For the past couple of weeks we’ve begun walking through the bible in our midweek studies aiming to “be at home in the scriptures”. During this time we’ve looked at pop culture artefacts (jokes, memes, GIFs, music) to understand the way in which meaning functions. Here’s another: consider your neighborhood or a neighborhood that you know well –a place in which you are at home. Imagine if you were to ask me for directions from my house to Liliha Bakery. I’d tell you something like this:
Take a left hand turn at the end of our lane onto Judd. Walk down past the house with the artificial turn driveway, until you come to Nu Place (you’ll notice it because the large white house on the corner of Nu and Judd looks like the kind of house you’d get sent to live in with your crazy aunt who turns-out to be a magician and the last of an ancient order defending our realm from invasion by fey creatures, which is why she has planted ti around the borders of her property, and why the monstera grows so large). Walk down Nu until you come to the vacant lot. Go through the vacant lot and continue going south (I forget the street’s name, but you’ll notice on your left hand side lots of vegetables, specifically uala, in the yard of a Chinese family. That lane will drop you into Kunawai park. Walk across the street to the fish pond and then walk down the lane that winds around the backside of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church and exit through their parking lot. Liliha Bakery will be across Kuakini to you left.
All of that is true. It is also a very enjoyable walk. It is not, however, how Google Maps would lead you.
Why? Because Google, for all its might, is not pedestrian (remember that even their “street view” mode is composed of pictures captured during vehicular movement). Google is not a neighbor. Google does not know about the vacant lot at the end of Nu. Google does not know about the lane the winds serpentine around Good Shepherd. Google is good for many things insofar as it provides a “bird’s eye view” –what James Scott calls “seeing like a state.” Sometimes this view can be helpful. But it remains helpful only as long as we remember that it is incomplete. When we assume that “seeing from above” is the real way to see things (seeing them for how they actually are), we actually become blind. The vertigo granted by the bird’s eye can blind us to the alleys, the lanes, the vacant lots. And worse—it can make the whitecaps of the open ocean appear smooth and serene to an Icarus about to plummet.
Michel de Certeau describes his experience of standing on the 110th floor of the former World Trade Center and looking down over New York. Being above the city, like Google, gave him “the pleasure of ‘seeing the whole’, of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of texts” (92). Standing above the world in that moment transformed the “bewitching world” of human lives, and traffic, and sewer-works, and hot-dog sellers, “into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (92).
This is among the problems that Jane Jacobs identified in her work in The Death and Life of Great American Cities when those in authority over a city (or neighborhood), see it only “from above” and not “from the sidewalk” and make decisions thereby. It produces parks no one uses, city blocks too large to walk around (thus demanding cars), and shopping malls vacated two decades after their construction. There were all good ideas when one looked down on the city without reference to the actual everyday lives of its neighbors.
Here’s my modest reflection: the Bible is like this too. While it can be helpful to get an overview of the Scriptures, to give a road map through its books, to lay-out a macrosturcture of, say, the books of Moses (Genesis thru Deuteronomy) –much of which we do in our midweek study—we cannot dispense with the pedestrian ways of knowing the in-and-outs, the “alleys and vacant lots”, of the Bible because, like a city, that’s where life happens!
This and last week we looked at Judah and Kingship in Genesis, and much of that time was a pacing through the cul-de-sacs and overgrown byways of scripture, tracing-out this or that theme and symbol. Now we know is more deeply and fully –more neighborly— what it means to be a king in the bible. And next week we’ll spend some time looking at Exodus thru Deuteronomy and while we’ll begin with some “bird’s eye” map work (e.g. “here’s how Leviticus is structured…”), the goal is to grow more deeply in being at home in these passages. This is because what we are doing when we are doing the pedestrian work of walking and wandering through the scripture is walking with Christ; following all of his ambulation through the sidewalks and unpaved footpaths of the words, symbols, and forms.
Slowly, we begin to inhabit the words of Scripture in the way we inhabit domestic spaces. I can say of this of that passage of scripture “oh that reminds me of that part earlier in Exodus when this thing happened” or “Oh man, I remember the first time I read this with Dawson back in high school…” And we can do this just like we can do say of our neighborhoods “Oh man, I just love those September nights when aunty Meg’s night jasmine flowers across the street” or “Hey kids look, that used to be the best pizza parlor in Honolulu”. Even the language we use is the same, that of memory: “Do you remember when Elijah contested the thrall of Baal on Mt. Carmel? That sure was crazy!”
And so, by a long pedestrian knowing, Scripture becomes not only something that lives in us, but, in a way, something we live in.