Just what kind of a horsemen is it we’re hitching a ride from?

Just what kind of a horsemen is it we’re hitching a ride from?

Posted on July 6th, 2010 by Frank Wilson

Many years ago, when I was a senior at what was then St. Joseph’s College, the college drama club mounted a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

I have no acting ability. I can only play myself (which means, I suppose, that I am — at least potentially — a star). But the members of the club were a part of the set I hung out with, and I spent a lot of time backstage. In fact, I had a modest role in that production of Much Ado: I was the prompter, standing every night in the little box at the center-front of the stage, reading along as the actors spoke their lines, ready to help them out if their memories faltered.

I don’t recall ever having to prompt anyone, so I ended up just reading the script every night. You would think I would know the play better than any other, but mostly what has stayed with me are some lines of Dogberry’s, in particular these: “Well, God’s a good man. An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.” This has always struck me as the nearest thing in Western literature to a Zen koan.

Dogberry, of course, is the night constable given to malapropisms (“Comparisons are odorous,” he declares). But Dogberry and his fellow watchmen, bumbling though they may be, are the ones who inadvertently uncover Don John’s plot and in so doing set the play on its course toward a happy ending.

So in retrospect Dogberry’s silly remark about God can be taken as having more weight than at first seems the case.

It’s the image that has always intrigued me: God as the horseman and man as the rider clinging to him from behind. What a way of portraying Providence.

Some would probably consider it irreverent, but all it really does is convey the comic aspect of man’s relation to God, something too little is made of. I sometimes think God himself must grow weary at times of the reverence incessantly directed his way and long for some down-to-earth candor. “If this is how you treat your friends,” St. Teresa of Avila once prayed, “then no wonder you have so few of them.”

God must have found having someone tell him how she really felt in no uncertain terms an immensely refreshing change from the usual obsequious blather.

When I was growing up, the joke about Catholics was that they didn’t read the Bible, only the New Testament. The vernacular Mass, however, now includes plenty of passages from the Old Testament, and I must say I don’t find many of them edifying. Recently, for instance, there was the story of Athaliah, who upon the death of her husband, King Jehoram and her son, Ahaziah, had all of her grandchildren killed (except Joash, who was secretly saved by Athaliah’s sister) and took the throne herself. When Joash came of age, he was hailed as the true king and Athaliah was deposed and executed.

Great story, though I am at a loss to figure out what its place during Mass might be. On the other hand, I have always thought that the book of Job was not without its humorous elements. Oh, I know that what happens to Job is literally God-awful. But the premise of the story — God making a bet with Satan, who seems to have heavenly visiting privileges and be on quite cordial terms with the deity — has always struck me as at least a tad comic.

The same may be said of the book’s conclusion. Job never does curse God — who thereby wins the bet — but he does curse the day he was born. God apparently takes umbrage at this — after all, Job exists, like everything else, because God chooses that he exist. So God decides to disguise himself as a whirlwind and upbraid his ungrateful creature.

What is funny is that he offers no real justification for what he has done other than that he could do it. “Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?” In other words, I’m God, and you’re not, and I’m not answerable to you or anybody else.

I gather, by the way, that those who insist on Scripture’s being taken literally are likely to gloss over such details as God’s and Satan’s chumminess and God’s ostensible amoralism. I’m not a Biblical literalist myself, but I think it worth pondering all of this in light of Dogberry’s quip: Just what kind of a horsemen is it we’re hitching a ride from?