonders. After all, there is a time and a season for everything.

Perhaps to assuage the hearts of the fallen leaves, the Titan might say, “Consider the acorns, my children. They also have to let go, to drop, to die. Somehow they’re programmed to know that there’s a squirrel waiting to bury them so they can again take root downward and bear fruit upward. Trust me, My ways are perfect.”

The March breezes carry the whisper of the Great Silent Voice as it speaks tender assurances to the leaves. “As you were not anxious in the day of your birth, be not anxious in the day of your demise. Well done, good and faithful leaves.”

**********

Possessing even a small degree of mysticism, one might find a metaphor, maybe even a smile, in contemplation of a leaf’s final ‘let go.’ After all, it’s a one and done, its first and its last.

And if metaphors could be extrapolated, they might lead us to the conclusion that our very own final drop could be an exhilarating and incredible journey home. Personally, I look forward to my very own noble experience.

Bud Hearn
March 4, 2016