"Once a Pharisee..." ruminations on the Apostle Jeff

The Apostle Jeff.  Not always so. Nay, once among the religiously proud Pharisee, "legalists" in the spirit of the letter.

Having so long ago lost the living God, these high muck-a-muck Pharisees.

He always had some kind of Wrigley's gum on him or in his mouth, or maybe Now And Laters(or as we call them in the Southland slang: "nihilators").  A certain schoolboy whimsy, devil-may-care, off-the-dandelions unto the dull eastern breeze, and all that.

But it took him a year of physical rehabilitation after having his head re-attached in surgery.  Meeting-up with the surgeon, having happened upon him driving along in his Mercedes with his 2.5 children in the car.  The surgeon obviously thought a return to regular life would be good sport for Jeff.   "I'm just an old Alabama sawbones" he said, "but I think it's high time to get back on that there horse."

On the road to Jefferson, off on that "Old Tyme Persecution", at once blinded and spoken to from on high.

"We dost thou persecute me?"

J'ccuse.

He would apply that same zeal as a newly-claimed Christian, standing in a secret safehouse, his presence generally making the rest of them nervous, with whispers, "you know who that guy is?"  "can we trust him?"  "HE'LL KILL US ALL!".

After he lets Seamus and Cesaro sneak-attack everybody at the dinner table, Jeff is explaining to his new girlfriend, "Don't you see?  I never left!", then the centurions come and haul everybody to jail.

He'll find later, not only the ring around his neck, but ghastly stigmata all over his person, emblems of having endured suffering, and he starts reading books by and about Holocaust survivors.  Like Cora Ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He begins to look beyond his suffering, look even deeper, past all the hurt, and try in vain to extrapolate some kind of sense of the matter.

And at Halloween he can make light of it all and use his surgical scars as part of his Frankenstein costume.  "Ahm da Suthern take on da munstah" he tells the people, as he stands on the porch steps with his trick or treat bag, holding it out and open, expectantly.

"Isn't that adorable!  And such realism!"

When life gave him bitter orange lemons, he squashed the cherries and made some cobbler.