Numbers

It's extraordinary how many numbers we carry around in our heads-countless telephone and fax numbers, account numbers, street numbers, ID numbers, ZIP codes, area codes, and so on and so forth.

Numbers are lifeless and boring abstractions, yet for each of us there are some that are so charged that, if we happen to be paying attention, they can make our hearts skip a beat. The year somebody we loved was born or died. A telephone number we may not have called for twenty years. The number of steps there were to climb to our bedroom as a child. The age we were when we first fell in love. Uninteresting as they are in themselves, numbers remind us that, if we have our wits about us, almost anything we look at has treasure buried in it.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Pentecostal Fire

The following excerpt is from the novel The Final Beast. The protagonist is Theodore Nicolet, a minister.

NICOLET HAD GONE to sleep thinking of Pentecost, and it returned to him now, just coming awake in the shade-a moment not unlike this, he imagined. There were all the accustomed sounds of morning-the traffic, the pneumatic drill at work on the parking lot by the bank, footsteps and voices-and then just the first unaccustomed intensification or distortion of it so that the man unloading vegetables from his pick-up stopped with a crate of tomatoes in his arms and shook his head vigorously sideways as though he had water in his ear. The hum of blood in the head of someone about to faint: the sound began to drift and spread like a cloud swelling in the slow wind. A horn honked and kept up a steady blast that began to reverberate like a bell, a noise within a noise. Nicolet drew his feet together and leaned forward with his chin in his hands, his shirt tail coming out in back. The fire began unspectacularly: whispering flames from hair and fingertips. Then it spread to the shoulders, a conflagration swept high by the hastening wind, and upturned faces burst into flame with everyone getting out of cars at once and yelling, and only then did the big man raise his voice: "Men of Judea, and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you . . ." Nicolet watched a butterfly open and close its wings on a cannon ball. "The birthday of the church took place in the midst of terrible fire." That might be a way to begin. He got up with his jacket hooked over his shoulder on one finger and walked away.

-Originally published in The Final Beast

Obedience

In recent times obedience has become a bad word. It seems incompatible with good words like independence, individualism, and freedom. The emphasis is all on doing your own thing and doing it your own way. What you're supposed to obey is authority, and authority has come to be confused with "the authorities" - people in uniform or with Ph.D.s or earning ten times a year more than you do. Who wants to obey them?

Many parents have given up asking their children to obey them and just hope they won't burn the house down. In religious circles, obedience, like its partners poverty and chastity, tends to be associated largely with monasticism. If the mother superior or the abbot tells you to do something, you better do it. Otherwise you let your own conscience be your guide and take no guff from anybody. The phrase obeying your conscience is gradually being replaced by listening to your conscience.

It is generally supposed that to obey somebody is necessarily to do something for somebody else's sake. However, when Jesus asks people to obey above everything the law of love, it is above everything for their own sakes that he is asking them to obey it.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Observance

A religious observance can be a wedding, a christening, a Memorial Day service, a bar mitzvah, or anything like that you might be apt to think of. There are lots of things going on at them. There are lots of things you can learn from them if you're in a receptive state of mind. The word observance itself suggests what is perhaps the most important thing about them.

A man and a woman are getting married. A child is being given a name. A war is being remembered and many deaths. A youngster is coming of age.

It is life that is going on. It is always going on, and it is always precious. It is God that is going on. It is you who are there that is going on.

As Henry James advised writers, be one on whom nothing is lost.

Observe!! There are few things as important, as religious, as that.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Ocean

They say that whenever the great Protestant theologian PaulTillich went to the beach, he would pile up a mound of sand and sit on it gazing out at the ocean with tears running down his cheeks. One wonders what there was about it that moved him so.

The beauty and power of it? The inexpressible mystery of it? The futility of all those waves endlessly flowing in and ebbing out again? The sense that it was out of the ocean that life originally came and that when life finally ends, it is the ocean that will still remain? Who knows?

In his theology Tillich avoided using the word God because it seemed to him too small, denoting only another being among beings. He preferred to speak instead of the Ground of Being, of God as that which makes being itself possible, as that because of which existence itself exists. His critics complain that he is being too metaphysical. They say they can't imagine praying to anything so abstract and remote.

Maybe Tillich himself shared their difficulty. Maybe it was when he looked at the ocean that he caught a glimpse of the One he was praying to. Maybe what made him weep was how vast and overwhelming it was and yet at the same time as near as the breath of it in his nostrils, as salty as his own tears.

~originally published in Beyond Words