Hearing

IF I CAN’T SEE YOU FOR SOME REASON but can only hear you, you don't exist for me in space, which is where seeing happens, but in time, which is where hearing happens. Your words follow one after the other the way tock follows tick. When I have only the sound of you to go by, I don't experience you as an object the way I would if you stood before me—something that I can walk around, inspect from all angles, more or less define. I experience you more the way I experience the beating of my own heart or the flow of my own thoughts. A deaf man coming upon me listening to you would think that nothing of importance was going on. But something of extraordinary importance is going on. I am taking you more fully into myself than I can any other way. Hearing you speak brings me by the most direct of all routes something of the innermost secret of who you are.

It is no surprise that the Bible uses hearing, not seeing, as the predominant image for the way human beings know God. They can't walk around God and take God in like a cathedral or an artichoke. They can only listen to time for the sound of God—to the good times and bad times of their own lives for the words God is addressing to, of all people, them. 

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

Healing

THE GOSPELS DEPICT JESUS as having spent a surprising amount of time healing people. Although, like the author of Job before him, he specifically rejected the theory that sickness was God's way of getting even with sinners (John 9:1-3), he nonetheless seems to have suggested a connection between sickness and sin, almost to have seen sin as a kind of sickness. "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick," he said. "I came not to call the righteous but sinners" (Mark 2:17).

This is entirely compatible, of course, with the Hebrew view of the human being as a psychosomatic unity, an indivisible amalgam of body and soul in which if either goes wrong, the other is affected. It is significant also that the Greek verb sо̄zо̄ was used in Jesus' day to mean both "to save" and "to heal," and sо̄tēr could signify either "savior" or "physician.

"Ever since the time of Jesus, healing has been part of the Christian tradition. Nowadays, it has usually been associated with religious quackery or the lunatic fringe; but as the psychosomatic dimension of disease has come to be taken more and more seriously by medical science, it has regained some of its former respectability. How nice for God to have this support at last.

Jesus is reported to have made the blind see and the lame walk, and over the centuries countless miraculous healings have been claimed in his name. For those who prefer not to believe in them, a number of approaches are possible, among them:

1. The idea of miracles is an offense both to our reason and to our dignity. Thus, a priori, miracles don't happen.

2. Unless there is objective medical evidence to substantiate the claim that a miraculous healing has happened, you can assume it hasn't.

3. If the medical authorities agree that a healing is inexplicable in terms of present scientific knowledge, you can simply ascribe this to the deficiencies of present scientific knowledge.

4. If otherwise intelligent and honest human beings are convinced, despite all arguments to the contrary, that it is God who has healed them, you can assume that their sickness, like its cure, was purely psychological. Whatever that means.

5. The crutches piled high at Lourdes and elsewhere are a monument to human humbug and credulity.

If your approach to this kind of healing is less ideological and more empirical, you can always give it a try. Pray for it. If it's somebody else's healing you're praying for, you can try at the same time laying your hands on her as Jesus sometimes did. If her sickness involves her body as well as her soul, then God may be able to use your inept hands as well as your inept faith to heal her.

If you feel like a fool as you are doing this, don't let it throw you. You are a fool, of course, only not a damned fool for a change.

If your prayer isn't answered, this may tell you more about you and your prayer than it does about God. Don't try too hard to feel religious, to generate some healing power of your own. Think of yourself instead (if you have to think of yourself at all) as a rather small-gauge clogged-up pipe that a little of God's power may be able to filter through if you can just stay loose enough. Tell the one you're praying for to stay loose too.

If God doesn't seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he's giving you something else.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Hate

HATE IS AS ALL-ABSORBING AS LOVE, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying. As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the ones they hate. They confirm them in all their darkest suspicions. They add fuel to all their most burning animosities. The anticipation of them makes the hating heart pound. The memory of them can be as sweet as young love.

The major difference between hating and loving is perhaps that, whereas to love somebody is to be fulfilled and enriched by the experience, to hate somebody is to be diminished and drained by it. Lovers, by losing themselves in their loving, find themselves, become themselves. Haters simply lose themselves. Theirs is the ultimately consuming passion.

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

Ham

HAM WAS THE YOUNGEST of Noah's three sons and by tradition the progenitor of the black race.

After the Flood was over and the family had settled down into the wine business, Noah did a little too much sampling one hot afternoon and passed out buck naked in his tent. Ham happened to stick his head in at just the wrong moment and then, instead of keeping his mouth shut, went out and treated his brothers to a lurid account of what he'd seen.

When Noah sobered up and found out about it, he blew his top. Among some other unpleasant things he had to say was a curse to the effect that from that day forward Ham was to be his brothers' slave.

For generations certain preachers have pointed to this text as biblical sanction for whatever form of white supremacy happened to be going on at the time, all the way from literal slavery to separate but equal schools, segregated toilet facilities, and restricted housing.

"The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose," says Shakespeare, and you can just see him standing up there with his paunch and his black robe citing it. As somebody once said, comparing the church to Noah's ark, if it weren't for the storm without, you could never stand the stench within.

Genesis 9:18-27

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Hagar

SARAH COULDN'T HAVE CHILDREN, so she persuaded her husband, Abraham, to have a child with her lady's maid Hagar instead. Abraham and Hagar both proved willing, and soon a child was on the way.

As you'd think one of them might have foreseen, however, there are certain problems inherent in a ménage à trois that are not solved by the prospect of its becoming a ménage à quatre. Au contraire. 

As Sarah saw it, Hagar no longer walked around the house, she flounced, and whenever she had a craving for things like bagels and lox, naturally Abraham went out and got them for her. In no time at all Sarah was livid with jealousy. Eager for peace at any price, Abraham said to go ahead and fire Hagar then if that would make things better, and within a short time Hagar was out on the street with all her belongings piled around her, including a layette.

It wasn't long, however, before an angel found her there and persuaded her to go back in and try to patch things up with her mistress. Not having anything better in mind, Hagar agreed. Then the angel told her that the Lord had taken pity on her and wanted her to know that she was to name her baby Ishmael when he came. He also wanted her to know that though Ishmael was never going to win any popularity contests, he would nonetheless be the first of a multitude of descendants. It was a promise. Much cheered by this, Hagar returned to the house through the servants' entrance, ate humble pie, and was eventually given back her old job. A few months later, Ishmael was born, just as the Lord had said.

But her troubles weren't over. To the stupefaction of her gynecologists, it wasn't long before Sarah herself gave birth to a son named Isaac, who God promised would be the father of a great nation. This was so far beyond her wildest expectations, not to mention everybody else's, that for a while she was as happy as she'd ever been; but then one day she found Isaac and Ishmael playing together in the nursery, and once again the fat was in the fire.

She was convinced that her upstairs son would have to split his inheritance with Hagar's downstairs brat, so for the second time she nagged Abraham into driving them both out of the house permanently. When they got as far as Beersheba, they ran out of water. Hagar gave up her son for dead and sat down and wept.

It all ended happily, however. This time the Lord took care of her personally. First he produced a well and then he told her to dry her eyes because not only would her son live, but he gave her his word that the boy would grow up to be the father of a great nation just like his half brother, Isaac, back home. And so it came to pass.

The story of Hagar is the story of the terrible jealousy of Sarah and the singular ineffectuality of Abraham and the way Hagar, who knew how to roll with the punches, managed to survive them both. Above and beyond that, however, it is the story of how in the midst of the whole unseemly affair the Lord, half tipsy with compassion, went around making marvelous promises and loving everybody and creating great nations like the last of the big-time spenders handing out hundred-dollar bills.

Genesis 16; 21

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later Beyond Words