July 20, 2009 by djackson.

Shakespeare’s Hotspur taunts the Welsh wizard Owen Glendower to “tell the truth and shame the devil.” (Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1). Instead of that, I want to invite everyone to read books and shame the devil. In his thirteenth letter to his protege Wormwood, C. S. Lewis’ arch-tempter Screwtape berates the hapless trainee because “you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.” In Lewis’ theology, then, reading a book one loves - whatever the contents (assuming, I assume, that they are not pornographic, heretical, etc.) is a powerful act of spiritual formation. In another of his books, the novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis has a character’s redemption begin when he finds sufficient humility to re-discover a book from his childhood.

Two shelves in the little sitting room were filled with bound volumes of The Strand. In one of these he found a serial children’s story which he had begun to read as a child but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half way through it, and he was ashamed to read it after that. Now, he chased it from volume to volume till he had finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, execept for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish.

And then in yesterday’s paper, I find an article where several powerful, successful women talk about how the Nancy Drew books shaped them when they were girls: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/fashion/19drew.html. The really interesting thing is that each reader had her own “Nancy,” though they were reading the same stories.

So . . . I want to invite everyone to re-read a favorite book from junior high school. NOT a children’s book you discovered as an adult, NOR a book you had to read, NOR a book you should have read. I’m talking here about one you just plain old liked. And take a minute to think about it. It might be a book that your adult self, neurotic about childish pleasures, has forbidden you to recall.

I am currently doing this myself. Not long ago, out of the blue, I thought of Sinbad and Me, a detective story about a small-town boy and his faithful bulldog who solve the mystery of a buried treasure. It has pirates and caves and deserted mansions and secret codes and (did I mention this?) a BULLDOG! Re-reading the book has not only re-acquainted me with the characters and the story, but with an eleven-year-old kid who found it in the library at Royal Palms Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona back in 1971. He noticed it on the shelves because the cover art had a picture of that dog on it. He started reading and couldn’t stop. Turns out he wasn’t such a bad kid; likable, in fact. In fact, I think I like him better than some of the later versions of him.

I hope you’ll take the invitation and let me know what you read and a little bit about the experience.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

July 17, 2009 by djackson.

On a visit to my parents’ home this week I spent considerable time contemplating the hummingbirds zipping around the feeders on the back porch. They dogfight for purchase on the perches of those sugar-water dispensers with an agility that any fighter pilot would envy. They so intrigued me that I decided to do a little research. I learned, among other things, that Montezuma himself stitched hummingbird feathers into his royal garments. These tiny avians flash some amazing color, but their feathers contain no actual pigment. Instead, crystal platelets of varying thicknesses refract the sunlight and throw out selected segments of the spectrum. These colors blaze brightest when the sun sits behind the observer and hits the bird head-on. I also learned that, like most birds, hummers feed their young by barfing into the babies’ mouths. With the hummingbird’s rapier-like proboscis, however, this can look more like stabbing than nursing. Naturalist John L. Tveten calls it a “sword-swallowing routine,” which, though alarming to the viewer, does no harm to the fledglings. Speaking of baby hummers, my reading also tells me that they have no down but crack out of the egg completely naked and must rely entirely on the mother’s presence for enough borrowed warmth to survive. Of course, given their eye-blurring wingbeats and Red Bull heart rates, hummers need lots of calories, consuming beyond their own body-weight daily and living constantly within a few hours of starvation. For all this, and despite their tiny size, certain species fly clean across the Gulf of Mexico non-stop during their annual migrations.

With all of that in mind, and with due apologies to one of my favorite saints, I offer the following.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Whose glory rests not within herself
But reflects the light of her Lord.
She teaches us to hover
With our face toward God’s light
That others might see his beauty in us
And offer Him their praises.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Whose bill is a sword that feeds her young
Even where it seems to slay.
She teaches us to be sword-swallowers
Who fearlessly devour
The sword of the Spirit, the Word of God,
That wounds us only to nourish.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Whose naked young cannot warm themselves,
But must nestle near her nurturing breast.
She teaches us that we little ones
Cannot not be warm alone,
But must huddle together beneath the breast
Of the church who cherishes us.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Who holds no life within herself
But lives as her Lord provides.
She teaches us that we must ever seek
The living Word that feeds us,
And draw our life from the Source of Life,
The Spirit who sustains us.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird.
Like the lilies, Montezuma in all his glory
Envied her beautiful raiment.
She teaches us that life is more
Than this world’s envious goods,
That when God’s children seek Him first,
All other things He adds.

Posted in St. Francis Redux(ion): An Occasional Bestiary | No Comments »

July 16, 2009 by djackson.

Mark 6.14-29

Introduction

In 2004 the British Broadcasting Corporation launched a reality television show called “Strictly Come Dancing.” The premise was simple: they would pair celebrities with professional ballroom dancers in a season-long competition with the audience voting each week for those who would survive to the next round until finally a champion emerged. The concept went viral. Coming to America as “Dancing with the Stars,” it currently runs in thirty countries and was the world’s most popular program across all genres in 2006 and 2007. Clearly, watching Hollywood has-beens hot-foot it across the dance floor with prime-time prima donnas has wide appeal.

I must admit that I don’t watch the show. Because it is a show about dancing, and I had far too good a Baptist upbringing to take any pleasure in such a sinful pass-time. In fact, P.E. majors at my Baptist university had to go off-campus to the local community colleges to complete their required courses in square dancing because our trustees refused to allow any involvement in such choreographed carnality.

Garrison Keillor eloquently expresses my own experience with this sinful diversion when he writes:

The beat goes on but I can’t dance to it anymore. Of course, I never could dance at all, having grown up in a fundamentalist home, which you can tell by the way I move. We believed that any rhythmic physical movement would awaken our carnal desires . . . so we kids had to sit in study hall when they taught dancing in phys ed, couldn’t go to the dances, not even square ones, couldn’t even join marching band. . . .couldn’t dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus. Those Sanctified Brethren are good people but they do leave a mark on a boy and even today, when I sweep into a room holding a glass of Pouilly-Fuisse, people see me sweep and say, “I didn’t know you were Baptist.” I wasn’t. We considered Baptists loose.

I have since softened a little on my views of dancing, but my parents raised up the child in the way that he should go and now that he is considerably older his body cannot depart from it. A few years back my older son and I appeared together in a production of Shakespeare’s play “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Our director chose to set it on a college campus in the late ’50’s and the show ended with a sort of sock-hop procession of the cast members one by one to the footlights. It was agony for me! The play lasted two hours and I had several scenes and lots of really funny lines, but all anyone remembered was my slew-footed stamp and stumble in the last two minutes.

That is why I’ve always liked the story in today’s text. Here we have the pilot episode of “Dancing with the Stars” and, predictably to my fundamentalist sensibilities, it doesn’t end well. True enough, young Salome triumphs as Herod and his pals madly punch her code into their cell phones, but the prize is the head of God’s prophet. I can almost see my junior high Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Rached, peering through her half-glasses over the gilt edge of her massive King James Bible as she fixes us with the formulated phrase, “Young people, you will never find a praying knee and a dancing foot on the same leg!” Except that, as a good Baptist, she didn’t say “leg;” she said “limb.”

Still, I have to let my adult seminary-professor self get a word in edge-wise here and admit that a jeremiad against jigs probably is not the primary purpose of this passage. At the same time, I think I should be allowed some leeway since nobody seems quite sure just why Mark does tell this story at this stage of his gospel. It is a sort of flash-back. Like a Hollywood director shooting out of sequence, Mark dredges up a storyline that would have fitted in much more smoothly back around chapter 1, verse 14, where Mark mentions the imprisonment of John at the outset of Jesus’ public ministry. Doubtless it is a great story: it has sex and scandal and political intrigue, all the makings of a good HBO series. But why here? What is behind the Holy Spirit’s inspiration to the evangelist to tell this particular tale at this particular point. Liberals, of course, think the story is literally too good to be true, even though it has independent confirmation from the secular historian Josephus. But then liberals think all the best parts of the Bible are invented - things like the resurrection, for instance. But if we accept this as a true account, we still have the question of its purpose in this place.

I think that the key, as usual, lies in the context. We have something here called a “Markan Sandwich.” Mark loves to do this - take a single tale, slice it in half, and insert another story in the middle. A good example would be the healing of Jairus’ daughter in Mark 5.21-43. Whenever Mark does this, he invites us to make connections between the two plots and see how God works to weave them together. That’s what I think is going on here. Notice that Mark wraps this account with the beginning and end of Jesus’ sending out of the twelve disciples in teams of two. They receive their instructions in v.7-11 and they return and make their reports in v.30-32. Mark bookends the sawdust trail dance of the destitute disciples with the tipsy tap-dancing of the royal court to convey a bold challenge: Christ calls us to choose between the dance of eternal life and the dance of eternal death.

Christ calls us to the dance of eternal life.

Jesus’ instructs his disciples in a dance of irrational faith. Almost everyone who reads the Bible stumbles over these instructions. The Lord insists that these missionaries not only leave home without their American Express cards, but without a wallet in which to carry them. Embarrassed scholars hasten to assure us that the orders are only temporary - meant for this one mission, not for the long-haul. Well-dressed preachers stammer that the real point is evangelism, not poverty, though perhaps we throw in a reminder to tithe. Every now and then some maniac like St. Anthony or Francis of Assissi or St. John of the Cross or Mother Teresa or Rich Mullins comes along, someone crazy enough just to do what Jesus says, but we can observe them from the comfortable distance of a sermon illustration; they are there to inspire, not to be imitated.

Yes, Our Lord’s orders are clearly impractical. Yet the practicality of an action really depends on what you want to practice. Actions that are irrational for one purpose may make perfect sense for another. What is bad advice for marching turns out to be wise counsel for dancing. In Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice Miss Caroline Bingley, wanting to show how much more sensible she is than the general run of female society, complains that she does not like balls. “It would surely be much more rational,” she remarks, “if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.” To which her brother replies, “Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say but it would not be near so much like a ball.”

Perhaps in our efforts to make twenty-first century sense of the call of Christ we have failed to see that materialism may make the Christian life much more rational, but much less like the joyful dance it is meant to be. Doubtless a supply of spare food and spare clothes and spare change gives a traveler a feeling of security. At the same time, it is far easier to dance if you aren’t weighed down by wearing two sets of clothes!

Christ calls us to reject the Devil’s dance of death.

So the disciples go dancing into the dusty distance, weaving complex steps of dislodged demons and healed bodies behind them. It is at this point that Mark notes, “And King Herod heard of it.”

This is not the Herod who sought to slay the infant Jesus. This is the son of that Herod, who shared his father’s ambition to become the official King of the Jews. He comes before us as a man of power. He wields enormous control: Mark calls him “King Herod,” though in fact he ruled only one-fourth of his father’s former empire and the Romans had not granted him the title of king. He can marry whom he chooses, despite Jewish law or social taboos. He can arrest whom he pleases and execute that person or not at his own whim. He throws lavish parties for himself and can reward a pleasing performance with outlandish gifts.

Yet woven into the warp of the text we find Mark’s hints that Herod is as much the prisoner as the possessor of power. In the story his step-daughter does the literal dancing, but we find Herod living a much deadlier dance: the dance of a man powerless in the face of his own power.

He jilted his first wife - and ended up fighting a war with his powerful ex-father-in-law as a result - because he could not control his physical lust for the trophy bride who subsequently nags him into arresting and then tricks him into executing the preacher whom he wants to preserve alive. He can command the most powerful men in the land to attend his birthday party, but cannot escape their scorn if he breaks the oath that his outlaw libido led him to make in the first place. He can command them because he rules them, but he cannot rule if he cannot keep his command. Both parties live this symbiotic lie, trapped in a death-dealing two-step that neither side dares desert.

Herod also finds himself powerless to stop listening to the preaching of John the Baptist, yet powerless to carry out the repentance that preaching demands. He was, Mark 6.20 tells us, “very perplexed.” The Greek verb here comes from the word for the ford of a river: Herod found himself between a rock and a hard place, up the creek without a paddle. In the words of those great theologians Martha and the Vandellas, he had “nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.” Yet, Mark says in the next stroke of the pen, Herod “used to enjoy listening to him.” The Greek verb shows repeated past action - he called for John over and over again. Like a heroin addict who knows the horse is killing him but can’t leave it alone Herod unfailingly fed his jones for John’s judgmental preaching. As one writer expresses it:

Herod is grieved but powerless. That is the dance of death. This is the dance we step when we grieve over our decisions or actions but seem powerless to change them. We’re doing a dance, and we can’t get the bandleader to change the tune.

This theme repeats itself in all human encounter, and has even found its way into our fairy tales. In 1934 the famous animator Walt Disney assembled his staff and told them a story that had mesmerized him since childhood. It concerned a beautiful princess and the wicked stepmother who, jealous of the child’s beauty, orders an assassin to slay her in the forest. But the girl escapes and goes to live with seven little men until finally the evil queen comes to her in disguise and feeds her a bite of poisoned apple. In the end, of course, a handsome prince arrives and kisses the girl back to life. Subsequently the evil stepmother dies as she flees into the forest. Disney recounted the old fairy tale, acting out all the parts himself, and held his animators spellbound. Then he told them of his ambitious plan: to make a full feature-length animated movie out of that tale, something that had never been done before. He hocked everything he owned, maxed out his credit and made the movie that his critics called “Disney’s Folly” but that is now known as the first animated classic, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

But to make the tale palatable for an audience of American children Disney had to rework a few details, particularly the ending. In the original version as recorded by the Brother’s Grimm, the stepmother, finding out from her magic mirror that another rival to her beauty has arisen, attends the girl’s wedding, only to discover that her new rival is the old stepdaughter whom she believed was dead. To punish her, they strap her into a pair of red-hot iron shoes in which she must dance until she falls down dead.

And that is the nightmare that Herod finds himself living. He believes John is dead. As the huntsman brings the queen the supposed heart of Snow White, so Herod’s metal man hands him his tormentor’s head. Yet only a few weeks later, Herod begins to hear wild rumors of a country rabbi who dances the dusty trails of his kingdom healing the sick and even raising the dead. He believes that, against all odds, his victim has come back to life. In the end, of course, he will learn that the truth is far worse: John does not come back from the dead. Instead, the Jesus whom John preached undoes death itself. By that time it is too late for Herod. He has made his choice. He has strapped on the blistering boots of privilege and power and cannot take them off. He dances the dance of death until a bottomless grave sinks him to hell. Herod finds himself in that condition described by C. S. Lewis’ fictional arch-tempter Screwtape who gloats that one of his “patients,” upon entering Hell, said, “I now see that I spent my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

And notice how Mark contrasts this to Jesus’ dance. The disciples return from their unburdened dance to a Lord who dares unplug from the busyness of success. Untroubled about losing market share, Jesus invites them to “come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while.” No wrought-iron red-hot deadly dancing shoes in the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is a lesson I think perhaps Christ’s church needs to re-learn. Not long ago a local church contacted us at the School of Christian Studies and asked if we would post a notice saying they were looking for a new youth minister. Under the job qualifications was listed, “Must have a killer work ethic.” I couldn’t help but wonder what they meant by that. Whom would this work ethic kill? The minister? The congregation? The minister’s marriage and family seemed the most likely candidates. This sounded to me more like the white-hot iron shoes of capitalist America than the airy sandals of the call of Christ.

Life and Death: Choose your partner.

Herod’s wife Herodias is the villain of the piece, but we must give her credit for realizing what Herod tried to deny: no one sits out this dance; eventually everyone must choose a partner. She knew that Herod could not continue to be both distressed and delighted by the sermons of this demented dancer from the Judean deserts. She had learned the philosophy of Violet, a character in the early days of Charles Shultz’s famous strip “Peanuts.” A Sunday strip from 1963 finds Violet in hot pursuit of the hapless Charlie Brown. “It’s no use running,” she bellows. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you Charley Brown. I’ll get you! I’ll knock your block off! I’ll . . . .”

Suddenly Charlie Brown turns at bay. “Wait a minute!” he cries. “Hold everything. We can’t carry on like this. We have no right to act this way . . . .The world is filled with problems . . . .People hurting other people . . . .People not understanding other people . . . .Now, if we, as children, can’t solve what are relatively minor problems, how can we ever expect to . . . .”

At that point, Violet slugs him. A huge “Pow!” dominates the frame as Charlie Brown goes flying bodily backwards. “I had to hit him quick,” Violet explains to her friend Patty. “He was beginning to make sense.”

Herodias knew she had to kill John quick; he was beginning to make sense. At some point we inevitably find that our carnality cannot coexist with the claims of Christ. Jesus said we cannot serve two masters, which is just another way of saying that no square dancer can dance to two callers. And the decision is serious because, while God always offers repentance, at some point we lose our capability to respond.

Like Herod, we all at times find ourselves trapped in the dance of death, unable to stop though we know that to continue means disaster. Yet we fear that daring to stop means we will simply disappear. So let me ask you: who is your partner today in the exhausting dance of death?

Are you dancing the death-dance of technology, strapped to your electronic servants, finding that the very devices that promised a better life have left you with no life at all? Unplug in the name of Jesus and dance the simple dance of faith.

Or maybe you find yourself caught up in the death-dance of pornography, the digital descendant of Herod’s teenage step-daughter. You want nothing more than to unplug, but the demons that drive you are calling the tune and you can’t seem to stop. Jesus offers you escape and a better dance.

Maybe you are a teenager who finds yourself, like Herod, trapped into the death-dance of popularity, doing things you don’t want to do in order to gain the approval of people you don’t like, all because the Devil has sold you the lie that if you don’t exist in that social circle you will cease to exist at all. Dare to turn loose of that merry-go-round of conformity and dance alone with your Lord. Maybe you won’t end up being homecoming queen but you will find out that you can dance better without the tiara anyway.

Perhaps your partner is the death-dance of American materialism, the worship of what philosopher William James called “the bitch-goddess of success.” She’ll dance you to death and then cast you aside as new partners embrace her addiction. Turn loose! Dare to live without the burden and baggage of all the world’s extras and learn that you dance better when you have less.

Maybe you find yourself partnered with other death-dancers, whether food or anger or entertainment or fear. Whatever has you in its grip, Jesus yearns to be your partner in a better dance. He died for you to all the sin that holds you, and he pleads with you to die to it in your own turn and hang onto him. Take nothing for your journey but a pair of ballet pumps, or better still, cast it all away.

Hear the invitation of Christ as imagined so eloquently in the words of the song “Lord of the Dance” by Sydney Carter. Here, I believe, is the call of Christ in the contrast of these two stories:

I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun.
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth
At Bethlehem I had had my birth.

Dance then, wherever you may be.
I am the Lord of the dance said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the dance said he.

I danced for the scribe and the Pharisee,
But they would not dance and they wouldn’t follow me.
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John.
They came with me and the dance went on.

Dance then, wherever you may be.
I am the Lord of the dance said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be.
And I’ll lead you all in the dance said he.

I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame.
The holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high,
And they left me there on the cross to die.

Dance then, wherever you may be.
I am the Lord of the dance said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be.
And I’ll lead you all in the dance said he.

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black.
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I’d gone,
But I am the dance and I still go on.

Dance then, wherever you may be.
I am the Lord of the dance said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be.
And I’ll lead you all in the dance said he.

They cut me down and I leapt up high.
I am the life that will never, never die.
I’ll live in you, if you live in me.
I am the Lord of the dance said he.

Dance then, wherever you may be.
I am the Lord of the dance said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the dance said he.

Posted in General | No Comments »

July 11, 2009 by djackson.

Don’t look to your left.

Bet you just went left. Don’t feel bad; it’s human nature.

Writing in this week’s “Science Times” in the Tuesday edition of the New York Times, Benedict Carey explores the long-noted tendency to do and say the very thing we have sworn we would avoid. He quotes Edgar Allen Poe’s essay, “The Imp of the Perverse” to describe those moments when a hateful desire, like a computer virus, takes total control of our software:

That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.

Carey notes the long pedigree of this concept. He cites Daniel M. Wegner, a contemporary psychologist at Harvard, then skips backward from Poe to Freud to Darwin.

He might have gone a little farther back. The seventeenth century Baptist preacher John Bunyan described it eloquently in his Pilgrim’s Progress. As the hapless Pilgrim blunders his way through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,

I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it. Just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and, whisperingly, suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind. This put Christian more to it than anything that he met with before, even to think that he should now blaspheme Him that he loved so much before. Yet if he could have helped, he would not have done it; but he had not the discretion either to stop his ears, nor to know from whence those blasphemies came.

Kick it back another century and we find the idea eloquently expressed by the Carmelite mystic and reformer, St. John of the Cross. In his famous work The Dark Night of the Soul, John writes of those just beginning to grow in the Christian faith that

It often comes to pass that, in their very spiritual exercises, when they are powerless to prevent it, there arise and assert themselves in their sensual part of the soul impure acts and motions, and sometimes this happens even when the spirit is deep in prayer, or engaged in the Sacrament of Penance or in the Eucharist. These things are not, I say, in their power.

John goes on to describe the origin of these thoughts, one of which is “the devil, who, in order to disquiet and disturb the soul, at times when it is at prayer or is striving to pray, contrives to stir up these motions of impurity in its nature.”

Of course, we could take it clean back to the first century, to the writing of a brilliant theologian, Paul of Tarsus, who confessed,

For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. (Romans 7.15-20)

The problem, according to Carey’s research, is that “the adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action.” This means we devote a lot of disc space to telling ourselves what we shouldn’t do. You see how that would work out. “To avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imagine just that; the very presence of that catastrophic insult, in turn, increases the odds that the brain will spit it out.”

Anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon abounds. When Leo Tolstoy was a kid, his oldest brother, Nicholas, promised to take his siblings on an expedition to the mountains, but the trial by ordeal for the trip was to stand in a corner and not think of a white bear. A famous (perhaps apocryphal) tale tells of a hostess who, giving a dinner for J. P. Morgan, strictly warned her daughters not to say anything about the famous financier’s protuberant proboscis. The girls performed flawlessly and it was the mother herself who eventually asked, “Mr. Morgan, do you take cream and sugar in your nose?” An “All in the Family” episode has Archie Bunker asking Sammy Davis, Jr., a similar question about his glass eye. Dieters who spend a lot of time thinking, “Don’t eat ice cream” also spend a lot of time picturing a two-scoop, waffle-cone delight. “Keep it out of the water” focuses a golfer’s attention on just the place he doesn’t want the ball to go.

St. John was also onto this dodge. Though alive to the role played by the demonic in such perverse thoughts, he also observed that an additional

source whence these impure motions are apt to proceed i order to make war upon the soul is often the fear which such persons have conceived for these impure representations and motions. Something that they see or say or think brings them to their mind, and this makes them afraid, so that they suffer from them through no fault of their own.

So what’s the upshot? The dominant religious approach in Jesus’ day worked from the half of the brain devoted to suppressing bad thoughts. The Pharisees looked harder and harder for corruption and so, of course, they found more and more of it. The harder they scrubbed, the more they found that needed scrubbing. Jesus offered a novel strategy: devote more brain power to the stuff you want to increase. Where the religious leaders saw a sinful woman, Jesus saw repentance. Where the populace saw a greedy corporate goon out on a limb, Jesus saw a hungry soul treed by his own excesses. Where the Jews saw a Roman storm trooper or a Syro-Phoenician foreigner or a Samaritan half-breed, Jesus saw faith that outstripped anything he’d run across in Israel.

Catholic theologian Hans Kung once quipped that “the finer the net is woven, the more numerous are the holes.” Perhaps today I can best drive out my demons, not by debating them, but by looking very hard in the other direction to discern where, at just this moment, Jesus might be.

Posted in General | No Comments »