Neurotics

A MINISTER BEGAN TO PREACH by saying, "To start with, I'm just as neurotic as everybody else," and there was an audible sigh of relief from the entire congregation. Anxiety, depression, hypochondria, psychosomatic aches and pains, fear of things like heights and crowds—there's almost nobody who can't lay claim to at least a few of them. They involve an utterly fruitless expenditure of energy. They result in an appalling waste of time. Yet maybe there's something to be said for them anyhow.

Neurotics don't lose their sense of reality like people who think they're a poached egg or that somebody's going to blow poison gas under the door while they're asleep. You might even say that they have a heightened sense of reality. They sense everything that's really there and then some. They don't understand why the peculiar things that are going on inside their heads are going on, but at least they're more or less in touch with what's going on inside their heads and realize not only that they're peculiar themselves, but that so are lots of other people. That's probably why neurotics are apt to be more sympathetic than most and, unless their particular neurosis happens to be nonstop talking or antisocial behavior, why they make such good listeners.

You wouldn't want one of them operating on your brain or flying you across the Andes in a jet or in charge of things when there's a red alert, but when it comes to writing poems and novels or painting pictures or even preaching sermons, it's hard to beat them. Their overactive imaginations, which are a curse elsewhere, are a blessing there. Personally speaking, their oversensitivity may be their undoing, but professionally it's one of their strongest cards. They may see and hear and feel more than is good for them, but there's no question that, with the exception of their immediate families, it's good for everybody else.

"A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated," Saint Paul wrote to his friends (2 Corinthians 12:7). Nobody knows just what the problem was that he was referring to, but you don't have to read many of his Letters to suspect that he would have been among those who sighed with relief at the minister's opening confession. His violent swings of mood from deep depression to exaltation. His passionate likes and dislikes. His boasting. His dark sense of guilt. Almost certainly it was some sort of neurosis that was bugging him. Three times he prayed to God to get rid of it for him, he said, but God never did. Maybe it's not so hard to guess why.

A psychological cure would no doubt have greatly enriched Paul's own life at the time but would have greatly impoverished generations of his readers' lives ever since. "Through his wounds we are healed" are words to be reserved only for the most grievous Wound, the holiest Healing (Isaiah 53:5). But maybe in some small measure they can be applied to people like Paul too. Their very hang-ups and crotchets and phobias and general quirkiness give their kind—and, through them, give us—insights into the human heart that few can match. It's a high price for them to pay for our comfort and edification, but where they come closest to a kind of oddball holiness of their own is the feeling they give you sometimes that even if they could get out of paying it, they wouldn't.

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

Neighbor

WHEN JESUS SAID to love your neighbor, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbor. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something on the order of: "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever."

Instead, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the point of which seems to be that your neighbor is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you. The lawyer's response is left unrecorded.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Nehemiah

NEHEMIAH BROKE DOWN and wept when he found out that the walls of Jerusalem were still in ruins from when the Babylonians had pulled them down over a century earlier. The Persians had replaced the Babylonians as the number-one superpower by then, and, as luck would have it, Nehemiah was one of the king of Persia's right-hand men. So, waiting till the king was in a mellow mood after his second planter's punch, he went and asked for permission to go home to Jerusalem and supervise its refortification. The king said not to stay too long, but gave him the go-ahead anyway. To strengthen his hand when he got to Jerusalem, he even had him made governor.

It took Nehemiah twelve years to get the job done, and it was tough sledding all the way. The Samaritans thought he was rebuilding the walls to keep them out and so did their friends. Others made a fuss because they were suspicious of a Jewish governor who worked for Persia. A man named Tobiah said that any wall Nehemiah was likely to build would fall to pieces the first time a fox stubbed his toe on it (Nehemiah 4:3). The construction crews threatened to walk off the job because back on the farm what the weeds hadn't taken over, the neighbors had. The Jerusalem Jews tended to be freer and easier about religion than Nehemiah was, so they objected to him as a narrow-minded, holier-than-thou Puritan prude. And so on. But after twelve years the walls somehow got put back in working order anyway, Nehemiah threw a big celebration, and then he went back to Persia.

After another twelve years, he showed up in Jerusalem to see how things had been getting on and almost had a heart attack. The walls were strong as ever, but inside the walls everything had gone to pot. Tobiah, the man who'd made the remark about the fox, was living like a king in the Temple, while a lot of priests were out on the street corners selling apples. Everybody went to work on the Sabbath just like any other day, and all the big stores were open, not to mention the bars, and if people bothered to go to religious services at all, they could hardly hear a word over the spiel of the Tyrian fish peddlers. Worst of all in Nehemiah's eyes, there were a lot of Jewish boys who'd not only married foreign girls, but had picked up their foreign ways to such an extent that most of their kids didn't even know Hebrew.

Once again Nehemiah rose to the occasion. He tossed Tobiah out on his ear and had the place fumigated. He took the priests off the streets. He reinstated the Blue Laws with a vengeance. He sent the fish peddlers packing. He had the city gates locked from Saturday night till Monday morning. As for the boys who'd married wrong, he reminded them how even the great Solomon had gotten into trouble over his taste for imported cheesecake, and to make sure they wouldn't forget, he "contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair" (Nehemiah 13:25). By the time he was through, he had Jerusalem looking like a convention of hard-shell Baptists.

The ones who called Nehemiah a blue-nosed Puritan weren't entirely off base, of course, but you can't help admiring him anyway. It's too bad that one of his favorite prayers had to be "Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people" (Nehemiah 5:19; compare 13:14,31). It would be nice to think he'd done it all for love. But even when he went wrong, he went wrong for the right reasons mostly, and when his time finally came, it's at least ten to one that God didn't fail to remember.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Nebuchadnezzar

NEBUCHADNEZZAR, KING OF BABYLON, was a real horror. The ingenuities of his torture chamber made those of Vlad the Impaler look like parlor games. When King Zedekiah of Israel rebelled against him, for instance, he had his eyes put out—which anybody could have thought of—but the master touch was that just before this was done, he had Zedekiah's sons killed before him in some appropriately loathsome way, so that in his blindness he'd have that last sight to live with for the rest of his days.

And then there was the famous trio of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were all three of them employees of the Babylonian civil service, but as Jews they believed there was one God only, and his name was Yahweh. Therefore when Nebuchadnezzar had a ninety-foot idol made out of twenty-four-karat gold and commanded everybody to grovel at its feet—or else—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego tried to get themselves registered as conscientious objectors. Nebuchadnezzar lost no time in ordering them to be thrown into a flaming, fiery furnace prepared especially for the occasion.

He ordered the furnace to be heated to seven times its normal temperature, had the three trussed up in their long black overcoats, galoshes, and derby hats, and then took his seat in the front row center. The fire was so hot that the men who tossed them in were burned to a crisp in the process. This wasn't supposed to be part of the act, and neither was what happened next. First of all, Nebuchadnezzar could see that there were four men in the furnace, instead of three, and that the fourth was an angel. Second, they were all obviously fireproof.

Nebuchadnezzar was so undone that he called to them to come out, and when they emerged with not even their earlocks singed, he pardoned them on the spot and remarked that Yahweh was clearly a God you didn't fool around with. He then went a step further by issuing a new command to the effect that from that day forward, anybody caught treating Yahweh with anything but the highest respect was to be torn limb from limb and have his house burned down, in that order.

Yahweh was presumably pleased by this sudden conversion of Nebuchadnezzar's, but he may have had the sense that there were still a few rough edges to take care of before the job was complete.

Daniel 3; 2 Kings 25:7

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Nave

THE NAVE IS THE CENTRAL PART of the church from the main front to the chancel. It's the part where the laity sit, and in great Gothic churches it's sometimes separated from the choir and clergy by a screen. It takes its name from the Latin navis, meaning "ship," one reason being that the vaulted roof looks rather like an inverted keel. A more interesting reason is that the church itself is thought of as a ship or Noah's ark. It's a resemblance worth thinking about.

In one as in the other, just about everything imaginable is aboard, the clean and the unclean both. They are all piled in together helter-skelter, the predators and the prey, the wild and the tame, the sleek and beautiful ones and the ones that are ugly as sin. There are sly young foxes and impossible old cows. There are the catty and the piggish and the peacock-proud. There are hawks and there are doves. Some are wise as owls, some silly as geese; some meek as lambs and others ravening wolves. There are times when they all cackle and grunt and roar and sing together, and there are times when you could hear a pin drop. Most of them have no clear idea just where they're supposed to be heading or how they're supposed to get there or what they'll find if and when they finally do, but they figure the people in charge must know and in the meanwhile sit back on their haunches and try to enjoy the ride.

It's not all enjoyable. There's backbiting just like everywhere else. There's a pecking order. There's jostling at the trough. There's growling and grousing, bitching and whining. There are dogs in the manger and old goats and black widows. It's a regular menagerie in there, and sometimes it smells to high heaven like one.

But even at its worst, there's at least one thing that makes it bearable within, and that is the storm without—the wild winds and terrible waves and in all the watery waste, no help in sight.

And if there is never clear sailing, there is at least shelter from the blast, a sense of somehow heading in the right direction in spite of everything, a ship to keep afloat, and, like a beacon in the dark, the hope of finding safe harbor at last.

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