Spirit

THE WORD spirit has come to mean something pale and shapeless, like an unmade bed. School spirit, the American spirit, the Christmas spirit, the spirit of '76, the Holy Spirit—each of these points to something that you know is supposed to get you to your feet cheering, but that you somehow can't rise to. The adjective spiritual has become downright offensive. If somebody recommends a person as spiritual you tend to avoid that person, and usually with good reason.  Inspiring is even worse. Inspirational is worse still. Inspirational books are almost invariably for the birds.

Like its counterparts in Hebrew and Greek, the Latin word spiritus originally meant "breath" (as in expire, respiratory, and so on), and breath is what you have when you're alive and don't have when you're dead. Thus spirit = breath = life, the aliveness and power of your life, and to speak of your spirit (or soul) is to speak of the power of life that is in you. When your spirit is unusually strong, the life in you unusually alive, you can breathe it out into other lives, become literally in-spiring.

Spirit is highly contagious. When people are very excited, very happy, or very sad, you can catch it from them as easily as measles or a yawn. You can catch it from what they say or from what they do or just from what happens to the air of a room when they enter it without saying or doing anything. Groups also have a spirit, as anybody can testify who has ever been caught up in the spirit of a football game, a political rally, or a lynch mob. Spirit can be good or bad, healing or destructive. Spirit can be transmitted across great distances of time and space. For better or worse, you can catch the spirit of people long dead (Saint Therese of Lisieux or the Marquis de Sade), of people whose faces you have never seen and whose languages you cannot speak.

God also has a spirit—is Spirit, says the apostle John (4:24). Thus God is the power of the power of life itself, has breathed and continues to breathe life into his creation. In-spires it. The spirit of God, Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, is highly contagious. When Peter and his friends were caught up in it at Jerusalem on Pentecost, everybody thought they were drunk even though the sun wasn't yet over the yardarm (Acts 2). They were.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Soloman

KING SOLOMAN WAS A PRODUCT of the scandalous liaison between King David and Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. It was not an auspicious beginning. He was then brought up in that hotbed of intrigue and ostentation that was his father's court, and that was less than conducive to the development of sound moral character. He also spent his formative years under the thumb of his beautiful but conniving mother, who had browbeaten David on his deathbed into giving him the throne in the first place. It is a wonder he turned out as well as he did.

He was the first of the big-time spenders, and the menu that he and his retinue consumed per diem reads like the inventory of General Foods: a thousand measures of flour and meal plus ten oxen, twenty steers, and one hundred sheep, not to mention a garnishing of harts, gazelles, roebucks, and butterball chickens for when their jaded palates were in need of reupholstering. He had forty thousand horses with twelve thousand horsemen to keep them in shape, and recent excavations of his stables indicate that these figures aren't as far out of line as they might seem. His building program isn't to be overlooked either.

He put up a temple in Jerusalem that had to be seen to be believed. It stood three stories high, and you entered it through a soaring porch of Egyptian design that was flanked by two thirty-foot free-standing bronze columns with carved lilies on top. It had cedar ceilings, cypress floors, and olive-wood doors, and the amount of gold they used to trim it inside and out would have bankrupted Fort Knox. Seven years was what it took him to finish this job for God, and he then proceeded to build a palace for himself, which took thirteen. It was composed of the House of the Forest of Lebanon, the Hall of Pillars, the Hall of the Throne, and the Hall of Judgment. These were for show. He also had them knock together a nice little place for his personal use and another for his wife, the daughter of Pharaoh.

The daughter of Pharaoh was not his only wife. Perhaps the reason they preferred separate bedrooms was that he had six hundred and ninety-nine more. Just in case they all happened to be busy at the same time some evening, he also had three hundred other ladies who were ready to drop everything for him at a moment's notice. Some of these were Moabites or Ammonites, some were Edomites or Sidonians, and there were five or six dozen Hittites thrown in to round things out. It was a regular smorgasbord.

Somehow he found time to run the country too, and in some ways he didn't make too bad a job of it. His reign lasted forty years, and Israel was at peace the whole time. He made advantageous treaties with both Egypt and Tyre, and in partnership with Hiram, king of Tyre, maintained a fleet of oceangoing ships that did a brisk export-import business with a number of Mediterranean ports, dealing in things like gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. He also made a killing as a horse trader.

Unfortunately the price for all this ran pretty high, and it was his subjects who had to pick up the tab. In order to finance his building program he had to bleed them white with tolls and taxes. In order to get people to run the bulldozers and bench saws, he had to press them into forced labor gangs. You don't keep seven hundred wives and three hundred lady friends happy on peanuts either, and it was the people who had to foot that bill too. When some of them revolted in the north under the leadership of Jeroboam, he managed to quash it successfully, but instead of solving the problem, that just postponed it.

Furthermore, his taste for foreign ladies got him into more kinds of trouble than just financial. They worshiped a whole carnival of fancy foreign gods, and in his old age Solomon decided to play it safe by seeing to it that not one of them went neglected. He put up expensive altars to Ashtoreth of the Sidonians, Milcom of the Ammonites, and Chemoth of the Moabites, to name just a few, and Yahweh was so furious he said it was only for the sake of his father, David, that he didn't settle Israel's hash right then and there. As it was, he said he'd wait a few years.

In spite of everything, Solomon was famous for his great wisdom. There wasn't a riddle he couldn't crack with one hand tied behind him, and he tossed off so many bon mots in the course of a day that it reached the point where people figured that if anything clever was said anywhere, it must have been Solomon who originally said it, and the whole book of Proverbs was ascribed to his hand. His judgments in court were also praised to the skies, the most famous of them involving a couple of women each of whom claimed to be the mother of the same child, to which Solomon proposed the simple solution of slicing the child down the middle and giving each one half. When the first girl said that was fine by her and the second girl said she'd rather lose the case, Solomon awarded the child to the second girl, and it was all over Jerusalem within the hour.

But wisdom is more than riddles and wisecracks and courtroom coups, and in most things that mattered King Solomon was among the wisest fools who ever wore a crown. He didn't even have the wit to say "Apres moi, le deluge" in Hebrew and was hardly cold in his grave when revolution split the country in two. From there on out the history of Israel was an almost unbroken series of disasters.

1 Kings 3-11

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words 

Snobs

SNOBS ARE PEOPLE who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?

Don't look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don't know yet and who don't yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.

-Originally published in Beyond Words

Smell

MY BROTHER AND I were walking up a flight of stairs somewhere when I suddenly stopped and asked him what the smell reminded him of. Without a moment's hesitation he said our grandparents' house in Pittsburgh when we were children, and he was right. It was a comforting kind of smell, faint but unmistakable—freshly laundered sheets, applesauce simmering with nutmeg in it, old picture books. More than any sight or taste or sound, it brought back in its totality the feeling of being a child there all those years ago—the excitement of it, the peace of it, the unutterable magic of it.

Dogs have it right. Frantically zigzagging along, their tails in a frenzy, they miss nothing as they go, not a hydrant or trash can or curbstone, not a tree or hedge or flower pot. And it's not just the good smells that send them into raptures either, but smells we would recoil from in horror. "O taste and see that the Lord is good," says the Psalmist (34:8), to which their refrain is, "Oh sniff and smell!" More fragrant even than grandparents' houses is the Quarry they track with their noses to the ground.

-Originally published in Beyond Words

Sloth

SLOTH IS NOT TO BE CONFUSED with laziness. Lazy people, people who sit around and watch the grass grow, may be people at peace. Their sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting.

Slothful people, on the other hand, may be very busy people. They are people who go through the motions, who fly on automatic pilot. Like somebody with a bad head cold, they have mostly lost their sense of taste and smell. They know something's wrong with them, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes they hardly notice them. They are letting things run their course. They are getting through their lives.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words