Onan

THE ANCIENT LAW was that if a man died, his brother was supposed to have a child by his widow so the line wouldn't become extinct. Therefore, when Er died, it was up to his brother Onan to perform the duty with Er's widow, Tamar. Because Onan knew that the child to be born wouldn't really be his, he refused and "spilled his semen on the ground" instead (Genesis 38:9). As a result, God killed him.

This story is dismal enough in itself, but later generations have made it more so. Onanism has become a euphemism for masturbation, and the punishment Onan received has been interpreted as meaning that God is, to say the least, against it. Actually what God was against was that Onan had disobeyed the law of levirate marriage and had done so on the unedifying grounds that he didn't want any children of his running around with another man's name. Presumably the punishment would have been just as severe if, instead of doing what he did, he'd simply caught the next bus out of town. According to Dr. Kinsey, some 92 percent of all males have masturbated, as have some 62 percent of all women. The only damage to come of it seems to be the crippling sense of guilt and terror inculcated by well-meaning, pious folk who, forgetting their own sexual past, say that it makes you go crazy or blind or have your hair fall out.

There seem to be no scriptural grounds for condemning masturbation in itself. Like sex in general, if it is practiced to the exclusion of a loving relationship with other human beings, it is an infraction of the law of love and is its own punishment. On the other hand, if it's practiced as a temporary expedient until the right person comes along, it is harmless. It was not for his sexuality that Onan was punished, but for his stinginess and selfishness and general cussedness.

Genesis 38:1-10

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Old Age

OLD AGE IS NOT, as the saying goes, for sissies. There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it's like living in a house that's in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn't work right anymore. There are bats in the attic. Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there's a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather. The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on. The odd thing is that the person living in the house may feel, humanly speaking, much as always. The eighty-year-old body can be in precarious shape, yet the spirit within as full of beans as ever. If that leads senior citizens to think of all the things they'd still love to do but can't anymore, it only makes things worse. But it needn't work that way.

Second childhood commonly means something to steer clear of, but it can also mean something else. It can mean that if your spirit is still more or less intact, one of the benefits of being an old crock is that you can enjoy again something of what it's like being a young squirt.

Eight-year-olds, like eighty-year-olds, have lots of things they'd love to do but can't because they know they aren't up to them, so they learn to play instead. Eighty-year-olds might do well to take notice. They can play at being eighty-year-olds, for instance. Stiff knees and hearing aids, memory loss and poor eyesight are no fun, but there are those who marvelously survive them by somehow managing to see them as, among other things and in spite of all, a little funny.

Another thing is that, if part of the pleasure of being a child the first time round is that you don't have to prove yourself yet, part of the pleasure of being a child the second time round is that you don't have to prove yourself any longer. You can be who you are and say what you feel, and let the chips fall where they may.

Very young children and very old children also have in common the advantage of being able to sit on the sideline of things. While everybody else is in there jockeying for position and sweating it out, they can lean back, put their feet up, and like the octogenarian King Lear "pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies."

Very young children and very old children also seem to be in touch with something that the rest of the pack has lost track of. There is something bright and still about them at their best, like the sun before breakfast. Both the old and the young get scared sometimes about what lies ahead of them, and with good reason, but you can't help feeling that whatever inner goldenness and peace they're in touch with will see them through in the end.

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

Ocean

THEY SAY THAT whenever the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich 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

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

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 Word