What thought itself an adlib extempo, modified for comprehesibility.
Malcolm Muggeridge greeted me this morning as I lay snuggled against the chill of a mid-May anti-global-warming activity on the part of whoever or whatever balances such things. Atop my bookcase lay a book I don’t remember seeing for a very long time, ten years maybe. During that period I sought the book several times, hoping for a quip from the old Brit that might poke some odd inflated idea in a more adroit manner than I might.
Deflated ideas are easier to pull down when there are so many floating above our heads with banners waving and amps blaring, raising themselves above any effort to examine what keeps them afloat. God knows it’s easier to see farther when you can see stars and such, unblocked by crazy solution polution. So, Malcolm has some points helpful in releasing hot air when that is the only support for a particular idea or other -ology of any sort, probably.
Malcolm Muggeridge gave me laughs when I was approaching that state of being arrived at after one’s last hope has popped. He is no comedian. Dry wit, is Malcom’s mode, nothing near comedy. Wielding sharp insight and high-brow perspicacity, without the slightest touch of Rowlingian muggleridge, he late in life wrote “Rediscovering Jesus”. He made me laugh out loud, on purpose, I believe.
Late in life, I began to read that book, ‘t’was the one I was greeted with at first noticed light through my window this morning, my east facing window that sees no direct light until the orb we occupy rotates it toward the sun which must clear the Lagunas before shining in my valley. Around 7, I guess.
Background on me and Mr. Muggeridge. I was in Nashvile, in a dormitory next door to Music Square Church, near the time the pope was shot, 1981. He was a guest on William F. Buckley’s PBS Talk Show. Why I was watching, I don’t know. All I remember went like this:
MM– Given what can be known. the only solution to the problem of evil required the incarnation.
WFB– But you can’t bring that up at a party in Washington.
MM –Oh, quite the contrary, it is a magnificent conversation starter.
Those are not quotes, but are my recalled impressions of what I heard in those few seconds in 1981. May it was, then, too.
Googling him reveals a noticeable life trail that may be followed as far as one might choose to go. His old age, the last 17 years of his mortality, is all that interests me. Much he his known for supporting, I scorn; his grip on the gospel itself, outside the superstitions and traditions, I laud, aloud sometimes.
Really off the wall possibility, perhaps this line of thinking about hot air is my sub-self still laughing at the farting dog story I read to Gabe last night. Laughter
does good, good medicine for all that ails ye. If you can think and laugh at the same time, otherwise, you knever know.
Muggeridge became a Roman Catholic in 1982 and said this:
Our entry into the Church is settled, which gives me, not so much exhilaration as a deep peace; to quote my own words: A sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.
If by Church he meant what I mean I would weigh his wisdom well beyond me but he does not. He joined a herd hierarchy and ritual pomp that I believe robs, kills and has destroyed the faith of many a fallen crusader attempting to crash Heaven’s gate with good works and penances aplenty.
The just, just live, by faith.
