There’s a Far Side cartoon from decades ago: a distraught, writer’s-block-plagued Herman Melville at his desk, hands clutching his head, and all around him are rejected pages of Moby Dick, Chapter One with one line each: “Call me Larry” says one, “Call me Bill” “Call me Warren”…
I don’t know what made me think of that cartoon, as I sit here, having deleted probably a dozen potential opening lines of my Grand Re-Re-Re-Opening of Samwise the Greek. No idea… BUT as long as we’re talking about what to call me, I guess I can start with “Samwise the Greek,” and where that comes from…
Back in college, there was a very intense priest who was quite good at the classic fire and brimstone homilies. He made babies cry. He yelled a lot. One day, he was preach-yelling about how he saw a ton of allegedly-studious students practically living in the library, but not so many in the Adoration Chapel, and not nearly as many on the various outreach and mission outings… He was worried, he told us, that the university was not producing little Christs, i.e., Saints, but rather, little Greeks.
So of course, being very moved, with the very Body and Blood of Our Lord in my veins, I went to the library, studied for my philosophy midterm that I probably B-plus-A-minused, and went to Immokalee to help the poor mayyybe once eventually that year. Maybe. I suck-diddly-uck, is what that story is called.
Anyway, a few years later I was in grad school, trying to come up with a title for my silly, sanity-saving ramble blog, and thought Samwise the Greek sounded like it would work. It also worked for me as a subtle shout out to the great BadCatholic‘s shoutout to Walker Percy. What kind of Catholic am I? Bad. Father Fire&Brimstone said I’m more Greek than Saint– what say I? Guilty as charged. No defense there.
So. Hopefully in the ten years since I started this thing I’ve at least oriented myself more Saintward and less Greekward, but who knows. Augustine says no one can reeeally know himself ever in this life; (which is super fun because know thyself, according to the Doctor of Grace, is also the great commandment of philosophy and human life in general…)
Anyway, this Easter season, Anno Domini Two-Thousand and Twenty, a thousand days into the End Times Quarantine House Arrest, I will again attempt to regularly write more or less philosophical stuff that is eminently amusing to me and hopefully interesting to some of you, as well. Many thanks for reading the boring intro, further posts won’t be so laaame, but rather brimming with inspiring, hilarious insights and discourses that will probably change your life.
I leave you, of course, with a little, faintly Easter-scented, peacock feather from Flannery:
If [people in general] only believed at least that God has the power to do certain things. There is no sense of the power of God that could produce the Incarnation and the Resurrection. They are all so busy explaining away the virgin birth and such things, reducing everything to human proportions that in time they lose even the sense of the human itself, what they were aiming to reduce everything to. …All this is underlining the obvious but I am unaccustomed to finding anyone else interested in it.
Hope you are all as interested in underlining the obvious as this poor philosopher is.
Cheers!
This post brought to you by:
~Harrison Lemke Soundcheck at the Eschaton
~New Belgium Brewing Ranger IPA
~Easter Octave Joy and Hope against hope
Samwise the Gρεεκ. 