Repentance

TO REPENT IS TO COME TO YOUR SENSES. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, "I'm sorry," than to the future and saying, "Wow!"

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Remember

WHEN YOU REMEMBER ME, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I'm feeling most ghostlike, it's your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I'm feeling sad, it's my consolation. When I'm feeling happy, it's part of why I feel that way.

If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who I am will be gone.

"Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.

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

Religious Books

THERE ARE POETRY BOOKS and poetic books—the first a book with poems in it, the second a book that may or may not have poems in it, but that is in some sense a poem itself.

In much the same way there are religion books and religious books. A religion book is a book with religion in it in the everyday sense of religious ideas, symbols, attitudes, and—if it takes the form of fiction—with characters and settings that have overtly religious associations and implications. There are good religion books like The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, and there are miserable ones like most of what is called "Christian" fiction.

A religious book may not have any religion as such in it at all, but to read it is in some measure to experience firsthand what a religion book can only tell about. A religion book is a canvas. A religious book is a transparency. With a religious book it is less what we see in it than what we see through it that matters. John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany would be an example. Huckleberry Finn would be another.

Writers of religious books tend to achieve most when they are least conscious of doing so. The attempt to be religious is as doomed as the attempt to be poetic. Thus in the writing, as in the reading, a religious book is an act of grace—no less rare, no less precious, no less improbable.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Religion

THE WORD religion points to that area of human experience where one way or another we come upon Mystery as a summons to pilgrimage; where we sense beyond and beneath the realities of every day a Reality no less real because it can only be hinted at in myths and rituals; where we glimpse a destination that we can never fully know until we reach it.

Since the Reality that religion claims to deal with is beyond space and time, we cannot use normal space-and-time language (i.e. nouns and verbs) to describe it directly. We must fall back on the language of metaphor and resign ourselves to describing it at best indirectly.

It is obvious that this is what we are doing when we say Jesus is the "Son of God," or the Lord is our "shepherd," or the Kingdom of God is "within you." It is not so obvious that this is what we are doing—but we are doing it no less—when we say, "God exists." This does not mean that God "exists" literally as you and I do—that is, exists now and not then, here and not there, and stands out of (ex + sistere) some prior reality. It is at best a crude metaphor.

To say that God "does not exist" may be a better metaphor to suggest the nature of God's reality. But since it also is bound to be taken literally, it is better not to say it.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Rebekah

REBEKAH'S MARRIAGE TO ISAAC was a family arrangement rather than a love match, and all the love she had in her to give she seems to have lavished on her son Jacob.

When she overheard old Isaac say that he was going to give Jacob's twin brother, Esau, the paternal blessing and make him his heir, she was almost beside herself. She ran and told Jacob what was up and said he'd better get to Isaac before Esau did or Esau would get the blessing and everything that went with it and Jacob wouldn't get a blessed thing. Jacob objected that, blind as Isaac was, he would still be able to tell the brothers apart because Esau was a hairy man whereas he, Jacob, had all he could do just to raise a toothbrush mustache. Just one touch, Jacob said, and the old duffer would know that something fishy was going on.

Rebekah thought fast and, after dressing Jacob up in one of Esau's best suits, produced some bearskin gloves for him to put on his hands and an extra pelt to wrap around his neck. The trick worked beautifully. Isaac thought it was Esau kneeling before him, and Jacob carried the day.

When the cat was finally out of the bag, Esau first burst into tears and then announced that, by the time he got through with Jacob, not even his mother would recognize him. But again Rebekah thought fast. She told Jacob what his brother had in mind and persuaded him to get out of town while he could still walk. Jacob took the advice, and the bitter irony of it is that if Rebekah ever saw the apple of her eye again, it is at least not so recorded.

It is also not recorded when or where or in what state of mind Rebekah finally died, but there is a note to the effect that when the time came, they buried the lonely old woman in a cave at Machpelah. Years later Jacob was buried there too, and if she had any way of knowing about it, one can imagine her happy at last to be lying there side by side with the beloved boy for whose sake she had betrayed not only Isaac, her husband, and Esau, her son, but God himself, in whose name the fateful blessing had been given.

Genesis 24-27

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words