From Gorging to Gorges

I had nothing to say this month because I spent all my time reading: Umberto Eco, William Desmond, Barbara Tuchmann, the Book of Judges. I was disconnected from Facebook, no people around me; it was wonderful. Today, however, on the memorial of St. Ignatius of Loyola, I am going to Austria with a group of warm-hearted young adults, to spend a week mountain hiking and meditating while walking. Wish us luck! That's all for now, because I'm typing on my cellphone.

New Occupation

“As a young boy, the Prince of Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a candle whilst he was in her womb. … Until one day Prince Rhaegar found something in his scrolls that changed him. No one knows what it might have been, only that the boy suddenly appeared early one morning in the yard as the knights were donning their steel. He walked up to Ser Willem Darry, the master-at-arms, and said, ‘I will require sword and armor. It seems I must be a warrior.’”

(from A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin)

I wrote that I sometimes wondered what my younger self would think if he could see me now. If he could have seen me last Thursday evening, he would have been astounded. First he would have seen me at evening prayer in a long white robe, in a square chapel, holding a priest’s garment while he walked round to incense the altar; then taking the censer and swinging it at the priest and the lone seminarian whom we could call the congregation (doing some violence to the etymology).

My younger self might have eyed all this sceptically, for it is not true (as has sometimes been supposed) that he ‘needed to see things’; some argument and an intense dose of poetry was required to open his eyes to the beauty and validity of sensory expressions of the sacred. Even my contemporaneous self (that would be me) is more moved by the aspect of order than by free-floating shininess.

Be that as it may, my sensitive and tender-skinned younger self would have been even more stupefied on seeing me, divested of my alb, run upstairs, change into sports gear, and get into the car for krav maga practice.

Krav maga, or, as I prefer to call it, קְרַב מַגָּע (I’m just showing off here; do tell me to stop) is a form of martial arts developed in the 1940s by a Hungarian Jew. Imi Lichtenfeld happened to be a boxer and a wrestling champion, skills which he put to use and modified in fights against fascist gangs to protect the Jewish community. After he got into trouble with the local government (which was not pro-Semitic), he left and ended up in Israel, where he started training paramilitary troops from 1948 onwards.

Unlike most Japanese martial arts, which have a certain elegance and focus on specific movements (as I understand it, having no experience with them), krav maga focuses on maximum efficiency in realistic attack situations. Every defensive move is accompanied by a simultaneous offensive move (and followed up by a few more). No holds are barred: all weak parts of the body are exploited (though, obviously, safety in training is observed: you don’t actually get to punch people in the face, which is a small price to pay for not being similarly punched yourself).

I have been training since the end of January. I had been saying since last Summer that I wanted to do some form of martial arts, and some friends encouraged me to try krav maga. So during my last exam month, I considered it was probably going to be then or never; and faced with that dilemma, I took the step. The fact that Deacon Prins practices kickboxing (and derives satisfaction from it in moments of pastoral challenge), and that Fr. Hagen once served with the Dutch Marines (and has learnt to kill people with his bare hands, as he told me afterwards), helped me to cross the threshold.

Since then, I have gotten scrapes on my toes, knuckles and elbows, my arms and wrists have been jarred by blocking movements, my lips have bled, my self-confidence has gone up, and it’s been great fun overall. One particularly fun moment consisted in meeting a person who had gone on the diocesan pilgrimage to Rome, in which around 800 people participated. I knew him from the pilgrimage as a father of two kids (including a young one that was kissed by the Holy Father!); he knew me as a seminarian, and when we saw each other again at the training centre, we had difficulty recognizing each other.

It has been educative as well. After the second lesson, you think you are stronger than the world; after the fourth, you find out you are not. The confidence boost comes with a realization that most attackers are stronger, faster, more resilient, and more merciless than your own hero fantasies make them. It’s good to discover that while holding a solid punching pad.

Yesterday I filled out and sent my subscription form to the national office of the IKMF (International Krav Maga Federation). In the evening I went to Haarlem for training. Around the beginning of the lesson, because of an unlucky foot movement by my partner (I think), part of my toenail tore. It took me a while to notice what had happened; we were concentrating on something else. Small droplets of blood were all across our corner of the room. I went to the reception, where I was skilfully bandaged by a concerned lady, and spent a significant time scrubbing my own blood off the mat (I almost wrote ‘mopping’, but it wasn’t that bad). Then I resumed training.

Now if I could punch, hammer and kick my thesis into completion…

The End of an Era

Yesterday was my last day of class at seminary: an hour of musical repetition for Corpus Christi and two hours of General Sacramental Theology.

For a moment I thought that my days of school were over, that twenty-one years of formal education had come to an end. It was not so; next year I will still have to take some weekend classes. But the balance of my life will shift to real-life observation (initially) and practical assignments (as my internship advances).

In a way, I am looking forward to it, despite feeling quite unprepared. There is much I still want to practise, many questions I do not know the answer to, many books I would still love to read. But perhaps the point of the past twenty-one years consists in that realization.

Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine contains the following exchange:

‘Well.’ She started pouring tea. ‘To start things off, what do you think of the world?’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty­-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.’

‘You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.’

‘It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?’

So what have I learned at seminary, besides living a liturgical life? Partly, to be more tolerant and patient. And this at a seminary which has the reputation of being strict and conservative. Whatever they tell you, you were not born to change the world, only to help some people take some small steps, hopefully without doing too much damage in the meantime. As St. James says,

Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness. For we all make many mistakes…

(3:1-2)

But (not to end on too depressing a note) also this: the Bible is much more interesting than I thought. It is a patchwork and a whole, it stimulates but eludes interpretation: call it ‘hard-to-get’. It is a pluripotent stem cell of meaning with many offshoots that are interesting in their own right.

During my years at seminary, I have also gotten to know the human dimension of the Church. That makes it possible to joke about religion, even if Humor ist, wann man trotzdem lacht. Jokes about religion are the best because there is always something that the joke does not cover, something to return to after laughter, a solace and a challenge. I came into the Church because She inspired reverence, and now I paraphrase Tertullian: credo quia absurda – but these are two permanent aspects of the same creation, two sides of one moon.

The Dragon's Head

On 25 December 800, when Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, a delegation of Eastern monks was present in Aachen. They sang a Greek hymn which pleased the pious emperor (who rose daily at 5am for Matins) so much that he had it translated into Latin. The various stanzas of the hymn were used as antiphons, which were used eventually at the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. So our liturgy teacher told us. The fourth antiphon runs:

Caput draconis contrivit Salvator in Iordanis flumine; ab eius potestate omnes eripuit.

‘The dragon’s head the Saviour has crushed in the Jordan river; out of his power He has torn all men.’

The initial words of this antiphon sounded familiar, and so they were:

At the very end of the corridor hung a portrait of a very fat woman in a pink silk dress.

‘Password?’ she said.

‘Caput draconis,’ said Percy, and the portrait swung forward to reveal a round hole in the wall … the Gryffindor common room, a cosy, round room full of squashy armchairs.

This, as you will have divined, occurs on Harry Potter’s first evening at Hogwarts. The password of Harry’s house is the first part of a liturgical antiphon celebrating Christ’s victory over the devil, just like his parents’ gravestone in the last book contains a Biblical quote looking forward to the Resurrection.

I was excited about this discovery and decided to double-check. This was rather a let-down. It turns out that the password also has a place in a different symbolic universe: that of geomancy. Geomancy is a practice which seeks to know the future through reading patterns of soil, rocks or sand tossed on the ground. Wikipedia identifies 16 geomantic figures, consisting of four rows referring to the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth); each row can have either two points (passive) or one (active). 2 possibilities for each row * 4 rows = 16 figures.

The most ‘active’ figure is Via (the Way), which looks like this:

   x

   x

   x

   x

The most ‘passive’ figure is Populus (the People):

x    x

x    x

x    x

x    x

And this is Caput Draconis:

x    x

   x

   x

   x

This figure, Wikipedia tells us, is generally neutral, but fortunate with starting or beginning new things – such as a Hogwarts education. But there are stronger indications that Rowling was making a reference to geomancy. For one thing, Fortuna Major is one of the 16 figures and also functions as a Gryffindor password at some point.

Then there is an reversed pair of Albus (‘white’) and Rubeus (‘red’), which Harry Potter readers cannot fail to recognize as the first names of Dumbledore and Hagrid. The figures resemble, respectively, an upright and an overturned goblet. Albus stands for ‘peace, wisdom and purity’, and while the disagreeable elements of Rubeus have been excised from Hagrid’s character, it still refers to ‘good in all that is evil, and evil in all that is good’ (like a good heart in a fierce and towering appearance, seeing the spirited beauty in dangerous creatures, and unmasking overly smooth politeness?).

Anyhow, given the plurality of interpretations possible in any literary work, I’ll just stick with my own reading while acknowledging a potential tension with the mind of the human author.

P.S. I skimmed the Geomancy article on Wikipedia, which describes the formation of any chart of geomantic figures. The first four of these are random, or ‘inspired’ (take your pick); the other figures are computed from the first four. Thus one ultimately arrives at a chart of sixteen figures; or sometimes fifteen, in these troublous times, for so the section concludes:

A sixteenth figure, the Reconciler or superiudex, is also generated by adding the Judge and the First Mother, although this has become seen as extraneous and a ‘backup figure’ in recent times.

Who could have believed that the Judge and the First Mother would generate the Reconciler?

Judgement Day

Laetare Ierusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam —

Oh, excuse me; I was just singing the Introit, but it is true I promised you a homily, which you have no doubt ardently expected, so I shall skip to it right quickly.

The passage from the Letter to the Hebrews, with which the last post ended, hides a secret that shall now be revealed. It is a dark passage, a warning to Christians who reject the consecration and the spiritual riches they have received. After all, we have come to know God, who said: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ and: ‘The Lord will judge his people.’

How do we know God said this? From the Old Testament, obviously. The second sentence is quoted from Deuteronomy 32:36, which reads in the Greek translation: Krinei Kyrios ton laon autou. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, who wrote in Greek, lifted this sentence from its context to make his point. In its original language, it meant something different.

Krinō means ‘to judge’. From this we derive the words ‘critic’, one who judges; ‘crisis’, a process of judgment; and ‘crime’, a deed liable to judgment. A quick look at the etymological dictionary shows that the word comes from an ancient root meaning ‘to sieve, discriminate, distinguish’. It is an analytical sort of word that conjures up an image of an impartial, impassive observer, looking carefully if the thing under scrutiny meets standards.

The seventh book of the Jewish Bible was called in Greek Kritai, ‘Judges’. In Hebrew, however, it is called Shophetim, ‘rulers, leaders, chieftains’. The connotation of this word is very different: not an impartial observer applying a fixed measure, but a superior who demands obedience and is supposed to work for the good of his people (or less suavely: to bring his tribe to glory).

Similarly, the verb used in ‘The Lord will judge his people’ is dīn, ‘bring justice, put things to rights’. This sounds promising rather than threatening – and so it is. The sentence quoted to terrify in the Letter to the Hebrews brings deliverance in Deuteronomy:

For the LORD will vindicate his people

And take revenge for His servants,

When he sees that their might is gone,

And neither bond nor free is left.

Our judge is not impartial, but a deliverer; after he has taught us not to look for freedom and protection elsewhere, He will (so the poem in Deuteronomy ends)

Wreak vengeance on His foes,

And cleanse the land of His people.

Hell in the Gospels

Prefatory note: this post is not intended to deny or question any aspect of developed Catholic teaching on Hell; it is merely an attempt to put things in perspective.

When the Jacobean version of the New Testament was in process of evolution the pious and learned men engaged in the work insisted by a majority vote on translating the Greek word "Aides" as "Hell"; but a conscientious minority member secretly possessed himself of the record and struck out the objectional word wherever he could find it.  At the next meeting, the Bishop of Salisbury, looking over the work, suddenly sprang to his feet and said with considerable excitement:  "Gentlemen, somebody has been razing 'Hell' here!"

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, “Hades”)

It has been common in Catholic and Protestant circles alike to suppose that unbelievers would go to Hell. Both were convinced that Heaven was something one did not gain by one’s own efforts, but only through the mediation of Jesus, and that disbelieving in Jesus meant rejecting salvation. Preaching strongly on Hell served a double function: for unbelievers, to heighten the sense of urgency of conversion; for believers, to dissuade them from leaving the fold.

When in the last centuries an increasing number of people voiced doubts as to whether the existence of Hell was consistent with a merciful God, it was pointed out that most of the sayings on Hell came from the mouth of Jesus himself, to whom friend and foe ascribe great compassion. So, because Jesus himself threatened unbelievers with Hell, this cannot be so unmerciful as people suppose.

Whether or not the conclusion is true, the logic is flawed. It is flawed because the statement ‘Jesus spoke often about Hell’ cannot be substituted by ‘Jesus threatened unbelievers with Hell’. In fact, my cursory (and possibly deficient) examination of the Gospels revealed the following:

(1) The ones threatened with punishment are generally insiders, not outsiders.

(2) The vast majority of references to final punishment occur in the Gospel of Matthew, the most ‘Jewish’ of the Gospels, and therefore directed at those who shared Jesus’ religious presuppositions.

(3) The Gospel of John, which uses the starkest terms to describe the contrast between faith and unbelief, talks about judgment but not about Hell.

The first time that ‘Gehenna’ is mentioned, an ancient site of idolatry outside of Jerusalem where children were formerly sacrificed (used to indicate a place of final punishment), is in the Sermon of the Mount. Here Jesus intensifies the demands of the law with the formula ‘You have heard that it was said … but I say unto you …’ The first two sections aim at eradicating the roots of anger and lust, respectively. The person who openly insults his brother by denying his rightness of mind ‘shall be liable to fiery Gehenna’. And the person who looks at a woman lustfully is told that it is better to cut off wayward body parts than to be cast bodily into Gehenna.

This theme of self-mutilation must have made an impression, because it occurs a second time in Matthew with a parallel in Mark. In this case the warning is not against the lustful look, but against anything that causes sin, especially in the ‘little ones’. Someone who weakens the character of those still in need of protection and encouragement cannot count on God’s sympathy.

Mark is rather explicit in his description of Gehenna: it is a place where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched’. This is a quote from the final vision of the prophet Isaiah, where the corpses (not souls) of the rebels against God will be eternally devoured outside of the city. However, this punishment is introduced by the consoling thought ‘All mankind shall come to worship before me’. (The ingathering of the Gentiles, i.e. the outsiders, is a major theme in Isaiah, as is the destruction of those who exhibit aggression towards the holy place.) Unquenchable fire, by the way, is a prophetic image for the ‘muscle power’ with which God reacts to evil.

Those sent on a mission by Jesus are exhorted to take God more seriously than outside pressure from others, because those can hurt our body, but God can destroy our soul in Gehenna. This warning occurs in two Gospels (Matthew and Luke) and is addressed to the closest insiders in Jesus’ circle.

So is there no threat of judgment for the ‘outsiders’ – in current terms, those to whom Jesus seems like a distant historical figure, difficult to see through the fog of Christian legend? Yes, there is, because the whole world will be judged at the end of history. However, the judgment is based not so much on belief as on the character of one’s heart. In the Gospels, Jesus teaches that everyone has to meet certain negative and positive expectations on God’s part. Negative: ‘all who cause others to sin and all evildoers’ will be thrown out. Positive: only those who have practised active mercifulness towards those in need will escape eternal punishment.

Mostly, however, Jesus’ warnings involve a reversal of expectations for those who are in some sense ‘insiders’, but who have not lived up to this relationship. The first occurrence could serve as a textbook example: after preaching on what the people are like in the kingdom of heaven (which the nation of Israel is called to embody), Jesus meets a Roman centurion. In other words: a military leader of the occupying force in Israel, which often made it difficult for Jews to worship God freely and without compromises. At the moment, however, the centurion is on a mission of peace: he asks Jesus to heal his servant, with complete trust in Jesus’ ability to do so. Jesus is struck and says: ‘Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom [of Israel?] will be driven out into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’

This is quite a slap in the face of his Jewish hearers! Isaiah’s vision was that the Gentiles would come to worship with Israel, not that they would take Israel’s place. Since Israel was God’s people, every Israelite could be considered an ‘insider’, but now they are excluded while the ‘outsiders’ are allowed to approach Israel’s founding fathers!

Jesus’ provocations are not ended. Towards the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus pronounces a series of ‘woes’ on the outwardly religious Pharisees, including this one: ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You traverse sea and land to make one convert, and when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna twice as much as yourselves.’ (The title ‘children of the kingdom’ is reversed.) And a little later: ‘You serpents, you brood of vipers, how can you flee from the judgment of Gehenna?’

Lastly, the theme of final punishment occurs in several parables in which a servant or subject has failed to do what was expected of him: the guest who has not dressed properly for the royal wedding; the head servant who abuses his fellow servants and neglects his responsibilities; the servant who buried his talent. They all go to a place where there is ‘wailing and grinding of teeth’. They are punished for thinking and acting as if no effort were required of them; they are ‘insiders’ who do not meet the demands.

The Gospel of John, which has the strongest dichotomy between faith and unbelief, does not say much about final punishment. Rather, there is a sense that unbelievers exclude themselves from the greatest gift God offers, and consequently remain in darkness: ‘He who believes in [Jesus] is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God … He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.’

Faith and life are interlinked. The sort of unbelief that John has in mind is the kind that refuses to believe because it refuses to be well: ‘the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.’ So even in John, there is a judgment based not merely on religion but on one’s heart: ‘The hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice [viz. of the Son of God] and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.’

All this does not really convey the idea that ‘outsiders’ go to Hell by definition. But it is a different thing to have become an ‘insider’ and to fail to act like one. This is attested by Jesus in the Gospels, and also by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews:

If we sin deliberately after receiving knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains sacrifice for sins but a fearful prospect of judgment and a flaming fire that is going to consume the adversaries. Anyone who rejects the law of Moses is put to death without pity on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Do you not think that a much worse punishment is due [to] the one who has contempt for the Son of God, considers unclean the covenant-blood by which he was consecrated, and insults the spirit of grace? We know the one who said: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ and again: ‘The Lord will judge his people.’

I wish my fellow Christians (and everyone else, of course) a blessed Lent. A meditation on the above text should be a good start. It hides a secret, but I will leave that for Laetare Sunday (15 March). Stay tuned.

Sexy Heresy

All my life a ludicrous and portentous solemnisation of sex has been going on.

(C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, “Eros”, p. 97)

A while ago I heard a song on the radio of which I could only catch the words ‘Take me to church’ and ‘Amen, amen, amen’. I strongly suspected I was missing something, so I looked up the complete lyrics. The song was Take me to church by Hozier; it has been on the Top 100 list for 25 weeks now, peaking at #2 and currently still going strong at #3. Hozier’s church, contrasted with the sombre and misanthropic institutional church, turns out to be one that ‘worships in the bedroom’. Almost Augustinian is the line ‘I should’ve worshipped her sooner’. Sero te amavi!

The simile is so extended as to become almost Homeric. The lover is called a ‘mouthpiece of heaven’, a ‘Goddess’ that demands sacrifice, one that gives ‘deathless death’ (a stock metaphor) and to whom one’s life can be given. Imagery of Christmas and Corpus Christi is combined (with innuendo) in the lines ‘What you got in the stable? / We’ve a lot of starving faithful’. Sex becomes worship, a liturgical rite – but one without hierarchy:

No Masters or Kings

When the Ritual begins

There is no sweeter innocence

Than our gentle sin

Dammit, it sounded like such a good song.

In fact it reminded me of nothing so much as the Da Vinci Code (spoilers alert). In Dan Brown’s book, the murdered Louvre curator who opens the plot has had a falling-out with his favourite granddaughter ten years before. The granddaughter happens to become Langdon’s intelligent and docile sidekick. She is struggling with the event that led her to break off contact with her grandfather. This event is referred to in gradually increasing detail until you have an idea what it could be, and when it is ultimately revealed to be a sex rite, you’re not surprised.

Hieros Gamos, Langdon calls it, the Sacred Marriage. Practised in temple prostitution in many ancient cults, including the Jewish Temple before the patriarchal system took over. (Perhaps he is thinking of Eli’s sons, but they were priests at the Shiloh sanctuary before the Temple was even dreamed of.) Still practised secretly in cultural centres like Manhattan and Paris. It is a festive celebration of fertility, a happy natural religion in contrast with the gloomy, restrictive, sin-obsessed Judeo-Catholic power structures.

Sophie voices the obvious objection: ‘What I saw was neither holy nor a marriage.’

Now Dan Brown lets this hang in the air, but ultimately answers it with an almost Chestertonian twist: the woman who was with the curator was actually his wife. They had separated to avert danger from their two grandchildren, but still they came together annually because some rites just had to be performed.

It is very interesting to note the devilish cleverness by which our author has painted sex rites with a veneer of bourgeois conventionality. All of the reviews I read back in the day took pot-shots at the historical wrongness of Dan Brown’s opus, but none addressed the core idea. What precisely is wrong with having ritual sex with your wife?

Well, aside from wrongness, there are two inner contradictions in this picture. The most obvious one is this: if the rite is an annual celebration of fertility, why on earth did the curator have only one child? Apparently most of the fertility rites failed to deliver. The Christian way of celebrating fertility (liturgically at Christmas and more informally after the birth of any child) would seem to make more sense.

The other element has to do with the anti-patriarchal pretence that Langdon/Dan Brown puts up. This gets a little more complicated. His contention is that the Catholic Church established their power status by elevating Jesus to divinity at the Council of Nicea (325), making the Church the only bringer of salvation on earth. (Try telling the Donatists that. Or the Assyrians, or the Copts.) The Church obscured the ‘fact’ that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus in order to create the hierarchical Petrine church we all know and love.

In reality, Dan Brown claims, Mary Magdalene was the hero of the story of Christianity. She was the ‘Holy Grail’ because she was the chosen vessel of Jesus to perpetuate his bloodline: the line of King David, later of the Frankish kings. The Da Vinci Code ends with Langdon’s realization of the pilgrimage we are called to make: to ‘pray at the feet of the outcast one’, at the relics of Mary Magdalene in Paris. She was ousted from her powerful position in the early Church because they feared the power of the ‘sacred feminine’.

But what was her merit? Apparently nothing more than being married to Jesus, as his favourite disciple, and being the mother of his children. And Jesus was only a human prophet. How this makes Mary Magdalene an embodiment of the ‘sacred feminine’, I have no idea.

So this is the second inner contradiction: in Dan Brown’s world, women receive their importance and insight from men. As Mary Magdalene was taught and wedded by Jesus, Sophie with her ‘virginal’ (i.e. uninitiated, receptive) mind is taught by Langdon and Teabing, who draw an explicit analogy between teaching and sexual intercourse (planting the seed, that sort of thing). In the Priory of Sion, it is the Grand Master who holds the strings, also of its ritual aspects. No Masters or Kings / When the Ritual begins?

Say what you like about the Judeo-Catholic tradition, I am not convinced that the cult of the sacred feminine offers a better alternative. Somehow it always seems to end in temple prostitution, half-orphaned children, empty celebrations and failed promises, enshrined lies – and no forgiveness:

I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife

Well, Saturday is almost over. Anyone available to take me to church tomorrow?