HE LIVED life surrounded by people who were in some way destitute; people whom life’s struggle had broken and beaten into shambles. They were the castaways of society who endured positions of shame and scorn, or held no particular position and so were nobodies. They might have been despised and shunned by society, or they might not have been thought of much at all. They were seen as forsaken by God for their wretchedness, and there was no hope in their religion—none at all—for them to ever set things right. They were the people whom the rest of society would just as soon have seen dead. In the eyes of the world, they were utterly, justifiably and deservedly condemned.

But he, in opposition to all of society’s judgments, loved them. He spoke to them. He reclined and ate with them. He touched them. He considered them to be his friends and family. He told them they were not lost, but found. He told them God loved and cared for them. He told them that God’s kingdom itself belonged to, of all people, them. And he meant it. In repayment for this radical vision of a deeply loving and profoundly compassionate God, the pious and the powerful tortured him until he died.

GOD CONSTANTLY reveals himself to us, and so once in a while, for a moment, we notice. Once in a while, we have unavoidable moments of insight that make it plain to us that during all the other moments we are living in darkness. Once in a while, we have moments when we see clearly that there is something else underlying our normal, ordinary living—something far more deep and profound. We become silent and reverent, and the normally incessant activity of our mind stops, for it knows it cannot comprehend what it has just experienced. It knows, beyond itself, that there is something else stirring around or over or beneath or behind or in front of it. It knows there is an other-ness to life.

We must treasure these moments above all others. We must teach ourselves to drink them into the deepest parts of our humanity, and we must do our best to make these moments last for ever within us. We must learn that this is the highest calling of memory—to carry through time the fleeting moments when we see life as it truly is, beyond the physical and mental. We must treasure them and allow them to be always with us, constantly leading us elsewhere, beyond the shadows of everyday life.

But we rarely, if ever, do this. We never notice, because we are always gazing elsewhere, captivated day after day by the things of what we call life, but that in truth are absolute nothings. This is the darkness of humanity—that it exists bathed in the light of the heavens, but doesn’t really care.

IF I SEE life only in black and white terms defined by my countless convictions I may accomplish a great number of things but they will not be creative, alive, and spontaneous with the spirit of God. I may accomplish a number of things that are morally praiseworthy and even grand in scale, but they will be lifeless and stale because they originated in the sterility of my own pride and prejudice.

On the other hand if I see life only in disorienting differential shades of gray then I may excel at debate and playing the Devil’s Advocate and I may impress all my friends, but between all my ranting of possibilities and theoreticals I will never utter a simple yes or no. I may even rightly believe I am extraordinarily intelligent and open-minded and a wonderful example of what a post-modern thinking person should be, but I will never accomplish anything worthwhile because I have no conviction to stir my resolve and plant my feet. The truth is that I am most likely a coward and I have no backbone and I am taking up oxygen better saved for somebody who will make a difference in the world.

I must have enough freedom of movement that the spirit may carry me aloft to wherever it pleases, and I must have enough conviction in my heart that I may stand and deliver what I was intended to be. It does me absolutely no good to make a rock of myself and spend my years buried immobile in the inertia of my prideful stubbornness, but neither does it do me any good to make of myself a piece of chaff that spends its days in aimless wandering until it decomposes.

I WAS thinking this week of the Terri Schiavo case, a case that bothered me for one simple reason. I mean no disrespect by the analogy, but if Ms. Schiavo had been a cat or a dog, somebody would have been legally charged with wrongdoing for allowing her to die of dehydration. In the simple case, it would have been neglect. In the case of doing it on purpose, it would have been abuse and cruelty. I mentioned this to somebody a few months ago, and they dismissively remarked, as though my point was not germane, “Well, if it had been a cat or dog, they just would have put it to sleep.” To which I said, exactly.

Apparently Ms. Schiavo could not be granted that favor of mercy. It would have been a crime to end her life mercifully and on purpose, and so it was decided to end her life slowly—in discomfort at least formidable enough that the medical staff provided morphine in response to her moans and groans. How one decides, exactly, that refusing to hydrate a person and predicting that she will die within two weeks as a result is not killing on purpose, I have no idea. But I have a very definite idea that of all conceivable courses of action in Ms. Schiavo's ordeal, the worst one of all was pursued.

When Ms. Schiavo was still alive, a politician in favor of keeping her alive addressed the fact that her medical condition was an issue of contention, but that when we cannot know, we must err on the side of life. I have to say, I love this statement. I cannot argue with it. And now I remember why Ms. Schiavo’s case reminds me of the death penalty issue.

I WANT to be honest about the death penalty, and I can only do so by trying to place myself in a horrible place. I have three children who are more precious to me than my own breath. If I were to catch a person in the act of trying to gravely harm one of them, and if it took death to stop that person, then either that person or myself, or both, would die. I have absolutely no compunction of heart about this. I am a peaceful person, but in an instant I would kill to save my kids. No questions. No arguments. Maybe that makes me morally bankrupt, but for my children I’m willing to go broke. As far as I’m concerned, this is already a signed contract between God and myself, with motions for any required mercy and understanding on God’s part already placed on file.

Furthermore, if a person committed such an act against one my kids, and I was not present or able to stop him or her, then I would desire, with an inferno of passion, to make him or her pay dearly. And if the crime involved violation, torture, imposition of fear and terror and the like, then… well, my feeling would be that that person had better learn to pray to God to help them, because if I had anything to say about it, nobody else would be given a chance to do so. I would have a desire to find the guilty one and make absolutely certain that with deafening screams of pain and guttural cries of agony, he or she would regret their day of birth. A part of me would want this, very badly. It is one of the sobering and frightening things about being human.

But I pray I would do better. I pray, and tend to believe, that there is one thing I would want much more. I have an unspeakably deep faith. I have profoundly felt the grace of God. And I pray that I would want my child’s tormentor to know the glory of that grace.

I would not be able to know, of course, if he or she would ever, in a hundred years, find this grace and experience its beauty within his or her soul. Perhaps not. But then again, perhaps so. Just maybe. And if so, then the two of us would know what true justice is: True regret, true sorrow, and true forgiveness in the light of God’s love. Regret, sorrow, and forgiveness; for both of us. It might not happen, but it might, just maybe—unless the guilty was first executed by the state. Then all my hope for the guilty, all my hope for me, and all my hope for anything good at all to come from an evil act which destroyed my life, would be gone.

This is why I do not support the death penalty. To associate it with justice is a falsehood. It removes the last hope of true justice: The action of God’s infinite grace bringing love, healing and salvation to the lives of the broken.

It might not happen. But it might. We cannot know.

And when we cannot know, we must err on the side of life.

DEFINITIVELY, to live in spiritual darkness means to live according to a falsehood that prevents us from seeing life in terms of its underlying reality. The falsehood that confounds us may be a grand and blatant lie so gargantuan in scope that even the most casual of observers can see we are absolutely demented, or it may be a small and subtle one so clever that all people, ourselves included, are completely convinced that we are true “people of God.” Darkness can take the person who hates the very idea of a Holy God, and the person who is absolutely convinced she knows and loves God, and keep them both far from God. It can create within us a hatred so strong that we would murder another man, or it can create within us the illusion that we love all men, when the truth in either case is that we simply don’t care about them one way or the other. It can bring us to a place where we cannot tolerate the idea of truth at all, or it can deliver us to a place where we love the truth so much that we are convinced there can no longer be falsehood in us—which is the biggest lie of all.

TO TELL my child “I believe in you” is not to make an intellectual statement about my acceptance of the reality of her existence (or the existence of her reality). To tell my child I believe in her is to say to her that with all of my heart, with all of my soul and strength, I know she is worthy of my love—and so much more than I have to give. It is to say that she is invaluable, irreplaceable, and beautiful beyond words. It is to say that I am and always will be faithful and devoted to her as a person, to the two of us as parent and child, and to our relationship. It is to say that I trust in her nature, in her abilities, and in her innate goodness. It is to say that I can see all of these things deep within myself whenever I think of her. It is to say that she is not merely a grand and glorious part of my life, but that she defines my life and helps to make it a life with meaning and purpose—a life worth living. This is what it means to believe in my daughter. And it is also, by the way, much of what it means to believe in God.

IF WE had to summarize the personal problems of man in the most concise terms using a concept easily understood, we could say man feels lonely, and he spends his days trying to feel lonely no more.

We feel lonely, and the reasons number enough to challenge being counted. We feel lonely because we are not married. We feel lonely because of our marriage. We feel lonely in our parents’ absence. We feel lonely in our parents’ presence. We feel lonely because we are not first in a particular person’s heart, or first in receiving the greatest energies of their passion. We feel lonely with no one to sleep beside us, and once we find somebody to do so, we are soon lonely with them. We feel lonely because we think we are smarter than everybody else, or because we feel we aren't as smart as anyone else. We feel lonely because we are not as pretty as anybody else, or because we are more pretty than everyone else. We each could write an entire book consisting of nothing but all the things that have made us feel lonely in life.

Such a book would be full of accusations against other people, and useful to convince ourselves we feel lonely for reasons other than the true one. To get closer to the true reason, we must realize we feel lonely because nobody truly knows us. We are acquainted with a great number of people, some of whom we call family, friends, or lovers, and not one of them has a reasonable understanding of who we really are. They do not know our greatest longings, our most dreaded fears, our deepest desires, nor the heat of our most fiery passions. More importantly, they do not know how we perceive the world, our relation to it, and our selves. They only know what we allow them to see, which is precious little, and how can anybody ever begin to truly like or love us, if they do not know who or what we are? What good is it to me if others love only the partial person, the pretend person, I have told them I am? How can I believe another person loves me, when all I know for sure is that the person they think they love, is not even me? Perhaps I am absolutely, completely lacking in unconditional love from any other soul. If so, it certainly is not entirely their fault. There is no way they can fully love me, because I have not shown them who I am.

I REALIZE that I need to change gears in these posts once in a while, mixing up the subject areas so as not to make a reader have to slog through too many of any one type in a row, so here is a bit of social commentary.

Now, I’m going to say something about some other people, and you may think I’m not being very nice. In fact, once you’ve read this, you may think, “Hey. You’re talking bad about what those people are saying, and you’re writing the same kind of stuff about them in this post. That makes you a hypocrite.” Just remember that if you think that, then my response is, “Fair enough. And that’s my point.”

I HEARD mention the other day, mention by somebody I reckon wouldn’t mind being put in the politically liberal bucket, about “hate radio” folks. I need to make a couple of asides here. First, when *I* talk about liberals and conservatives, I’m almost always talking specifically about divisions in Christianity (and, by the way, I’m more toward the liberal camp, in case my posts don’t make this clear enough). I am a little out of my element in this current post, because liberal versus conservative politics is not something I know much about. Second, along with this is the fact that I do not listen to the alleged “hate radio,” watch alleged “hate TV” or read alleged “hate books,” but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there are some of the “hate people” on each side of the political spectrum. Those are my disclaimers.

Now. I was intrigued enough about the “hate radio” comment that it stuck with me, and a couple of days ago I was browsing book shelves in a store and decided maybe I should skim through one of the “hate books” by one of the famous “hate authors.” And no, I’m not saying which author it was, nor which camp they sleep in. So I skimmed through the book, and a few thoughts popped into my mind. One thought was, “This is really boring.” The second thought was, “It really aggravates me that people get this stuff published, when I have yet to have my writing published.” The third thought was, “This is trash.” And the fourth thought was the basic outline of this post. These four thoughts occurred to me roughly simultaneously, then I put the book down with a bit of a scowl.

Which brings me to the title of this post, and the place where I try to sound smarter than I am. If you want to be impressive, go to your library and check out a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. If you really want to be impressive, then read all the way through the book, and place yourself on the very short list of people who have managed to do so. The relevant point of the book for this post is that in any highly developed system, there is at least one internal contradiction. If I may extrapolate this, the point is that no system, no way of thinking, no platform, no person is always one hundred per cent consistent; everything breaks down once in a while here and there. This isn’t just human nature; it is the way things work. It is even true for our system of mathematics. (Hofstadter won a Pulitzer, putting it a bit more eloquently than I.)

Next, find yourself a copy of the essay entitled, “Thinking as a Hobby” by William Golding. (William Golding is the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies, and the only reason this is important is that it makes for a great post title.) The idea behind this essay is that people’s thinking can be grouped into three levels. Level three is child-like thinking, based upon emotion. Golding says level three thinking isn’t really even thinking, but rather acting upon feeling. Level two thinkers, which covers most all of the rest of us, are people who have enough analytical ability to point out the contradictions in other people’s thinking. Level two thinkers are good at tearing things down, but not at building new things. They are good at pointing out problems, but they do not spend much time coming up with solutions. Level one thinkers, on the other hand, see problems, ask meaningful questions, and find answers. It has been many years since I read the essay, but as I recall Golding had met Albert Einstein and considered him a level one thinker. Other than that, he couldn’t think of any. Personally, I would add people like Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and the like to the list of level one thinkers. But anyway, what’s the point?

Well, it is this: Referencing Golding, the loud voices we hear in the political arena today are level two thinkers. They use their talents to incite the emotional fervor of level three thinkers, and awaken the innate ability of other level two thinkers who have no aspirations of ever ascending to level one thought. These media personalities point out contradictions as though they are the most clever people in the world to have unearthed startling revelations about the people and ideas on the “other side” of the political arena. But, and referencing Hofstadter, contradictions are always among us, everywhere. So, the mark of these people is that they possess the gift of articulating the blatantly obvious, in such a way as to whip people into a frenzy. It is as if they are yelling, “Oh my gaaawd! There’s air all around us! And we’re breathing it into our lungs all the time! The insanity of it all!” And before long they have a portion of the public on their side, screaming that we have got to stop all this air which is surrounding us. Well, actually we don’t have to stop it, we just need to make sure we elect somebody who actually cares about getting rid of air, and will do something about it, because it is obvious that the other side does not give a flip about the horror of air. Look at them! They’re air breathers, after all! Notice all of the exclamation points in this paragraph? I hardly ever use them, but I needed a bunch here, because everything in this realm of trash talk is an exclamation. It has to do with all the emotion involved.

This is why I believe it is trash writing; trash talk: It reveals no surprises. It offers nothing to better us in any way. It prays off of a public that thrives on angry rhetoric and ill will. It is insulting and demeaning. It promotes ignorance. It weaves truth and falsehood into an unintelligible tangle of knots. It borders, theologically, on evil.

SO HERE is my advice: Let’s ignore it. Let’s stop playing a game that says we’re informed and educated and sophisticated if we learn a hundred new reasons to hate somebody else. It’s pointless. We’re all contradictory. We’re all flawed. We’re all hypocrites. Let’s rise above it. Let’s listen to something else. Let’s watch something else. Let’s read something else. Let’s read something that feeds our souls. Let’s stop bickering, and start trying to fix things with a little love, understanding and compassion. This, it seems to me, would put us on the path of trying to find solutions rather than problems.

YESTERDAY I sat upon one of the swings on your school playground, waiting to pick you up at the end of the day. When you came out to meet me, you wanted to take time to show me around the playground. It was a nice few minutes that we spent together as we walked from one play apparatus to another. You explained each one with great earnestness—which ones you avoided, and which were your favorites. I could tell how happy you were in those few minutes—how relaxed you felt with only the two of us there, and how proud you were to show me a little world that is known to you far better than it is to me. You are only six years old, just starting the first grade, and you already have a world that is more yours than mine.

And that is really the fulcrum of it, I think, although you understand not why. For now this morning, as I have dropped you off for another day, I am keenly aware of the magic of childhood. I see today that the meaning of life rests hidden, comically and teasingly, behind the translucent tears and laughter of little children. If we adults can place other concerns of the morning aside for a few meditative minutes and take time to observe children on a school playground, we can begin to know this is true. And after the school bell rings and the children flow inside to their assigned seats behind closed doors, we can walk alone amidst the playground now empty and silent, where the joyful music of their voices lingers in the air to waft gently around us—like a field of butterflies returning from the summers of our youth.

On this playground today, the yellow hooded cup perched upon its steely stilts and accessible only by ladder will most likely be a recess playhouse for you—sitting shy and unaccompanied within it. I can imagine your tender presence there, as I can my own from long ago. On a playground thousands of miles away and many years ago, this cup would have been my Apollo capsule, a hundred thousand miles from earth and for some heroic reason piloted solo in my imagination; for I too was shy and often alone. And the sand around my feet that today finds its way unbidden and unwelcome atop my business shoes would have been the material of a hundred castles and caves sized just so for my little toys and larger dreams. The threats of litter I see within it today, waiting as if with sinister intent to slice or pierce my skin and infect me with microbes possibly lethal, would have been grand bonuses when I was a child; free little toys of metal and glass inexplicably left behind by adults who do not know their value. Thirty years ago this little playground of steel and sand would have been to me a place without boundary; a place of everywhere I could want to go, a place of being anybody I wanted to be. It would have been a virtual world, to become every dream a child could ever dream.

This playground is a place of life in all its simple perfection. It is a place of real life, vibrant and magical and safe; and in my heart today, in this moment, like the children I feel this life. I am moved near to tears because I can feel its essence lingering here from all the little hearts and minds departed only minutes ago. I feel as though I am walking in slow motion—floating almost—through a hope and innocence so tangible I can hold out my hands and feel them upon my skin. I was once made of them. But not so much anymore.

What has transpired through all the years to get me from a long-ago then of childhood to a present now of adulthood? Did the separation begin for me behind walls of brick like these in front of me today, in classrooms remembered only by scents of mint paste and janitor’s wax? Is the same sort of division growing now within you as you sit properly in your seat, raising your hand on cue, and learning the sanctioned way to place serifs upon your ABC’s?

My day is just beginning. I offer these questions to that which I know as God, and turn my thoughts to the office that awaits me.

THERE ARE PEOPLE who think they do not want God, but in reality what they do not want is a religion which attempts to sell them a lesser god. They do not want somebody trying to convince them there is only a single, inerrant, infallible, sacred method of talking about or thinking about or experiencing God. They do not want others to tell them God is understood only by a select group of people who huddle together under a specific name or title, nor that this group is the sole custodian of truth. The reason people do not want this, and the reason people reject it, is because they know it isn’t true. They know at least enough of God to know he is beyond man’s religion. They know that if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be much of a god at all.

ALL ROADS to God merge in the end, joining the singular path of true compassion. Any road that does not lead to this compassion does not lead to God. Until we come close enough to God that we feel compassion within us the way Jesus felt compassion within himself, we will never really understand the Jesus story. We will never really understand why Jesus lived the way he lived, and we will never really understand why he died the way he died. We will never have the focus that serves to keep our lives out of the darkness.

Until we come into meaningful contact with the compassion of Jesus, and welcome it for what it is, we will forever live our lives thinking in terms of what is wrong—what is ugly and contemptible and shameful and evil—with other people and with ourselves. We will never learn to live our lives thinking in terms of everything that is made right—beautiful and noble and honorable and good—in the purifying love of God.

TRUE COMPASSION requires and nurtures a depth within us, a profound unearthly depth that comes from God and God alone, but it also requires a simplicity that allows compassion alone to be enough for us, and that stops our intellect from questioning the decency of everyone and everything around us. Compassion is the determinant of all that is truly moral and selfless, but a prideful human morality and the selfishness of man strive every moment of every day to hold compassion in contempt—to belittle and control and limit it. Therefore, if we want to be compassionate people, if we want to have the heart of God, at some point in our lives we have to draw a line in the sand, surrender many things, make a stand, and say with all our resolve, this is where I will live and die. We have to make up our minds that our own lives do not matter at all, that we will be satisfied with a strange and foreign depth of being that most people will never comprehend, and that we will never care nor notice if everyone around us thinks we are foolish, stupid, idealistic or demented. We have to deeply believe, and will eventually come to know, that what the world and our friends call living is nothing of the sort, and that we live a different kind of life that is hidden from the world behind the shadows of everyday living.

AT ITS heart, Christianity is not a religion, but a path. It lies in the message and meaning of a single, solitary life. It has been said and written over and over again for two thousand years that to live a Christian life one must do only a single thing, which is to continually focus upon Jesus. The problem with this idea is that it often results in Jesus becoming something akin to a Hollywood celebrity or political candidate. Television and radio and churches all over the country are filled with voices repeating, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” in just the proper accent and with a culturally prescribed polish and inflection. Mention to an average man on the street that all he need do in life is to keep his eyes upon Jesus, and most likely he will begin to hear the echoes of television evangelists repeating the name of “JE-uh-zus” over and over again, usually followed by the promise that JE-uh-zus can save anybody—especially if he or she mails a check of gratitude on Monday morning. Jesus becomes so frequently seen in this light that, in practicality, his depth is entirely lost. In the worst of cases, our views of him become the object of clumsy and childish late night television parody—and sometimes rightfully so.

Of course Christians are usually sincere in our beliefs, but when we share in these superficial Jesus images, on Sunday mornings watching a charismatic and well dressed minister stand before us and talk of JE-uh-zus and perhaps the gospel of prosperity, what should we honestly expect? When we adorn our luxury cars with bumper stickers that in their own parody ask, “Got Jesus?” as if the message were something to be likened even humorously to a product that comes from cows, is it not understandable that profundity is not in the air?

Our shortcoming is that in our minds the only way we can stay focused upon Jesus is to safely and idealistically objectify him like we do everything else in our lives; as far as we are concerned, to focus means to objectify. We consider Jesus with the same part of our humanity that we reserve for other paramount things such as boyfriends and girlfriends, favorite sports teams, Americana, and patriotism. Fatuous love, baseball, apple pie, democracy, and Jesus. This may make us good American women and men, but it is not sufficient to approach a message regarding the fundamental reality of Life Itself. Reducing Christianity to such a level should embarrass us.

I MET HIM on a street in the bad part of town—a hard and wrinkled man old beyond his years, lame, drunk, dirty, foul smelling, and slowly dying from chronic disease. I never would have been there in the first place, but I was studying emergency medicine, and it was my assignment that day to ride along in an ambulance. En route to a hospital, I sat beside him while a paramedic drove and a medical technician sat forward, scribbling on a clipboard. In a flash, the man defeated his restraints and sat up, his head thrust toward me, his right fist clenched and raised in anger. He suddenly seemed huge and frightening. I froze, staring at his calloused and scabbed over knuckles, startled by the breadth of his fist, wondering what fraction of a second it would require to reach my face, and if disease transfer could take place in the instant of impact. I am not a fighter. I have no instinct for such things. My adrenaline told me to flee, but my mind knew there was nowhere to go.

Fortunately the man had first yelled at me, and the technician looked up from his clipboard, grabbed the man from behind, threw him back down to the gurney, chastised him firmly, and returned to his scribbling. The man and I stared at each other, both of us knowing we were completely out of our elements. As the ambulance rolled onward, the man I had moments ago considered so dangerous began to cry softly, without making a sound. I then knew that within him was a fear, an embarrassment, a shame, and a loneliness—so strong that I could feel them within myself. Unbidden, within my head I heard the words of Kahlil Gibran, “You are my likeness, for we are prisoners of two bodies formed of one clay,” and I knew their truth beyond all things in that moment. My own eyes moistened and welled up, and soon he held out a hand to me, and I took it, holding it in mine like an old friend’s. His face quivering, he looked into my eyes deeply and deliberately, as if searching for something.

Some months later I read Gandhi’s remark that, “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Years later, I still hope that if that man was looking for compassion, he found it in my tears. I hope he found his bread for the day. It must be a terrible thing to hunger so much for something, and to have to search for it in such loneliness.

I wonder from time to time if he is still alive or if he has since passed away, and if the latter, if he had anyone to hold his hand in his final hour. I truly hope he did. He was, as a child born of God, my brother. And for the few minutes we were given together, I loved him.

IF WE are not careful, then to think that there is a God, and to think we are created in his image, is to think that he is essentially like us. It is to believe that God thinks, at least approximately, as we think. It is to believe that God values, at least approximately, what we value. It is to think that God perceives, weighs and balances life as we do—that God reasons the same way we reason, about the same things we reason, and reaches the same conclusions we reach. It is to believe that God would run the world the way we would run the world, if only we had his power. It is to believe, in a sense, that God is a super-Man. It is to believe, conceptually, that it is the Human which is God. And this is the theological problem of Man: Not that he believes there is no God, but that he believes he is God.

ON THE OTHER hand, to say that we must work out our salvation in fear and trembling is a way of saying that we come into contact with God through our human frailty and inadequacy—that God is found in the midst of man’s ultimate poverty.

Until we understand this, we will always think that our pain and suffering, the wrongs we commit and regret, the wrongs we suffer and the sorrow we endure, our shameful weaknesses and embarrassing frailties, are the worst of all possible things. We will believe that the many ways we are able to mess up our lives beyond any hope of human love and respect are incompatible with anything called a Godly life. We will avoid, run from, hide, cover up, disguise, despise, abhor and judge as horrible all of these things as if they are the greatest of human evils.

But in fact, these are the very nature of human life, and are necessary to find a true life in God. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, are moral enough to always choose the best thing. We are too selfish to love as well we’d like to love. We are not wise enough to be perfect parents, children or partners. We are not strong enough to win every battle. We are not smart enough to solve every problem. We are too psychologically damaged to be completely competent. Oftentimes, we are simply at a complete loss as to how we have gotten into the state we are in. We haven’t the resources we need to make things better. We are suffering from privation. We are poor. In some ways, we are absolutely destitute. And so much the better that we are.

If we were good, and decent, and respectable and lovable all on our own, then we would need no god but ourselves. Then we would have absolutely nothing, and think we had everything. This, in truth, would be the worst of all possible things.

I AM IMAGINING that I am somewhere else; a place I have been before. I am in a particular neighborhood in a particular foreign country. I am walking in the dirt streets—streets where cars are driven only by outsiders. There are no houses here—not in the sense I usually think of houses. The local people live in tiny dirt-floored shacks built of wooden shipping pallets and cardboard boxes. Each spring some of the babies here will die—their little lungs filled with the dust which blows in the hot and stifling wind. It is a place of daily struggle, and even the dogs roaming the streets are famished, walking everywhere with their heads held low, and their tails between their legs.

Without me asking, a resident has taken a few precious coins and walked to a store to buy a bottle of soda so I do not have to drink his contaminated water. Food is served to me, and none of the locals eat of it until they know I have eaten first. I am momentarily confused when they tell me they will carry any leftover food to another neighborhood, and give it to “the poor.” With this I remind myself that all things are relative, and immediately I am ashamed and angry, for it is just like me to placate myself with logic in the face of others’ deaths. I try very hard for a few hours, but I cannot escape feeling opulent and fat and selfish. The people here never say that I am. They do not even seem to think I am. They are too gracious. They are too humble. Maybe if I was more like them, I would not begin to hate myself. But this is precisely the problem.

Little boys and girls, young children like my own, run up to me with bright eyes and happy smiles, seemingly unaware, thank God, that somewhere there might be a different kind of life—a life they will never taste. I am thinking, in sadness and a tinge of fear, that maybe my being here is enough to tell them so. I feel uneasy. Perhaps I am like the introduction of a virus to these people. I feel as though I am a contaminant. Perhaps I will infect and spoil them all.

In the middle of all this a man explains to me in whispered tones that most of the mothers in this neighborhood are young, and single, and prostitutes. I do not shudder. I do not feel repulsed. I do not even blink at his words. He walks away, and I go to stand on a corner, surveying the scene around me. I have a single thought, and I tell myself to never forget it. It is not a thought of disgust, nor judgment, nor piety. It is something else entirely. I think somberly and lucidly, and I know why Jesus didn’t judge the prostitutes.

IT IS DIFFICULT to explain, and in our normal, daily pride we have little understanding. We are too focused upon a naïve list of moral rights and wrongs to ever think of mitigating circumstance. We never think that perhaps there are things more important—things deeply profound which so greatly overshadow what we call wrong that the wrong, per se, ceases to matter. We have never seen life reduced to its most basic forms, nor gazed so intently at the lonely and the hurting and the struggling that their pain becomes our pain, to such a degree that we see ourselves in them and we see them in ourselves, and we ache with an ethereal pain which brings tears to our eyes and wrenches our bowels until we want nothing—absolutely nothing—but to love these people in their suffering. We do not know what it is like to look from such a vantage point and see that within them is a courage, an honesty, and an integrity we may never know. We do not think it is possible that they know something we do not. We cannot bear the idea that perhaps, just maybe, the unclean and the marginalized and the outcasts of this world are the blessed ones. We are incapable of considering that they may be closer to God than we are.

WHILE I’M on the topic of women in the news, I might as well mention Lynndie England. In case you’ve been out of touch for a while, Ms. England unwittingly became the poster child for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, and recently received a three year sentence for her part in the fiasco. (By the way, why do we always say somebody received a sentence? We make it sound like it’s a gift: “Here ya go, here’s your twenty to life in a tiny little cell.” “Oh, thank you so much. You shouldn’t have.”) Anyway, I’m not here to accuse or defend Ms. England; she is simply the icon I’m borrowing to lead us into the meat of the story; which is an odd mix of flesh both human and swine.

FIRST of all, let’s be honest. As for our prison camps, nobody knows exactly what happened there, by and upon whom, how and why, except for the people who were there. I’m having to go with what I’ve heard, which admittedly is probably not one hundred per cent accurate.

I want to mention that I listened to a question (one, single question) from the congressional inquiry into the scandal before I became frustrated and tuned to a different station. A congressman was asking an official “in the know” if placing a bag over the head of a prisoner… well, I had better be less ambiguous… over the cranium of a prisoner amounted to torture. I am continually awestruck at the ability of politicians to ask questions in just the right way to get the answer they want. Needless to say, the guy who is supposed to know something about this torture stuff swallowed hard and acquiesced, answering in the affirmative. Okay. So at this point, here’s my thought right before I change the station: Of all the prison camps in all the world in all the wars in all the centuries, if there is one where “torture” is defined by sitting all alone in relative quiet, or even just sort of wandering about, for three days with a bag over your skull, I'll take that one. Lock me up right there. I know I’m naïve (is that an oxymoron?), and perhaps the bag thing drives a person right off the deep end, but at the moment it seems for more preferable to me than daily beatings, broken bones, dislocated joints, busted jaws, extracted fingernails, and pulled teeth. But that’s just me. I’m pretty wimpy. I just want to say that I really think the respondent should have answered similarly, unless perhaps he was understandably deeply intimidated at the time of questioning. I’m just curious if that intimidation, that use of power and authority by those in control of the inquiry, counts as unfair treatment.

ON THE other hand, the scandal does bother me in a more important way. No, make that two more important ways. Number one: Scuttlebutt has it that “we” used tactics on “them” which involved forcing them to bad-mouth Muhammad and claim Jesus as savior, tearing up copies of the Qur'an, throwing a Qur'an on the floor and kicking it around, throwing Qur'ans into the buckets that were used as toilets, and force-feeding pork to the prisoners.

As I think about acts like these, I am dismayed first by our insensitivity to religious belief, and second by our apparent lack of concern for consequences incurred from the first. The latter is the practical aspect of the former’s theoreticals. I do not expect many people to understand that it is questionable to denigrate what a person of faith (any faith) considers sacred. I do not expect many people to understand the difference between a Muslim’s view of the Qur'an and a Christian’s view of the Bible. I do not even expect them to understand that it is questionable to lower a person’s own perception of how he might ultimately stand with his God. I guess what I’m saying is that I do not expect many people to understand what it means to be devoted to a faith, nor why faith should be treated with respect even if you disagree with that faith.

But, what I do expect people to understand, especially people from our great nation, is that it makes no sense to fight under your country’s flag while you are coincidentally violating the principles which make that country wonderfully worth defending. And furthermore, I expect the military (and whatever other agencies) to profoundly understand what does and what does not win hearts and minds. Apparently my expectations are a bit high, so here is a bit of a suggestion I will make and then let go: Taking those things which a people consider most sacred in all of creation and then defecating on those things is not an effective way to convince those people that you are the righteous and good one.

AND NOW for the second thing that bothers me. Back to Ms. England for a moment. In the trials of our military personnel we have seen the “following orders” defense, and England’s latest defense of an overly compliant individual who happened to be a love-struck young woman. I said I was not here to defend or accuse, and I need to stand by that, but I will say that while what England did was wrong and needs to be addressed, I would bet that under responsible guidance she would have acted responsibly. Or to put it another way, if she had been under direct leadership which was moral, she would have acted morally. And this brings me to the threshold of my second point, but first let me be a coward and place some sandbags around myself and dress up in a bit of body armor…

I have friends who oppose the war, friends who support the war, and friends who fight in it. I believe all of them are correct in their convictions, because they are all humble and true in their own beliefs. War is a product of evil, and needs to be avoided. On the other hand, sometimes it needs to be fought. (Did this one need to be fought? I don’t know. My personal belief is that it is not my place to know.) And so just because war is caused by evil, it does not mean that everybody who takes part in it is evil. The best we can do, whether we are opponents or proponents of war, is do our best to live our lives morally and courageously—to live our lives with profound compassion. Certainly to humbly stand against war is to be compassionate. But just as certainly, it is possible to find one’s self in the middle of war, humbly believe you are supposed to be there, and find a hundred ways each day to be compassionate—ways we will never find anywhere else but in war. This would be my prayer if I were called to serve; that I would serve dutifully and courageously, while remaining moral in the midst of Hell—compassionate in a sea of hatred.

And so this, then, is the second and more important point: At a certain level, all the legal trials are smoke and mirrors, obscuring the real point, the real issue, the real problem. We forget that the darkest evil of war is that we allow it to warp and suspend our sense of morality. After all, we come to think, what is a bit of theft in the midst of absolute destruction? What is it for me to take a single life in cold blood, if I have already taken a thousand via sanctioned directive? What is it to torture, if I have already murdered? What is it to rape, if I have already tortured? What is it to consider as nothing what a people call holy, when they have killed, murdered, tortured and raped my comrades? What is a little more darkness, after all, in a land that is already dimmed by the smoke from the conflagrations of Hell?

This is what war attempts to do to us, and what we must not allow it to do. Goodness is about our resolve to remain loving, merciful and compassionate in a place where there is little or no love, mercy or compassion. It is about, as Rumi would say, standing in a place, and being the soul of that place—even if it is the very gate of Hell. I can imagine Jesus at that gate, standing there as the soul of souls, loving every one of us—Muslim, Christian, Jew—as human beings in the middle of a war he finds entirely regrettable, and altogether unsurprising.

BEING A FAN of ocean life and preferring to take my kids to movies that don't feature people killing one another, I took the family to see March of the Penguins. This post isn't a movie review, so I'll cut to the chase.

I like to consider myself a bit of a forward thinker, but I have to admit I didn't see this one coming: According to the national news media (which, in case you haven't noticed, shouldn't always be considered the definitive source on... well, anything), there are folks in one or more conservative Christian circles who are lauding this movie as an example of "family values." I just didn't see this coming. The gist of their view, as I understand it, is that the movie demonstrates monogamy and devoted childcare as being part of the natural world. Well, setting aside the heavy anthropomorphism in the film, I still don't get it. I mean, I sort of get it, but not really. Penguins change mates every year, arriving at the breeding ground on the lookout for the best looking penguin they can find. If they successfully hook up and make a new little baby penguin, then as soon as the little tike is able to walk off the ice and take its first swim, its parents are done being mommy, daddy, wife and husband. Seems to me that if you only have to stay absolutely committed to each other and to the little one for a few months of any given year to have family values, then the majority of our culture's population isn't doing too poorly after all.

Please understand I'm not denying the formidable strength of natural commitment and the beautiful dedication to life the penguins demonstrate in this film. I like penguins, and I too left the theater being impressed and uplifted. Neither am I holding in contempt the conservative folks who have read important values into the film. Certainly conservative Christianity has good ideas to offer to the world. Some of my best friends and beloved family members are quite conservative, and in many ways I can't hold a candle to them. But rather, here's my point: You're bright people. You have a good message rooted in a lot of precedence and history. Why risk it all and put it into question by giving the world the impression you have to rely upon tenuous examples which are so vulnerable to perceived self-contradiction? You deserve to honor yourself with deeper and less debatable demonstrations of your faith.

NOW, LIFE is full of little funny things; strange things. I was inspired enough by my friend Kirk's blog that I decided to sit down and create my own blog, which obviously I have done. I even had an idea for my first post. Imagine my surprise when, five minutes after setting up my blog, I checked in on Kirk's blog and he had added a new post; on the subject I had planned. I swear there are angels in creation whose assigned duty is to create little coincidences like this. But at any rate, the thing is there are a couple of odd parallels between March of the Penguins and this other subject.

First of all, penguins spend part of their lives on ice. Which brings us to the other subject: The story of Ashley Smith. I suggest you now go read Kirk's blog, which is in the links list here in my blog, because he has a great post about this story and it echoes my thoughts extremely well. The only problem I have with his post is that his words are better than the ones I had planned, which is one of the things I don't like about Kirk; he often puts words together better than I do. But that's a personal problem of mine. So go ahead, read his post. I'll wait here...

Pretty good, huh? Now, it should be obvious that ice isn't the only thing in common between the penguins and Ms. Smith. I don't know if these are the same people or not, but again, somebody decided to jump right in and praise Ashley, raising her up as a would-be hero exemplifying their values—without looking very far ahead. Now they have placed themselves once again into the familiar spot of having to think something like this: “We said she… was… a hero, but… now we see… she’s… a… drug user… and… what does that… do to… our message?” This one I did see coming. Don't ask me how, because I don't know. I just saw it coming. Call it a gift.

I have three points about Ms. Smith's story. Number one, everything Kirk said. Number two, personally I like to think that her story goes something like this: A young widowed woman with a drug problem can't get things sorted out and loses custody of her child. She struggles for a while, going through drug programs and mental counseling with little success, eventually seeks God, and prays the prayer of all prayers, "God help me. Whatever it takes, help me." And the rest is history. Well, at least news. I like this version. I can’t honestly say it’s exactly the way things went down in Ms. Smith’s case, but I think it’s probably pretty close. It’s the way God works. When you’ve finally been broken enough that you will get out of the way and let God step in, God steps in.

And point number three: I can't help but wonder if Jesus would bring up a different set of questions. I tend to think Jesus would find nothing too terribly offensive in Ms. Smith's life—troubling and in need of fixing yes, but offensive no—and would be deeply moved by her faith and human struggle. But I also tend to think Jesus would characteristically turn the tables on all the rest of us. As I look at Ms. Smith’s picture on the news sites, I hear nagging questions at the back of my skull. Would any of us have talked much at all about Ashley, if she weren't quite so attractive? Is it likely that if she were just plain ugly, she would have quickly ceased to be, or would have never been, an item of discussion? Perhaps instead she would have been only—and quite briefly—a "lucky survivor," or "victim number five."

NOW THAT I think about it, maybe the conservative media was correct in the first place. Maybe we are all a bit more like penguins than we care to admit.