October 29, 2008 by djackson.

Well, the day after tomorrow is Halloween. At least, it isn’t if you go to a church that doesn’t have it. A lot of churches choose instead to have a “Harvest Festival” or, as I sometimes call them, an “It Isn’t Halloween Really It Isn’t Festival.” I admit I don’t get that whole thing. I grew up before Mike Warnke wrote The Satan Seller and scared the helloween out of us all. Heck, our church youth group held haunted houses right there in the Sunday school classrooms and I don’t think any of us grew up to join covens or sacrifice billy goats. (Given what some of us did grow up to do, I’m not sure whether dancing a few jigs around a bonfire might not have been an improvement.)

Anyway, one way or another this time of year ends up focusing on fear so I thought I’d recommend a few of my favorite scary books. Now, these aren’t your basic Stephen King or Chuck Palahniuk stuff with crazed serial killers and zombies and curses and Methodists and one thing and another. Not that I’m a snob about that sort of thing. I like what Bertie Wooster calls “a good goose-flesher.” In fact, if you want something in that vein, I can suggest Dean Koontz’ Brother Odd. It’s the only thing of his I’ve ever read, though I’d like to check out The Coldest Evening of the Year because the title has an allusion to one of my favorite Robert Frost poems and because it’s about a dog. I picked up Brother Odd for the same kind of reason - Koontz sets it in a monastery and I’m sort of a frustrated Carmelite at heart. Anyway, the book is both scary and thoughtful, along with being reasonably well-written.

But that isn’t the kind of book I want to talk about. I want to talk about books that really frighten me because they deal with death and demons and Hell in theological terms. That is a far more realistic approach since the three topics named are exclusively theological. (Well, okay, doctors and other folks get to talk about death but I’ve noticed no one calls in his proctologist to do a funeral.) My point is that people say stories frighten them by being “realistic,” and discussing something “realistically” means discussing it in its proper setting. That makes a theological treatment of damnation much more unsettling than putting it in the context of, say, a creepy abandoned mansion. When I’m done with an Edgar Allen Poe I tend to think, “Thank God that could never really happen.” When I finish one of the works I’m about to name, I pray, “God help me! That could really happen - and to me!”

So what are these petrifying pot-boilers? I will discuss three titles: Katzuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Williams’ thriller, Descent into Hell. In my opinion, all three provide an extended exegesis of C. S. Lewis’ line in The Screwtape Letters (another terrifying read), where he has the senior demon explain to his protege that “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” (And that reminds me! While I’m at it I want to plug a scary movie but I can’t because 1) it is actually a TV show and 2) I’m not sure which one. Last Sunday while channel-strafing I wound up on Chiller and caught part of en episode of “Tales from the Crypt” or “Tales from the Crypt” or something. Anyway, a gnarl of demons sit around a coffee shop late at night as one of them expounds his method of temptation in terms that are very Screwtape indeed. If anyone knows the show I’m talking about and can enlighten me, please do. I’d like to watch the whole thing.) Well, I seem to have drifted. Back to my original thread.

The Remains of the Day: Nobody dies in Ishiguro’s novel. Nothing more scary than an empty gas tank on a country road happens in the whole thing, although one chicken nearly gets squashed by a car. But the book has its own real-life zombie, because narrator is one of the living dead. Stevens the butler reveals himself as a man who has spent his life mindlessly stoking the Molech of the British empire and class structure with any fuel that came to hand - his time, his talents, his father, even the woman he loves. At the end, the god himself dies without forking over any of the rewards he’d promised to his faithful acolytes. The book might well be called The Cremains of the Day, because the hero ends up with the charred fragments of what might have been. I read this book once a year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I do it as a pleasure (the writing is eloquent) and a discipline, an annual check of my life’s compass to make sure the sunset toward which I sail is not a mushroom cloud.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich: Only one guy dies in this novella, and his demise doesn’t scare anybody but himself. Him, however, it terrifies. Tolstoy’s story amounts to an extended treatment of John Bunyan’s advice, “If a man would live well, let him fetch his last day to him, and make it always his company-keeper.” Ivan Ilyich, a prosperous and respected judge, moves through life from strengh to strength until a lingering terminal illness forces him to confront his existence from the perspective of non-existence. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the tale is the way that Ivan, like Dives in Jesus’ parable, looks on from Hell as his family and friends follow the same route to damnation and finds himself powerless to warn them. I also read this one annually, between Christmas and New Year’s.

Descent Into Hell: Charles Williams works on the premise that this “real” world merely blankets ultimate spiritual reality and that thus we make no trivial decisions. His protagonist, a military historian named Lawrence Wentworth. Again, there’s not much overt horror in the story. The action is set in a brand-new subdivision built over an ancient battlefield, but we get only one ghost and he’s reasonably harmless. He isn’t even the restless spirit of a long-dead warrior seeking to set right his final act of treachery in the Wars of the Roses or something. He’s just a hapless grunt from one of the construction crews that built the new houses. Wentworth suffers from a recurring nightmare but the whole action involves an image of himself gradually sliding down a rope. There’s a doppelganger, but she ends up being more helpful than otherwise. And that’s just the point: an erudite and respected scholar constructs his own Tophet from these humble raw materials. Worst of all, in the end Hell is not burping pits of brimstone and souls roasting on spits but a sort of eternal senility. It could be subtitled “How to Build Your Own Gehenna Using Items You Probably Have in Your House.”) I don’t read this book once a year. I’m not made out of steel.

So there you have it. Wanna have a scary Halloween? Ditch the jack-o-lantern and paper skeletons. Put on your most comfy jammies, brew up some hot chocolate, sit in a squashy recliner with a good reading lamp and open one of these volumes. If they don’t frighten you, well then, you really should be frightened.

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October 19, 2008 by djackson.

Call it “The Parable of the Corrupt CEO.” Jesus tells it in Matthew 18.21-35.

Peter asked Jesus, “You’re big on this forgiveness business. I’m down with that. Still, be reasonable; there’s gotta be a limit. I need some way to keep score later on when I become pope. Whaddya say to seven times - good workable number with an intriguing theological background.” Jesus looked at him, secretly wondering if it wouldn’t, after all, have been easier to try trained rhesus monkeys.

“Let me tell you a story.”

Imagine they caught the guy responsible for the global financial crisis: one guy - Herb Schmaltzer, CEO of Heavens to Murgatroid National Trust. I mean, he’d lit the fuse on the whole thing! Turns out for years he’d been plundering a veritable cosmos of corporations, snorting up money like Robert Downey, Jr. in a cocaine-cutting factory. The President of the United States called him in. “What’s up with that?” the chief exec demanded.

“Sorry,” Herb responded.

“Sorry? Do you realize what you’ve done? It’s gonna run me a trillion just to get America out of this thing, and even at that it’ll probably only slow the hemorrhage. And it isn’t just us! You’ve tanked Europe and Asia too. Iceland’s talking about putting the whole country on Ebay.”

“Well, Iceland,” Herb shrugged, “I mean, c’mon.”

“Yeah, but what about Germany?” the President shot back. “Anyway, look - you’ve gotta fix this. Where’s the money? You’ll have to give it back.”

“Uh . . . I spent it.”

“Spent it?! How did you manage to spend that much money? We’re talking about enough money to bankrupt the entire global economy. Oprah doesn’t even have that much money. The net prayer-cloth income of all American televangelists combined wouldn’t put a dent in it. Spent it? How did you spend it?”

“Fritos. I really like Fritos. Oh, and Ding Dongs.”

The President continued to eye him.

“Well, there were a few million-dollar-a-pop staff retreats to a spa in the Caymans. Do you know what they charge for a deep tissue shiatsu? I tell you it’s a scandal. Now THAT’S what Congress should be investigating.”

“Look, I’m really, really sorry,” Herb continued as he unwrapped a cigar. He caught the President’s glance. “Oh. Want one? Cuban. Take two. Take sixteen or so.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” thundered the President. “Well, you’re about to get it. You’re going to be the poster boy for this whole fiasco, pal. We’re going to do an old-style Stalinist show-trial. I’m airing it live on all the cable news networks. I’m putting Judge Judy on the bench and taking away her hormone medication and I’m appointing Bill O’Reilly as prosecuting attorney! We’re reopening Alcatraz just for you and importing Asian hissing cockroaches to breed in your cell! Prisoners at Guantanamo will spend their daily prayer times just thanking Allah they aren’t you! We’re going to sentence you to one enema per dollar stolen, sentences to run consecutively, and the evicted homeowners are going to be taking turns holding the hose!”

For the first time, Herb showed signs of nervousness. He put the lit end of his Havana into his mouth. He wiped his forehead with his two thousand dollar tie. “No! No!” he blurted. “I can fix this, I swear.”

“What did you have in mind?” the President asked dryly.

“Well, I thought maybe I’d pay it back. Do you take Visa?” The President’s jaw dropped. “Oh, yeah. Okay, bad idea. How about this? I figure I’ll make it back on the stock market. If you could front me a couple of million, maybe twenty, I could put it into junk bonds and . . . .” His words died away as he looked at the President. “Mmm, no good either, huh? Well, how about this . . . .”

Suddenly the President began to laugh. He tried to fight it at first, but the corner of his mouth twitched, then he choked on a chortle, then it burst out in deep rolling belly guffaws. Tears burst from his eyes. He slapped his hands on his knees and drummed his feet on the floor. “Poor man,” thought Herb. “I’ve driven him over the edge. I wonder if I could lift his watch and wallet before he recovers? I could get a few bucks for that bling.”

Suddenly the president sat upright and stared at Herb, the gleam still in his eye. “I know what I’m going to do!” he bellowed. Herb braced for the blow. “I’m going to pardon you!” Herb’s eyes saucered. “That’s right,” the president continued, “a full and free presidential pardon. I’m a lame-duck anyway so I’ve got nothing to lose. Who knows, maybe this will become my legacy! That’s it, Herb - a full pardon, no hard feelings and we call the whole thing square.” He went off again into gales of laughter. In a minute he managed to stagger over to the intercom and summon an assistant. Helpless with giggles, the president pointed to Herb and gasped out, “This guy - pardon - paperwork - right away.” When the assistant figured out what was going on, he began to laugh, too. He ran from the Oval Office holding his pocket handkerchief before his streaming eyes. In fifteen minutes Herb left the White House, the ink of the President’s signature still wet on the dotted line of his pardon. Behind him the entire building seemed to resonate in maniacal laughter.

Herb signalled for his limo and sank into the leather seat. He barked a direction to his driver, then repeated it, grumbling about how these people should be required to take a basic English proficiency exam before entering the country illegally. The stretch prowled the Beltway before nosing down the narrow streets of a wasteland of tenements. Herb consulted his Blackberry for the address and barked it to the chauffeur. In a minute he saw a small man in ragged clothes whipping along the sidewalk on a bicycle. The man peddled furiously, a messenger bag flung from his shoulder. Herb instructed the driver to pull to the curb, then jerked his door open so that the bike and its rider slammed into it. The small man tumbled over the handlebars and thudded in a heap on the sidewalk. Before he could recover, Herb was on him.

“Hey, Enrico. Where you going in such a hurry?”

“Oh, Señor Schmaltz,” the man stuttered. “I . . . I’m working. As a messenger!” He flailed for the bag and thrust it up as evidence. “I’m making plenty of money. I’ll be caught up on the rent in no time.”

“‘No time,’ Enrico,” Schmaltz spat, “is exactly what you got. I’ve waited long enough. You’re two months behind on the rent and I can’t put up with deadbeats. So unless you got two grand in that bag, we’re done negotiating.” Enrico begged for Schmaltz to have patience but the landlord remained implacable. He jerked the little messenger to his feet and dragged him into a nearby pawn shop where he hocked the bike and pocketed the cash. Then he frog-marched Enrico down to INS where he ratted him out as an illegal alien along with his wife and six children, accepting a sawbuck per head under the table from a pal who was trying to meet quota.

Later that night he sat in his club regailing the boys with the story over a round of highballs. “Not bad!” he crowed. “A five-spot for the bike and a Jackson each for the undocumenteds - cleared two yards and had that pigstye rented again before nightfall, first and last cash-in-advance.” Somehow, it seemed to him the rest of the guys didn’t laugh as loud as they should have.

Turns out they’d had enough. Even a Wall Street CEO has a gag reflex if you get a dig enough finger far enough down his throat. They put in a call to the President (most of them had him on speed dial) and filled him in on the details. He summoned Herb back for a conference. Herb’s breezy manner evaporated when he saw a bunch of media trucks out front. He felt even worse when he noticed that the guy who opened the door for him was Enrico.

“I pardoned you for a debt that would have staggered Tammy Fay Bakker on a spending spree, and you couldn’t offer rent control to a hard-working immigrant?” he hollered as the cameras rolled. “Tell you what we’re gonna do, Herb. We’re flying you all over the country to a series of homeowners association meetings and you’re gonna explain to every one of ‘em how you intend to pay back their mortgages.”

Herb gulped. “But what if they don’t like my plan?”

The President smiled. “then maybe they’ll have a few plans of their own.”

“Now,” Jesus concluded as Peter muttered something to Andrew about being sorry he’d asked. “You’re Herb. Whose your Enrico?”

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October 14, 2008 by djackson.

Dear Readers,

After a couple of weeks’ downtime, the wizards who run this site have unclogged my blog. I don’t know what happened but the whole thing suddenly exploded into code. In my more paranoid and egotistical moments I am prone to concoct a conspiracy theory about the nefarious forces of liberalism, conformity, and short sentences hacking my site to deprive the world of my insights. In my saner moods, I figure it was just some vagary of the cyber-world. Anyway, it’s nice to be back! I’ve had an entry on the drawing board all this time and have posted it below. My thanks to all of you (I count three) who noticed my absence and said nice things about wanting me back.

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October 14, 2008 by djackson.

I’ve been too long in the wind
Too long in the rain
Taking any comfort that I can
Looking back and longing for the
freedom from my chains.

- Nana Mouskouri

I was pondering those lyrics the other night as my wife and I walked home from a faculty recital in the Performing Arts Center at Texas A&M University of Corpus Christi. The PAC is a beautiful facility with crystalline acoustics, tasteful decor, and really comfy seats. Both of the musicians who performed that particular evening teach on the music faculty for the university and ply their art with virtuoso talent. The audience mostly consisted of people like Becky, dedicated music students fully capable of appreciating what they heard. And this trifecta of venue, talent, and discernment all combined to form a setting for some really ugly music.

Understand, it was meant to be ugly. They had chosen selections of what the cognoscenti designate as “modern classical.” Learned professionals define this school in various ways but I’m a layman writing to laypersons so let me put it on the non-technical level: If it sounds like a biker and his old lady are having sex on the sounding board of a Steinway baby grand, you’re probably dealing with modernism. If you get the general impression that someone tossed a sackfull of flutes off the top story of a skyscraper then recorded the sound as they smacked the sidewalk, it’s probably modern classical. Every now and then something like a melody struggled to the surface, but no sooner had I begun to relax into its beauty than the writhing tentacles of modernity boiled up, siezed the sound in their slimy clutches and dragged it drowning back below the boiling brine of chaos.

Now, I’m supposed to be a professional intellectual these days but I confess that, in the words of that great theologian David Allen Coe, “my long hair doesn’t cover up my red neck.” Good art means you can tell whether it’s a cow or not. Good music means something, well, musical. On the walk home, I asked Becky why modern works sound like this. I speculated as to whether some manmade disaster, like Nagasaki or carbon monoxide or homes built too near to power lines, had rendered composers incapable of writing coherent tunes. She smiled and, with the patience born of a quarter-century of being married to the last living Neanderthal, explained. Mind you, Becky isn’t wild about modern classical either, but she has studied the movement. Apparently it all has to do with freedom. See, Aristotle felt that music shaped the soul and thus should follow certain rules and conventions. Modernists debunked the stodgy old Greek and concluded that we are now free to explore dissonance and disharmony.

I’m with Aristotle on this one - a fact that I’m sure would have brought him great comfort. In my experience, the soul resembles tofu. It is wonderfully adaptable, tending to take on the feel and flavor of whatever it encounters. And I for one don’t want my soul smelling or tasting like what I heard the other evening. (Confession: I listen to Buck Owens and Hank Williams, so my soul may look like a cowboy hat and smell like Roy Rogers’ boots. Snobbery in one direction is just hypocrisy in another.) I side with that Falstaffian philosopher Ignatius J. Reilly, who sought for theology and geometry in all things.

By the way, it isn’t just me and Aristotle against the world. We have science in our corner. Dr. Marina de Tommaso and a team of colleagues in Italy recently asked volunteers to select twenty beautiful pictures and twenty ugly ones, then zapped the volunteers with laser beams while they looked at each image in succession. Upshot: subjects felt less pain while gazing on something sublime than while looking at something repulsive. Van Gogh - less pain; Picasso - more. Upshot: ugly art may be art indeed, but it hurts.

But my real point here is about freedom, not music. After all, there’s freedom and then there’s freedom. Or perhaps more accurately, there’s freedom and there’s the free-for-all. Advocates of the free-for-all don’t seem to understand that you can’t have it both ways. G. K. Chesterton says it so well in a chapter from Orthodoxy entitled “The Suicide of Thought”: “Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.” In the same passage Chesterton argues that the “freedom” to draw a giraffe with a short neck really amounts to not being free to draw a giraffe. “Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

C. S. Lewis, one of God’s Great Curmudgeons, self-styled “dinosaur” and a tireless fighter against modernism in all things, wonderfully skewers this sort of “freedom” in his early book The Pilgrim’s Regress. His hero, John, visits the city of “Eschropolis” (that’s roughly “Poopville” for those of us not versed in classical Greek). In a salon that is something between a laboratory and a bathroom the ingenue encounters various versions of pornography and Dadaism. In the end we find out they’re all working for Mr. Mammon, “the man behind the gun,” and that their seeming rebellion merely mirrors the market.

Lewis confessed to his pal Arthur Greeves that his attitude toward modernism teetered on the brink of priggishness, and he later apologized in print for his sixty-grit massage of the movement. Well, I’ll issue a double-ditto of Clive’s mea culpa but I can’t really claim to be repentant.

Now, all of this comes to a theological point for me. Atheism, along with a good deal of the theology I hear these days, harps a lot on “freedom.” Without God, we’re free to do and believe anything we like. With a sufficiently domesticated and gerrymandered God, we have almost as much freedom, along with the additional freedom to claim divine sanction for the things we don’t like. But I much prefer the freedom that comes from a theology and spirituality crafted and pursued according to the rules, to quote Luther, of Scripture and evident reason. Throw in tradition if you like; I’m not picky. My point is that one can create something beautiful by discovering the inherent beauty in the medium he works with. That’s why I think Augustine is beautiful and Shelby Spong isn’t. I suppose I could read Athanasius all my life and still go to Hell, but somehow I think the fire and brimstone would hurt less if I endured it while contemplating good thinking.

Let’s take it back to Chesterton, this time from The Everlasting Man. He finds at least the beginnings of this beauty even in pagan worship.

The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange, but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him forever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons.

I was not literally gagged at that concert, but I did nearly gag. The composition took away from the composer the gesture of obeisance to the rules of music and stunted and maimed his work. The performers, deprived of the freedom to follow the rules, were enslaved to creating cacophony. In the freedom-olatry of our society, it makes one think about the state of one’s soul.

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October 1, 2008 by djackson.

Now there was a rich man, and he habitually dressed in purple and fine linen, joyously living in splendor every day. And a poor man named Lazarus was laid at his gate, covered with sores. - Luke 16.19-20

I got one right this week. Sometimes you get one right. But I got a parable right. How often does that happen?

It came about on this wise. I was on my way to Waco last Monday morning. I planned to attend a preaching conference at my alma mater, Truett Seminary. Dr. Thomas Long, one of the leading scholars in the field, was speaking. I’d left Corpus Christi with plenty of time to spare and had provided myself with a thermos of coffee, liquid sleep to compensate for the hour at which I’d arisen. Cool early-morning air sang through my open window as I headed north out of Refugio toward Goliad. The scent of mown fields drifted in. I decided to declare a dividend by pouring out the first cup of java and had just taken my second sip when I passed two trucks broken down beside the road.

A group of young men milled about the derelict vehicles. One stood by the road. He didn’t actually signal for help - just looked at passing traffic with that hopeful expression of one with no choice but to depend upon the kindness of strangers. I don’t always stop in those situations. I often don’t. But something tugged at me and I whipped a U-turn. As I pulled up, I realized that they had me outnumbered: lean, limber young men. The idea crossed my mind that this could be a setup for a robbery. Then I remembered Tolstoy’s character, Simon the cobbler, who in a similar situation asks himself, “Have you grown so rich as to be afraid of robbers?”

Well, no one robbed me. No one even asked me for money. When I inquired whether they needed help all of them immediately turned to one man, a shortish, crew-cut fellow who stepped forward holding a greasy car part in his greasy hands. Between his broken English and my fragmented Spanish I figured out that he and his amigos had broken down the day before and spent the night here, and that they needed to get to an auto parts store to buy a new part. It meant fifteen minutes right back the way I’d come, and who knew how many more minutes waiting, then fifteen minutes back. During the trip I learned that the man’s name was Augustine. That was about it.

I made my conference on time - barely. (I should add that I took a wrong turn coming out of Cuero, so that if I’d been late it would have been my stupidity, not my generosity that caused it.) In the evening service Dr. Long preached from Jesus’ story of Lazarus and the rich man. He put quite a topspin on the application. In fact, I think he threw us a spitter. Dealing with Hell and the “great gulf fixed,” he explained that here and there, now and then, we catch a glimpse into the kingdom of Heaven. We can respond or not. Then, in the words of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,”

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Or, in Dr. Long’s simpler but equally eloquent phrase, “A window opens. A window closes.” As an example, he told of a time he’d gone to a speaking engagement instead of taking his daughter to her Campfire Girls banquet. He understands now that he should have gone . . . but the banquet is long since over, and his daughter has aged out of the Campfire Girls organization.

Thomas Howard, speaking of the novels of Charles Williams, explains Williams’ view of this in terms of getting a cup of water for a thirsty spouse in the middle of the night. If I perform the small service, “I will have gone through a small lesson in Charity.” If I refuse,

I will have missed one lesson. The difficulty here is that this refusal turns out to be more serious than my merely having missed a lesson. I have lost ground. I am not where I was. I am a step back. . . .It is so much easier just to stay in bed here. It is much, much nicer. How comfortable and warm it is here. Let my spouse fend for herself. I’ll just doze a bit more . . .and wake up in hell.

We all pass those windows, and we do it on a regular basis. And, in the language of Deborah and Barak, the Sonny and Cher of ancient Israel, “Among the divisions of Ruben, there are great searchings of heart.” Like that mighty but hesitant tribe of old, we too often stand debating, letting, in Lady Macbeth’s cat-in-the-addage fashion, “‘I will’ wait upon ‘I would’” while the opportunity for greatness passes us by. Others win the battle; victory comes, alright. It just comes without us, for good. As Mordecai warned Esther, salvation arises from some other source, but we miss, at least for that moment, the very hour for which we have come into the kingdom.

All I can say is, I’m glad I stopped. But who did I stop for? A few possibilities occur to me.

The man’s name, though he pronounced it more like “Austin,” was Augustine - like the bishop of Hippo. No, I don’t think it was him; no beard, for openers. But another point Dr. Long made in his sermon was that the ancient rabbis took an obscure Old Testament character, Eliezer of Damascus, and used him as the basis for a number of stories, morality tales, midrashim. It seems that Eliezer crops up on a regular basis but never as himself. Instead, he is alway the tailor, the cobbler, the beggar - someone that no one would expect of being Abram’s top lieutenant. The stories judge characters by how they treat Eliezer when they don’t know who he is. And “Lazarus,” Dr. Long argued, is the Greek version of “Eliezer.” And “Augustine” with a thick Mexican accent is the direct descendant of “Augustine” in classical Latin, or even if the fashionable British that insists on accenting the second syllable.

Or try this one out. Hebrews 13.2 pushes hospitality by holding out the chance that chance kindness to people can actually be clueless care for angels. Abraham didn’t organize an impromptu tailgate party because he knew two-thirds of his visitors were city-smoking seraphim and the other third divine. He simply followed the mores of his culture and cared for those with no better sense than to walk in the midday sun. Augustine didn’t have wings. I admit I glanced over my shoulder toward Waco more than once as I headed the opposite way, but he never turned me to a pillar of salt. Still, “unwawares” is the whole point.

But here’s another possibility. Jesus promised to chase the sheep right and the goats left on the last great judgment day. I turned left off that highway, but remember that if we’re facing Jesus, our left is his right. The least of these his brethren needed a starter motor. Jesus, having toiled all night and fixed nothing, told me to cast my nets on the right side of the road. I’m still not sure what I might have caught, but I can almost hear John whisper, “It is the Lord.”

I got one right this week. I’ve gotten so many wrong. The windows seem to close so quickly. Another couple of seconds at seventy miles per hour (all right, seventy-five) and my rearview mirror would have lost their reflection. May we walk slowly enough to find discernment in moments of choice.

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