Righteousness

"YOU HAVEN'T GOT IT RIGHT!" says the exasperated piano teacher. Junior is holding his hands the way he's been told. His fingering is unexceptionable. He has memorized the piece perfectly. He has hit all the proper notes with deadly accuracy. But his heart's not in it, only his fingers. What he's playing is a sort of music, but nothing that will start voices singing or feet tapping. He has succeeded in boring everybody to death, including himself.

Jesus said to his disciples, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:20). The scribes and Pharisees were playing it by the book. They didn't slip up on a single do or don't. But they were getting it all wrong.

Righteousness is getting it all right. If you play it the way it's supposed to be played, there shouldn't be a still foot in the house.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Riches

THE TROUBLE WITH BEING RICH is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all of the practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in your life.

In desperation the rich are continually tempted to believe that they can solve these problems too with their checkbooks, which is presumably what led Jesus to remark one day that for a rich man to get to heaven is about as easy as for a Mercedes to get through a revolving door.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Reverand

REVEREND IS A TITLE OF RESPECT to be used only in third person, if then. Speak about the Reverend Susan Smith if you have to, but never go up to her and say, "That's telling them, Reverend!" any more than you'd go up to a senator and say, "How are things in Washington, Honorable?"

Reverend means "to be revered." Ministers are not to be revered for who they are in themselves, but for who it is they represent, just as the Spanish ambassador is seated at the hostess's right not because of his beaux yeux, but because he represents the king.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words 

Revelation

THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT WAYS of describing how you came to know something. One way is to say you found it out. The other way is to say it occurred to you. Reason is involved in both. To say you found out that so-and-so was the best friend you had suggests that you reasoned your way to such a conclusion. To say it occurred to you suggests that, although the conclusion was not reached by reason, it was not incompatible with it.

It occurred to you as distinct from you found out suggests knowledge given as distinct from knowledge earned. It suggests inner meaning as distinct from outer semblance. For example, I found out that Francis of Assisi gave all his money to the poor, called the sun his brother, and preached sermons to birds. But it occurred to me that he must be a saint. Or an idiot.

Revelation means knowledge as grace. Nobody has ever managed to find out much if anything about God.

Classic Buddhism is reasonable, found out, and doesn't claim to be otherwise. In the Four Noble Truths, Buddha puts it in a nutshell. Like the family doctor, he diagnoses our ailment and prescribes a cure. He says (1) that the name of our ailment is life, which causes great pain because we know that it always falls to pieces in the end. He says (2) that if we didn't like life so much, we wouldn't mind having it fall to pieces in the end. Therefore, he says, (3) the way to get cured of the ailment is to stop clinging to life as though it were a prize instead of a fatal disease. Finally (4) he outlines eight steps for getting out of life and into Nirvana.

Classic Christianity, on the other hand, is not primarily reasonable or something we have found out or worked out for ourselves. Christ came. He healed people. He forgave people their sins and said to love everybody including your enemy. He died in a peculiarly unpleasant way, forgiving his executioners. Christianity was born when it occurred to some of the ones who had known him that his kind of life was the only kind worth living, and that in some invisible way Christ was still around to help them live it.

Nobody figured Christianity out. It happened. That is what it means to call it a revealed religion—not incompatible with reason maybe, if you give it some thought, but not arrived at primarily by reason either.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Retirement

SOMEWHERE AROUND the age of sixty-five, many people decide it's time to stop working and start just enjoying life. The trouble, of course, is that they're apt to discover that with nothing much to do except play golf, travel, catch up on their reading, watch TV, and so on, life isn't all that enjoyable. They need something to give themselves to the way they once gave themselves to their jobs. The question is, give themselves to what? Maybe they could do worse than give themselves to the world that needs them as much as they need the world.

This may involve things like volunteer work at the hospital or delivering meals on wheels or heading the library-fund drive, but the place where giving yourself to the world starts is simply paying attention to the world—to the people you've been saying hello to for years without really knowing them, to the elementary-school kids hanging upside down on the jungle gym, to the woman taxi driver with the face of a Boston bull and no teeth to speak of who waits for fares at the bus stop, to the old vets marching down Main Street on Memorial Day.

If retirees just learn to keep their eyes open, the chances are they will find themselves more involved, fulfilled, challenged, and nourished than all the years they spent with their noses to the grindstone. And enjoying themselves more too.

-Originally published in Beyond Words