Doctrine

NO MATTER HOW FANCY and metaphysical a doctrine sounds, it was a human experience first. The doctrine of the divinity of Christ, for instance. The place it began was not in the word processor of some fourth-century Greek theologian, but in the experience of basically untheological people who had known Jesus of Nazareth and found something happening to their lives that had never happened before.

Unless you can somehow participate yourself in the experience that lies behind a doctrine, simply to subscribe to it doesn't mean much. Sometimes, however, simply to subscribe to a doctrine is the first step toward experiencing the reality that lies behind it.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Disaster

ON THE EVENING OF THE DAY the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, a service was hastily improvised in one of the largest New York churches, where crowds of both believers and nonbelievers came together in search of whatever it is people search for at such times—some word of reassurance, some glimmer of hope.

"At times like these," the speaker said, "God is useless.”

When I first heard of it, it struck me as appalling, and then it struck me as very brave, and finally it struck me as true.

When horrors happen we can't use God to make them unhappen any more than we can use a flood of light to put out a fire or Psalm 23 to find our way home in the dark.

All we can do is to draw close to God and to each other as best we can, the way those stunned New Yorkers did, and to hope that, although God may well be useless when all hell breaks loose, there is nothing that happens, not even hell, where God is not present with us and for us. 

-Originally published in Beyond Words  

Angels' Music

NOBODY EVERY TRIED harder at making God hear surely.  He called on him till the veins on his neck swelled and his face went black.  He kept at it till one eye got sucked deep into the socket and the other bulged out like a berry on a stem.  He gaped his jaws at Heaven till his lips peeled back from his teeth and you could see down to where his lungs and liver was flapping like fish in a basket.  Up out of the point of his head a jet of his heart’s blood spurted black and smoking.  That’s how he told it.

“There came angels at last, Finn,” he said. “They were spread out against the sky like a great wreath.  The closest were close enough to touch nearly. The farthest were farther than the stars.  I never saw so many stars.  I could hear the stillness of them they were that still.”

I see his pinched face go silver watching. There’s silver in the hollow of his cheeks.  He has silver eyes.  His shoulder-blades cast shadows dark as wings on his bony boy’s back.

“Lofty and fair beyond telling was the angels’ music,” he said.  They heard me cry and they answered me.  They weren’t singing to me of the mercy of God, Finn.  Their singing was itself the mercy of God.  Do you think I could ever forget it even if I tried?"

-Originally published in Listening to Your Life

Diary

EVEN THE MOST CURSORY OF DIARIES can be of incalculable value. What the weather was doing. Who we ran into on the street. The movie we saw. The small boy at the dentist's office. The dream.

Just a handful of the barest facts can be enough to rescue an entire day from oblivion—not just what happened in it, but who we were when it happened. Who the others were. What it felt like back then to be us.

"Our years come to an end like a sigh . . . " says Psalm 90, "so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (vv. 9,12).

It is a mark of wisdom to realize how precious our days are, even the most uneventful of them. If we can keep them alive by only a line or so about each, at least we will know what we're sighing about when the last of them comes. 

-Originally published in Beyond Words  

Devil

TO TAKE THE DEVIL SERIOUSLY is to take seriously the fact that the total evil in the world is greater than the sum of all its parts. Likewise the total evil in yourself. The murderer who says, " I couldn't help it," isn't necessarily just kidding.

To take the Devil seriously is also to take seriously our total and spine-tingling freedom. Lucifer was an angel who even in paradise itself was free to get the hell out.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words