Lying

THERE IS PERHAPS NOTHING that so marks us as human as the gift of speech. Who knows to what degree and in what ways animals have the power to communicate with each other, but to all appearances it is only a shadow of ours. By speaking, we can reveal the hiddenness of thought, we can express the subtlest as well as the most devastating of emotions, we can heal, we can make poems, we can pray. All of which is to say we can speak truth—the truth of what it is to be ourselves, to be with each other, to be in the world—and such speaking as that is close to what being human is all about. What makes lying an evil is not only that the world is deceived by it, but that we are dehumanized by it.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Lust

LUST IS THE CRAVING for salt of a person who is dying of thirst.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Luke

OF THE FOUR EVANGELISTS, Luke wrote the best Greek and, unlike the other three, was almost certainly a Greek-speaking Gentile himself, who put his Gospel together for a Gentile audience, translating Jewish names and explaining Jewish customs when he thought they wouldn't be understood if he didn't. In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul refers to somebody as "Luke the beloved physician," and without stretching things too far, you could point to three blocks of material in Luke's Gospel, omitted from the others, that might suggest that he was the same man.

First of all, there's the parable of the Prodigal Son, the account of the whore who washed Jesus' feet and dried them with her hair, and the scrap of conversation Jesus had with one of the two crooks who was crucified with him.

Smelling of pig and cheap gin, the Prodigal comes home bleary-eyed and dead broke, but his father's so glad to see him anyway that he almost falls on his face. Jesus tells Simon the blue-nosed Pharisee that the whore's sins are forgiven her because, even painted up like a cigar-store Indian and smelling like the perfume counter at the five-and-dime, she's got more in her of what the gospel of love is all about than the whole Ladies' Missionary Society laid end to end. The thief Jesus talked to on the cross may have been a purse snatcher and second-story man from way back, but when he asked Jesus to remember him when he made it to where he was going, Jesus told him he'd make sure they got rooms on the same floor. Different as they all are in some ways, it's not hard to see that they all make the same general point, which is that, though he could give them hell when he felt like it, Jesus had such a soft spot in his heart for the scum of the earth that you would have almost thought he considered them the salt of the earth the way he sometimes treated them.

Second, Luke is the one who goes out of his way to make it clear how big Jesus was on praying. He prayed when he was baptized and after he healed the leper and the night before he called the twelve disciples, and Luke was the only one to mention these together with a few others like them and also was the only one to say that the last words Jesus ever spoke were the prayer, "Father, into thy hand I commend my spirit." It's also thanks to Luke that there's a record of the jokes Jesus told about the man who kept knocking at his friend's door till he finally got out of bed to open it and the widow who kept bugging the crooked judge till he finally heard her case just to get a little peace, the point of both of which seems to be that if you don't think God has heard you the first time, don't give up till you're hoarse. Luke wanted that to be remembered too.

Third and last, Luke makes sure that nobody misses the point that Jesus was always stewing about the terrible needs of poor people. He is the one who tells us that when Jesus preached at Nazareth, his text was "he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor" from Isaiah (Luke 4:18), and whereas Matthew says that the first Beatitude was "Blessed are the poor in spirit," according to Luke it was just plain "Blessed are the poor" period (Luke 6:20). He also recorded some parables, like the one about the rich man and the beggar, that come right out and say that if the haves don't do their share to help the have-nots, they better watch out, and he's the only one to quote the song Mary sang that includes the words "he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich has sent empty away" (Luke 1:53).

To put it in a nutshell, by playing all these things up Luke shows he was a man who believed that you shouldn't let the fact that a person is jailbait keep you from treating that person like a human being, and that if you pray hard enough, there's no telling what may happen, and that if you think you've got heaven made but don't let it worry you that there are children across the tracks who are half starving to death, then you're kidding yourself. These characteristics may not prove that he was a doctor, like the Luke in Paul's Letter, but if he wasn't, it was a serious loss to the medical profession.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Lucifer

LUCIFER MEANS "LIGHT-GIVER" or "Morning star" or "Son of dawn" and, ever since the Middle Ages, has been one of the aliases the Devil goes by, along with Satan, Old Nick, Old Scratch, the Old Harry, and so forth. Thus the Bible's blackest villain is known by one of the Bible's loveliest names, and not by accident either.

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" the prophet Isaiah says (14:12), the point being that it was while he was still at the height of his loveliness that the ugly episode took place.

Lucifer was a leading member of the heavenly chorus that sings Bach around the throne of grace and as such seemed so infinitely removed from all temptation that both to him and to his fellow angels the very possibility must have seemed ludicrous. Then one day he made the mistake of saying to himself, "Just see how far I have come," with the emphasis on the first-person singular, and from there to "Just see how far I can still go" was of course only a hop, skip, and a jump.

When you are one of God's right-hand angels, there is clearly only one step farther you can go, and with his usual uncanny combination of justice and mercy, God let him go there.

Lucifer was no longer called upon to love anybody except himself or to sing Bach anywhere but in the bathtub or to follow anything or anybody except his own instincts and inclinations. He was given an office with mottoes like "Nobody loves you like yourself" and "Nice guys finish last" on the walls and was named to the number-one job in charge of everybody else who both then and for all time felt the same way, and they have been having one hell of a time together ever since.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Love

THE FIRST STAGE IS TO BELIEVE that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.

The unabashed eros of lovers, the sympathetic philia of friends, agape giving itself away freely no less for the murderer than for the victim (the King James Version translates it as "charity")—these are all varied manifestations of a single reality. To lose yourself in another's arms, or in another's company, or in suffering for all who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you—to lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself. Is what it's all about. Is what love is.

Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold that is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.

To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus' terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.

When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn't say, "There, there. Everything's going to be all right." He said, "You brood of vipers! how can you speak good, when you are evil!" (Matthew 12:34). And he said that to them because he loved them.

This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn't have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for people's well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like them too.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words