We have all heard the expression, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” (to which some might add, “and if you can’t be godly, at least be clean.”)  We have also probably met some people at different times who are preoccupied with cleanliness to an extreme degree, so that it becomes an obsession.  Sometimes this kind of obsession can even be a sign of neurosis as in the case of people who feel the need to wash their hands continuously even though there is no apparent need to do so.  Compulsive hand-washing is a symbolic act:  it represents the person’s unconscious desire to be rid of some deep mental preoccupation.  The process of washing expresses the…

I’m sure many of us have at some time enjoyed the English television comedy, “The Vicar of Dibley.”  You may recall at the end of each episode, the vicar tells Alice, the church warden, a joke.  The joke is often quite funny but Alice never quite gets it.  She applies a literal logic to the joke, and she tries to reason the joke out, all of course to the frustration of the vicar.  I often think that before many of the stories of the gospel and before the parables of Jesus we are a bit like Alice in the “Vicar of Dibley.”  We apply to what we have heard a logic that is quite foreign…