THAT EXPLAINS IT ALL

Ever wonder why we human beings can sometimes be so smart, do so much, be so intelligent that it often staggers the imagination? Every time I look around, it almost seems that there is another newer and better and faster technological gadget on the market. My first cell phone years ago had more computer stuff than the Apollo astronauts had. My new phone is a less than a year old and it is behind the times.

That is only for starters. One only wonders what will be next so smart are we. And then, at the same time, we have to wonder why we same human beings can do some of the dumbest and most foolish things. We make serious decisions often on the spur of the moment and live to regret what we’ve done, regret it for a long, long time. We all have skeletons in our closets we had to hide there out of sight and out of mind because we did not want to be continually faced with our foolish past actions.

So why do we very smart human beings often do what is quite foolish, what we would not do had we given some thought ahead of time? Mark Twain had the answer. “Man was made at then end of the week, when God was tired,” he opined. Sounds like a plausible explanation to me given that I know I make foolish and rash decisions when I am tired, when I should have waited, that I do not do my best when I am exhausted.

Tongue in cheek or not, Twain was on to something there. Of course, no matter when we were created, we would still do what is unwise and foolish, free will being what it is. That being a given, something else Twain observed goes hand-in-hand with our ability and proclivity to do the foolish after which we often grieve over our mistakes. We grieve alone because we are not going to find a sympathetic ear. We made our bed freely even if foolishly. No one is going to join us in it just to ease our guilt. That is how we learn.

Grief can take care of itself, says Twain. And it should. But, he says, “to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.” We can and do – must – grieve over our foolishness alone. We do not rush out and tell everyone, tell anyone, about the fool we have been. But we do not rejoice over our good deeds all alone. We need someone else, many others, to share our joy. When something good has happened to us, we can’t wait to share our good news.

God may have created us on the last day when God was worn out, exhausted, and did not give us his best shot. I can live with that. We all can because we must. What God also did, as the creation parable makes very, very clear is that God created us for one another. It is not good for us to be alone, especially in our joy and even in our grief and sorrow.

Yes, we need to grieve alone in order to personally deal with whatever it is we are grieving about – a foolish action, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a failure of some kind. We need that time alone, but we need others to be close at hand.

We are who we are: each of is wise and foolish, weak and strong, sad and joyful all rolled into one human being. We are God’s creation. That explains everything even if we can’t understand the half of it.

ELIMINATE THESE WORDS

The late Senator Barry Goldwater, no friend of mine because of his politics, but a kindred spirit when it comes to what is really important, namely our relations with one another and with this world of ours, made a couple of astute observations. First: “Scratch the word hate from your vocabulary. If you’re going to talk about a man you don’t like, just say you don’t like him. Don’t say you hate him. ‘Hate’ is the dirtiest, ugliest word in the language – any language.”

To truly hate someone means that we wish that person were dead and not only dead but consigned to everlasting hell as well. What is worse is that when we hate another person, we are, in the process, hating God because that person is a child of God no less a way than we are and is loved by God to no less a degree than God loves us and has God living in him in no less a way that God lives in us.

We can and must always hate the sin, just as God does. But we must extrapolate the sin from the sinner if only because we desire the same from God and especially from the one we have sinned against. We all do sinful and selfish and stupid actions because we are limited human beings. We are not perfect and will never be perfect but can only strive to be better today than we were yesterday. And if we fail, as we often do, then we need to pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and start all over again.

That is all God expects of us, all we can expect of ourselves, and all we can expect – and demand – of the other. There is no room for hate in God’s world, only confession, repentance, and forgiveness. As Goldwater said, we need to scratch the word hate from our vocabulary, admit we don’t like what the other did or perhaps even like him or her as a person. Remember, as difficult as it may be to believe, there are many people who don’t like us.

One more Goldwater observation that goes hand-in-hand with his thoughts on hate: “I’ve never been in a place on earth that I would call ugly, because when you talk to the people there it begins to be a little beautiful. I have a strong feeling that when this world eliminates the social, language, and religious barriers there will be peace. I think that’s the way the Lord wants it.”

As the song says, “everything is beautiful in its own way.” Why? For the same reason why we must not hate: everything, like every person, is a creation of God. It is good and it is beautiful, not only in its own way, but in the eyes of others. They see beauty it what is plain and bland to us just as God see good in someone who acts so badly.

We put up barriers, even walls, sometimes impenetrable walls, between ourselves and others because of cultural issues, religious beliefs, socio-economic differences (and that is only for starters). WE erect those walls, those divisions, those barriers. God does not. As the Senator opined, God’s choice would be that we not only knock them down, but keep them down and eliminate them entirely. That is not and never will be easy; but if we want peace on earth and peace of mind and heart and soul as well, that is the only way.

MISREADING THE CROSS

Sometimes whenever we look at the cross with Jesus on it, hanging in pain and suffering and death, we can easily get the wrong idea about what it means to be a Christian, to follow Jesus. Yes, there are times, probably very, very few and very far between, when we get nailed for being a Christians. But those times are the exception, thank God, and not the rule.

Being a Christian demands sacrifice, to be sure. It means putting the other person first, walking the extra mile, even turning the other cheek if necessary. All these actions can be and usually are painful. But they come up short when we compare that kind of pain to the pain Jesus endured. And, yes, we have been told that no greater love can we have than to lay down our life for another, lay it down and give it up as in actually dying. So, when was the last time anyone ever asked you to do that?

Novelist and poet Chris Abani, a Nigerian by birth, thinking about not only life in war-torn Nigeria but life in this world, said this: “What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back to me.”

He is not denigrating what Jesus did on the cross; rather he is observing that such messianic gestures really don’t change the world. Jesus’ death on the cross did not. What changed the world were “the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion” that the followers of Jesus did day in and day out. That is what converted others, changed them, changed their lives.

Yes, we are all thankful for what Jesus did, but that is not what he has called us to do nor is that we have promised to do in and through our baptism. We are called to live each day as caring and compassionate people, no more and no less. That is not always easy and it is often a pain in the neck if not everywhere else on our body. Kindness and compassion are not always rewarded in kind but just the opposite.

Nevertheless, if we truly want to change the world from what it is to what God created it to be and what Jesus came to remind us that we could make it over as, then the only way is the ubuntu way. That means that we are fully alive, fully human, when the kindness and love we share with another is shared back. Sometimes that happens immediately. Sometimes it takes a long time, even a very long and painful time. And sometimes the other simply does not share back. It happens.

Yet, no matter how long it takes, how painful it is at times, the only way we can change another and in the process change a very, very, very small part of this world, is to hang in there even when our acts of kindness and compassion are rejected. Jesus never gave up even to the end when he kindly, lovingly and compassionately forgave those who rejected his love and nailed him to that cross. Neither can or must we.

THE DEVIL

One of the great comedic lines of all times was that from Flip Wilson who used to explain his failings and shortcomings by asserting “The devil made me do it.” It always, always got a laugh no matter how often we, the audience, had heard that line. Why? As with all humor, there is always a sense of truth. It is said that when we find something in another that makes us laugh, we are really laughing at ourselves.

Like Flip, there is not a one of us who has not done something for which we were later or even immediately chagrined. We wondered how we could have been so foolish, so stupid, so selfish. How could we have done such a thing, said such words? The pain for our foolishness could have been eliminated or at least alleviated if we could have blamed it all on the devil.

Like Flip, sometimes we did. In our imagination we pictured this evil-looking creature, fork in hand, fire blazing from his mouth, who forced us to do that which we now rue. Of course we knew better. Nevertheless, there was and is and always will be that need to try to pass the buck, or at least some part of the buck of blame onto someone else. The devil is always and easily that scapegoat.

Yet, no one and nothing, the devil included, can make us do that which we know we should not. The devil is not the cause of or reason for our sins and offenses. We are. However, the truth is that we need the devil. We need that figure in our imagination who prods and pushes us to say and do that which we know we should not. We need that reminder that sin, evil, selfishness is simply the absence of good.

And is not that what the devil is for us: a creature, however we imagine him to be, that personifies all that is bad, all that is wrong, evil incarnate? No good can possibly come from the devil and thus, we reason, all bad somehow must originate with the devil. Thus, whenever we take stock of our sins, we go back to whence they obviously began: the devil. Laying the blame for our sinfulness at the feet of the devil quickly follows.

It makes for a good laugh when we try, a good laugh all around. If we tried Flip’s line on another, they laughed. They didn’t even have to say, “Get serious!” If we tried that line on ourselves, we laughed even harder even as we truly wished we could blame someone, anyone, even the devil.

And yet we need the devil even if we don’t believe in the actual existence of a devil, of Satan. We need the reminder of how powerful the absence of good really is. Nazi Germany, Muslim fanatics, a crazy man with a Glock are examples of the devil at work, examples of what power the absence of good has and the evil that it can do.

There is evil in this world, lots of it. We are reminded of it every day, sadly. But the doer-of-evil, the devil, is not figment of our imagination or some outside force trying to control us. The devil is in each one of us yearning to get out and have his way with us. We are the devil whenever we do evil and we have no one else to blame but ourselves.

IN A PICKLE

Over the millennia there have been numerous arguments and discussions between scientists and theologians. For the most part they have gone nowhere. The scientist wants proof: proof of God’s existence, proof that a certain miracle has taken place, proof that a law of nature has been suspended in this instance – proof. The theologian, on the other hand, does not demand such. The theologian only demands that what he believes is, well, believable, given his first belief, namely, that of his belief in God.

Novelist Robertson Davies, discussing his joining of the Anglican Church: “Yes, indeed, I consider myself a believer. But if I were asked to nail down and defend what it was I believed and why, I would be in a pickle like a lot of people. I think this is the kind of thing that is not perhaps very widely or sympa­thetically understood. Religious belief is not susceptible to the kind of discussion and proof that appeals to skeptical minds that generally want to work on scientific principles. They’re so imbued with the scientific method that intuition and a sort of native awareness don’t count for anything.”

We believers are always in a pickle, often with ourselves let alone with those who demand scientific proof. We, too, wonder why we sometimes believe what we believe. We, too, have our doubts about God’s love for us, even about God’s very existence or certainly that God cares about us either individually or as a whole. Given the mess that the world is in and has been in almost since creation, we have to wonder about this God of our faith.

Thus, when we try to defend our faith or our God or both, we wind up in a pickle. We have no adequate answers, answers that will satisfy the questioner even when that questioner is ourself. Yet, while the scientist will walk away shaking his head at our foolishness for believing what is impossible to prove and what, in many instances, makes no sense at all, we hang on. We don’t give in or give up.

That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be easier to live with ourselves if we did. There are times when we would just like to shuck it all and give up on this God of ours who seems so often to be so distant and so uncaring about the pain and suffering that we are enduring, unjustly and undeservedly enduring. Just mark it up to fate and get on with life without God. Wouldn’t that be so much easier and certainly make so much more sense?

Perhaps. But we do not. Why we do not, why we hang on and hang in when everything in us says to give up and walk away, we cannot explain. As Davies asserts, if and when we try, we end up in a pickle of our own making. There is no scientific explanation for this instance of ours to hold on to a God who sometimes does not seem to care to hold on to us. Sometimes.

But it is in those times when God holds on to us, won’t let us go, who even forcibly grabs us, that we know why we still believe even when it might make complete sense not to. We wish we could explain this faith of ours, but we cannot. That may put us in a pickle but it is a very sweet one, is it not?

PRAYER

When I was in college, my English professor used to regale the class with definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. For example: Conservative (noun) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. Lawyer (noun) One skilled in circumvention of the law. My prof’s favorite was that of prayer: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

As with all of Bierce’s definitions there is a very real ring of truth about them. Most conservatives I know, religious and political, get all bent out of shape around existing evils: taxes and sexual issues being two. And most liberals I know, myself included, invariably arrive at solutions to these problems by creating other problems rather than real answers. A good defense lawyer’s job is to find a way around a law or a reason why his client is exempt from the law.

So, too, whenever we pray to God, we most assuredly confess our unworthiness to approach God in prayer because we are sinful human beings. And that we are. We dare not do otherwise. And there are times in prayer when we most assuredly ask God to either annul or at least bend the laws of the universe on our behalf. That’s what a miracle is, is it not: asking God to go against nature?

Are we fools? Are we wasting our time? Are we wrong? Is that what prayer is all about? Well, yes and no. It’s not what prayer is all about but prayer is about some of that. We do pray that God work miracles on our behalf, or at least on behalf of someone we love at our request. And sometimes our prayer takes the form of yelling at God in anger or begging with tears streaming down our cheeks or, in some instances, both.

We’re not fools or wasting our time or are wrong when we pray for miracles, pray that the laws of nature be annulled on our behalf because we believe, no, because we know God can and sometimes does do exactly that. Not always, but at least often enough for us to pray in the hope that God will make another exception to the laws of nature just this once more and for us or for someone we love.

Lewis B. Smedes said it best: “I think we should see miraculous healings not as a way of solving human suffering, but as whimsical signals – to be taken sometimes with a bit of humor, not made too much of, but still signals – that God is alive, that Christ is Lord, and that suffering is not the last word about human existence.” Whimsical signals: playful, fanciful, impulsive acts on God’s part on our behalf.

It is God who is in control and not us, and we know it. That is why we ask God to give some of that control into our hands by giving in to our prayers, our wishes and wants. Yet, like Bierce’s definition of a conservative and a liberal, sometimes our solution to the problem may be worse than the problem itself or we are creating more problems in having our prayers answered. Bierce reminds us that we need to be aware of what we are asking and Smedes reminds us that God really does know best.

FAME

Andy Warhol once opined that every one of us gets his or her fifteen minutes of fame. Whether this is good or bad is often determined by the way this fame is achieved. The reality shows on television allow many people to make fools of themselves in front of a vast audience that is foolish enough to waste its time on such foolishness. There are those, obviously, who care not how they earn their fifteen minutes.

Fame comes at a price. The more fifteen-minute segments someone is allowed to have, the less of a private life that person has. The larger the audience that produces the fame, the more will be the demands placed on that person afterwards, either trying to down play or trying to live up to whatever it is that produced the fame initially. Those who have sought out fame or those who have it thrust upon them can all vouch for the price they have had to pay for their time in the limelight. More than less will tell us that the fame is not worth the price one has to pay.

Yet we all want to be looked upon, at least by some, as someone of some importance. We do have our pride and we want and even need that pride to be stroked at times, not necessarily and even not certainly on television or YouTube or Facebook. As long as there are others who look up to and respect us, that is enough. Of course, maybe a little bit of publicity wouldn’t hurt now, would it? Would it?

The question remains, and it is a very personal one and one whose answer we dare not reveal to anyone but ourselves, if we even dare to do that, is this: do I worry too much about what others think of me? Do I? Really? If I do, if any of us does, then perhaps we need to heed the admonition of Eleanor Roosevelt. She said this: “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” Ouch!

She is right, most certainly. Even the most famous people in the world are ignored and never thought about on a daily basis by most of the people. They just are not. And since we are nowhere near to being deemed famous, it should give us pause to realize that if we really are worrying about what others think about us, our worries are for naught and we are truly wasting our time.

None of this is to say that who we are is unimportant and what we do makes little difference. We are important because each one of us is a child of God and because God has given each of us a mission and a ministry that only we can fulfill. When we discover that mission and ministry and fulfill it, the world is a better place and we are a better person, whether we receive any fame in the process. On the other hand, whenever we fail to fulfill the mission and ministry God has entrusted to us, both we and the world are less for it.

Our goal and responsibility in this life is not to seek out our fifteen minutes of fame. It is simply to learn what God has in mind for us, to fulfill it as best we can, be thankful that we can, and be satisfied. If any fame comes in the process, so be it. If none does, at least in the world’s terms, so be it as well.