Love

THE LOVE FOR equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. 

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.

And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.

-Originally published in The Magnificent Defeat

Superstition

SUPERSTITION IS THE SUSPICION that things are seldom what they seem and usually worse. Breaking a mirror foreshadows a graver misfortune than having to buy a new one. Inviting thirteen for dinner involves a greater risk than not having enough to go round. The superstitious person may be more nearly right in being wrong than the person who takes everything at face value. If a black cat crosses your path and all you see is a black cat, you need to have more than your eyes examined. What is crossing your path with four legs and a hoisted tail is the dark and inscrutable mystery of creation itself. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words 

Suicide

THE MOST FAMOUS SUICIDE in the Old Testament is King Saul's. He was doing battle with the Philistines. The Philistines won the day. They killed his three sons, and he himself was wounded by archers. Fearing that he would be captured by the enemy and made a mockery of if he survived, he asked his armor-bearer to put him out of his misery. When the armor-bearer refused, he fell on his own sword (1 Samuel 31:4).

Judas Iscariot's is of course the most famous one in the New Testament. When Jesus was led off to Pilate and condemned to death, Judas took his thirty pieces of silver and tried to return them to the Jewish authorities on the grounds that Jesus was innocent  and he had betrayed him. The authorities refused to take them. They said that was his problem, and Judas, throwing the silver to the ground, went off and hanged himself (Matthew 27:3-5).

Taking your own life is not mentioned as a sin in the Bible. There's no suggestion that it was considered either shameful or cowardly. When, as in the case of Saul and Judas, pain, horror, and despair reach a certain point, suicide is perhaps less a voluntary act than a reflex action. If you're being burned alive with a loaded pistol in your hand, it's hard to see how anyone can seriously hold it against you for pulling the trigger. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words 

Story

IT IS WELL TO REMEMBER what the ancient creeds of the Christian faith declare credence in.

"God of God, Light of Light... for us and for our salvation came down from heaven... born of the Virgin Mary... suffered ... crucified... dead... buried... rose again... sitteth on the right hand of God... shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead." That is not a theological idea or a religious system. It is a series of largely flesh-and-blood events that happened, are happening, will happen in time and space. For better or worse, it is a story.

It is well to remember because it keeps our eyes on the central fact that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense. In other words, the truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it's to be found at all, not in the Bible, or the church, or theology—the best they can do is point to the truth—but in our own stories.

If the God you believe in as an idea doesn't start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don't believe in as an idea does start showing up.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life's story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others' lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then they are scarcely worth telling.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Stephen

AFTER JESUS DIED, it took a while for his followers to settle down and get organized, and the process was no easier then than it has been ever since. One problem that came up early in the game was how to take care of the poor, especially the widows who couldn't support themselves. The apostles decided to appoint a group to handle this side of things, and one of the ones they appointed was Stephen.

His career was a short one. In addition to doing what he could for the poor, he also did what he could to spread the word about Jesus, the one who'd gotten him interested in the poor in the first place. He healed, and he preached, and he talked about how his own life had been changed, and it wasn't long before the Jewish authorities called him on the mat to defend his far-out views as best he could. As far as they were concerned, he was a bad apple.

Stephen made them a long speech, the gist of which was that from year one the Jews had always been an ornery lot, "stiff-necked," he said, and circumcised as all get-out in one department, but as cussed and mean as everybody else in all the others (Acts 7:51). They'd given Moses a hard time in the wilderness, he said, and there hadn't been a saint or prophet since whom they hadn't had it in for. The way they'd treated Jesus was the last and worst example of how they were always not just missing the boat, but doing their damnedest to sink it. The authorities were naturally enraged and illustrated the accuracy of Stephen's analysis of them by taking him out and stoning him to death.

Stoning somebody to death, especially somebody as young and healthy as Stephen, isn't easy. You don't get the job done with the first few rocks and broken bottles, and even after you've got the person down, it's a long, hot business. To prepare themselves for the workout, they stripped to the waist and got somebody to keep an eye on their things till they were through. The one they got was a young fire-breathing arch-conservative Jew named Saul, who was there because he thoroughly approved of what they were doing.

It was a scene that Saul never forgot. Years later when he'd become a Christian himself and was under arrest much as Stephen had been, he spoke of it. He wasn't called Saul anymore by then, but Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, the great letter-writing saint, and he still remembered how it had been that day when he'd stood guard over the pile of coats and ties and watched a young man's death.

Stephen was the first person to shed blood for the new faith he loved more than his life, and as Saul-who-was-to-become-Paul watched the grim process, it never occurred to him that by the grace of God the time was not far off when he himself would be another.

Acts 6-7; 22:20

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words