Stairway To Heaven

Whoever corrects a scoffer gets himself abuse, and he who reproves a wicked man incurs injury. -- Proverbs 9:7

If we find ourselves wondering occasionally why our country is in such a sad state, the above verse highlights at least one of our problems.  The next verse in Proverbs says that reproof results in hatred in the heart of the scoffer but love in the heart of one who is wise.  It is hardly surprising then that those who seek to follow delusions are angered when reality intrudes.  All of us make mistakes, either through willfulness, arrogance, or ignorance.  Even the wise may succumb to hubris.  The difference is that when a wise person is checked by reality and suffers the consequences of his error, he does not attempt to reject the truth or alter it; rather he alters himself and adapts to it.  He learns and grows and matures. 

The fool and the scoffer are those who believe that truth is nothing more or less than what they believe to be true.  If reality does not conform to the scoffer’s state of mind he disdains and despises it.  A fool’s delusions may be mild or severe, trivial or dangerous to those around him.  Christians tend to think of atheism as a foolish view, yet there are atheists who are wise with regard to some things -- Penn Jillette comes to mind, and many people who consider themselves religious that are quite unwise in areas of their lives. 

It is no mere accident of geography that people in urban areas tend to be more left-leaning and government-oriented than those who live in more rural areas.  The City testifies of the power of the imagination, of man’s unique ability to mold and control his environment.  Every city is a child of Babel, a new Babylon.  Every once in a while the natural world shakes itself and the illusion is shattered for a time by flood or fire, earthquake, hurricane, or tornado.  Still the mirage remains convincing.  We rebuild with dressed stones amid the bricks broken to ruin.  Human technology enables us to do that which my great-grandfather could not have dreamed.  Surely all things can be conquered.

The tricky part of it is that so long as our work is guided by truth what we build has a life to it.  That which deviates too much, which builds not upon reality but against it, dies.  Fools promise foolish things, tickle the ears, and build to destruction.  They kill and devastate that which possessed veracity and authenticity because it is a rebuke to their misconceptions.  After they have choked the life out of it, they point to the remains and deny that it ever lived.  How then, they ask, could we have killed it?

Consensus does not make it so.  Everybody who worked on the Tower of Babel said the same thing, but as it got higher and higher, they agreed less and less.  If the founders are scoffers and fools, why are they surprised to find the slothful and malcontents numbered among them?  Conflict, confusion, and chaos wait patiently at the top of Escher’s steps.  There is no getting past them, and it is a very long, rough tumble back to the bottom.  Utopia’s first name is Babel.

 

The Way of the Intercepting Mouth

A fool's lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating. – Proverbs 18:6

A fool’s lips walk in to a bar.  The bartender says, “We don’t offer lip service here.”

The only time I have been in any real trouble with the law was a result of growing up in the wrong part of the country among polite and civil people at the wrong time in the previous century.  I was forced to settle a few disagreements with physical force.   I avoided the use of violence on numerous occasions because I made it clear that I could and would accommodate anyone who wanted to take our disagreement up a notch.  By the end of my freshman year in high school, I had come to the eye-opening and occasionally eye-blacking realization that most people are not looking for an opponent but a victim.    

People who do not understand the role and purpose of physical force do not understand human nature.  My parents – my mother in particular – whipped me whenever it seemed necessary.  Being a sensible child, in my own way, I recall only a couple of time where our discussions became really serious.  Once she used a solid, seasoned oak 1-by-4 – and that was not the modern ”1x4” that’s really a quarter-inch short each way.  Nor was it smooth and well-planed.  Nor was it light, high-velocity pine.  It was heavy, hard, and rough.  And frankly I do not recall her being too particular in her aim, but I am pretty sure that was the last time she had to beat me. 

Mom was not above offering lessons to others.  My dad, being the youngest of a large family, had some nephews and nieces that were his age and older.   One such nephew lived up around the bend about a quarter-mile and his kids were about the same age as my older siblings.  They all walked to the one-room school together.  One day, after some school function, which the parents attended, Dad and Mom, the nephew and his wife, and all the kids were walking back across the field.  The nephew’s wife, J., said something derogatory about one of my sisters or my brother.  Mom said nothing, but Dad observed her lips pressed into a familiar thin, straight line across her face.  Probably because he was a wise and forward-thinking husband and/or didn’t want to eat burnt biscuits that night, Dad said to Mom, “You don’t have to take that.”  It was all the encouragement Mom needed as she wheeled on J. and laid her out flat.  A fool’s lips … 

In this day and age, Mom would have been hauled off to jail.  It would probably have been worse because I’m sorely afraid Mom would have resisted arrest.  “I think we’re gonna need a bigger Taser.”

The absence of consequences leads to a lack of order and discipline.  This is true for us personally – what would you eat if you had a pill that really kept you from gaining weight? – for the education system, for the economic and financial system, for government – for any human endeavor.  Distant and vague consequences never change behavior.  A wise person knows how to bring the future consequences into the present for himself or herself.  Being able to imagine the long-term destruction wrought by a vice or a bad habit can drag the future into the present and strengthen us in our struggle against it. 

I was a young fool, but I was blessed to be in a culture that was reluctant to suffer such.  I have no idea what will become of those who desperately needed their butts whipped as children or their noses bloodied as adolescents.  But there is another proverb that says, The way of the transgressor is hard.  We were a far more civilized nation when we all knew that a fool's lip could become a fat lip.  

(Note:  I think I owe this meditation to something Sultan Knish said, but I cannot find it, and it may have been someone else.)

Higher Laws

The foundation of the Christian faith is that the basis of human life is redemptive, and on that basis, God performs His miracles. – Oswald Chambers from The Shadow of an Agony

For those who are perishing, the message of the cross is foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is God’s power. – 1 Corinthians 1:18

I wonder if, at the time Chambers wrote those words somewhere around a hundred years ago, they met with more agreement than they would today. I suspect a great many people view that statement – provided they don’t pass right over it – as quaint and naïve, if not ridiculous. The question is raised: What is the basis of human life? Dawkins says it is the replication of selfish genes, which washes out free will and makes a mockery – not just of religion, as is intended, but of all human culture including science itself. If I’m going to be a puppet, I think it is better to be a marionette guided by a possibly loving higher being than to be a sock puppet of mindless, irrational genetic forces. Putting aside the Dawkins crowd, we might see a thinker with more respect for humanity give a different answer – something along the lines of “self-realization”, and it is self-realization that Chambers goes on to speak about in that passage.

Self-realization can mean different things to different people, but it is a convenient term for a pragmatic approach to life. We don’t know how we got here or why, but, hey, let’s make the most of it. The idea of self-realization can run from the truly spiritual to the criminally hedonistic. It echoes in innocuous and even positive phrases from “be all you can be” or “the pursuit of happiness” to more selfish ones like “get it while you can”, “you’ve got please yourself”, or that notorious anthem of the ‘60’s “if it feels good, do it”. In its highest form, self-realization is a pursuit of authenticity and contentment within the accepted moral and rational bounds of society. It makes for a good person, someone we’d like to have for a neighbor. Often the better class of practitioners will accept, either openly or tacitly, the tenets of Christianity or some related moral system. In fact, I have found that many people who think of themselves as Christians are practicing self-realization within the framework of the Ten Commandments or perhaps the Sermon on the Mount. They go to church. They give money to charity. They do good works, and so on.

No matter how good we are, if we never turn aside and take the time to understand that the central point of Christianity is the Cross and with it the redemption of man by God, we are bound to be disturbed by all that assails us in life. But if we will walk up that hill and stand at the foot of the Cross, gazing up at Christ as He hangs suspended between heaven and earth, between God and man, we can begin to understand what God thinks of redemption. At that point, there can be no question about the fact of His desire to rescue us and embrace us, even if the why of it remains elusive.

Paul says it himself – it is foolishness to the perishing. A vast universe, eons of time, billons of years of life and death and mud and blood, millions of species passing into oblivion, and it is all to bring us to an insignificant little knoll beside a dusty road on the edge of a squalid town in a backwater country. It is laughable. Yet the alternative is not just that Jesus died for nothing, but that man lives, in anything more than a purely physical way, for nothing. Either we are sons of God being redeemed from enslavement to the material and temporal, or we are self-deluded animals driven by forces we cannot control even if we should understand them.

…[B]ecause God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom… -- those who accept the redemptive basis of human life find that there has been an amazing pattern running through their lives. Like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, what made no sense suddenly fits in the picture. There was an accident that seemed to be a mere inconvenience but revealed a truth about myself. There was a chance meeting with an old friend that reinforced a good decision. There was a disaster that opened many hearts to God’s comforting presence. Some will question: Does God allow death and destruction merely to get people’s attention? Why doesn’t He just speak directly to us or give us a sign instead? Not attention, redemption.

This is one of my common themes, and though I am far too repetitive, it is one of those things I have to work through for some reason. I watch myself – and others sometimes – but mainly me – and when I can step back a little, I see God is answering my questions so loudly and clearly that I have trouble hearing it.

But I don’t want to get so far down my typical track that I forget the end of the sentence: …and on that basis, God performs His miracles. The miraculous serves the redemptive. I believe in miracles, but I do not believe that God ever violates the laws of the cosmos. It is that the law of redemption is higher than any other law, even in this world. Turning stones into bread at the devil’s behest is a conjurer’s trick, and Satan’s hand must be in it. But feeding a multitude by multiplying bread is the hand of God operating through the law of redemption.

”It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. …”

Batteries Not Included

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like 10 virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the groom. Five of them were foolish and five were sensible. When the foolish ones took their lamps, they didn’t take oil with them. But the sensible ones took oil in their flasks with their lamps. Since the groom was delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night [at the midnight hour -- traditional] there was a shout: ‘Here’s the groom! Come out to meet him!’ – Matthew 25:1-6

Oil, we were always reminded, is a type of the Holy Spirit. But the story isn’t just about oil, it is about fire and light. As long as the sun is up and everything is evident and exposed to the natural eye, oil, to the mind of the foolish, is superfluous.

I used to read this story and picture in my mind the coal oil lamps that all of us country folks had sitting around for those quite frequent times when the power failed. They are antiques now, but we had to use them any time there was lightning, high winds, heavy rain, or, sometimes, for no apparent reason. Electricity was considerably less reliable in our part of the country fifty years ago. Our lamps, of course, had a big reservoir from which the wick drew kerosene, as well as a tall, very fragile chimney that bellied around the flame to both protect and feed it. The lamps of the virgins were not like that. They might have been terra cotta vessels about two inches deep and four inches across – the width of a man’s palm. Those lamps had one larger center opening an inch or so across in which to pour the oil, with a smaller opening at the nose of the lamp for the wick. Some were even less elaborate – simply an open, clamshell-shaped dish with a narrow, elevated slot to hold the wick. These were not lamps with a long burning time. The first five virgins were foolish, not because they had only a little oil, but because they had none. Without batteries even a Surefire M6 isn’t illuminating.

We should do our work in the day, preparing for the coming, inevitable night. Part of that preparation is to provision ourselves with light for those long dark hours when the sun is as far away as it can get, when life reaches the nadir, when natural perception faces the blackness of incomprehension.

My daughter gave birth to a healthy, normal baby -- on Lincoln’s birthday. Given her age and the problems she has had over the past few years – including foolishly totaling a perfectly good car shortly after she became pregnant, this is miraculous. On the other hand, there is my niece. She is younger than my daughter and in better health. She had two previous pregnancies with no problems at all. She has a stable life, a loving husband, and no bad habits of which I am aware. My niece is as beautiful, intelligent, kind, and loving a person as you are ever likely to meet. Yet, the same day that my new grandson arrived, my niece learned that the child she is carrying will likely not be born alive, and, if by some wondrous chance he is, he would require immediate surgery. The prospects are not good. For her, it is midnight. I believe, though, my niece and her husband are numbered among the wise. They can trim their lamps and go on knowing the light they have will not fail even in the darkness of sorrow, grief, loss, and disappointment.

As long as the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, I’m OK. The mind of modern man tends to think his judgment is less fallible than that of his predecessors, perhaps less fallible even than the relatively primitive mind of Christ. We are more evolved and enlightened. We are better able to judge right and wrong. Some of us think ourselves capable of judging God and calling His actions into question. Call me a stop sign, but that is a bad road, if a sure one, to Midnight itself.

The odd thing is that the midnight hour is supposed to be a joyous occasion, a celebration, not because it is dark, but because of our being reunited with the Groom. If we are ready, if we have prepared ourselves, built up our reserve ahead of the times of darkness, we will welcome Him and come to know Him in a greater and more intimate way. Otherwise, we will flee in shame. I cannot speak where others are concerned, but, for myself, I know that God always gives me grace to prepare. I may allow myself to be distracted, to become foolish in my thinking, to be turned aside to other things and neglect the filling of my flask, but I can never say that I had no opportunity to be ready. In a moment’s time really, I can have all the oil I need to feed the flame of truth all through the darkest of nights.

Get ready.