Category: Faith

What I Believe

Something is watching out for us. I don’t know what. Call it God if you like. Why do I believe that?

First, there’s all this perfection. Examples of perfection are never more than an arm’s reach away. I had this thought as I waded through dry leaves under a great linden tree after three weeks of midsummer drought. Stressed by too little water the tree sheds its leaves, cutting down transpiration to save water. Automatically it tunes itself to the conditions, keeping its leaf surface area just right and returning the nutrients to its feet. Absent some blight or the chainsaw that tree will go on doing that for hundreds of years without our laying a hand on it. Perfection. Virtually all the organisms we see are perfected to live in their current environment.

I don’t doubt that this is the product of natural evolution but I feel sure that there is something driving it, transcendent, infinitely powerful and ubiquitous. This force inhabits and invigorates nature’s realm, set it going in the beginning and keeps it running. Extend your senses, shut down the filters which are only there, after all, to keep us safe and alive. Perception does not equal reality, not by a long stretch — this has been proved over and over. If we reach beyond the survivalist chatter of our verbal reasoning we can feel it. Know it. And know that it is looking after us. Not gently. It permits all nature of savagery, excess and barbarism. It allows genocide and starvation in one country while other countries like Qatar throw money around like confetti.

One indicator is how every now and then this divine caretaking shows up in a single, identifiable moment when it saves us from falling all the way into global darkness, evil and destruction, coming to the rescue of the good and the wholesome, sometimes through the agency of a single human at a single moment. General von Rumstedt decides to halt his panzers 15 miles short of Dunkirk, ensuring the survival of an allied army that will eventually shorten the thousand-year Reich by nine hundred and ninety years. Vasili Archipov refuses to acquiesce in the decision of his two co-commanders to launch a nuclear torpedo at a critical moment of the Cuban missile crisis and literally saves the world from nuclear annihilation. Single decisions that changed the entire history of the species. You could say we got lucky those times but I don’t think so. At Dunkirk the weather was critically important; calm and clear for six long days, enabling sailing dinghies and little runabouts to cross the Channel. I know; there’s nothing miraculous about that but the timing was literally perfect. In the Soviet era Archipov’s independence of thought and courage of his convictions were virtually unknown, doubly so in the ranks of the military. Everyone followed instructions. I can’t prove it but I believe these were not rolls of the dice: we were saved.

I believe that it will often be a close-run thing but as long as there are enough good people in the world, (the ten good men of Sodom?), and most people are fundamentally good, that force of goodness will save us and the good world and, at times, show up in something that we can see and name. Jesus Christ was its epitome. Reminders appear in the form of the virgin, as avatar. After three separate Papal enquiries by appointed ‘Devil’s Advocates’, deliberately chosen atheists, we still have no explanation for what happened at Fatima. We were visited, spoken to, in human language. An explicit warning was given. Either three illiterate shepherd’s children in a rural Portuguese backwater had their finger on the pulse of Russian politics or a miracle took place. The warning was ignored and Russia and peoples all the way to the middle of Germany endured 70 years of misery and massacre. There have been other such miracles and not only in the Christian epoch.

The question is what do I do about it. Be as good as I can, obviously. But why do I and so many others feel the need to do more, to reach out, communicate, supplicate, humble ourselves and give praise and thanks? It is more than the essential homeostatic urge to bind with our neighbour and support the good and powerful among us in the interests of communal survival. It is a deep thing, a fundamental. Faith. We long for faith. Indeed if faith can be named as a thing among things, not sui generis, then it is an emotion. One of the basic emotions that we are kitted out with, along with love, hate, grief, joy and the others. Psychologists say, and they are right, that wellness requires the expression of a full range of our emotions, and every emotion contains within itself the powerful urge to share it with others. It’s why we have love songs and hate preachers. We are literally built to have, and share, the emotion of spiritual faith and without it we are incomplete, just a transport vector for water and cellphones.

Of course many, even most people are not aware of this potential for faith. But everyone who has ever asked themselves. “Is this really all there is? This the whole deal?” is feeling its absence. They just don’t know it. People of faith don’t ask themselves that question.

Which raises another question: why do we have the capacity for this emotion, faith in a higher being? Can we be furnished with with such an essential emotion as faith and it be based on an illusion? I think not. If we are made to be creatures of faith then there is something there that is to be the object of that faith.

God. We are designed to believe in God. It is universal. Truly atheistic societies have been rare, short-lived and chaotic. So I’m inclined to believe in God, aware of my desire for faith, but to be honest, most of the time it is not enough. I’m just too damn rational. Fortunately, realism in the 21st century, scientific rationality, has come to our aid. Thanks to advances in physics, belief in a creator is now the rational choice.

Traditional rationalists, the Richard Dawkinses of this world, would have you believe that faith in the supernatural has been superseded by our deep understanding of the natural universe, right down to the quantum level. We start out by discovering that thunder and lightning are not displays of the wrath of gods and advance to the present day to where there is no need for divine explanations of anything: we understand the world, we see how it works.

Well, as we will see, we don’t.

That proposition worked pretty well for a century or so but around the middle of the 20th century it began to unravel. I’m talking, if you haven’t already guessed, about the fine-tuned universe.

I think it got going with the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why could no two identical particles in a system not be in the same state? And more importantly, how is that when you force one particle into a state already occupied by another its counterpart immediately changes state, regardless of the distance separating them? We don’t know – it just does and has been shown to do so in experiments that are now almost commonplace. Simultaneous interaction at a distance with no connection or information being transferred. It should be impossible. Showing this experimentally was, in my opinion, the point at which traditional rationalism started to come apart.

Far greater steps have been taken since then. Thanks to computer modelling and a hell of a lot of mathematical legwork, we are able to say what the universe would look like if the force of gravity, for instance, were just a shade stronger or weaker. The short answer is a universe totally unable to evolve or support life.

What about the weak nuclear force, the thing that keeps electrons orbiting protons? A fraction of a percent stronger and electrons would bind so strongly that no compounds could form. The same degree weaker and the electrons would fly off and everything would just be some formless stew of undifferentiated matter. Obviously, again, a universe without life.

The fact is, gravity could theoretically have any value. Likewise the weak force. There are no fundamental principles behind them – they just happen to have, within a tolerance of ten to the power of a ridiculously large number, the exact values needed to create and sustain a universe with stars and galaxies and planets like Earth. And, amazingly, the same can be said of literally dozens of other universal constants. Introduce the most infinitesimal variation and it all comes apart.

The same is true of life itself. In the mid-20th century there was a lot of excitement about the ‘primordial soup’. A couple of scientists sealed methane, hydrogen and ammonia, supposedly replicating the pre-biotic earthly conditions, in a glass container and passed steam over it. This produced a handful of amino acids – the building blocks of life, no less! The crowd went wild.

Alas, later work has revealed that pre-biotic earth was nothing like that. And supposing that chucking a whole lot of amino acids together could eventually produce the exquisite, densely coded phenomenon that is life is like saying, as the great Fred Hoyle put it, like supposing that a giant tornado blowing through a vast junkyard could leave behind a fully-functional Boeing 747 (although a single living cell is probably even more complex than a jumbo jet).

I won’t cover the whole subject here – there are plenty of works already doing that, and it’s huge – but get to the end point: maintaining a ‘rationalist’ conviction that life is accidental requires the rationalist to believe in something so unlikely that believing some lucky chancer could win Lotto week after week for years would be a safer bet.

The fact is that traditional rationalism now requires a far greater leap of faith than any deist has to face.

Some unimaginably intelligent force with unlimited agency created the universe and then, with a second wave of the almighty hand, created life, and us.

It is the only reasonable conclusion.

There you are: God exists. Science proves it. The rest, however, is supposition. I happen to believe that Jesus Christ, and possibly Gautama Buddha, were dropped in at the right time to give us some direction as to the deity’s intentions for us. They came along a mere few hundred years apart, i.e. simultaneously on any evolutionary or geologic time scale. It was time. I wonder if humanity was not going through some kind of phase shift around then, but we are too far down among the weeds to see it.

Perhaps one day science will prove those things too, although I doubt it. Never mind. I see no harm, and much good, in taking it on faith.

What I Believe — It Gets Stranger

It’s a process, this business of trying to understand the deeper dimensions of human life. At the time I wrote What I Believe I was not in possession of information that has since come to hand. Although I have nothing to renounce in that earlier essay, new discoveries take it further – much further.

Two very peculiar and unforgettable events have continued to puzzle and challenge me for decades. In 1969 I had the experience described in my post Another Force of Nature, where my mother 1,200 miles across an ocean absolutely knew that I was in serious trouble in Sydney and, thank goodness, acted on that knowledge. Two years later, in Bangkok, I had a vivid dream in which I was terrified by two Americans who, in a few hours, would walk into a room, identify themselves as FBI agents and do me serious harm. I saw into the future. I have always felt greatly blessed by those two events because they allowed me to know with a great deal of certainty that the Newtonian/Einsteinian view of space and time did not describe the limits of what we consider reality. Thanks to In My Time of Dying, an extraordinary book by Sebastian Junger, I just might now understand the true state of things. At least insofar as they can be understood because as Junger points out the comprehension of matters involving quantum mechanics may exceed the design parameters of the human brain.

We now know that neither physical reality nor the flow of time are anything like how our perceptions construct them. It started with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, moved on to quantum entanglement and has now arrived at the point where it has been experimentally proven that consciousness influences reality. Subatomic particles subsist in many places at once, each place being no more than a probability that that particle is in that position. But when we observe a particle it instantly coalesces into a single point. What’s more we can know that particle’s location or its momentum, but never both. Observing the particle blinds us to one or the other, always, as a law of nature.

That’s right. Just looking at something changes it in a provable, measurable way. This flies in the face of everything we consider rational and real. It is so alien to the way we think that many great minds have suggested that we may never understand it because our minds are intrinsically incapable of doing so. As Nobel physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” There is a temptation to regard the incomprehensible but real outcomes of quantum experiments as interesting but to us irrelevant events taking place only in laboratories. That is an error – quantum mechanics are at work in every atom of our bodies and the world around us, all the time. Recent computer modelling suggests that quantum entanglement plays an important role in our neural network. And what we observe, how we observe, is in all likelihood shaping external events and processes. We must learn to live with astonishment and incomprehension.

Which raises the question of what is meant by that ‘we’. Great meditators and many experimenters with hallucinogenic drugs share the experience of the non-separateness of living beings. Now that we know that consciousness changes objective reality there is every reason to suspect they may be right. We know of many instances of ‘hive mind’ in the natural world. What if all consciousness is one great hive mind, something our primordial antecedents may have experienced? We know that our senses are filters developed by evolution to process information in ways that enhance our chances of survival. Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion the senses remove data; that is what filters do. Our senses shape our experience of reality by making us ignorant of much that is there to be observed. That approaching sabretooth tiger was so important to our survival that we learned to filter out birdsong, weather, and the falling of leaves to see only the tiger. Importantly, our senses and our minds limit our observations to what our individual biological organisms can perceive. But that may not reflect the true state of consciousness. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his essay “Experience”: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” An impressive observation for someone writing in the early 19th century.

I have come to the hypothesis that at some point way back in the evolutionary chain we broke our hive mind into apparently individual, separate instances of consciousness because that enhanced our chances of survival. Each separate biological pre-human organism then had its own, specialised instance of consciousness highly focused on taking care of itself. But perhaps the hive mind persists below our level of perception, breaking through under great pressure. Hence in 1969 my mother in Auckland knew with certainty that I was in serious trouble in Sydney. Is this universal consciousness what we call God? Why is there not a single human society that did not, historically, subscribe to some version of divinity? The belief that there is something conscious, with agency, that is greater than us and inhabits a universal realm is uncannily persistent across all humankind.

The ancient Hindus said that there is Brahman, the material world, and Atman, spirit or universal consciousness, and that they are the same thing. I’m starting to think they were right.

While we are at it, nor is time the linear absolute we perceive it to be. In the early 2000s scientists in the Canary Islands performed two sequential versions of the famous two-hole experiment with two entangled photons in which the second experiment caused the results of the first experiment, in the past, to change. Maybe under great stress we can also break the flow of time. It would explain how in Bangkok, in extreme danger, I was able to see in a dream the two men who in a few hours would turn up in my ‘real’ life and consign me to a hellish prison.

Astonishment, but perhaps some comprehension.

My thanks to Greg McGee for tipping me off about Junger’s wonderful book and to Robert Lanza for his thinking about biocentrism. See https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/

The Cosmic Paradox of The ‘Virgin’ Mary

via The Buddha Christ – Pagola Erects a Lighthouse | Play With Strangers.

One of the many understandings I drew from reading Pagola: the story of the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Birth of Christ which we celebrate each Christmas was all quite clearly made up, something apparently accepted by all serious biblical scholars. How little I knew. Two gospels, Mark and John, don’t mention it. Luke and Matthew have contradictory versions. Pagola goes further though, putting it in the context of the midrash haggadah, a Jewish tradition of fictionally expanding on the lives of the great and holy with the intention of deepening our understanding of who they were, what they were like. A devotional tale, if you like.

The early church really went the doctor on it, revering Mary as ‘ever (i.e. always) virgin’ in spite of the fact that Jesus is specifically stated to have brothers in the New Testament. Probably sisters too, but women counted for so little it would be quite natural for them not to be mentioned. From the Annunciation story we are supposed to understand that she always knew he was the son of God incarnate in spite, again, of the gospel account of her accompanying her other sons on a mission to bring Him home after he supposedly lost the plot after his sojourn in the desert.

Fine. Nice story. But here’s the weird, weird thing. Of all the possible Biblical presences who might be supposed to be watching out for us, it’s Mary who keeps turning up. I made quite a study of Fatima. In spite of the Church commissioning more than one ‘devil’s advocate’ to debunk the story, no-one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain what happened in Fatima in 1917. Three illiterate children talked about trouble in Russia, reporting information which they completely failed to comprehend. Three weeks later the Bolshevik revolution erupted. When they asked the apparition who she was, she answered ‘I am the immaculate conception,’ words they again failed to understand but repeated to others. When separated and terrorised by the local police, all three steadfastly refused to recant. These are little peasant kids. Finally, of a huge crowd who had been told to expect ‘a sign’ (and that’s all) at three o’clock on the final afternoon, the great majority described exactly the same vision, the so-called Dancing Sun. Mass hypnotic suggestion can be ruled out.

I find it most logical to conclude that the apparition was real and genuinely treated the crowd to the promised spectacle. It didn’t physically happen, of course, but that’s irrelevant. There were cameras and reporters present; it didn’t show up on film. The point is that there is no known way to cause a crowd to experience the same vision with neither prior suggestion nor technology. Just in case you think the word spread through the crowd in some form of ripple effect, there were simultaneous identical or highly similar reports from as much as 15km away. The question which I keep revisiting after reading Pagola is: who is this? Lourdes. Guadalupe. Walsingham, not too far from here. All instances of the same miraculous presence. I’m now starting to look back and elsewhere and starting to find parallels which I will update but my thesis is already formed: there exists in the universe a benign entity, female in our understanding, long predating Christ, which has real agency in the world. Which is, in short, looking out for us.

Usually I post completed propositions. This time I’m looking for suggestions. Any takers?

The Buddha Christ – Pagola Erects a Lighthouse

A postscript to : That Wondrous Camino. My faith was, as reported, robustly restored by that long walk, but since reading Jesus: An Historical Approximation by Fr José A Pagola, the astounding product of thirty years’ study of everything – historical, archaeological, cultural, philological and linguistic – that can currently be known about Christ, I have acquired a much more nuanced acceptance of the modern church. Among many other of Pagola’s revelations is the clear understanding that the real Christ had no wish to start an hierarchical religion. What emerges is, in fact, astonishingly similar to the compassion-centred teachings of the Buddha. Why am I not surprised?

Pagola’s is probably the most deeply-researched book I have ever read, enriched with footnotes on, I think, every page. Some sections had such impact that I turned back and reread them at once. I began to count his bibliographical references and gave up at 43, covering A to E. Hundreds. His methods exemplify what is being called the ‘third wave’ of Christology, an explosion on multiple research fronts dating from around 1980. The denial of the historical Christ is a dead duck – he is mentioned, among others,  by Jewish contemporary historian Flavius Josephus, by Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and several times in the rabbinical sources which began to accumulate after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.

From deep linguistic study, scholars are now in broad agreement as to which words in the New Testament can be attributed with confidence to the mouth of Christ. The ‘New Testament’ can be understood to include the lost Q source which shows up in numerous identical fragments in Mark and Luke and the apocryphal Gospel of St Thomas, the latter now considered authentic although ‘tainted’ with Gnosticism.

It is utterly fascinating. Stripped of the redactions of the gospellers, parables appear with new and often different meaning. Luke 8:9-14, for instance, portrays the Pharisee praying in the Temple, thanking God for his virtuous life, as a hypocrite. Jesus intended no such thing; it was perfectly in order for someone to be grateful for the opportunity for righteousness, so important to observant Jews. Luke adds that the humble tax collector beating his chest at the back of the Temple ‘… rather than the other, went home justified before God.’ Not what Jesus was saying at all, apparently.

Another snippet: Matthew, writing around Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple, constantly vilifies the Pharisees. At the time, with the Temple gone and the ruling Sadducees broken, the Pharisee movement was hard at work saving the Jewish faith and culture, bringing them up against the flourishing Christian community. In fact, the Pharisees of Jesus’ time were a disparate, devout ginger group who probably respected Jesus, although they certainly debated with him.

So what emerges from the distortions of the gospels and the outright wreckage wrought by the guilt-ravaged, misogynistic and probably self-hating homosexual Paul? The message can be summed up as what Jesus himself consistently called ‘the good news’ that the poor and the rejected need not be down-hearted because, seen through enlightened eyes, the whole of creation is already the ‘reign of heaven’. (As anyone who has taken mescaline or psilocybin in the right circumstances may have glimpsed.)

This, I  am sure from reading his account in The Seven-Storied Mountain/Elected Silence, is what Thomas Merton experienced during his famous moment of satori on the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets in Louisville Kentucky. Finding no satisfactory explanation  in Christian sources, he found his way to meetings with Tibetan Lamas in Calcutta, became an advocate for a close ecumenical relationship between Christians and Buddhists, and, at an ecumenical conference in Buddhist Bangkok, was apparently murdered. At the behest of what dark hand, we wonder?

Why am I not surprised that Christ’s message turns out to be so like that of the Buddha? At the centre, universal compassion and acceptance. Not so much the destruction as the disregarding of hierarchy, the rejection of rejection. Condemnation of the objectification of women and children.  And a teaching that, to those with open hearts and freshly opened eyes, heaven is already all around us, in ‘the birds of the air and the lilies of the field’. Sin is something to be cast aside, not agonised over, because the state of grace, what he called the father’s mercy, is neither rationed nor earned. The quality of mercy is indeed not strained.

His enemies called him a drunkard and a consorter with prostitutes and tax collectors. In fact, apart from his healing and preaching, these deeply significant meals were his principal activity. To eat with someone, and especially to recline while doing so, was to honour them. Note that he was never reported to dine with thieves and bandits, just the outcasts – the ‘sinners’ of the day. To understand why, we need to understand who these people were.  A wife was merely a man’s property and could be cast aside like any other thing, for any or no reason and without further obligation. Their only choices -beggary, prostitution, or both.

The tax collectors referred to were not swaggering thugs going about expropriating the fruits of people’s labour. They too were social rejects, frequently men who, for one reason or another, had been booted out of the protective family circle and left with neither status nor property.

Their choices – beggary, or a miserable life sitting in a booth on a wharf, or at the gates of a town, taking a cut for Herod, or the tetrarch Antipas in Jesus’ home territory of Galilee. Hounded from above to increase their takings, constantly reminded there were plenty of others who would take the job (sound familiar?), despised by all who passed by, riven by guilt at their unrighteous life.

Pagola’s revelation of Christ’s passionate defence of women is one of a number of areas where he directs us to conclusions impolitic for him, a priest and a seminary professor, to articulate. The Church’s stand on divorce for instance. The sole New Testament teaching against divorce is in Matthew 19: 3-12. Consider what Pagola writes about Matthew and the Pharisees. Now see that Christ specifically repudiates the Mosaic law authorising divorce in answer to a challenge from ‘some Pharisees’. The context is all-important. My conclusion? If Christ said it at all it would certainly have been in condemnation of the brutality of divorce as practised at the time. Imagine – the woman would never have been allowed to take her children, certainly not sons, anyway, who would remain within the extended family. She literally had the status of human rubbish.  Would the real Jesus have condemned a divorce within the framework of fair, judicial property and custody settlement? Of course not. This is one of several inescapable conclusions that Pagola avoids putting into words, but his signposts are large and clear.

Again, when Jesus says, “I come to bring not peace but a sword … to set father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law,” he was not speaking of anything like the families we know, so transformed by two millennia of Christianity. He was referring to roles within a merciless, virtually life-or-death authority structure.

No wonder, in spite of the fact that Pagola’s book has sold more than 150,000 copies, many to Christian clergy who rave about it and convene study groups around it, that Spain’s arch-conservative bishops have succeeded in having it banned in Pagola’s own country. A futile rear-guard action of course – the original Spanish edition had sold 60,000 copies before they got their way. These are the same people who are so entrenched in their defiance of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council that they send out spies to report on priests who share the wine of communion, even those who give the host dipped in wine.

A mad world, my masters. But a glorious one.

POSTSCRIPT

Reading Pagola launched me on a difficult journey. Since my return to Christianity I had been nourished by it, relying on the steady, gentle cycle of the ritual year to give balance and continuity to my always chaotic life. In my darkest hours, the final years of my marriage, St Patrick’s Cathedral in Auckland had become a second home, a place where I would always be greeted as a friend. I knew that nothing, nothing I could say or do, would ever cause its doors to close against me.
Now all this was thrown into question and it would be painful months before I came to this understanding: whatever the Christian churches may have been at times, or may be now, they embody the authentic continuity of Christ’s primary intention to create communities where compassion, gentleness and worship flourished. Does the modern Catholic/Anglo-Catholic church meet this description? Absolutely, if not uniformly. Settling back into the community required a degree of surrender, a conscious act of intellectual humility. But I’m back. And grateful to be so.

My thanks to the remarkable Fr Michael Elligate, SJ, Order of Australia, of Melbourne University, for the generous gift of his time and the recommendation of Jesus:An Historical Approximation, by José A Pagola, Fourth (Revised) Edition, Convivium Press 2013, translated by Margaret Wilde.

Nietszche’s Error

Nietzsche was right, if only partly: most people live their lives cocooned in a host of glib little self-deceptions.  They will do anything to avoid the great crisis which would force them to stare straight at the truth about themselves, at what they have become, the crisis which would ultimately set them free.
Nietzsche realized that avoiding suffering and pursuing happiness was a vainglorious pursuit. What is necessary is to accept that suffering is inevitable and the real goal is to accept and learn from our suffering, to discover the most important and ennobling ability we possess – how much we can bear and stay straight and true.
No-one to my knowledge has ever expressed this better than Viktor Frankl, in ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ where he writes of his experiences in Auschwitz and observed that those who survived longest were those who found meaning in their suffering and a reason to endure it. Great book.
Neitzsche’s greatest error was his conviction that belief in God and the life of the spirit was an anodyne for the weak, a comforter to cuddle in the cold winter of truth. Because accepting God imposes heavy burdens. Never mind all the obligations to pray and attend Mass instead of lounging in bed on Sunday morning – they are actually pleasures. Prayer can be like talking with a friend, and Mass is beautiful, uplifting, social, musical, a real worldly pleasure.
No, the hard part is in following Jesus’ instructions, about which he was unambiguous and forthright. “I was hungry, and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was imprisoned, and you cared for me.”
How about “If someone steals your coat, give him your shirt.”? Or “If your enemy strikes you on the cheek,  offer him the other cheek.”
Anyone who thinks these are metaphors is sadly mistaken.  Unfortunately, Jesus never added a rider to his injunctions. I wish he had said “Turn the other cheek (unless the bastard desperately needs a good hiding)” or “I was hungry and you surely would have fed me if you’d had a little more to spare and the time to get it organised, so you’re all good on that one.”
But he didn’t, and if we are to glory in the works of the Lord and truly fear no evil as we walk in the shadow of the valley of death, we have to deliver.
Worth taking particular note of, I think, is that reference to visiting prisoners.  Of all the many good works, Christ singles out visiting prisoners as one of the ‘must-do’s’. Why? He doesn’t single out the unjustly imprisoned, so it’s not about that.  I think it is because helping those in prison requires not only generosity but the all-important ability to suspend judgment. Succouring prisoners is like giving the thief your shirt; they don’t deserve it. Those who do so play an important social role, of course, because they counteract the natural tendency of the imprisoned to hate society and everyone in it. Rednecks who want to see prisoners given the stick, those who rant on about prison being a holiday camp do us all a grave disservice because they justify recidivism. I wonder I Jesus had that thought at the back of his mind?

Sorry Friedrich. You got that bit wrong.