1. It's Exodus season in the Office of Readings, and I've read Exodus a lot. I wasn't really expecting the WOW moment that hit me this morning. It's not hard to see Moses as a type of Christ, saving his people from slavery through the blood of a spotless lamb. What clicked for me this morning was the similarities at the beginnings of their lives.
2. I knew that both of them were born into danger -- Moses' life threatened by Pharaoh's edict, Jesus' by Herod's. I hadn't realized that both were mothered by young women from royal families -- Moses by Pharaoh's daughter, Jesus by David's g'g'g'g'g'g'g'granddaughter. I'd never seen the parallel in their mutual decision to say yes. Why didn't they play it safe? One of the handmaids asked the princess, "Should I find a woman to nurse him?" Why didn't the princess say, "My dad will totally flip his lid if I bring home a Hebrew baby." Why didn't Mary say, "The Holy Spirit wants to do WHAT?" Instead both of them said yes, an answer that would echo down the generations. (Oh, God, grant me the courage to say yes to you, even when it seems like a bad idea.)
3. That train of thought reminded me that just as Moses was a foreigner in his own home, as a Hebrew child reared in Pharaoh's court, so was Jesus. The One who set the earth in motion confined himself to a tiny pocket of it for his growing-up years: the fullness of divinity dwelling in the modest home of a carpenter. For a moment I imagined the very walls bowing outward under the power of the Presence, but then I remembered all the times I have walked heedlessly by a tabernacle. (Oh, God, grant me the grace to know your hidden holy presence in the world.)
4. I wonder if their shared experience -- growing up feeling like a stranger between two homes --equipped both Moses and Jesus to lead people away from one home and toward another. In hindsight it's easy to view the Israelites as whiners, but admit it: you probably would have joined in too. It's all very well to talk about the Promised Land, but we've been in this desert for years now -- years! And I! miss! cucumbers! (Oh, God, help me to see beyond temporal struggles to the true Promised Land, to cultivate willing detachment from this world that is not my home.)
6. I'd never heard of typology before my college Chaucer class and it sounded like a wacky cabalistic idea at first. It's kind of cool, though, to see the parallels. The thing about being Catholic is that you can be pretty sure somebody else probably got there before you in 2000 years of collective reflection on the Bible. In fact, I checked the second reading to see if it was some desert father or other musing on these very same things, and I had just forgotten about reading it last year or some other time. (It wasn't. At least not today.) Even though it's unlikely that these are original thoughts, I couldn't quite settle down to work until I'd written them down.
7. This is unrelated to Exodus, but what are your thoughts on pictures in blog posts? I prefer blogs that don't have a lot of pictures -- it's more about the text for me. (I almost never go to the Pioneer Woman's site, no matter how much people rave about her recipes, because I get impatient waiting for the picture of flour + baking powder to load immediately below the picture of flour without baking powder. Just give me the proportions; I can imagine the flour for myself.) I've read a couple of posts lately asserting that blogs need regular infusions of pictures and I'm wondering which way opinion runs in these parts. This is going to be a skewed sample, I suppose, since nobody is reading this blog for the pictures.
More quick takes at Jen's.
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