Here’s where they have flown, all the old commentaries and concordances culled
from pastors’ studies, found boxed
and forgotten in a parsonage attic long after the disgraced preacher fled to find a
job selling term life insurance
or cemetery plots, flown here to the bowing shelves of Elder’s Bookstore on an old
street in Nashville, their own special homegoing. They rest now,
unread and roughly shelved like the riprap facing of a levee raised to stem the
flood of the Higher Criticism, a stay
against modernity and any other tide that could erode the first inch of authority
from the pulpiteering class, a half-dozen editions
of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, the revised Genesis volume from The
Broadman Bible Commentary next to Vol. 12
James through Revelation of The Interpreter’s Bible, library binding, hardly
opened, part of a Methodist minister’s contested estate,
and other reference works so old they earnestly grapple with theological disputes
embarrassing to recount, a record
of how the studied, typeset wisdom of one age quickly becomes ridiculous, or
worse, to the next. But my interest lies
in what’s on the other side of theology, the places theology can’t cross to. I am
touched by the sadness of emptied rooms, old library furniture
carted to the landfill, the parsonage converted to office space and dead file storage
now that the new pastor and his young family
have bought a home in a treeless development on the edge of town. The lights are
off in the pastor’s study, so hopefully restocked
with new commentaries based on the NIV translation. There’s a theology of silent
rooms that has yet to be systematized, woven
in the original languages, waiting for a commentary to unlock their subtle
meanings, to be of use for awhile, and maybe unfold some slight comfort.