Avoiding Typos vs. Living Lessons Learned

Psalm 5, 6 • Psalm 10, 11
Num. 35:1-3, 9-15, 30-34 • Rom. 8:31-39 • Matt. 23:13-26

In today’s gospel Jesus denounces the Scribes and Pharisees, for belief that perfect form proved piety. Since we hear complaints much more often about the Pharisees than the Scribes, it might be well to review the latter’s diligent if mistaken path to Godliness.

For those of us of a certain age, before the days of computers with spell-checkers and desktop printers, it seemed as if our college professors misapplied to our term papers the following rules for Scribes in the time of Jesus. (Please note that to our young minds, these rubrics had nothing to do with the organization of our thoughts, the merit of our analysis, or the most important lessons we had learned through this writing assignment.)

“In making copies, the middle paragraph, word and letter must correspond to those of the original document.” (Before the age of the photocopier, we used carbon paper, invented in England in 1806 by the Wedgewoods of pottery fame, to accomplish this feat of typographical fidelity).

“If as many as three pages of a document require corrections, the entire manuscript has to be redone.” (We attempted with occasional success to hide our errors with “Liquid Paper” or “White Out,” invented in 1956, to avoid this fate).

Now it is certainly true that the professors of my misspent 1960s wanted me to respect the time it took for them to read and grade the paper by showing care in its preparation, and since I wanted to get a good grade, I followed the rules without exactly falling in love with them.

But I did fall in love with learning. It became my life’s work. Actually living the message of the Scriptures is why they and I suppose I, exist, even if I still get the “tittles and jots” wrong.

Written by Tony Stankus

Tony Stankus, now 69, the first librarian ever to be promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor at the U of A, became an Episcopalian at age 66, because he could no longer resist the transcendent joy of the  liturgies at St. Paul’s nor the warmth of its priests and people.