The formal term for that undeniable and oftentimes frustrating tendency toward sin is concupiscence.  Saint Augustine, in fact, in his Confessions uses the term to refer to sinful lust, and he would know.  Before he came to Christ, Augustine lived the life of a prodigal jumping from sexual adventure to sexual adventure.  His appetite was large, but soon enough, he learned that being steeped in so much sin was its own punishment.  A depraved world begets a depraved mind and soul.  Like chewing gum in a child’s hair, it is bugger to remove.  A person’s only recourse is to shine a light on it.  Name it.  Own it.  In short, confess it. 

This, of course, helps to explain the sacrament of reconciliation.  Unconfessed sin is sin that festers and even grows.  In my Protestant days, I would confess in prayer; once I became Roman Catholic, I began to confess to a priest, and let me hasten to say, owning one’s sin before another human being who is acting in persona Christi is quite different from offering them up on one’s own, as it were.  The accountability is instant but on its heals is the forgiveness.  Penance and love go hand in hand. 

I mention all of this to angle, in a special way, into Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story, “The Lottery.”  This unsettling tale centers on a yearly tradition held in a village of some 300 citizens.  Each adult pulls a slip of paper from an old black box in the town square.  If the slip of paper is blank, then the person is off the hook.  There is one slip of paper, however, that has a black dot on it.  The person who chooses this slip of paper will be stoned to death.  In the short story, that person is Tessie Hutchison who had shown up late because she had forgotten that this had been the day of the lottery.  The last line is haunting: “ ‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchison screamed, and then they were upon her.”  A community that, in almost all senses, appeared clean-cut and civilized made barbarism a yearly tradition.  If you have seen the movie The Purge, you have seen a variation of Jackson’s short story. 

But it is not the annual murder that is troubling so much as it is the fact that the reader is forced to wrestle with his or her own animal nature.  Concupiscence.  That proclivity that reminds us that we may not be as noble as we would like to be.  That appetite we keep under wraps in polite company.  We all know what it is, and we all know to keep it unsaid.  “The Lottery” is powerful because it points directly toward a blemish in our very constitution.  The citizens in the story do not turn a blind eye toward it; they embrace it for what it is and institute a tradition that acts as a safety valve: a mechanism to let off steam and maintain harmony.  Their reality is harsh, but it is true.  This is really who we are. 

While we may not be engaging in a yearly lottery to determine who in our community must be stoned to death, we do find releases in other ways: violent movies, violent video games, violent sports, violent rhetoric on social media.  We have built an entire society around these forms of expression, making it very difficult, indeed, to judge the characters in Jackson’s short story; however, the sour aftertaste remains.  The issue persists.  We cannot escape our nature, yet we find issue with its unsavory part.  What is to be done? 

Perhaps the dynamic in the confessional holds the answer.  We confess the results of our nature, and in the forgiveness that follows, we are called to a higher plane.  God sees more in us than we see in ourselves. 

When one of my kids does something wrong, I know it is in their nature to do so occasionally.  What I delight in is when my child comes to me despite that error.  The error does not separate; the error draws us closer together.  I see more in them than they see in themselves. 

We turn, then, to Jackson’s vision of humanity and, perhaps, our vision of ourselves right now.  Jackson’s characters are not called to a higher plane; they are left to indulge their concupiscence.  Are we who surround ourselves with violence like them?  Or should we aspire to a higher level, a different version of who we could be?  Jackson’s story is dystopian without a doubt.  What, then, does confession do but remove all black dots. 

https://fullreads.com/literature/the-lottery/

Written by Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame and published in two parts in 1853, “Bartleby,   

the Scrivener” is the sad story of a man, Bartleby, who finds work as a scribe with a Wall Street lawyer.  Though the work consists of copying by hand reems of dull legalese, his efforts, at first, are productive.  He is a model employee.  Soon, however, quiet and aloof Bartleby begins to answer his employer’s assignments with the phrase, “I would prefer not to.”  He continues to show up for work, but instead of copying page after page after page of some meaningless document, he responds again and again with the same line.  He stares out of the window into a brick wall.  “I would prefer not to.”  He stands in silence at a distance, never bothering to socially connect with anybody.  “I would prefer not to.”  Eventually, the Wall Street lawyer moves his business to another building, leaving behind poor Bartleby.  The new tenants, unable to evict Bartleby, plead with his former boss to have the disturbed man removed.  He sits on the building’s stairs.  He sleeps in the doorway at night.  Bartleby is eventually arrested as a vagrant and taken to a place called The Tombs where he dies of starvation, preferring not to eat anything. 

The story, to me, is fascinating because two characters, the lawyer and Bartleby, seem to be deadlocked in a persistence the former cannot explain and the latter will not explain.  The lawyer could have had Bartleby physically removed from the premises, yet he decides to move his business operation instead.  To be sure, he could have simply refused to play along with Bartleby’s peculiar behavior and sacked him in the beginning the first time he uttered those passive aggressive words.  But he didn’t.  He begged Bartleby.  Checked up on him.  Seemed to be genuinely concerned if not mystified by his willful inaction.  Bartleby, on the other hand, sticks with his banal proclamation all the while showing up to the office.  He goes through the motions.  Physically, he is there but, otherwise, he is absent.  Seemingly hollow.  Checked out. 

Of course, Melville may have been making a comment on the nature of some work in his industrialized America mid-19th century.  The breakdown of work meant massive profits for the titans of industry, but it meant soul-draining labor for everyone else.  Craftsmanship was being replaced by low-skilled labor, which often meant mindless repetition, maddening boredom not unlike copying by hand legal documents.  Fair enough.  But I wonder if Melville was also anticipating an exodus that reached its zenith with the “turn on, tune in, drop out” countercultural movement of the 1960s.   

Timothy Leary, the popular psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs, pushed for the young in particular to dramatically step away from their parents’ society to form something Utopian in nature.  We know, of course, how that turned out, but this should not detract from the question of what makes some want to quit altogether.  What is it about society that inspires one to take a long look at it and conclude, Nope.  Not for me. 

I am reminded of a recent story of a domesticated cow.  Somehow, the cow escaped from a Polish farm and could not be found for days.  Eventually, someone spied the cow grazing with a herd of wild bison.  The bovine had gone rogue.  Entered into an alternative way of existing.  Without convention.  Absent the arbitrary.  And free.  Ultimately, free. 

If anything, Melville’s short story begs the question of how we each should exist – indeed, how we were meant to exist.  It is less a “what” question and more a “why” question.  Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” refrain seems to have as its subtext “And why, really, should I trouble myself with such vapid, senseless labor.”  It is a legitimate question in the face of what truly matters: how God meant us to live.  If a task, any task, chips away at the integrity of our very soul then the red flag should immediately go up.  It becomes a task that diminishes us and, therefore, inhibits the possibility of our fullest self-realization.  For some, namely the lawyer, the ins and outs of the law might be very fulfilling.  It was why, in small part, he was put on this earth.  For Bartleby, that was not the case.  He would prefer not to.  The takeaway for us, then, is clear: What, deep down, would we prefer not to do?  How is the rogue in each of us yearning for open fields? 

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra called it her “salad days” -- those bygone days when the skies seemed to be bluer, the air fresher, and there was not even the suspicion that old age could ever happen to you.  I recall a professor I had in graduate school reflecting on those lines.  He took long pauses.  The rest of the narrative arc in the play simply fell to the wayside.  For a moment, it was as if he and Cleopatra were both rapt in an undeniable reality of being young – that it is fleeting and precious. 

In his own way, Romantic poet John Keats echoes this sentiment, though I hasten to say that his contribution was profoundly ironic as it was penned when the poet was merely twenty-three years old, two years before his untimely death from tuberculosis.  He was a youth writing about youth, in other words.  If there was any hint of nostalgia then we can be sure that it was borne out of someone supremely, perhaps painfully aware of the passing of time – that the sands in the hourglass are always falling, like it or not, recognize it or not.  Keats certainly understood this truth.  In his classic poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats seems to meditate on the tension we all hold inside: life, death, the haze of a bliss we once knew, another haze of an end we all must face.  He writes,  
  Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
    Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, 
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; 
        Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; 
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
        For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed 
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; 
And, happy melodist, unwearied, 
    For ever piping songs for ever new; 
More happy love! more happy, happy love! 
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, 
        For ever panting, and for ever young; 
All breathing human passion far above, 
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, 
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 

Here, we see two lovers in rapturous anticipation.  Two lovers who will never grow old, always be fair, forever exist in an ecstasy of passion.  Sensual music,  Green, green boughs.  Pounding, thumping hearts.  All a scene painted upon an urn of all things.  A vessel containing ashes of the dead.  The irony could not be sadder. Keats punctuates this poem by underscoring the point that the scenes like those depicted on the urn are universal.  In one way or another, we all experience them – delight in youthful splurges, revel in happy impulses – but on a dime, it seems, we all too quickly begin to amass the days and weeks, months and years that put cruel distance between those times and us, causing confusion and, for many, no small measure of melancholy.  What hope we can cling to, Keats offers in the end.  He concludes, 

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! 
    When old age shall this generation waste, 
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, 
    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all 
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

More will come.  Others will experience the same sensation of growing up, growing old, and growing distant, but the message on the urn will remain the same: we are closest to what is true and beautiful when we are young.  This, of course, is the Romantic thesis.  Wordsworth championed this.  As did Coleridge and Blake.  I have said as much in earlier episodes. “We are trailing clouds of glory” when we are born.  We are closest to God.  The Divine.  Perfection.  And when we age, we gradually step away from that ideal.  As such, the Romantic cause remains hopeless if and only if the gaze remains in the past.  To be sure, circumnavigating Keats’ conclusion means understanding time differently altogether.  Perhaps, dear listener, Keats himself gives us an out in the final line” That is all ye know on earth.”  He specifies a place.  Earth.  What about heaven?  The rules certainly change there.  Did he forget that the contents of the urn will be redeemed?  It is hard to say.  Had there been more days and weeks, months and years for the young Keats, perhaps he would have known to make this assertion on his own. 

Paula Delgado-Kling’s aptly named book, Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood, details in vivid and sticky language the plight of a poor Columbian girl whose destiny could never be anything else but what it was: a tangled, complicated, and, ultimately, violent relationship with the only authority that even pretended to care about her and others like her: the FARC or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Columbia.  This nominally Marxist terrorist organization made an untold amount of money in the production and sale of cocaine, primarily to customers in the mainland United States, and in the process, visited brutality and constant fear upon the destitute inhabitants of rural Columbia.  The conflict this organization maintained with Columbia’s U.S.-backed government forces only kept Leonor and everyone else in her station in a perpetual state of anxiety and want.  She was always hungry, and the FARC had food to give away.  The choice was practically made for her. 

Being an attractive girl was certainly no advantage.  In point of truth, it was quickly a liability.  Men ogled Leonor, and in no time, even as an adolescent, she was the victim of unwanted sexual advances and, eventually, rape.  In these instances, in particular, Delgado-Kling respectfully exercises tact yet does not shy away from plainly underscoring the reality that was Leonor’s – that grown men, decades her senior, sometimes, had no qualms about crossing the line with a minor.  If anything, this is a sad and disturbing testament to the levels some will stoop for power and money.  Leonor’s world was dog-eat-dog, and because of her age, sex, and, importantly, place on the echelon in narco-state Columbia, she would never have her own agency.  She would always be at the mercy of others. 

There would be many rapes.  There would be innumerable beatings.  Even her own family would, at times, turn their backs on Leonor.  She was forced to find solace where she could, which often meant reaching for a bottle or the sexual embrace of who, she did not really care.  As the reader bears witness to Leonor’s metamorphosis from a person who experienced a maelstrom of abuse from a seemingly constant series of victimizers to a wounded young woman who became very good at abusing herself, the reader also sees how brokenness travels from generation to generation.  As the popular saying goes, hurt people hurt; the adjective becomes the verb, and Delgado-Kling does much to shed light on this predictable phenomenon.  Leonor experiences bouts of deep despair and rage, oscillating between the two extremes in jarring fashion.  She considers returning to bad habits and bad people.  She tries to improve her plight but gives up.  Hope is always elusive.  Leonor flails – cannot seem to find any bearings – however, it is only when her life comes full circle that she finds a modicum of that thing we all desire – peace.  Perfection is never reached as it is never reached for the lot of us, but with Leonor, there is, at least, a horizon to walk toward and somebody to accompany her on the journey. 

Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood is like many books in the genre of books that feature what poverty, conflict, and greed do to the young and vulnerable.  It is never pretty and always begs a single question: Why?  Why do we let this happen to those we should protect and nurture the most?  Honest individuals know that the answer is always the same, yet even they, as evidenced by the fact that Leonor’s story is not unique, understand that fixing a world that could do what it did to her would mean fixing human nature at its core.  It is a nice idea – one we should always strive for – but it will not happen.  The money is just too good.  Indeed, the truth of human nature is something many thinkers wrestle with all the time.  Our sin proclivities are perplexing.  We do the things we ought not to do and then scratch our heads when the consequences are the same.  Beat ourselves up.  Drag ourselves to confession, if we are good Catholics.  But hear me on this, dear listener: I am not juxtaposing the evils done to Leonor and those like her to venial sin.  There are degrees to transgressions, to be sure.  I am simply pointing out that fallenness is in us all – that we should be wary of our capacities, on guard against our concupiscence or proneness to be wayward.  In the lives of those who strive to be Christlike, the consequences are there.  Unavoidable.  Glaring.  And in the lives of those who have turned away from Christ, the consequences are there, too, but largely ignored.  The remedy for evil, then, is clear.  It is to be called out.  It is to be named.  The innocent depend upon the voices of the good.  To be sure, to be silent is to be complicit.  How many saw Leonor on the street and walked on by, only God above knows.

https://www.amazon.com/Leonor-Story-Childhood-Paula-Delgado-Kling/dp/1682194477/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MOAHJTCE8ZE8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.99bS4X6_TpevBXs8nRMRAaOyC4_HAESQ_LHaDXOY5U-gnCsjpFiusiurA0pdGVRWY47PUOhi66MRh__jY7C2-nvPmaRYLV_7neausBGv6JxXghTzLvcArnq680gdDk4zW6oCg0avVx2-aKTTjjoAOX5s7el0Uab6z-Sh8eGRL7XwH7ipZ2afiftmdQ8frnf1Pa7lB1T90ahzYAZy-TZWljAoVCWLgwTVEJcUf9kBwPc.7tnFquuFLY3kLu2vprEbcDSUsiO6D1rbufjDkKZExYU&dib_tag=se&keywords=leonor&qid=1731098660&s=books&sprefix=leonor%2Cstripbooks%2C79&sr=1-1

American poet, Jane Kenyon, was only forty-seven years old when she died in 1995.  Her death, like all who die so young, was tragic, and it resonated throughout the literary community.  A few years afterward, I became a teaching assistant for a professor in graduate school who knew her widower personally, fellow poet Donald Hall, and I had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at an event on campus.  Hall even signed a copy of a collection of his poems I had.  He wrote, “For Jason.  With pleasure.  All these poems.  Donald Hall.”  I was particularly fond of his poem, “Names of Horses” for its rustic beauty, powerful nostalgia, and I returned to it often when I needed to feel something about the passage of time in my own life.  Hall's message was universal.  The minutes, hours, days, and eventually years wait for nobody.  Perhaps this is something all artists struggle with – try to articulate, understand, frame with words or music or paint or what have you.  It is central to the artistic impulse – indeed, the human experience – and so generation after generation of artists size it up and give it their best shot.  Hall wrote about horses.  His wife, Jane Kenyon, wrote about light.  The poem, “Let Evening Come” is worth quoting in its entirety: 

Let the light of late afternoon 

shine through chinks in the barn, moving    

up the bales as the sun moves down. 

Let the cricket take up chafing    

as a woman takes up her needles    

and her yarn. Let evening come. 

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned    

in long grass. Let the stars appear 

and the moon disclose her silver horn. 

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.    

Let the wind die down. Let the shed    

go black inside. Let evening come. 

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop    

in the oats, to air in the lung    

let evening come. 

Let it come, as it will, and don’t    

be afraid. God does not leave us    

comfortless, so let evening come. 

When I recorded this episode, I was not yet fifty.  As you, dear listeners, hear my voice now, know that it comes from somebody who has reached the half-century mark.  Understandably, this is cause for some serious reflection.  To be sure, it feels as if I have stepped outside of myself and all that it entails to regard the state of a man – me – who has experienced many milestones and wonders about the next steps – in point of truth, observes other soon-to-be or recent empty-nesters for clues as to how to act, what to feel, how to ultimately be.  At fifty.  An age that had previously been mythic, unreal, impossible yet now, the exact opposite.  Right now.  In my face.  Actual. 
Of course, I am in good and great company.  Not alone in this endeavor at all.  Which is why Kenyon’s poem intrigues me.  Hers is not a raging against the dying of the light as Dylan Thomas would have it in his 1951 poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”  No, hers is a letting go, a peaceful acquiescence to what cannot be avoided.  As it should be.  But I, for one, do not fault Dylan Thomas for his rage.  It is a part of the grieving process, after all.  Kenyon is simply on the last step: acceptance.  There are many things that cannot be changed or reversed. 

But should we leave it there?  Should we shrug our shoulders and relax into the unknown? 

When I was younger – graduating from high school, heading off to college, starting my career – I was optimistic.  It was practically palpable.  Even today, a scent or sound might bring on that familiar sensation had so long ago.  There is Hall’s nostalgia.  Is my only response to give in like Kenyon? 

Optimism, almost by definition, is future oriented.  If we situate our physical death as the endpoint of our existence then optimism shrinks as we age.  When we are young with so many years ahead of us, we can afford to be grandly optimistic.  As we get older, optimism diminishes.   Possibility corresponds with time.  This is a manner of thinking that is of the world.  It is why Thomas rages, after all.  If we can manage to see past our earthly demise and into a future that God holds out for us, then optimism can only abound.  It is an optimism we can scarcely imagine. 

So, perhaps, when Kenyon writes that “God does not leave us comfortless,” she is nodding toward the bliss of eternity with Him.  Where our earthly milestones stop, God’s promise begins.  While the evening will come for us all, so, too, will the morning light.  This, dear listeners, is the hard-earned wisdom of the Godly and aged. 

Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell’s 1936 essay describing the shooting of a once-aggressive elephant in British-occupied Burma remains a proper indictment of colonialism.  At its height, the sun truly did not set on the British empire with its tentacles reaching India and Africa, Australia and North America.  Because of British imperialism, folks in Zimbabwe do not eat cookies; they eat biscuits.  Because of British imperialism, Aborigines in Australia break for tea and those living in the Indian subcontinent revere the game of cricket.  It is why the English language is a staple.  It is why the British monarchy retains its allure.  This tiny island nation in the North Atlantic was, through guile and force, successfully able to accomplish what a British statesman proclaimed to Parliament in the early 19th century: make Englishmen of all denizens of the world.  The feat was monumental.  That the Redcoats were able to do this is nothing short of miraculous. 

As the empire began to wane, however, the British seemed to enter a period of self-reflection.  This is where Orwell comes in.  A British police officer, likely Orwell himself, is called to dispatch an elephant that had killed a coolie and is now wandering about a local bazaar.  It has already spent itself.  The animal is now docile.  The police officer absolutely does not want to dispatch the elephant, knowing that the beast is undoubtedly used in farming; however, a massive throng of locals wants him to do otherwise.  The crowd is in control, not the man.  Eventually, he shoots the elephant, but the death is not immediate.  It is slow, savage, and grueling, and, in the end, the police officer makes a disturbing admission: he only shot the elephant to save face.  He did not want to look like a fool. 

In effect, the essay describes a role reversal of sorts.  The power and influence of the colonizer is decreasing as the power and influence of the colonized is increasing.  The majority rules while the minority shrinks.  All said and done, this seems to be a just turn of events.  To say that the impulse in human beings to colonize others has gone away, however, would be incorrect.  While imperial powers that resemble what the British once had may not be around this day and age, it is unquestionable that another type of colonialism exist today. 

It comes down to recognizing what minority group, like the British through guile and force, is insisting that its values be adopted by the majority.  They may not have guns and canons, but they do have Hollywood and the music industry.  They may not have warships, but they do have the news media and the loyalty of many educators.  Theirs is a colonial enterprise, not of land and the people who occupy it but of the mind.  How people think.  What values those people hold.  And, notably, the end result is very much the same: control.  Always control.  The military outpost of a foreign power is not down the street or in the next town; it is in between the ears.  All in the head.  A colonized mind is a mind subservient to the will of a few self-interested actors, and to call this out for what it is runs against the grain of a very elaborate ruse.  The truth, you see, is that the majority can break the spell.  This is Orwell’s thesis, after all.  The police officer had the vestiges of authority, had the empire at his back, had the gun and the permission to use it, yet it was the will of the majority that, in effect, pulled the trigger, killing the elephant, destroying the empire. 

What could this mean for those of us today in the grip of ideological colonizers?  Imperialists of the mind? 

Perhaps there is hope that a role reversal is possible.  It will take an awakening, to be sure, but history shows us that empires do collapse – that power is never in the hands of the few forever – so let us all recognize the elephant in this current room and will that the weapons trained upon us become disagreeable to those who have them – those terrified of being made the fool in front of so many watchful eyes. 

The 2005 film version of C.S. Lewis’s beloved classic, The Chronicles of Narnia, is a treat to watch.  For the most part, it is true to the original text, doing honor to the former atheist turned devout Christian who penned it.  The special effects brought to life Lewis’s tale in unique and engaging ways, and even now, dear listener, I occasionally Google the scene where Aslan roars just after his resurrection.  It still gives me chills.  Aslan, indeed, is on the move. 

What the film version conspicuously lacks, however, is the brief interlude where Aslan plays tag with Susan and Lucy, the two girls who witnessed his killing by the White Witch and the resurrection that followed.  The Great Lion leaps and bounds and shares laughter with the children who, only moments before, were emotionally and spiritually crushed by the death of their beloved friend and protector.  While the army of good was going toe to toe with the army of evil, the only one who could make a quick and decisive difference was frolicking about.  At first glance, it seems to be an odd decision at best, an irresponsible one at worst.  But if we remember that this particular moment in Lewis’s timeless tale is practically verbatim a retelling of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we might view Aslan’s playfulness as something quite telling, indeed. 

Psalm 23 is often quoted at funerals for obvious reasons.  The psalmist writes the familiar lines: “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.  In green pastures he makes me lie down; to still waters he leads me; he restores my soul.  He guides me along right paths for the sake of his name.  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff comfort me.”  These are familiar words to most if not all of us.  Even if we have never heard them in church, we certainly have heard them in films.  This is a measure of their popularity and impact, to be sure.  What interests me, though, is the line that follows: “You set a table before me in front of my enemies.”  Darkness surrounds, and those who would do us harm are in our midst, yet the Good Shepherd sees it fit to prepare and serve a meal all the while.  What does this suggest about our Lord and Savior?  What does it say about our God? 

I can only conjecture, but it seems to me that we are being reminded that, contrary to a sadly common understanding of scripture, evil is not – again, not – on an equal footing with good.  Evil is present, evil is dangerous, but it can never overtake good.  God, in short, is always in control, even to the point that, in the midst of so much evil, He has no problem setting a table.  It is more than just being confident.  It is an unabashed demonstration of might.  Period.   

Lewis very well could have been on to this fact when he had his Christ character, Aslan, play with the girls.  A hurried Aslan would be an Aslan dancing to the White Witch’s tune.  A playful Aslan is a reminder that he dances to his own tune and his alone.  Nobody calls the shots but him.  Despite the battle raging around them, if it is time to play tag, then it is time to play tag.  That, dear listeners, is omnipotence.  All powerful.  Our God, indeed.  The One who defeated death.  The One who sets the table.  The One who plays when He wants.  The One who roars and roars still when the creatures of the dark forget who the Lion is and what the Lion can do anytime, anywhere ... all of His divine will. 

Medical ethicist Charles Camosy brilliantly offers the following analogy about the current state of Western culture.  The West, he argues, is like a flower that has been recently cut at the base of its stem.  It will retain its beauty for a time but not forever.  Cut off from its roots – its source of nourishment – it will wilt, then fade, then perish altogether in the vase in which it sits.  The root system, he continues, is Christianity.  Western culture has divorced itself from the profound mysteries, intricate philosophies, cherished theology, and amazing history of the Church founded by the Son of God over two-thousand years ago yet, curiously, wants to retain its nicer, more convenient fruits.  No to Jesus but yes to Christmas.  Nostalgia is good for the bottom line.  No to the cross but yes to the Easter bunny.  Who cares about self-sacrifice when the flowers are blooming and summer fun is on the horizon.  Forces hostile to the one true faith have worked overtime to remove it from the public square while at the same time preserving an incredibly watered-down version of Christianity – a version, I hasten to add, that does not and certainly should not challenge anybody to live differently.  The Nativity is not about the coming of our Savior; it is now about family gatherings and Hallmark movies.  To say otherwise is radical; it is to impose one’s Christian beliefs on another.  And that is something polite people simply do not do. 

The logical end of Camosy’s point, however, is that Western society will collapse.  If it rejects the very movement that created and sustained its core, then falling to pieces is imminent.  We can delude ourselves all day long, but the fact remains: without its roots, a flower will perish.  Without Christianity, so, too, will the West. 

But is there anything to be done?  Is the writing already on the wall? 

In a recent interview on NPR (of all places), Rainn Wilson, the actor who portrayed Dwight in The Office, remarked that what our society desperately needs is a spiritual awakening.  Russell Brand echoed this sentiment in an interview he did with Tucker Carlson a few months later.  Country singer John Rich said the same.  A conversation is beginning to emerge, calling for a return to faith.  Notably, this is not the first time this has happened, at least in America. 

From the early 18th century to the 20th century, America experienced The Great Awakening – a spiritual revival that was largely a response to the Enlightenment’s focus on reason to the exclusion of all other facets of being human.  The Great Awakening arguably helped to unify the colonies against their British overlords while also making distinct American culture – its people, values, and general orientation.  This is why many believed the Revolution was God-inspired.  America was meant to stand on its own two feet.  What another Great Awakening would do for us now, therefore, is twofold: 1. It would help to unify our country and 2. It would recall what made the West a dominating force to begin with.  Prosperity, strength, and safety means returning wholeheartedly to the embrace of Christ.  We need to rediscover as a nation and as a culture our place in His kingdom.  We need to collectively remember that we are adopted sons and daughters of God.  It stands to reason, then, that those who would oppose this move are in direct opposition to America, in specific, and Western culture, in general.  Would it be too far to suggest that these forces are demonic?  Perhaps not.  To be a member of the flock is to recognize the reality of spiritual warfare after all.  There is much more than the flesh.  Unseen battles rage, and the stakes are very high, indeed.  The flower may be severed from its roots now, but a return is possible only through Him who heals, Him who restores, Him who saves and raises the dead and makes whole what was once fractured. 

In his 2008 book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright tackles several misconceptions many have about what happens when we die.  Popular thought is that, if we are good, we pass on to heaven never mind what feelings and convictions we harbor about Jesus Christ.  Being nice or, as the saying goes, being a good human is the point.  We do not have to concern ourselves so much with a relationship with our Creator.  We simply hold the door for others, pick up the tab, collect the mail when our neighbor is out of town.  Simple.  But Wright takes his readers into the weeds, so to speak, to discover a vastly more involved theology that should prompt non-believers and uncommitted believers alike to seriously reconsider their views.  Heaven, it seems, is not a given, and hell very much exists.  Wright notes that “some historians have suggested that belief in hell, already under attack from theologians in the nineteenth century, was one of the major casualties of the Great War.  There had been so much hell on earth that people couldn’t believe that God would create such a place hereafter as well.”  The truth is that if a person freely rejects God in this life then that person exists with the consequences of that decision in the next.  No God now.  Fair enough.  No God then either.  Hell is the absence of God 

For Christian believers, however, heaven is much more than, as Maria Shriver writes in her book What’s Heaven?, “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there.”  This, Wright continues, “is more or less exactly what millions of people in the Western world have come to believe, to accept as truth, and to teach their children.”  A careful interrogation of scripture, however, yields a different story. 

Upon death, our soul separates from our body.  Most of us understand this basic premise.  What happens afterward, though, is not in keeping with popular assumptions.  Our souls are suspended in what we might call paradise until they will once again occupy a physical body – a transformed body that will have new properties, namely that it will be incorruptible.  This reoccupation, if you will, occurs the instant heaven and earth combine.  It happens, in other words, when Eden has been, in effect, reinstituted.  Wright asserts that “[s]alvation ... is not ‘going to heaven’ but ‘being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth,’ which means, Wright continues that “[w]e are saved not as souls but as wholes.”  It is, to put it another way, a multi-step process toward an unimaginably beautiful and blissful destination 

Although I am a practicing Catholic, I will not here weigh in on purgatory.  For Wright, his position is clear.  “For millions of our theological and spiritual ancestors,” he writes, “death brought a pleasant surprise.  They had been gearing themselves up for a long struggle ahead, only to find it was already over.”  In either case, it is the desired step toward an eternity with the one true God.  But above and beyond this debate is a grander and, I suppose, more reassuring reality.  “What [we] do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, loving your neighbor as yourself – will last into God’s future.”  Again, what we do will last, which means that the story of our lives does not end with our passing.  Because of Christ’s work on the cross, we get to live, turn a new page, write another chapter.  On and on.  Forever and ever. 

This is the reason to hope, which is another way of saying rise above the lies of the enemy that prompt us to fixate on the temporal and assume that’s all there is.  Doing so is a recipe for despair, and we should avoid it at all costs.  In the Lord, Wright reminds us, “[our] labour is not in vain,” but we must be in the Lord.  We must have a relationship with Him that is not superficial, not one of convenience, not one hidden away from some groups and revealed for others: a hypocritical faith, indeed.  Put simply, we need to be serious, honest, and open about our faith.  If we want to be “bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ,” as Wright put it, we should want to get to know Jesus Christ in the here and now.  Telling ourselves stories that do not reflect scripture does no good.  In fact, it does the opposite.  Being nice is important, but being nice without a relationship with Jesus Christ is futile.  Even when we think we deserve it, there is only one way, the narrow way, to enter into the light. 

It was likely the first time I appreciated the power of story, and I was only a boy of about four-years-old.  Charlotte’s Web, which was written by E.B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams, and published in 1952 by Harper and Brothers, was not read to me before bedtime; rather, like many other kids who were born in the 70s, I experienced this classic work of children’s fiction via what my grandfather used to call the Boob tube.  The story of a barnyard pig who escapes the slaughterhouse thanks to an impressively literate spider remains loved by millions around the world.  When the farmer begins to eye up Wilbur, the pig, for what his butchered body might fetch at market, Charlotte, the spider springs into action by spinning messages into her webs, reasoning that the farmer would never dream of selling a famous pig.  Her efforts pay off, and Wilbur is even entered into a contest at the county fair.  While he does win a special prize from the judges, the joy is short-lived because Charlotte, who had accompanied him to the fairgrounds, is dying, and after she gives Wilbur her egg sac, trusting him to look after her offspring and confident that the farmer will continue to spare the life of her swine friend, she, at last, expires.  She dies, and in doing so, made one four-year-old boy cry hard enough to concern his mother. 

The 20th century American poet, Charles Bukowski once said that, for an artist, literary or otherwise, an early experience with death was not necessarily a bad thing.  I think about that from time to time, having lost my own father when I was nine; however, it is worth pausing here to consider how story, in this case Charlotte’s Web, is able pose difficult heart questions, even to the littlest among us, while also holding out the balm of a more mature, time-tested, and peace-giving perspective.  I did not understand why Charlotte had to die, but I did understand what her children meant to Wilbur, even as he said goodbye to all but three who decided to stay in the barn.  Life continued despite the absence of a dear friend.  Joy and pain somehow mingled with a single result: life.  This was life.  This is what it means to be sentient.  Victories and setbacks, happiness and despair – to be on this side of paradise is to experience it all. 

Charlotte, for her part, lived until she had nothing else to give.  Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson in this story.  When times are good, we are called to give.  When times are tough, we are still called to give.  This applies to our families, of course, but we should also not be lost on the fact that Charlotte is an arachnid, and Wilbur is a hog.  The mission extends outward just as much as it extends inward because we are all fighting against the slaughterhouse.  This is the great battle.  Self-sacrifice is the only answer.  There is, as Christ says, no greater love. 

Just like Wilbur’s human advocate, Fern Arable, the girl who first pleaded for his life, I, too, grew up and found other interests.  This is typically how it goes, after all.  But I would hard-pressed to deny what White’s story awakened in me even at such a tender age. 

Love and loss, it turns out, are hard to reconcile.  It seems impossible that they can exist together, yet they do, at least in the temporal sense. 

John, in his account of the gospel, gives us the words we need to navigate this conundrum.  He quotes the Messiah as saying “he who believes has eternal life.”  It is not “will have” but the present “has.”  Right now.  Upon giving your life to Christ.  As such, there is no real loss, just a suspension of relationship.  Hard, yes, and certainly nothing to be dismissive and callous about – Jesus wept after hearing of the loss of his friend, Lazarus, after all.  But only temporary.  Nonpermanent. 

Charlotte’s Web taught me an important lesson about love and loss, but it also put into motion a series of questions and conclusions that brought me to Christ.  It was not the sole factor, of course, but it was a significant one.  In the end, what does this all mean?  Story has the power to influence and change, but it also has the power to ask the right questions, and if we let it, if we are patient, point toward hopeful, more promising answers that in turn help us to trust.  The pig, the spider in the beginning.  The spider, the pig in the end.  Trust is the vessel on which love floats.