The Second

The modern use of “ecumenism” pertains to a narrow problem in a wide swath of differing Christians.   And within that context it’s regarded ambiguously, either with hope or suspicion.    Between these poles sits a taught unspoken proposition that the Church is divided.   Since Christians know that the Church can’t be truly divided, the proposition finds no voice.   Instead ecumenism proposes to solve dividedness.   While it may have some impact on unity as a qualitative experience, ecumenism has offered little with regard to the universality of the unified Church. The very notion of dividedness is ambiguous; just consider the grammar.   “Dividedness” as a noun seems concrete, but its verb root (to divide) already has a standard noun form as “division,” which is the concrete result of dividing a whole.   “Dividedness,” on the other hand, begins with something that has already been divided, abstracts the quality of that division, and then trea...

Here’s a test.  What is the Gospel message? a)   Jesus died to pay your debt of sin. b)   Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! c)   A word that means “good news” Answer:  b Many years ago, after some years in active rejection of Jesus and all things called by His name, and after the consequent despair arising out of ephemeral alternatives, I returned to Him.  I had become acutely aware of my shortcomings and of my inability to rein them in.  I knew that, although my case was mild, it did not differ in kind from others who drift into more consequential, death inducing, shortcomings. On the cosmic scales of justice I deserved punishment quite as much as they.  It’s not surprising, then, that the Gospel of my Protestant upbringing reached me in a profound place of need.  The Protestant Gospel is answer a), “Jesus died to pay your debt of sin.”  What I needed was forgiveness, and that’s what I got, in spa...

Be careful what you ask for you just might get it .   For many years this has functioned as a warning against frivolous prayer, against treating God as a butler.   Persistence in such requests may invite, rather, a painful object lesson.   But none of these calculations interfered with my decision, soon followed by the action, to ask God regularly to help me be an ordinary person.   My life has had many voices saying that “ordinary” is the way to go.   The message did not connect.   It’s not that I am extraordinary, but that “ordinary” has operated as a term of disdain.   A litany of enticements beckon:   Success, meaning, impact, “make a difference,” “fulfill your potential,” on and on and on.   Naturally this meant that I needed to make everything around me better, and be better than others.   The results?   Failure by an impossible standard.   Bitterness.   Frustration.   A scary enticement to disengage, to ce...

The great thing about aphorisms, proverbs and sayings is they so often turn out to be right.   Of course they also tend to have something of an iridescent effect: looked at one way they can mean one thing; looked at another they seem to mean the near opposite.   Take for example the saying, “Can a leopard change his spots?”   You’ll hear this when a habitually bad actor repeats his bad behavior in the face of a second chance.   But then we all know of examples of people who have, indeed, reformed their bad behavior into a more upright life.   So, would we say of them, “See, these leopards did change their spots!” The nagging sentiment at the bottom of this particular saying challenges those of us who really want to lead good lives.   We, if we’re honest, know that we are not as morally upright as we aspire to be—we all slip up, we all cling to another saying, “nobody’s perfect.”   Although a leopard certainly cannot change his spots into stripes...

A good friend of mine has found occasion to quote Kierkegaard on almost every occasion.  On account of this friend, an utterly decent man, I filed an item in the back of my mind to pick up something of Kierkegaard and meet him for myself.  Of course I had two unspoken, but prominent, impressions of Kierkegaard also in the back of my mind, and these date back many years.  The first brings a fear of dense prose and compact ideas stretched into long threads of meandering exploration.  Such imagery came through a certain tone of voice, a subtle turning of eye brows and lowing of posture, all of which shaded the few, or fewer, words, something like, “whoa.  Kierkegaard.”  But the second impression comes from similar nonverbal cues, of near-contempt and even ridicule for a thing called “Existentialism,” a category I somehow knew held claim on Kierkegaard.  And so, by means of these two impressions, both phantoms, years passed without my having met him....