Knowing ..

They knew him in the breaking of the bread
But we are strangers now, and do not stay
But leave him lying buried in the hay

The Road

The beginning of the road called Love is so attractive that many people choose it. Not everyone does, of course, some prefer the golden road of Greed, or the stark, twisting road of Power, and others are drawn to Knowledge, or Pleasure or even choose to go nowhere at all. But it starts in wide meadows of flowers and soft sunshine, and many think that they have arrived when they have barely passed the entry point, and sit around in easy groups making daisy chains. What becomes of them when the storms gather, and the cracking lightning sizzles across the open fields, I do not know, but perhaps they have to make a real choice for the first time in their lives.

But the meadows are only the beginning of the road. It continues. Fairly soon (though sooner for some than for others, but such is the nature of the road) another road branches off, broad and fair, There is a row of fine hotels there, which cost almost nothing to inhabit. Many turn aside there, for surely this is a pleasant place to go, and look what pleasant people are already there. And every hotel is called ‘Nice’. And those that turn off at this point keep straying further, for each hotel seems more agreeable than the one before, and they are so pleased with themselves for becoming ‘nice’ people, that they do not even notice that each hotel is made of thinner and thinner cardboard.

But the road called Love continues, and gradually the travellers notice that three possibilities have developed. On the right hand side the road surface goes harder and smoother. Eventually it veers off from the road called Love, into Moralism. Those who take that exit will find it leads them at last to a stern wilderness strewn with rocks. As fast as they try to build themselves shelters there from the rocks, they pull them off again in order to throw them at one another. On the other edge, the left side, the path gets softer and softer, until your feet start to sink into it like sand. Eventually this veers off into the road called Tolerance, and those who follow it end up in a slow quicksand. Because they are all sinking they cannot pull each other out.

Meanwhile, shed of these diversions, the road named Love continues. It is narrower now, and goes more steeply. Sometimes it is so steep that one has to use both hands and feet to climb it. Sometimes it is so narrow it feels like walking a tightrope. Many turn back or stop when they reach those places. Some even devote themselves to telling others not to go there, “it’s too dangerous”. They do not understand that, though there may be scrapes and bruises, no one can ever fall very far. There is always a safety net: the Everlasting Arms are stretched to catch any who lose their footing, and lift them up once again.

At last, and the road is a different length for every traveller, they reach the summit of the road. It is a stark, bare hill, surmounted with a cross. By this time the journey has changed the traveller, and they rarely hesitate. Willingly they climb up to the cross, willingly they embrace it. And the moment that should be death becomes the moment of transformation, for the road of Love is the road to LOVE, LOVE in all its fullness, and they know themselves truly to be the beloved of the Beloved.

My short rant

Some say that women have full equality, and are just “playing the gender card”. But women are not equal

n  While many more baby girls are killed by selective abortion and infanticide

n  While women can’t go out alone at night for fear of sexual assault

n  While the physical signs of aging are not treated with the same social respect in women as they are in men

n  While many kinds of religious leaders regard women as spiritually inferior

n  While a woman’s protests against injustice are dismissed as ‘emotionalism’ or ‘that time of the month’

n  While a woman’s experience in raising children is treated negatively in the workforce

n  While many parts of the world do not think that women need much education

A just society starts with each individual choosing to live justly and oppose injustice

The Warrior

How I longed for the freedom of Israel! I hated the Roman yoke we struggled under, and I was quite convinced that most of the problems I saw around me were the direct result of our nation being under Gentile oppression, and that if only we could be liberated from them, we would truly be the Israel of God that the prophets had described. My friends nick-named me the Zealot for my passionate views.

I was surprised when the Teacher called me to be one of his disciples, but I was entranced by the beauty of his teaching, and impressed by his miraculous powers. Surely he was the one sent by God to deliver us? So I followed, and I sat as his feet and I learned. He knew the scriptures better than any rabbi I had ever heard, but when he explained them, they came together in a different pattern. Truth itself was a different shape to what I had thought. The Kingdom of God, as he described it, was so different to the correct religious observances that the priests taught us. There was freedom there, as well as justice, and something else I couldn’t put a name to. Only later did I learn to call it love.

And the miracles? Truly he had the power of God! He could heal the sick, the blind and the deaf, calm a storm, feed a multitude from almost nothing, and even raise the dead. With such power, how could he not defeat the Romans and bring about a greater Israel than David or Solomon ever knew?

Even when they arrested him, I hoped this would be the moment when he turned the tables and showed his power. But it wasn’t like that. Convinced that something had gone horribly wrong, we fled the scene and cowered in hiding. Wasn’t he going to fight for us at all?

It was only days later that I began to understand. Yes, he was fighting for us in every moment of his suffering. Sometimes the warrior is not the one who beats everyone else up. Sometimes he is the one who gets beaten. It takes so much courage to suffer in silence for another’s sake. I thought the victorious fighter was the one with the shining armor and the blood-smeared sword. I was so wrong.

Our greatest need wasn’t to defeat Rome, our greatest enemies weren’t the Romans, but those who could devour Rome, Israel, and every human being that ever was or will be. Our greatest enemies were Sin, Death and Satan, and in that lonely torment on the cross he overcame them all. Calmly and deliberately, he walked into the ultimate darkness, and made a way. He was life, the very life of God himself, and that life was the light of men. It is easy to be brave when you operate in your strength, and the cheering crowd supports you. But to fight alone, invisibly, under insult and derision, and still stay faithful to the end? Such is my hero, my warrior, my Lord and my God.

Visiting Dachau

Dizzy with dreams we drop into a time

Where no dreams were: this stretch of bitter stone

Where the soulless aridity of scorn

Screams at the anguished, “Now you are alone!”

“What is a man?” The wind, so cold, so spare,

Pierces with mocking questions the great void

Between our sweet reality and theirs;

Thus are our bright illusions crushed, destroyed.

What separates us? Sixty seven years,

An educated nod to being kind,

A literature and a geography:

The comfortable counties of the mind.

But what unites us blows with bitter teeth

Across those counties. I and they are one

In all our fumbling, broken, human fear,

In what we dream, and what we leave undone.

As vulnerable as they, but not as brave,

I stand diminished, and I stand in tears,

Yearning their courage as I fear their pain,

Knowing that no attrition of the years

Must dim their story. At the chapel door

One crown of thorns says all that we can say:

The crucified stands with the least of these

And strips our false self-images away.

Dachau

Night. It is forever night here, even when the sun shines, stark and blazing, overhead. It is the night of those men who love darkness, rather than light, because their deeds are evil. Darkness cloaks the truths we cannot bear to face, re-clothing them in the illusion of glamour.  But how many of these men know that they do evil? Some know, and take pleasure in it, they are devils in human form and cruelty and destruction are their delight. The darkness is both within them and without, and the pain of others has become their meat and drink. But most of them are men, human beings with wives and children, who love and delight in the common grace notes of life: the warm hug, the cool drink, the feel-good trappings of ordinary success. How did they come to be such instruments of Hell?

Some know that they do evil, but have lost the ability to preserve their own souls. They may be valiant on the battlefield they were trained for, but in the moral arena they are arrant cowards. They go through the motions like men in a waking dream, automata who do just as they are instructed with set faces and empty eyes. Somewhere, locked deep away, their soul is screaming with the terror of damnation, but they dare not listen. It is easier to sell your human birthright for a bowl of soup, than to throw your soup back in your superiors’ faces. Such men end up on the other side of the wire. They are called prisoners. But then, in such a system, who is free? So they fumble their nervous addictions, and try to pretend all is well.

And many deny evil, refusing to name it for what it is. Years of enculturation have made their hearts as cold, and as hard, as the ice on the Bavarian mountains. It is just another, necessary job. It is the prisoners’ own fault if they are hurt, if they are disobedient or inadequate and cannot meet the demands placed upon them. Weak men deserve what they get, and the elimination of the weak is the price that must be paid for a ‘better’ world. In truth, they have no choice. Once you admit the truth of others’ pain you can no longer deny your own: you must acknowledge that your own soul was not created to thrive in this barren wasteland, where dog eats dog and the hard men laugh at the bones. It is so much easier to drift along with the system, submit to the propaganda and the lies, and dismiss love as the realm of women and fools. And if the wind blows bleak and terrible in your nightmares, well, you have learned to endure silently even in your sleep.

But no night is eternal, and when the light of heaven breaks upon your prisoners and slaves, the eyes of the world will turn to you and demand an accounting. And no one will consider the sheer banality of evil, or the simplicity of the descent to Avernus, an adequate excuse. You were a human being, you were supposed to see and know. 

Telling the Truth

Snow falls on Dachau, wintry year on year,

Covering, like the subtler snows of time,

The lineaments of naked truth and pain.

We speak the story.

The blur of story, and of memory bent,

Bending to edit, bending to rewrite, 

Will waver what is etched in blood and stone:

Theirs was the story.

We must remember, we must stand like trees,

And put our roots down in the bitter place,

To drink in all that is, and all that was:

Facing the story.

Every pretending opens up a gate

Through which a monstrous evil may walk forth,

To spew more filth on an uncaring world,

Numb to the story.

We must stand witness under time’s cruel lash:

The least we can do for the least of these,

Till memory becomes a sacrament,

Knowing the story.

Stark truth must stand, and we must speak its name,

With heavy lips but a courageous heart,

Speaking that our own souls have played their part –

Owning the story.

Let it not fade to make us comfortable,

Let there be justice done and justice said,

Until that hour when every wrong is dead:

This was the story.