A member in good standing
None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for the fact I like reading other people’s mail.
Not living people, mind you. That’s unethical, illegal, and rude. Privacy is becoming more and more impossible in this digital age and I do my best to preserve it where I can.
But a long time ago (November of 1976) I was a first year student at Bethany Theological Seminary and learned about a special one-time only class on the personal letters of early Christians. Things like: A guy wrote home and asked how his favorite horse was doing. A kid wrote to his dad who was out on a business trip complaining how the cheap gift left behind for him. A woman described the problems she had with luggage while traveling down the Nile River. A military officer kept writing home to his wife so she’d send him stuff he’d left behind, getting angrier with each letter, all the while sure his mother-in-law was interfering. Stuff like that.
Long story short, I’d only had two months of Greek at that point but I qualified for the course by taking a test that proved I was good as any second-year student, and ever since the study of ancient letters has been a hobby.
Six years ago, I gave myself permission to subscribe to a scholarly journey called “The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists.” That made me a board member. No decoder ring, no t-shirt, no special handshake, but a sure-nuff honest-to-goodness board member.
It also made me a little nervous. I felt like an imposter. Kind of like that scene where the Wizard of Oz tells the scarecrow about the great thinkers back in Kansas who think great thoughts, “And with no more brains that you’ve got. But they’ve got one thing you haven’t got – a diploma!”
That’s the problem. Real Papyrologists have beautiful framed diplomas proclaiming to all and sundry that on such-and-such a day and place they were awarded a PH.D.
I don’t.
Once a year all those papyrologists meet once in some distant, exotic location to hobnob with each other. Last year’s meeting got cancelled because of the Pandemic. This year, however, they had to hold a meeting on Zoom to discuss the problem of ethics, having to do with stolen artifacts mysteriously sold to museums having to do with the Bible.
And as a “Member in Good Standing” I got an invitation to attend.
Including me? Yikes. But at Zero Hour I clicked the Zoom link and suddenly there I was, in a virtual meeting with these people whose books and articles I’d been reading for years.
Men, women, young, old – with books on their shelves, paintings on their walls, cats resting in corners, new-fallen snow visible through the window, or warm, green vistas for those living in lands with perpetual summer.
The best thing was, nobody looked in my direction and said, “Who the heck are you?”
There’s a great scene in the movie “Shrek” where the smelly ogre rescues a Damsel in Distress with the help of a donkey. After the successful rescue she refers to the donkey as the Ogre’s Noble Steed. Prancing around with delight, the donkey brays, “I hope you heard that. She called me a Noble Steed. She think I’m a Steed.”
That’s what I felt like after I disconnected from Zoom. Okay, not a noble steed, but something even better: a Member in Good Standing!
Yeah, I pranced a little.