This particular phrase, listed as a direct quote of Jesus in Saying 77 of the Gospel of Thomas, has long stuck somewhere at least in the the back of my mind. The "long" is at least the 30 years back to my last year of seminary, when I first heard of the gospel, and read it on my own, because, not at the M.Div. level, and probably not even at the ThD level in New Testament exegesis, was Concordia Seminary going to offer a class on extracanonical gospels or even one on the study of Q. (That's even more true today.)
Well, on vacation in late July, high in the San Juan Mountains, the most beautiful of the Colorado Rockies, I saw this, shortly after having a sort of "secular spiritual experience" which included inventing the word "humaste" as a secular replacement for "namaste."
"This" is a standing dead trunk of a ponderosa pine with what's obviously new life of some sort in the center. (The full cutline on the original photo at Google Photos has more.)
So, what does the phrase mean to me now? Did I get explanation?
Yes.
It means I am there. Not Jesus, not Yahweh, not anybody else. Me, but not in a New Agey way. But, in a secular, "humaste," meditative way. Even as somewhat of an introvert, and definitely a loner, and both reinforced by being in an unintellectual rural outpost of America, "I am there" as part of being connected to nature, but also to other sentient human (and non-human) life.
[Update, Sept. 11, 2023: A year later, not much more than 100 miles as the crow flies, I saw another tree trunk that inspired me to do secular judo on this same logion: "Split the Log, there I am not!"]
And, I am an intellectual!
That said, and since I love multilingual puns anyway?
The Gospel of Thomas, per the link, is a string of bare sayings by Jesus without context. The Greek word for "saying," in the Latin alphabet, is "logion." So:
Interestingly, the next saying in Thomas is its version, though removed from the context as presented in Matthew and Luke, of what Jesus is reported in their version of Q as asking a crowd of followers after an imprisoned John the Baptizer sent disciples to Jesus to find out if he was the "real deal." There, Jesus, riffing on Isaiah, tells them to tell John they have seen the blind given sight, etc. etc. He then asked the crowd rhetorically, referring to John, "What did you come out into the desert to see?"
Interestingly, because I've regularly asked myself that question rhetorically while out hiking, and recently got the answer, and I'll blog about that shortly.
Finally, per my above multilingual pun, the Greek word for "word," as Bible scholars and many others know, per the opening of the gospel of John, is "logos."
And, that leads me to a phrase from the book of Hebrews, that "The logos is sharper than any two-edged sword." Indeed, it's sharp enough to split a logion and invite one to find one's self.
I debated about whether this was multilingual bad pun overkill, but eventually decided not. That said, because I had flattened the second picture and saved it as a .jpg and closed it, I didn't have a .psd with layers to work with to keep the text from being quite so cramped. (Non-photo editing people, it can't be explained simpler than that.)
Photo-editing discussion partially aside (not totally, because this blog IS in part about aesthetics) I went with it and not just because of a bad pun.
As I have riffed with my own thoughts on what splitting the log means, so, the two-edge sword of a word — or a statement, which is a logion — can split a saying. "Iron sharpens iron" becomes "word splits word," taking "word" as both "logos" and "logion" and being a "statement" or "saying" in both cases, not necessarily an individual word.
I don't think the author of Hebrews was referring to the Logos hymn at the start of John, or to the Stoic idea of the logos behind that. Rather, he's speaking to the power of words, sharply used (not "sharply" in the bad emotive sense) to cut through muck.
Of course, as a good secularist and skeptic, I'm cutting through different muck, including that author's belief system.
To find myself.
And, that leads back to Thomas.
Specifically, Logion 2:
Jesus said, "Whoever seeks shouldn't stop until they find. When they find, they'll be disturbed. When they're disturbed, they'll be […] amazed, and reign over the All."
What is this "all"? As a broad-minded but not New Agey skeptic, and also rejecting solipsism, is it not the finding of one's most nearly authentic self in relationship to the world around?
After all, the full Logion 77 says:
Jesus said, "I'm the light that's over all. I am the All. The All has come from me and unfolds toward me. "Split the log; I'm there. Lift the stone, and you'll find me there."
So, split the log, lift the rock, and as a non-reductionist secularist skeptic, find yourself.
(Note: None of the online versions of Thomas that I found perfectly floated my boat on some logia, including these two. Gospels.net, the top-linked one, had "split a log," which ruins the parallelism with the definite article before "stone." Either both are "the" or neither. A couple of other translations are KJV-English bad on "ye" and such, though having the classic "split the log." One or two, while numbering the logia, had NONE of them as separate paragraphs or even separate verses without headers.)
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