Anger

The Hogwarts crest says: Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus.

Now I take quite the issue at people who say that anger reveals your true personality. As if everything else is an Image. Fake. I don’t buy it for the very specific reason that we are not one-dimensional characters. A lot of different things make us up.

By which I mean that Mr. Hyde may be one of our personalities but we could also be Dr. Jekyll. It’s just opposite sides of a spectrum.

Which brings me to another point that force-suppressing innermost unhappiness and dissatisfaction could manifest in the ugliest ways. Dr Bruce Banner may be the personality people best know, but once The Hulk is forced out, that’s who people will remember. Is that anything remotely good? The Hulk destroys a lot of things. Things that never needed to be destroyed if pressure was just let off here and there. That’s how pressure cookers work, a lot of inside pressure released periodically. Job done.

And also conversely, but along the same tangent, the other side of the coin, so to speak, it would be grand if we’d just learn to never tickle sleeping dragons. That, by the way, is what the Hogwarts crest says in English.

Sometimes we just push and push people until they crack. And then we shake our heads and say: I knew it. It’s not so much an Aha! moment as it is unfortunate that we force people to reveal the worst of themselves. Then we forget everything good about them. We forget when they’ve shown exceeding kindness or just a congenial personality which, let's face it, is who most of us are. It’s how we survive in society, flying under radars. Conforming. Making the best of situations. Ranting and amiably verbally abusing authorities in the safety of friend groups.

We are not any of us cut out in black and white. We are multi-dimensional beings just shuffling along. For the Christian community, who pressure each other to be passive-aggressive and sort of suppress a lot of emotions and glory in suffering silently, we are often told to emulate Jesus. What Would Jesus Do, right? But even in this realm of ethics, WWJD technically includes flipping over tables and chairs and people’s businesses at a temple/church because he got angry. Are we really going to say that that violent nature is his “one true” personality?

Sometimes I think because we don't like some people, it is difficult for us to accept that they are decent people. Maybe they're just mean to us. Maybe we just rub them the wrong way. Human life is often not a zero sum game. 

Anger is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Anger gets a lot of things done. It moves a lot of things. It has altered courses of history. Controlling it is something we must do. Because too much of anything is never good. But otherwise, in and of itself, not the worst. And unless it is psycho level anger issues, just a part of a healthy psyche.

You should watch Inside Out by Pixar. I highly recommend. Also read Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. That will teach you about dragons, too. Also maybe watch Avatar, the bald head monk one, not the blue people one. 

Dragons, the other side. Still, don’t tickle them.

Comedy in the Book of Judges

Judges. As in one of the Books of the Bible, yes. I enjoy reading the Bible sometimes for the story content. And some really nice existential poetry in Ecclesiastes. Plus, not for nothing, Gospels are nice. Calming.

Anyhoo. There are three exceedingly funny stories in Judges. I always love reading this Book.

One is actually one of my favourite stories in the Bible. It involves a man named Micah. Micah was just this one random dude from the Ephraim tribe. One day, this random Levite (of the priestly clan, if you know your Israel tribes) knocked on his door. And Micah was like: you want to be my priest? And the Levite said: ya, sure. So Micah made some carved idols and paid the Levite to be his priest. 

Come this one day and some Danites came to this town and met Micah’s priest who told them a good fortune. So they said: you want to come with us with your cast idol, serve an entire clan instead of just one man? And the Levite, this Benedict Arnold of a priest, said: ya, sure. So he left with them.

Later Micah caught up with them and was like: Hey, you took my god and my priest, what is up with that?! And the Danites, very blood-thirsty and just a gang of 600 bullies, were just like: Don’t make us hurt you. So they just took Micah’s god and his priest and set up a new town.

I don’t know the point of this story. It’s just really funny to me.

The second funny story is a little racist. And again, it involves Ephramites. Apparently Ephramites can’t pronounce Sh. So the Gileadites would ask them, “Say Shibboleth”. And if the person says Sibboleth, they just killed them. It was highly interesting to me in college when I was obsessing over linguistics.

I just find it funny it has mention in this very solemn Book. 

The third one is just a random throw-away line. Judges 3:17 reads: He presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab, who was a very fat man. 

Just like that. It’s like the neighbourhood aunties and unclejis just looking at you and going: you are fat. Or a very honest kid who you ask to describe someone and they just go: the fat one. I mean this dude, who was a king, was ruling over Israel at some point, because they were evil and God was punishing them. Which is basically the entire recurring theme of the Book. And all that the Book has to say about his was that he was “a very fat man”. 

You have to wonder just how fat he was. And thankfully, the Bible provides that answer in the next next para. Somewhat. Ehud, a Benjamite man, whose only other description is that he was “a left-handed man”, plunged his one and half foot long sword into Eglon’s belly. And the Bible just says: “the fat closed in over it”. Always with the fat when it comes to Eglon. 

Very gory, very macabre. But also, so random it’s funny.

Now, go and read your Judges.