Salvation

SALVATION IS AN EXPERIENCE first and a doctrine second.

Doing the work you're best at doing and like to do best, hearing great music, having great fun, seeing something very beautiful, weeping at somebody else's tragedy—all these experiences are related to the experience of salvation because in all of them two things happen: (1) you lose yourself, and (2) you find that you are more fully yourself than usual.

A closer analogy is the experience of love. When you love somebody, it is no longer yourself who is the center of your own universe. It is the one you love who is. You forget yourself. You deny yourself. You give of yourself, so that by all the rules of arithmetical logic there should be less of yourself than there was to start with. Only by a curious paradox there is more. You feel that at last you really are yourself.

The experience of salvation involves the same paradox. Jesus put it like this: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39).

You give up your old self-seeking self for somebody you love and thereby become yourself at last. You must die with Christ so that you can rise with him, Paul says. It is what baptism is all about.

You do not love God so that, tit for tat, he will then save you. To love God is to be saved. To love anybody is a significant step along the way.

You do not love God and live for him so you will go to heaven. Whichever side of the grave you happen to be talking about, to love God and live for him is heaven.

It is a gift, not an achievement. 

You can make yourself moral. You can make yourself religious. But you can't make yourself love.

"We love," John says, "because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).Who knows how the awareness of God's love first hits people. We all have our own tales to tell, including those of us who wouldn't believe in God if you paid us. Some moment happens in your life that you say yes to right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen. Laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. Waking up to the first snow. Being in bed with somebody you love.

Whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. If you throw your arms around such a moment and bless it, it may save your soul.

How about the person you know who as far as you can possibly tell has never had such a moment—one of those soreheads and slobs of the world, the ones the world has hopelessly crippled? Maybe for that person the moment that has to happen is you.

It is a process, not an event.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Salome

ONE OF THE LESS OFFENSIVE ACTS of Herod Antipas was to walk off with his brother's wife, Herodias—at least there may have been something like love in it—but it was against the law, and since John the Baptist was a stickler for legalities, he gave Herod a hard time over it. Needless to say, this didn't endear him to Herodias, who urged her husband to make short work of him. Herod said he'd be only too pleased to oblige her, but unfortunately John was a strong man with a strong following, and it might lead to unpleasantness.

Then one day he threw himself a birthday party, possibly because he couldn't locate anybody who felt like throwing it for him, and one of the guests was Herodias's daughter from her former marriage. Her name was Salome, and she was both Herod's step-daughter and his niece. As it happened, she was also a whiz at dancing. Sometime during the evening she ripped off a little number that so tickled Herod that, carried away by the general hilarity of the occasion as he was, he told her he'd give her anything she wanted up to and including half of his kingdom. Since she already had everything a girl could want and was apparently not eager for all the headaches that taking over half the kingdom would undoubtedly involve, she went out and told her mother, Herodias, to advise her what she ought to ask for.

It didn't take Herodias twenty seconds to tell her. "The head of John," she snapped out, so that's what Salome went back and told Herod, adding only that she would prefer to have it served on a platter. No sooner was it brought to her than she got rid of it like a hot potato by handing it over to her mother. It's not hard to see why.

Salome disappears from history at that point, and you can only hope that she took the platter with her to remind her that she should be careful where she danced that particular dance in the future, and that she should never ask her mother's advice again about anything, and that even when you cut a saint's head off, that doesn't mean you've heard the last of him by a long shot.

Mark 6:17-22

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Saint

IN HIS HOLY FLIRTATION WITH THE WORLD, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Many people think of saints as plaster saints, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as I know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, "I am foremost among sinners" ( l Timothy 1:15), and Jesus himself prayed God to forgive him his trespasses, and when the rich young man addressed him as "good Teacher," answered, "No one is good but God alone" (Mark 10:18).

In other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint Augustine prayed, "Give me chastity and continence, but not now," that Saint Francis started out as a high-living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simeon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pillar, you figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves.

The Holy Spirit has been called "the Lord, the giver of life" and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Sacrifice

TO SACRIFICE SOMETHING is to make it holy by giving it away for love.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words 

Sacrament

A SACRAMENT IS WHEN something holy happens. It is transparent time, time you can see through to something deep inside time.

Generally speaking, Protestants have two official sacraments (the Lord's Supper, Baptism) and Roman Catholics have these two plus five others (Confirmation, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Matrimony). In other words, at such milestone moments as seeing a baby baptized or being baptized yourself, confessing your sins, getting married, dying, you are apt to catch a glimpse of the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life.

Needless to say, church isn't the only place where the holy happens. Sacramental moments can occur at any moment, at any place, and to anybody. Watching something get born. Making love. A walk on the beach. Somebody coming to see you when you're sick. A meal with people you love. Looking into a stranger's eyes and finding out they are not a stranger's.

If we weren't blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words