Like a shot off a shovel
Today’s readings (the 2nd and the Gospel) are all about love: This is my command: Love each other. The ten commandments make at least minimal love easier to define when they tell us not to steal, not to lie, not to kill, honor one’s parents, don’t covet another’s possessions . . . things we can chalk up as evidence that we care about, even love others. But when we are told simply Love one another – it throws me for a loss. Except for my spouse and son and others close to me, I find it hard to love, to care with the intensity of Jesus about everyone else in the world. Oh, I’m willing to affirm people in a passing way – but where will I ever get the energy to love them. Jesus seems to ask too much; indeed the longer we live the more resentful we seem to become. Too much change, too many new faces, generations becoming strangers to each other. It can wear one out, make one cranky – stodgy – grumpy – harden one in one’s prejudices.
That’s apparently what came over the character described as the “citizen” in James Joyce’s classic story Ulysses. There’s that scene in a Dublin pub in 1904. The story’s hero, the kindly Leopold Bloom, a baptized Jew, enters while on an errand of mercy. He soon stirs up the virulent anti-British feelings of the quasi-intoxicated “citizen” at the bar. Bloom intervenes saying, “It’s no use . . . Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everyone knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.”
Somebody asks, “What?” And Bloom answers, “Love . . . I mean the opposite of hatred.” At which he then leaves the pub for a moment. The answer only makes the “citizen” more furious and we phase into a passage that makes a mockery of Bloom’s theory of love in a sing-song way: “Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14 A loves Mary Kelly . . . Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr. Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs. Verschoyle with the turned in eye . . . and this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody and God loves everybody.”
Eventually Bloom returns to the pub to join a companion on his errand of mercy when the “citizen” now goes anti-Semitic. Bloom defends the honor of the Jewish people – ending with “the Saviour was a jew . . . Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” Then out Bloom goes, chased by the “citizen” who curses him and throws things at him as Bloom rides off in a jaunting car . . . except for one thing. Suddenly the writing of the chapter changes from normal description and becomes biblical in tone: “When lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donahoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.”
James Joyce, by transitioning from the ordinary discourse of the pub scene to a description of Bloom caught up in the biblically sublime language of Jesus’ own transfiguration in the Gospels, reveals the truth about every deed of love we perform – be it the least noticeable to all the world. So – want to lead a transfigured life? Start caring about others in the courageous manner of Leopold Bloom.