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in western South Dakota, but it’s also serious business. After the accidental death of a young man that grieved the whole community, the kind of death that can test anyone’s faith in God, I read in a sermon a portion of one of Chrysostom’s sermons on Divine Providence. Imagine someone without the least notion of agriculture, he says, “observing a farmer collecting grain and shutting it in a barn to protect it from damp. Then he sees the same farmer take the same grain and cast it to the winds, spreading it on the ground, maybe even in the mud, without worrying any more about the dampness. Surely he will think that the farmer has ruined the grain, and reprove the farmer.” The reproof comes from ignorance and impatience, Chrysostom says; only waiting until the end of the summer, he would see the farmer harvest that grain, and be astonished at how it has multiplied. So much the more, he adds, ever the consummate theologian, should “we await the final outcome of events, remembering who it is who ploughs the earth of our souls.” I hoped it helped just a bit, to remind people that when the tragic, inexplicable events come, one of the hardest things to accept is that we don’t have answers or explanations enough to cover the way they tear us up inside.

Chrysostom’s metaphor of the soil of our souls made sense to the people in the congregations I was addressing, but to many in the world it might seem a contradiction. The popular mythology of our day, the one-sentence stereotype of Christians that you encounter everywhere, is that Christians are people who have always despised the earth. Most of us, Christians or not, were brought up to believe that “earth” and “soul” are distinct categories, thoroughly separate, and not to be mixed. All I can say is, many things were looser in the fourth century than they are in our uptight, narrow-minded age. And they’re a lot looser now, out in western South Dakota, than in either the academy or the city.

June 9

EPHREM THE SYRIAN

The metaphoric poverty of the contemporary churches sends me back to an earlier time in Christian history, when Ephrem, the great theologian of the early Syrian church, wrote theology as poetry. The Incarnation was everything to him; frequently, Ephrem prays in a way made possible by the doctrine itself:

Have mercy, O Lord, on my children.

In my children,

Call to mind your childhood,

You who were a child.

Let them that are like your childhood

Be saved by your grace.

Ephrem’s Christianity, as the contemporary scholar Sebastian Brock has remarked, is much more Semitic than Greek. A man after my own heart, Ephrem “avoids—indeed abhors—definitions, which he regards as boundaries that impose limit; his own method, by contrast,” Brock says, “is to proceed by way of paradox and symbol.”

Ephrem is a serious and orthodox Christian theologian—officially, a Doctor of the Church—but he does lead his readers into strange places. One of his hymns on faith includes a passage on God’s efforts “to [clothe] Himself in our language, so that He might clothe us in His way of Life.” Ephrem compares this, memorably, with a person trying to teach a parrot to talk by the use of a mirror.

In his own time, Ephrem had such a reputation for holy tranquility that one story told about him in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers concerns a prostitute who solicited him, mostly to see if she could tempt him to anger, for, we are told, no one had ever seen him angry! He asks her to follow him and, when they reach a crowded place, tells her that she may now do what she desires with him. Ashamed, she departs. We hear nothing more of the woman, though in many monastic stories concerning prostitutes, the tremor of shame that the woman feels at the monk’s gentle rebuke proves to be the means by which she is able to change her life. This story gives us a glimpse into the ancient monastic attitude toward sexual honesty; or, as a later monk, John Cassian, put it, the goal of having anger subdued by chastity so that a monk “is found the same, day and night, the same in bed as in prayer, quite