This year, while moving mulch in our garden, I mulled over some of the Biblical passages dealing with horticulture and imagined how writers for the popular press, generally a fecund group, would apply them. After a couple of unfruitful leads, I decided to try once more to reap a rich harvest from the pages of the popular press. I went to the episode of the Burning Bush in Exodus 3. At last—I hit pay dirt!
This was not entirely unexpected. In what was, I think, my first “The Bible in the News” column, I referred to an inspired headline—“Searing Sounds Spout from a Burning Bush”—from a 1997 Omaha World-Herald piece by The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd. The “Bush” in question here was then-Texas governor George W. Bush, who made highly critical remarks aimed at President Bill Clinton on the supposedly nonpolitical occasion of the dedication of the presidential library of George H.W. Bush.
A recent reference to a person named Bush who burns (or burned) is found in this obituary (printed in The Times of London and elsewhere): “Known by his subordinates as ‘the Burning Bush,’ Admiral Sir John Bush illustrated the rule that such nicknames only endure when they are earned, as his most definitely was. As Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff and Commander-in-Chief … he was renowned for his driving energy, forcefully expressed impatience with obstacles to progress and intolerance of failures to perform to his own high standards.” We imagine that he would have been an esteemed colleague of the commander Joshua, had the ancient Israelites mounted battles at sea as well as on dry land.
It is, on the other hand, uncertain how Joshua would have reacted to the travails of former professional football player Randy Grimes (as related in the New York Daily News in a story with the expression “tackling his demons” in its title): “Grimes will never forget the moment when he realized he would beat [his] addiction to painkillers … Tears rolled down Grimes’s cheeks during what he calls his ‘burning bush experience’ in the autumn of 2009, two weeks after he was admitted to … a South Florida drug-treatment facility … ‘I was desperate. And then this feeling came over me—it was like someone put a warm blanket over my shoulders. That is when it turned around for me. It was a spiritual moment. God pulled me from the brink.’” It is possible that Joshua, or his mentor, Moses, could relate to Grimes’s experience at the psychological level. At the same time, it is certain that there would be an affinity at the sartorial level, since Grimes is reported (like his Biblical counterparts) to wear sandals on a daily basis.
Not one to beat around the bush, at this point I’ll ask a question: What would Moses or Joshua think about this (as reported in The Globe and Mail [Toronto])? “Tracey Erin Smith made her showbiz debut in the nude—she was six months old and had been cast in a TV commercial for diapers. Some decades later, she is still, in a sense, interested in nakedness, both physical and psychological. Her one-woman show, The Burning Bush … deals with a central character, Rabbi Barbara Baumawitz, torn between two seemingly antithetical temples, the strip joint and the pulpit. ‘I see stripping as a metaphor for the spiritual journey,’ Smith said in a recent interview. ‘The more layers we peel off, the closer we get to who we really are, and the more we see that we’re all really the same.’ ” Now that I think about it, we should probably refer this entire matter to the experts: Adam and Eve!
This year, while moving mulch in our garden, I mulled over some of the Biblical passages dealing with horticulture and imagined how writers for the popular press, generally a fecund group, would apply them. After a couple of unfruitful leads, I decided to try once more to reap a rich harvest from the pages of the popular press. I went to the episode of the Burning Bush in Exodus 3. At last—I hit pay dirt! This was not entirely unexpected. In what was, I think, my first “The Bible in the News” column, I referred to an inspired headline—“Searing […]
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