A WHILE back, I decided that I needed to review my list of heroes and role models. It was a bit short. Granted, I’ve never had a formal list, but I think most of us have one in some form or another.

I also decided that it's okay to put people on your list for very specific things—that they do not have to be nearly perfect people, or seemingly beyond reproach. I think that as long as you can find some thing in them that you truly admire and would like to emulate, then you should throw them on your list. We seem to forget that this is really the way humanity works; that we are each a mix of honorable things and dishonorable things—of strengths and weaknesses. Too many of us find it impossible to admire anything about a person if we can find something about them we think is questionable. I tend to think we have this backwards. But I am beginning to digress.

I have three people I need to formally place onto my list; two I will briefly mention and one I will talk about a bit. Here are the new additions:

Jimmy Carter, for his humanitarian work, his unflinching honesty on a number of issues, and for realizing that being President of the United States does not make you more special than anybody else.

Johnny Cash, for living a life that was open for all to see, warts and all. Johnny helped the world see that truth and honesty is, in itself, an art. I was originally going to write my whole post around the idea of Mr. Cash, but I found this article instead. Check it out; it's a winner.

And the third person on the list, the person I’d like to talk about for a few moments, is Mattie Stepanek. If you want to know facts, figures and biographical information about Mattie, do a web search. I just want to talk a bit about what Mattie meant to me.

I had followed Mattie a bit on television and had read one of his books shortly before he passed away. I remember clearly the night that I saw his face on television and sat down to listen to him talk, only to learn that he had passed away. I walked off by myself and shed a few tears. It was a strange feeling for me, because I never had a little brother, but the night Mattie died, I felt as though I had just lost one.

The Mattie I was able to see on TV and glimpse through his poetry was a magical human being. In his thirteen years of life he became in many ways the person I have yet to become in forty. Of course Mattie could get away with a lot of things that adults cannot. Due to the nature of his disease, he had to live life a day at a time. He did not have to plan for a future. He didn’t have to seem sophisticated and he didn’t have to put on a pretense of being mature. He didn’t need to claim allegiance to many things, and he didn’t have to defend his beliefs. He didn’t have to worry about being reprimanded by others, be they secular or church folks. Other people didn’t find him threatening. He could afford to be naïve. He could say what he felt. And he felt beautiful things.

Mattie was young enough to be able to afford naiveté, innocence and fantastic hope untainted by the burdens and cynicism of adult life. This was part of his magic, and perhaps we can say he received this for free. But on the other hand, a little boy who had to live with the death of all his siblings, and with the looming specter of his own early death, certainly had plenty of reason to be jaded—yet he was not. And the force behind Mattie’s magic was that his youth was a channel for adult ideas and perceptions about the needs of humanity. This, perhaps, he did not get for free, but rather earned through his own trials and agonies in the flesh. Or, if it was given to him freely, then I consider it likely that it was given to him because he alone was worthy to receive it and able to carry it in grace.

As for me, I find myself asking why, if I see the unquestionable beauty of Mattie’s life, why can I not believe in that beauty enough to emulate it? I find the fact of my adulthood to be an insufficient answer. And so, I have placed a seed in the soil of my soul lately—something that Mattie would have likened, I think, to a few notes of a song in my heart. That seed is the idea of loving with the heart of a child, driven by concerns of the ages, without the dubitable concerns of adult sophistication. Perhaps in short form, it is to let God love through me as he would through a child, and for me to be courageous enough to let him do so.

If you get a chance, go to a bookstore and browse through the book Reflections of a Peacemaker: A Portrait Through Heartsongs. It is the last of Mattie’s books, put together by his mother after his death. As I skimmed through it the other night, it was all I could do to hide my growing tears from other patrons in the store while I read what others have said about Mattie. Jimmy Carter, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Jerry Lewis and others share some of their thoughts in this book. Jimmy Carter notes that in all his travels throughout the world, after meeting presidents and kings and queens and princes and princesses, he was most impressed by Mattie, over all of them. And an entertainment personality notes that she never believed in the idea of angels coming to earth, until she met Mattie.

AS A PARENT, I try to understand the mixture of feelings Jeni Stepanek must face in regard to Mattie. It becomes too convoluted in my mind, for Mattie’s special nature must have, I tend to think, made his passing both more and less tragic. She would be blameless, too, if in the end she would have preferred Mattie a little less special, and still alive with her. And let us not forget that she lost not only Mattie, but her other children as well—little ones whose names the world does not repeat in fame, but were just as special to her. I began all this talk of Mattie hoping that I might say something meaningful to Ms. Stepanek, but as I sit here and think of my own children, I know that my hope was vanity, and that I should have known so when I began. I think that in order to say something meaningful, I would have to be something I am not. I am no Abram. If Mattie had been mine, I might well think the world did not deserve him, and that I simply want him back.

But then again, perhaps Mattie himself would have taught me otherwise; taught me that he belonged to the world. I can see him thinking that of himself. Beautiful people tend to think that way. It is what makes them beautiful.

If you haven’t already done so, you should scroll down and read my previous posts that are part I and II of The Weak and the Strong.

TO INTERJECT a bit of levity into this discussion, I am thinking of a couple of religious jokes that go hand in hand with the topic. If you’ve ever spent time in certain Christian denominations, the jokes will bring a smile to your face. If you haven’t, then, well, they won’t make any sense at all.

Why don’t people from certain denominations ever make love standing up? They’re afraid somebody will see them, and think that they’re dancing.

If you belong to a certain denomination, and if you go fishing, why should you always bring along two friends from your congregation? Because if you only bring one, he’ll drink all of your beer.

Now, the cynical, critical or uneducated person would say that these jokes are about Christian hypocrisy. But this would, in almost all cases, be incorrect. These jokes are not about hypocrisy, but about the struggle for what some might call propriety. In this post, I refer to it as expediency.

Expediency is one of the things at the heart of what Paul says in Romans fourteen, and he mentions it explicitly in two places (chapters six and ten) of first Corinthians. In my previous post, I referred to these latter places by noting that Paul seems to accept a claim that was being made by at least one person in the Corinthian church: “All things are permissible.” Paul’s response, interestingly enough, was not to deny the claim, but to put it into perspective. It appears to me similar to the idea of a person saying, “I’m stronger than he is, and I can end this issue by wiping the floor with his face,” and a mediator saying, “You’re stronger than he is and you can end the issue by wiping the floor with his face… but is this the most responsible and mature way to handle it?” Paul is not denying, and seems to accept, that all things are permissible for those of faith, but qualifies the idea by noting that not all things are beneficial for the brotherhood. To whom does the burden fall to act responsibly, with the best interest of all parties at heart? To the one who has the ability to command the situation. In the case of our would-be bully, it is up to him to choose to resolve the issue with something more mutually beneficial than brute force.

It is the delicate dance of a person acting in his or her own faith while attempting not to damage the faith of others, that often leads to being accused of hypocrisy. Now, don’t get me wrong—I know that there is plenty of hypocrisy in the church. I’m just saying that most non-believers, who are not familiar with the issues at stake, mistakenly view behavior born of the weak/strong/expediency issue as being hypocrisy. There isn’t a lot we can do about this, but we should keep it in mind, because it can help us understand the viewpoints of those who aren’t enmeshed in the situation. But I digress.

At this point, it should go almost without saying that while Paul’s ideas are at one level of great comfort (a vindication, in fact) to those who believe in Christian liberty, the pill to swallow is that his ideas place a much larger portion of responsibility upon them. If your faith is strong (and, yes, therefore relatively “liberal”), then it is your responsibility to live your Christian life with a sense of responsibility to those who are not. This is not intended to sound condescending, nor should it be so. Nor is it a blanket sanctioning of the dummying-down of faith. To condescend and to dummy-down our faith are both, in my opinion, mistakes. But what is the person of stronger faith to do, especially given these last two points?

As best as I can tell, struggle. Struggle in prayer, struggle in humility, struggle in your own frustrations. Struggle to allow God to kill all the pride and arrogance in your life. Struggle to successfully teach what you can, struggle to successfully swallow what you have to. Struggle to never be condescending. Struggle to not let the message of Jesus be dummied-down. Struggle to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Struggle to remember that Jesus said much will be required from the one who is given much. Struggle to remember that even Jesus admitted to keeping his mouth shut, and not sharing what he knew others could not bear to hear. But most of all, struggle to love your Christian brethren with the love of God. If you are strong in faith, then your strength comes from your knowledge that it is only the love of God that matters. So struggle to act according to your faith, and live in the love of God above all things.

If you haven’t already read it, you should scroll down and look at my December 01 post, The Weak and the Strong.

NOW, NOTHING is ever as simple as we would like it to be, or when it is rather simple we seem to have to make it complicated. In either case, there is a verse in Romans fourteen that can cause a problem for us. A popular translation of the sixteenth verse goes like this: “Do not let what you consider good to be spoken of as evil.” Another translation takes it as, “So do not let your good be spoken of as evil.” And, a literal translation of the original Greek would go something like, “Not let be insulted then of you the good.”

What are we supposed to do with this? It appears first to place us into a quandary, because here in the middle of Paul talking about how we should keep things to ourselves, do everything to preserve peace amongst our brethren, not judge one another, and not cause one another to fail in the weaknesses of our faiths, there appears to be the admonition to stand up for a doctrinal point that we believe is right. Certainly, I have more than once met a person who will quote this verse as a justification for publicly (and sometimes heatedly) defending his or her views or attacking other views. And more problematic than that, you do not have to think about this very long before you figure out that if we persist in this vein, we will soon all be at each other’s throats.

But it seems to me that when taken in context, what Paul is saying is that we need to make sure the strength and goodness of our faith is not exercised carelessly, such that it brings damage to another good (yet weaker) faith, which would end up causing our good faith to be viewed and spoken of as a bad thing. In more simple terms, our good beliefs can have bad effects, and we must be careful not to let this happen. This admonition of Paul is the same admonition he is making over and over again in various ways throughout the chapter. There is no quandary. We have misused the sixteenth verse to promote our own views, rather than to censor our own views. It is another thing we have gotten backwards.

Reading through the fourteenth chapter, I am unable to escape the idea that if we all followed Paul’s advice given therein, then eventually we would all pretty much end up sitting around with nobody ever complaining about another person’s faith. We would all simply consider each other brothers and sisters in God, trusting in him to accept our individual faiths as they are. It also strikes me that, after some thought, one is inclined to make a statement that is far too outlandish for us to accept: That when it comes to living as a Christian who has a strong enough faith, we can do anything in faith that we care to do, and remain in sound relationship with God. I will admit that this is a pretty crazy conclusion, and honestly I don’t think I personally know anybody who would agree with it. But, come to think of it, it is a claim that (in the sixth and tenth chapters of First Corinthians) Paul seems to accept as true.

SO FAR, Romans fourteen is tons of fun if you happen to be a Christian who believes in liberty. But the fact of the matter is, for those who value liberty, this chapter has a down side that demands a great deal—too much for some to bear. Such will be the point of discussion in part three of The Weak and the Strong.

THE FIRST time I heard Pachelbel’s Canon I was not far into my undergraduate program in engineering. I was wandering about the residence hall one day and happened upon an older student named Roger, who was fiddling about in a rec room with an Apple II and a bunch of little boxes tied to it by umbilicals. I forget how many of the little boxes there were, but it was an impressive setup, arrayed out on a big table. He went to the keyboard and started a program, and the boxes were transformed into a classical music ensemble. I was as mesmerized as a geek could be. “What is that?” I asked.

“Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major,” he said nonchalantly, and began to talk about music, computers and software. I didn’t listen to him. I was in love with the music, and it had taken me somewhere else. For a few moments, it had lofted me out of that residence hall, off of that campus, to some other place.

The next time I heard the Canon I was driving at night, listening to public radio, and it was played by strings. If I’m not mistaken, it was originally written for strings, but no matter. I stopped my truck, and found myself sitting alone and silent, feeling as though I was slowly walking through a forest in long-ago Europe—serene, peaceful, with rays of sunlight piercing through the canopy to shine down in front of me, and guide my way.

Many years have gone by, and the other day at my daughter’s piano recital one of her friends played the Canon. I closed my eyes as I listened, and once again I felt as though I were somewhere else. Where, I cannot say. I have no idea. But, I was elsewhere. It occurred to me that I was experiencing a grand rhythm of life. For over three hundred years the Canon has been played over and over again, and to hear it is to travel through time, I realized, and perhaps this is the “elsewhere” that it takes me—not to a place but to a state of being—a state that so many have known through centuries, yet all share in some ethereal studio as though we all stand together in eternity. And coincident with this thought, it occurred to me that my life was not only a part of those hundreds of years, but was a miniature model of it, as the decades of my life came back to me, and melded into a few minutes. It was the passage of time, my childhood passing by me and into the childhood of my children and their friends, adults and children being born and dying as if to some rhythm for hundreds of years, united by mere lines and dots on paper, scribbled out once long ago in the genius of one man’s mind. It was the last thought that hit me hardest. I thought of the beauty in the mind of the composer, the ability to sense within himself a bit of art and place it onto paper, and the genius of it all. I kept my eyes closed, for I was in a crowd, and I wanted no one to notice the tears upon which my eyelids floated.

I KNOW the canonical form of music was not invented by a single person. For all I know Pachelbel’s Canon may have been worked out as much by science as by inspiration. And certainly even I can see that there has been far greater genius in music than his. I admit my understanding of things is only elementary, as a child with not much of an ear. But this is, perhaps, a blessing for me in that I do not have to worry about such things as I listen to the Canon performed. I only know that it takes me wherever it takes me, and that it is beautiful, and that all in all it is inspired of Genius—human or Otherwise. And that is what makes me weep—that Genius exists, and never dies.

But tonight’s post is not for Pachelbel. It is for those of whom we have never heard. I post tonight for all those who must have touched, at least briefly or almost, that same genius—but not quite. What a gloriously agonizing thing it must be for your soul to have a brush with genius; not one found within your own self, but as if Genius Itself walked gently by you in a forest of the night, the beauty of It a Whisper that teasingly touched the garments of your soul. You would be one of the many who have reached out in the darkness for a Genius they could smell, taste and maybe even touch—but never hold on to. My God. The beauty of such a thing. And the agony of longing it would leave behind.

I AM not learned in music. But I know enough to know that I am drawn to the fugue, and that it is therefore no coincidence that I love the Canon. Sometimes when I am alone, I feel as though I could become lost in them for ever. And so I suppose it comes as no surprise, either, that I have a wish I cannot make come true. How wondrous it would be, I have often thought, to write a composition analogous to these musical works of counterpoint, but in words rather than notes. And not just words, but expressions of human life in the light of God’s Love. It is this idea, too, that moistens my eyes; a work of melodiously and harmoniously repeating expressions of God’s love; all of the inversions and retrogrades weaving the totality of human life together into a single silver strand. The mystery of human pain and sorrow melded with ecstasy and joy. All the horror that we can invent, and all the sacrifice of love and salvation we offer one another to heal it. The question of evil’s existence, the duality of nature, and of God’s Love that overcomes evil and removes all duality. The innocence of children and the culpability of the old. The blind passion of life relished carelessly, the resentment of life fearfully wasted, and our contemptuous longing for death. Imagine each and every form of awe every human can experience, everything that goes beyond language and must be spoken in tears to make itself known. Imagine such a thing. Imagine it written in paragraphs and chapters that weave together for hundreds upon hundreds of pages and when they are done, they leave the reader stunned in silence, to weep in the knowledge that what the work has just said—is the glory that its words could not say. This is the wish I cannot make come true. It is an opus that can be written, this I know; but not penned by me. I have been touched enough to taste it, to smell it, and to feel it. I know it exists—somewhere—but it is not for me to author. For Genius has brushed by me in the night—but alas I could not cling to It. Its whisper of Love is all that I am to be allotted, and the softness of its voice is truly Glory to my soul—but, God help me, it is not enough.

I merely temper claviers, and dare to call my craft “writing.”

PAUL, IN the fourteenth chapter of Romans, addresses a problem that still exists, virtually unchanged, in Christian churches and society at large today: The faith of those who are “weak” versus the faith of those who are “strong.”

I encourage you to read it, since it only takes a couple of minutes and there is no substitute for reading something for yourself. But, the gist of it is that some Christians were doing things that other Christians believed to be wrong, and it was causing a big problem amongst the fellowship of believers. In a nutshell and to get my points, according to Paul the stronger faith is the one which recognizes a liberty in Christ that the comparatively weaker faith does not. I find this interesting for two main reasons.

One, I have spent a lot of years in churches where the people of “strong” faith are considered to be those who most steadfastly hold to, and prescribe to others, as many items of doctrine concerning proper Christian morality as possible. A man who has lived sixty years never flinching on the importance of keeping the rules becomes one worthy of special note for his devotion to his faith. He becomes an icon of strength. Nobody ever seems to speak much about the fact that, according to Paul, he is quite likely a person of weak faith.

I’m not trying in any way to insult such a person, and certainly a well developed discipline and a heartfelt devotion to doctrine, when present, are very honorable and admirable things. I’m just saying we have our definitions backwards, and if we ever come to see this, it may change our thinking in grand and glorious ways.

Two, and the part I was thinking of at the beginning of the post, is that Paul makes a statement that is obviously born of personal experience and observation: He tells the weak not to judge the strong, and he tells the strong not to hold the weak in contempt. It seems that those of weak faith, who placed importance on following all the rules just so, considered the strong to be in danger of Hell. And, it seems, the strong, who understood that rules were of little consequence, considered the weak to be, well, stupid. These two derogatory views are born of different understandings, but they equate to a common thing—both the weak and the strong considered the other to be less in the sight of God than they were. This reminds me a lot of our churches, politics, and whatever else we can think of today. Half of us think the other ones are riding a rocket sled on rails straight into Hell, the other half thinks the first half is just plain stupid, and each side thinks the other side has no clue at all about God.

Paul tells us to leave each other alone in our own faiths, to love one another, and not to injure each other’s faith. For, what the weak believes, he believes in faith, and what the strong believes, he believes in faith. It is the faith, not the particular belief, that matters.

I KNOW many Christians who loathe the kind of thinking that leads a person like me to type out that last sentence and mean it with complete conviction. According to them it invites all kinds of evil, like “situation ethics” and “moral relativity.”

Which are, as far as I can tell, completely biblical concepts.

IT IS absolutely essential that I am left free, by myself and by others, to be who God created me to be. Any opposition, either internal or external, to becoming my true self is an inhibition of all that God wills. To impede a person from being who they are in God is to stand against their salvation and against fundamental reality and therefore against Love and therefore against God. To attempt to take from another his or her true self is the greatest crime possible. Yet, we are continually trying to turn ourselves and others into something else entirely, and we have the prideful audacity to do this in the name of God. Such a thing can only be said to be inspired by all that opposes God; it is evil.