Faces

FACES, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, can be looked at and not seen. Walking down a sidewalk at rush hour or attending the World Series, you're surrounded by thousands of them, but they might as well be balloons at a political rally for all you notice them individually. Here and there one of them may catch your eye for a moment, but in another moment you've forgotten it. They are without personalities, without histories. There is nothing to remember them by. They are anonymous strangers. As far as you are concerned, they simply don't matter. They are too much to take in.

But the odds are that for at least one other person somewhere in the world, each of them—even the unlikeliest—matters enormously, or mattered enormously once, or someday, with any luck, will come to matter. The pimply boy with the beginnings of a mustache, the fat girl eating popcorn, the man with no upper teeth, the suntanned blonde with the disagreeable mouth—if you set your mind to it, there's hardly a one of them you can't imagine somebody loving even, conceivably even yourself. If the fat girl were your kid sister, for instance. Or the pimply boy to grow up to be your father. Or the toothless man to have been your first great love. Each face you see has, or used to have, or may have yet, the power—out of all the other faces in creation—to make at least some one other person's heart skip a beat just by turning up in an old photograph album, maybe, or appearing unexpectedly at the front door.

Needless to say, it's easier to imagine it with some than with others. For all her good looks it's harder with the suntanned blonde than with the sweaty truck driver shooting a squirt of cut plug, but even with her you can probably manage it in the end. There's hardly a face coming at you down the supermarket aisle or up the subway escalator that you can't manage it with, given the right set of circumstances, the right pair of eyes. You can see even the bitter faces in terms of what probably made them that way. You can see even the hostile, ugly faces in terms of what they must have been once before the world got to them, what they might have become if they'd gotten the breaks.

Every now and again, however, you come across faces that are too much for you. There are people it's impossible to imagine loving if only because they look so much as though they wouldn't let you even if you could. If there are faces of the blessed to be seen in this world, there are also faces of the damned. Maybe you can love them for precisely that reason then. Maybe you're the one who has to love them because nobody else ever has.

In any case, the next time you find yourself in a crowd with nothing better to do, it's a game worth playing. 

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

Ezekiel

A POPULAR VIEW has it that what Ezekiel really saw were flying saucers.

There were these gleaming wheels with spokes and rims and things that looked like eyes built into the rims, he said, and one minute they were resting on the ground, and the next minute they were shooting up into the sky. There were also these creatures who flew around with the wheels and made a noise like thunder or a sonic boom, he said. Above them was this one creature in particular who looked humanoid, but was clearly not human and seemed to be wearing something like bronze or a space suit from the loins up and something like fire from the loins down.

Then all of a sudden from way up in the air his voice came down, and all the other craft stopped shooting around and just hovered, and, to make a long story from outer space short, what the voice said was that if Israel didn't whip itself into some kind of shape, it would be curtains.

Ezekiel didn't think he'd seen flying saucers, of course. He thought he'd seen the glory of God. And the close encounter he thought he'd had wasn't of the third kind, but of a different kind altogether. It wasn't a thirty-foot praying mantis he thought had given him the word, but the Almighty himself. So you pay your money and take your choice.

In making that choice, however, you ought to take into consideration at least one other thing Ezekiel thought he saw. It was a boneyard. There were shinbones and arm bones and wishbones and collarbones and skulls enough to keep paleontologists busy indefinitely. What the voice said this time was for Ezekiel to speak the word of the Lord to this boneyard and then stand back. So he spoke it.

The first thing that happened was a sound of rattling and clicking like the tide going out over a million pebble beaches as the bones started snapping back together again. The next thing that happened was a million reassembled skeletons pulling on skin like long winter underwear. The last thing that happened was the color coming back to a million pairs of cheeks and the spark to a million pairs of eyes and the breath of life to a million pairs of lungs.

Then the voice asked Ezekiel to tell the Israelites that—with God in the wings—even though it would be curtains for sure the way they were heading, the curtain that goes down when you bomb in New Haven is also the curtain that goes up on the marvelous new rewrite that hits Broadway like a ton of bricks.

As far as is known, nobody's ever stepped out of a UFO and made a statement like that.

Ezekiel 1-2.7; 37:1-14

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Evil

God is all-powerful.

• God is all-good.

• Terrible things happen.

You can reconcile any two of these propositions with each other, but you can't reconcile all three. The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There have been numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality of evil itself, they are none of them worth much. When a child is raped and murdered, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants us to love him, we must be free to love or not to love and thus free to rape and murder a child if we take a notion to.

Christian Science solves the problem of evil by saying that it does not exist except as an illusion of mortal mind. Buddhism solves it in terms of reincarnation and an inexorable law of cause and effect whereby the raped child is merely reaping the consequences of evil deeds she committed in another life.

Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene—not even this—but that God can turn it to good.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Eve

LIKE ADAM, Eve spent the rest of her days convincing herself that it had all worked out for the best. Their new life didn't turn out to be as bad as had been predicted, and somehow their marriage weathered the change. If they had moments of terrible bitterness over what had happened, they had other moments when it became more of a bridge than an abyss between them and when the question of which of them was to blame got lost in the question of how both of them were to survive. One son died an ugly, senseless death, and another went through life as disfigured by remorse as by a cleft palate. But all in all things didn't go too badly. When the last child left home, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to be alone again with a man who, after his third martini, might still lash out at her as a snake in the grass and a bad apple, but at least they still had their independence and their principles, which as nearly as she could remember were what they'd given everything up for. They stood, however grimly at times, on their own feet.

It was only once in a while at night, just as she was going off to sleep with all her usual defenses down, that her mind drifted back to the days when, because there was nothing especially important to do, everything was especially important; when too good not to be true hadn't yet turned into too good to be true; when being alone was never the same as being lonely. Then sad and beautiful dreams overtook her, which she would wake up from homesick for a home she could no longer even name, to make something not quite love with a man whose face she could not quite see in the darkness at her side.

Genesis 3:1-4:16

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Eutychus

"SERMONETTES MAKE CHRISTIANETTES," the saying goes, so Saint Paul kept talking till midnight to make sure they all got the word. Then he thought of a few things he'd left out and went on a while longer. He was so caught up in his own eloquence that he didn't hear the bumblebee sounds that were emerging from a young man with his eyes more or less closed and his mouth more or less open who sat slumped over in the third-story window. It was only a woman's scream that alerted him to the fact that the boy had fallen asleep, and out, more or less simultaneously. When Paul asked his name, they told him it was Eutychus.

Everybody thought Eutychus was dead, but Paul said he'd see about that. Then he went back upstairs where, after a snack, he ran over his major points once more just to make sure. When he finally left on the early bus, they found Eutychus sitting up in bed asking for two over light and a toasted English.

This miraculous recovery, plus the fact that by then the saint was already well on his way to the next county, made them decide to throw a double celebration. Presumably somebody had the sense to suggest that this time they use the ground floor.

Acts 20:9-12

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words