The Strong Man and the Cotton Wool
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
There is silence.
Here, I mean.
Well, birds.
And the smell of —
smoke, is that?
Smoke isn't a sound.
A muffled car door in the distance.
An even more distant train.
car.
cars.
— The sky is extraordinary.
I would describe it but my camera phone never does it justice…
Blue
And white.
(See?)
Slight breeze. Skin. Higher leaves. Overlong yellow flowers.
I'm reading the Bible.
Trying to.
About a strong man's house.
And Jesus's words (Mark 3).
Remembering: Sermons. Discussions. A dream once.
And what the annotations say. (This one's The Amplified. So, a lot.)
… and my mind is filled with scenarios and explanations.
Too many of them, in some ways.
It's a bit like balls of cotton wool. Packed together and the tray emptied into the stillest lake.
Drifting. A complete hard line over there — pure blue beyond.
The sky, I mean.
I'm watching the speed of drift.
Clouds. Forms.
Reminds me of long slow symphonies.
Boring. Too long, unless — you had not become addicted to something else.
Could not possibly do anything else,
and so you had to listen.
The blue is darkening… no. Deepening.
And some cloud now softer, blue showing through, reminding me of
a very old face full of life.
A strong man's house.
Like a body.
When it is without choice.
Disarmed.
Ransacked.
Plundered.
Fixed (with chains, with pain, with no more ideas), tied up.
AND THE ANNOTATIONS TELL ME:
X means x
Y means y
Z means either z or s depending on the source - ambiguous.
And I wonder how I would have know that without the annotations, and so whether Jesus or Mark should have supplied the annotations in the original. (But perhaps they did — right there staring the original audience in the face, and it's we who need help catching up.)
The annotations make this about
fighting the enemy. And I'm sure it is.
But when I read about disarmed, ransacked, plundered,
I can't help but feel like
someone whose wild choices and explosions, and addictions of attention
have been bound tightly
(in embrace)
whose old treasures have been stolen
(the overly sweet lollipop, the sharp-cornered ornament, the teddy bear idol)
and is
forced against their will
to listen
to the symphony
finding
they are wrapped on all sides
in
cotton
wool.
That's the kind of approach that led me to Scripture, Slowly: staying with the text long enough for the obvious answers to loosen their grip, and allowing something else to emerge.
Scripture, Slowly is my Bible companion project — helping to create space for the reader's own unique and personal encounters with Scripture.
