Pauline Letters

PAUL'S MADS WERE MADDER and his blues bluer, his pride prouder and his humbleness humbler, his strengths stronger and his weaknesses weaker than almost anybody else's you'd be apt to think of; and the splash he made when he fell for Christ is audible still. It is little wonder that from the start he was a genius at making enemies.

As his own Letters indicate, his contemporaries accused him of being insincere, crooked, yellow, physically repulsive, unclean, bumbling, and off his rocker. Since then the charges against him have tended to narrow down to one; that is, that he took the simple and beautiful gospel of Jesus and loused it up with obscure, divisive, and unnecessary theological subtleties.

Anybody who thinks the gospel of Jesus is simple should go back and take a look at it. "Love your neighbor." "Be ye perfect." "Resist not evil." "I and the Father are one." "Follow me." The only thing that's simple about the gospel is the language.

How? Why? Whence? Whither? These are the questions Paul digs into with all the gentleness and tact of a pneumatic drill. Jesus exploded on the scene like a bomb and blew the world in general and the world of Judaism in particular sky-high. It was left to Paul to try to sort out the pieces.

He wrote the church at Corinth what he got for his pains: "Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked. A night and a day I have been adrift at sea. In danger from rivers... robbers... my own people... Gentiles. In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst... in cold and exposure... " (2 Corinthians 11:24-27). One hears the whines and boasts of Shylock. One wishes he hadn't been the one who had to say it. But he says it and means it. And then he says, "I will not boast except of my weakness," and he means that too. The God who could work through the likes of him, he says, must be a God and a half.

So with a cauliflower ear and a split lip and whatever he meant by the thorn in the flesh that God gave "to keep me from being too elated" (2 Corinthians 12:7), he went his way and wrote his marvelous punch-drunk, Christ-drunk Letters. Jesus lit the fire, and Paul used it to forge for him a church.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Paul

HE WASN'T MUCH TO LOOK AT. "Bald-headed, bowlegged, strongly built, a man small in size, with meeting eyebrows, with a rather large nose." Years after his death that's the way the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla describes him, and Paul himself quotes somebody who had actually seen him: "His letters are strong, but his bodily presence is weak" (2 Corinthians 10:10). It was no wonder.

"Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one," he wrote. "Three times I have been beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked. A night and a day I have been adrift at sea. In danger from rivers... robbers... my own people... Gentiles. In toil and hardship, in hunger and thirst . . . in cold and exposure" (2 Corinthians 11:24-27). He also was sick off and on all his life and speaks of a "thorn in the flesh" that God gave him "to keep me from being too elated" (2 Corinthians 12:7). Epilepsy? Hysteria? Who knows? The wonder of it is that he was able to get around at all.

But get around he did. Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Galatia, Colossae, not to mention side trips to Jerusalem, Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Athens, Syracuse, Rome—there was hardly a whistle-stop in the Mediterranean world that he didn't make it to eventually, and sightseeing was the least of it. He planted churches the way Johnny Appleseed planted trees. And whenever he had ten minutes to spare he wrote letters. He bullied. He coaxed. He comforted. He cursed. He bared his soul. He reminisced. He complained. He theologized. He inspired. He exulted. Punch-drunk and Christ-drunk, he kept in touch with everybody. The postage alone must have cost him a fortune, not counting the energy and time. And where did it all start? On the road, as you might expect. He was still in charge of a Pharisee goon squad in those days and was hell-bent for Damascus to round up some troublemaking Christians and bring them to justice. And then it happened.

It was about noon when he was knocked flat by a blaze of light that made the sun look like a forty-watt bulb, and out of the light came a voice that called him by his Hebrew name twice. "Saul," it said, and then again "Saul. Why are you out to get me?" and when he pulled himself together enough to ask who it was he had the honor of addressing, what he heard to his horror was, "I'm Jesus of Nazareth, the one you're out to get." We're not told how long he lay there in the dust then, but it must have seemed at least six months. If Jesus of Nazareth had what it took to burst out of the grave like a guided missile, he thought, then he could polish off one bowlegged Christian-baiter without even noticing it, and Paul waited for the ax to fall. Only it wasn't an ax that fell. "Those boys in Damascus," Jesus said. "Don't fight them. Join them. I want you on my side," and Paul never in his life forgot the sheer lunatic joy and astonishment of that moment. He was blind as a bat for three days afterward, but he made it to Damascus anyway and was baptized on the spot. He was never the same again, and neither, in a way, was the world (Acts 9:1-6; 22:4-16; 26:9-18).

Everything he ever said or wrote or did from that day forward was an attempt to bowl over the human race as he'd been bowled over himself while he lay there with dust in his mouth and road apples down the front of his shirt: "Don't fight them, join them. He wants you on his side." You, of all people. Me. Who in the world, who in the solar system, the galaxy, could ever have expected it? He knew it was a wild and crazy business—"the folly of what we preach," he said—but he preached it anyway. "A fool for Christ's sake" he called himself as well as weak in his bodily presence, but he knew that "God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). There were times he got so carried away that his language went all out of whack. Infinitives split like atoms, syntax exploded, participles were left dangling.

"By grace you have been saved," he wrote to the Ephesians, and grace was his key word. Grace. Salvation was free, gratis. There was nothing you had to do to earn it and nothing you could do to earn it. "This is not your own doing, it is the gift of god—not the result of works, so that no one may boast," and God knows he'd worked, himself, and boasted too—worked as a Pharisee, boasting about the high marks he'd racked up in heaven till the sweat ran down and Christian heretics dropped like flies—only to find en route to Damascus that he'd been barking up the wrong tree from the start, trying to beat and kick his way through a door that had stood wide open the whole time. "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works," he wrote; in other words, good works were part of it, all right, but after the fact, not before (Ephesians 2:8-10).

Little by little the forgiven person became a forgiving person, the person who found he or she was loved became capable of love, the slob that God had had faith in anyway became de-slobbed, faithful, and good works blossomed from his branches, from her branches, like fruit from a well-watered tree. What fruit? Love, Paul wrote the boys and girls in Galatia. Love was the sweetest and tenderest. And then "joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" till his typewriter ribbon was in tatters and he had to take to a pencil instead (Galatians 5:22-23).

And Christ was his other key word, of course. Christ—the key to the key. He never forgot how he'd called him by name—twice, to make sure it got through—and "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us," he wrote out for the Romans (Romans 5:6) and for the Galatians again, "I have been crucified with Christ"—all that was dried up in him, full of hate and self-hating, self-serving and sick, all of it behind him now, dead as a doornail—so that " it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). And then, to the Philippians by registered mail, return receipt requested: "For me to live is Christ" (Philippians 1:21), and to the Ephesians, for fear they'd feel neglected if the mail carrier came empty-handed, "You he made alive when you were dead" (Ephesians 2:1). Alive like him.

But there were other times too. Sometimes the depression was so great he could hardly move the pencil across the page. "I don't understand my own actions," he said. "For I don't do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... I can will what is right, but I can't do it. For I don't do the good I want, but the evil I don't want is what I do... For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin... Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" He sat there by himself, aiming his awful question at the plaster peeling off his walls, and maybe it was only ten minutes or maybe it was ten years before he had the heart to scratch out the answer: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord," he said (Romans 7:15-25).

It got him going again, and on the next page he was back in his old stride with a new question. "If God is for us, who is against us?" He worked on that one for a minute or two and then gave it another try. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" It was the story of his life, needless to say, and at last he'd laid the groundwork for an answer he could get his back into. "No!" he wrote, the tip of his pencil point breaking off, he bore down so hard. "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:31-39). He sat there, with his cauliflower ear and a lump on his forehead the size of an egg from the last time the boys had worked him over, and when he reached for the drawer to get out an envelope, he found that his hand was shaking so badly he could hardly open it.

The ups and the downs.The fights with his enemies and the fights with his friends. The endless trips with a fever and diarrhea. Keeping one jump ahead of the sheriff. Giving his spiel on windy street corners with nobody much to hear him most of the time except some underfed kids and a few old women and some yokels who didn't even know the language. Where was it all going to get him in the end? Where was it all going to get all of them, any of them, in the end? When you came right down to it, what was God up to, for God's sweet sake, sending them all out—prophets, apostles, evangelists, teachers, the whole tattered bunch—to beat their gums and work themselves into an early grave?

 God was making a body for Christ, Paul said. Christ didn't have a regular body anymore, so God was making him one out of anybody he could find who looked as if he or she might just possibly do. He was using other people's hands to be Christ's hands and other people's feet to be Christ's feet, and when there was someplace where Christ was needed in a hurry and needed bad, he put the finger on some maybe not all that innocent bystander and got that person to go and be Christ in that place for lack of anybody better.

And how long was the whole great circus to last? Paul said, why, until we all become human beings at last, until we all "come to maturity," as he put it; and then, since there had been only one really human being since the world began, until we all make it to where we're like him, he said—"to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:11-13). Christs to each other, Christs to God. All of us. Finally. It was just as easy, and just as hard, as that.

Nobody's sure whether he ever got to Spain the way he'd planned or not, but either before he went or soon after he got back, he had his final run-in with the authorities, and the story is that they took him to a spot about three miles out of Rome and right there on the road, where he'd spent most of his life including what was in a way the beginning of his life, they lopped off his head.

At the end of its less than flattering description of his personal appearance, the Acts of Paul and Thecla says that "at times he looked like a man, and at times he had the face of an angel." If there is a God in heaven, as even in his blackest moments Paul never doubted there was, then bald-headed and bowlegged as he was, with those eyebrows that met and that oversized nose, it was with angel eyes that he exchanged a last long glance with his executioners.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Its Own Worst Enemy

 I WAS ON A TRAIN somewhere along that grim stretch of track between New Brunswick, New Jersey, and New York City. It was a gray fall day with low clouds in the sky and a scattering of rain in the air, a day as bleak and insistent as a headache. The train windows were coated with dust, but there wasn't all that much to see through them anyway except for the industrial wilderness that spread out in all directions and looked more barren and more abandoned as we approached Newark—the flat, ravaged earth, the rubble, the endless factories black as soot against the sky with their tall chimneys that every now and then are capped with flame, a landscape out of Dante. I was too tired from where I'd been to feel much like reading and still too caught up in what I'd be doing to be able to doze very satisfactorily, so after gazing more or less blindly out of the dirty window for a while, I let my eyes come to rest on the nearest bright thing there was to look at, which was a large color photograph framed on the wall up at the front end of the coa

It was a cigarette ad, and I forget what it was in it exactly, but there was a pretty girl in it and a good-looking boy, and they were sitting together somewhere—by a mountain stream, maybe, or a lake, with a blue sky overhead, green trees. It was a crisp, sunlit scene full of beauty, of youth, full of **life** more than anything else, and thus as different as it could have been from the drabness I'd been looking at through the window until I felt just about equally drab inside myself. And then down in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, in letters large enough to read from where I was sitting, was the Surgeon General's familiar warning about how cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health, or whatever the words are that they use for saying that cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer and kill you dead as a doornail.

It wasn't that I hadn't seen such ads thousands of times before and boggled at the macabre irony of them—those pretty pictures, that fatal message—but for some reason having to do with being tired, I suppose, and having nothing else much to look at or think about, I was so stunned by this one that I haven't forgotten it yet. "Buy this; it will kill you," the ad said. "Choose out of all that is loveliest and greenest and most innocent in the world that which can make you sick before your time and bring your world to an end. Live so you will die."

I'm not interested here in scoring a point against the advertising business or the tobacco industry, and the dangers of cigarette smoking are not what I want to talk about; what I want to talk about is something a great deal more dangerous still, which the ad seemed to be proclaiming with terrible vividness and power. We are our own worst enemies, the ad said. That's what I want to talk about. I had heard it countless times before as all of us have, but this time the ad hit me over the head with it—that old truism that is always true, spell it out and apply it however you like. As nations we stockpile new weapons and old hostilities that may well end up by destroying us all; and as individuals we do much the same. As individuals we stockpile weapons for defending ourselves against not just the things and people that threaten us but against the very things and people that seek to touch our hearts with healing and make us better and more human than we are. We stockpile weapons for holding each other at arm's length, for wounding sometimes even the ones who are closest to us. And as for hostilities—toward other people, toward ourselves, toward God if we happen to believe in God—we can all name them silently and privately for ourselves.

The world is its own worst enemy, the ad said. The world, in fact, is its **only** enemy. No sane person can deny it, I think, as suddenly the picture on the wall of the train jolted me into being sane and being unable to deny it myself. The pretty girl and the good-looking boy. The lake and trees in all their beauty. The blue sky in all its innocence and mystery. And, tucked in among it all, this small, grim warning that we will end by destroying ourselves if we're not lucky. We need no urging to choose what it is that will destroy us because again and again we choose it without urging. If we don't choose to smoke cigarettes ourselves, we choose at least to let such ads stand without batting an eye. "Buy this; it can kill you," the pretty picture said, and nobody on the train, least of all myself, stood up and said, "Look, this is madness!" Because we are more than half in love with our own destruction. All of us are. That is what the ad said. I suppose I had always known it, but for a moment-rattling along through the Jersey flats with the gray rain at the window and not enough energy to pretend otherwise for once—I more than knew it. I choked on it.

-Originally published in Secrets in the Dark

Parents

"HONOR YOUR FATHER and your mother," says the Fifth Commandment (Exodus 20:12). Honor them for having taken care of you before you were old enough to take care of yourself. Honor them for the sacrifices they made on your behalf, including the ones you would have kept them from making if you'd had the chance. Honor them for having loved you.

But how do you honor them when, well-intentioned as they may have been, they made terrible mistakes with you that have shadowed your life ever since? How do you honor them when, far from loving you or taking care of you, they literally or otherwise abandoned you? 

The answer seems to be that you are to honor them even so. Honor them for the pain that made them what they were and kept them from being what they might otherwise have become. Honor them because there were times when, even at their worst, they were doing the best they knew how to do. Honor them for the roles they were appointed to play—father and mother—because even when they played them abominably or didn't play them at all, the roles themselves are holy.  Honor them because, however unthinkingly or irresponsibly, they gave you your life.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Parable

A PARABLE IS A SMALL STORY with a large point. Most of the ones Jesus told have a kind of sad fun about them. The parables of the Crooked Judge (Luke 18:1-8), the Sleepy Friend (Luke 11:5-8), and the Distraught Father (Luke 11:11-13) are really jokes in their way, at least part of whose point seems to be that a silly question deserves a silly answer. In the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), the elder brother's pious pique when the returning Prodigal gets the red-carpet treatment is worthy of Moliere's Tartuffe, as is the outraged legalism of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) when Johnny-come-lately gets as big a slice of the worm as the early bird. The point of the Unjust Steward is that it's better to be a resourceful rascal than a saintly schlemiel (Luke 16:1-8); and of the Talents that, spiritually speaking, playing the market will get you further than playing it safe (Matthew 25:14-30).

Both the sadness and the fun are at their richest, however, in the parable of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:16-24). The "beautiful people" all send in their excuses, of course—their real estate, their livestock, their sex lives—so the host sends his social secretary out into the streets to bring in the poor, the maimed, the blind, the lame.

The string ensemble strikes up the overture to The Bartered Bride, the champagne glasses are filled, the cold pheasant is passed round, and there they sit by candlelight with their white canes and their empty sleeves, their orthopedic shoes, their sleazy clothes, their aluminum walkers. A woman with a harelip proposes a toast. An old man with the face of Lear on the heath and a party hat does his best to rise to his feet. A deaf person thinks people are starting to go home and pushes back from the table. Rose petals float in the finger bowls. The strings shift into the Liebestod.

With parables and jokes both, if you've got to have them explained, don't bother.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words