the Good Question

Earth Mounds Up

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:40:00 +0000

The earth mounds up
At the base of the trunk
To join the oak in its ascent.

But made of plant-junk,
Animal, dead stuff,
It has not that can grow.

But joining live seeds,
From deadness come the buds
That flower upward and spread,

And send back down their tears
To give more earth a life.
To lift it skyward and vault.

To Love Her Was His Disease

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:59:00 +0000

To love her was his disease—
It'd kill him if he could not please.

And love serves to perfect its wooed,
Not merely please its object's mood.

For 'her good' was his passion,
But not in common halfist fashion:

No doubt, half-loves prevail the day,
If armies win by what they say;

But whole-loves win, I say it's true,
If armies win by what they do.

Slow Growth

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:26:00 +0000

Seeds in dark ground
reach
for light unseen,
for downward-pressing warmth
reach.

Through long years more reaching gains—
centuries of slow growth yields—
a four-foot base and branches by thousands,
all reaching yet,
all reaching yet.

Halloween Special: The Cruel Painter by George MacDonald

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:32:00 +0000

"The Cruel Painter", set during the early Habsburg era in sixteenth-century Prague, perfectly fits the Halloween theme of this time of year, but—as always—MacDonald hasn't left us with a story that won't inspire us and make us think! It's interesting to me to find in this tale another nineteenth-century interpretation of the "vampire" legend. Whether this take on vampire lore is particularly German, Scottish, or uniquely his own, I don't know, but it is fascinating to read a pre-"Dracula" vampire story—especially one that isn't intended for horror.

Among the young men assembled at the University of Prague, in the year 159—, was one called Karl von Wolkenlicht. A somewhat careless student, he yet held a fair position in the estimation of both professors and men, because he could hardly look at a proposition without understanding it. Where such proposition, however, had to do with anything relating to the deeper insights of the nature, he was quite content that, for him, it should remain a proposition; which, however, he laid up in one of his mental cabinets, and was ready to reproduce at a moment's notice. This mental agility was more than matched by the corresponding corporeal excellence, and both aided in producing results in which his remarkable strength was equally apparent. In all games depending upon the combination of muscle and skill, he had scarce rivalry enough to keep him in practice. His strength, however, was embodied in such a softness of muscular outline, such a rare Greek-like style of beauty, and associated with such a gentleness of manner and behaviour, that, partly from the truth of the resemblance, partly from the absurdity of the contrast, he was known throughout the university by the diminutive of the feminine form of his name, and was always called Lottchen.

...Read More!

"I say, Lottchen," said one of his fellow-students, called Richter, across the table in a wine-cellar they were in the habit of frequenting, "do you know, Heinrich Höllenrachen here says that he saw this morning, with mortal eyes, whom do you think? —Lilith."

"Adam's first wife?" asked Lottchen, with an attempt at carelessness, while his face flushed like a maiden's.

"None of your chaff!" said Richter. "Your face is honester than your tongue, and confesses what you cannot deny, that you would give your chance of salvation—a small one to be sure, but all you've got—for one peep at Lilith. Wouldn't you now, Lottchen?"

"Go to the devil!" was all Lottchen's answer to his tormentor; but he turned to Heinrich, to whom the students had given the surname above mentioned, because of the enormous width of his jaws, and said with eagerness and envy, disguising them as well as he could, under the appearance of curiosity—

"You don't mean it, Heinrich? You've been taking the beggar in! Confess now."

"Not I. I saw her with my two eyes."

"Notwithstanding the different planes of their orbits," suggested Richter.

"Yes, notwithstanding the fact that I can get a parallax to any of the fixed stars in a moment, with only the breadth of my nose for the base," answered Heinrich, responding at once to the fun, and careless of the personal defect insinuated. "She was near enough for even me to see her perfectly."

"When? Where? How?" asked Lottchen.

"Two hours ago. In the churchyard of St. Stephen's. By a lucky chance. Any more little questions, my child?" answered Höllenrachen.

"What could have taken her there, who is seen nowhere?" said Richter.

"She was seated on a grave. After she left, I went to the place; but it was a new-made grave. There was no stone up. I asked the sexton about her. He said he supposed she was the daughter of the woman buried there last Thursday week. I knew it was Lilith."

"Her mother dead!" said Lottchen, musingly. Then he thought with himself—"She will be going there again, then!" But he took care that this ghost-thought should wander unembodied. "But how did you know her, Heinrich? You never saw her before."

"How do you come to be over head and ears in love with her, Lottchen, and you haven't seen her at all?" interposed Richter.

"Will you or will you not go to the devil?" rejoined Lottchen, with a comic crescendo; to which the other replied with a laugh.

"No one could miss knowing her," said Heinrich.

"Is she so very like, then?"

"It is always herself, her very self."

A fresh flask of wine, turning out to be not up to the mark, brought the current of conversation against itself; not much to the dissatisfaction of Lottchen, who had already resolved to be in the churchyard of St. Stephen's at sun-down the following day, in the hope that he too might be favoured with a vision of Lilith.

This resolution he carried out. Seated in a porch of the church, not knowing in what direction to look for the apparition he hoped to see, and desirous as well of not seeming to be on the watch for one, he was gazing at the fallen rose-leaves of the sunset, withering away upon the sky; when, glancing aside by an involuntary movement, he saw a woman seated upon a new-made grave, not many yards from where he sat, with her face buried in her hands, and apparently weeping bitterly. Karl was in the shadow of the porch, and could see her perfectly, without much danger of being discovered by her; so he sat and watched her. She raised her head for a moment, and the rose-flush of the west fell over it, shining on the tears with which it was wet, and giving the whole a bloom which did not belong to it, for it was always pale, and now pale as death. It was indeed the face of Lilith, the most celebrated beauty of Prague.

Again she buried her face in her hands; and Karl sat with a strange feeling of helplessness, which grew as he sat; and the longing to help her whom he could not help, drew his heart towards her with a trembling reverence which was quite new to him. She wept on. The western roses withered slowly away, and the clouds blended with the sky, and the stars gathered like drops of glory sinking through the vault of night, and the trees about the churchyard grew black, and Lilith almost vanished in the wide darkness. At length she lifted her head, and seeing the night around her, gave a little broken cry of dismay. The minutes had swept over her head, not through her mind, and she did not know that the dark had come.

Hearing her cry, Karl rose and approached her. She heard his footsteps, and started to her feet. Karl spoke—

"Do not be frightened," he said. "Let me see you home. I will walk behind you."

"Who are you?" she rejoined.

"Karl Wolkenlicht."

"I have heard of you. Thank you. I can go home alone."

Yet, as if in a half-dreamy, half-unconscious mood, she accepted his offered hand to lead her through the graves, and allowed him to walk beside her, till, reaching the corner of a narrow street, she suddenly bade him good-night and vanished. He thought it better not to follow her, so he returned her good-night and went home.

How to see her again was his first thought the next day; as, in fact, how to see her at all had been his first thought for many days. She went nowhere that ever he heard of; she knew nobody that he knew; she was never seen at church, or at market; never seen in the street. Her home had a dreary, desolate aspect. It looked as if no one ever went out or in. It was like a place on which decay had fallen because there was no indwelling spirit. The mud of years was baked upon its door, and no faces looked out of its dusty windows.

How then could she be the most celebrated beauty of Prague? How then was it that Heinrich Höllenrachen knew her the moment he saw her? Above all, how was it that Karl Wolkenlicht had, in fact, fallen in love with her before ever he saw her? It was thus—

Her father was a painter. Belonging thus to the public, it had taken the liberty of re-naming him. Every one called him Teufelsbürst, or Devilsbrush. It was a name with which, to judge from the nature of his representations, he could hardly fail to be pleased. For, not as a nightmare dream, which may alternate with the loveliest visions, but as his ordinary everyday work, he delighted to represent human suffering.

Not an aspect of human woe or torture, as expressed in countenance or limb, came before his willing imagination, but he bore it straightway to his easel. In the moments that precede sleep, when the black space before the eyes of the poet teems with lovely faces, or dawns into a spirit-landscape, face after face of suffering, in all varieties of expression, would crowd, as if compelled by the accompanying fiends, to present themselves, in awful levée, before the inner eye of the expectant master. Then he would rise, light his lamp, and, with rapid hand, make notes of his visions; recording, with swift successive sweeps of his pencil, every individual face which had rejoiced his evil fancy. Then he would return to his couch, and, well satisfied, fall asleep to dream yet further embodiments of human ill.

What wrong could man or mankind have done him, to be thus fearfully pursued by the vengeance of the artist's hate?

Another characteristic of the faces and form which he drew was, that they were all beautiful in the original idea. The lines of each face, however distorted by pain, would have been, in rest, absolutely beautiful; and the whole of the execution bore witness to the fact that upon this original beauty the painter had directed the artillery of anguish to bring down the sky-soaring heights of its divinity to the level of a hated existence. To do this, he worked in perfect accordance with artistic law, falsifying no line of the original forms. It was the suffering, rather than his pencil, that wrought the change. The latter was the willing instrument to record what the imagination conceived with a cruelty composed enough to be correct.

To enhance the beauty he had thus distorted, and so to enhance yet further the suffering that produced the distortion, he would often represent attendant demons, whom he made as ugly as his imagination could compass; avoiding, however, all grotesqueness beyond what was sufficient to indicate that they were demons, and not men. Their ugliness rose from hate, envy, and all evil passions; amongst which he especially delighted to represent a gloating exultation over human distress. And often in the midst of his clouds of demon faces, would some one who knew him recognise the painter's own likeness, such as the mirror might have presented it to him when he was busiest over the incarnation of some exquisite torture.

But apparently with the wish to avoid being supposed to choose such representations for their own sakes, he always found a story, often in the histories of the church, whose name he gave to the painting, and which he pretended to have inspired the pictorial conception. No one, however, who looked upon his suffering martyrs, could suppose for a moment that he honoured their martyrdom. They were but the vehicles for his hate of humanity. He was the torturer, and not Diocletian or Nero.

But, stranger yet to tell, there was no picture, whatever its subject, into which he did not introduce one form of placid and harmonious loveliness. In this, however, his fierceness was only more fully displayed. For in no case did this form manifest any relation either to the actors or the endurers in the picture. Hence its very loveliness became almost hateful to those who beheld it. Not a shade crossed the still sky of that brow, not a ripple disturbed the still sea of that cheek. She did not hate, she did not love the sufferers: the painter would not have her hate, for that would be to the injury of her loveliness: would not have her love, for he hated. Sometimes she floated above, as a still, unobservant angel, her gaze turned upward, dreaming along, careless as a white summer cloud, across the blue. If she looked down on the scene below, it was only that the beholder might see that she saw and did not care—that not a feather of her outspread pinions would quiver at the sight. Sometimes she would stand in the crowd, as if she had been copied there from another picture, and had nothing to do with this one, nor any right to be in it at all. Or when the red blood was trickling drop by drop from the crushed limb, she might be seen standing nearest, smiling over a primrose or the bloom on a peach. Some had said that she was the painter's wife; that she had been false to him; that he had killed her; and, finding that that was no sufficing revenge, thus half in love, and half in deepest hate, immortalised his vengeance. But it was now universally understood that it was his daughter, of whose loveliness extravagant reports went abroad; though all said, doubtless reading this from her father's pictures, that she was a beauty without a heart. Strange theories of something else supplying its place were rife among the anatomical students. With the girl in the pictures, the wild imagination of Lottchen, probably in part from her apparently absolute unattainableness and her undisputed heartlessness, had fallen in love, as far as the mere imagination can fall in love.

But again, how was he to see her? He haunted the house night after night. Those blue eyes never met his. No step responsive to his came from that door. It seemed to have been so long unopened that it had grown as fixed and hard as the stones that held its bolts in their passive clasp. He dared not watch in the daytime, and with all his watching at night, he never saw father or daughter or domestic cross the threshold. Little he thought that, from a shot-window near the door, a pair of blue eyes, like Lilith's, but paler and colder, were watching him just as a spider watches the fly that is likely ere long to fall into his toils. And into those toils Karl soon fell. For her form darkened the page; her form stood on the threshold of sleep; and when, overcome with watching, he did enter its precincts, her form entered with him, and walked by his side. He must find her; or the world might go to the bottomless pit for him. But how?

Yes. He would be a painter. Teufelsbürst would receive him as a humble apprentice. He would grind his colours, and Teufelsbürst would teach him the mysteries of the science which is the handmaiden of art. Then he might see her, and that was all his ambition.

In the clear morning light of a day in autumn, when the leaves were beginning to fall seared from the hand of that Death which has his dance in the chapels of nature as well as in the cathedral aisles of men—he walked up and knocked at the dingy door. The spider painter opened it himself. He was a little man, meagre and pallid, with those faded blue eyes, a low nose in three distinct divisions, and thin, curveless, cruel lips. He wore no hair on his face; but long grey locks, long as a woman's, were scattered over his shoulders, and hung down on his breast. When Wolkenlicht had explained his errand, he smiled a smile in which hypocrisy could not hide the cunning, and, after many difficulties, consented to receive him as a pupil, on condition that he would become an inmate of his house. Wolkenlicht's heart bounded with delight, which he tried to hide: the second smile of Teufelsbürst might have shown him that he had ill succeeded. The fact that he was not a native of Prague, but coming from a distant part of the country, was entirely his own master in the city, rendered this condition perfectly easy to fulfil; and that very afternoon he entered the studio of Teufelsbürst as his scholar and servant.

It was a great room, filled with the appliances and results of art. Many pictures, festooned with cobwebs, were hung carelessly on the dirty walls. Others, half finished, leaned against them, on the floor. Several, in different stages of progress, stood upon easels. But all spoke the cruel bent of the artist's genius. In one corner a lay figure was extended on a couch, covered with a pall of black velvet. Through its folds, the form beneath was easily discernible; and one hand and forearm protruded from beneath it, at right angles to the rest of the frame. Lottchen could not help shuddering when he saw it. Although he overcame the feeling in a moment, he felt a great repugnance to seating himself with his back towards it, as the arrangement of an easel, at which Teufelsbürst wished him to draw, rendered necessary. He contrived to edge himself round, so that when he lifted his eyes he should see the figure, and be sure that it could not rise without his being aware of it. But his master saw and understood his altered position; and under some pretence about the light, compelled him to resume the position in which he had placed him at first; after which he sat watching, over the top of his picture, the expression of his countenance as he tried to draw; reading in it the horrid fancy that the figure under the pall had risen, and was stealthily approaching to look over his shoulder. But Lottchen resisted the feeling, and, being already no contemptible draughtsman, was soon interested enough to forget it. And then, any moment she might enter.

Now began a system of slow torture, for the chance of which the painter had been long on the watch—especially since he had first seen Karl lingering about the house. His opportunities of seeing physical suffering were nearly enough even for the diseased necessities of his art; but now he had one in his power, on whom, his own will fettering him, he could try any experiments he pleased for the production of a kind of suffering, in the observation of which he did not consider that he had yet sufficient experience. He would hold the very heart of the youth in his hand, and wring it and torture it to his own content. And lest Karl should be strong enough to prevent those expressions of pain for which he lay on the watch, he would make use of further means, known to himself, and known to few besides.

All that day Karl saw nothing of Lilith; but he heard her voice once—and that was enough for one day. The next, she was sitting to her father the greater part of the day, and he could see her as often as he dared glance up from his drawing. She had looked at him when she entered, but had shown no sign of recognition; and all day long she took no further notice of him. He hoped, at first, that this came of the intelligence of love; but he soon began to doubt it. For he saw that, with the holy shadow of sorrow, all that distinguished the expression of her countenance from that which the painter so constantly reproduced, had vanished likewise. It was the very face of the unheeding angel whom, as often as he lifted his eyes higher than hers, he saw on the wall above her, playing on a psaltery in the smoke of the torment ascending for ever from burning Babylon. —The power of the painter had not merely wrought for the representation of the woman of his imagination; it had had scope as well in realising her.

Karl soon began to see that communication, other than of the eyes, was all but hopeless; and to any attempt in that way she seemed altogether indisposed to respond. Nor if she had wished it, would it have been safe; for as often as he glanced towards her, instead of hers, he met the blue eyes of the painter gleaming upon him like winter lightning. His tones, his gestures, his words, seemed kind: his glance and his smile refused to be disguised.

The first day he dined alone in the studio, waited upon by an old woman; the next he was admitted to the family table, with Teufelsbürst and Lilith. The room offered a strange contrast to the study. As far as handicraft, directed by a sumptuous taste, could construct a house-paradise, this was one. But it seemed rather a paradise of demons; for the walls were covered with Teufelsbürst's paintings. During the dinner, Lilith's gaze scarcely met that of Wolkenlicht; and once or twice, when their eyes did meet, her glance was so perfectly unconcerned, that Karl wished he might look at her for ever without the fear of her looking at him again. She seemed like one whose love had rushed out glowing with seraphic fire, to be frozen to death in a more than wintry cold: she now walked lonely without her love. In the evenings, he was expected to continue his drawing by lamplight; and at night he was conducted by Teufelsbürst to his chamber. Not once did he allow him to proceed thither alone, and not once did he leave him there without locking and bolting the door on the outside. But he felt nothing except the coldness of Lilith.

Day after day she sat to her father, in every variety of costume that could best show the variety of her beauty. How much greater that beauty might be, if it ever blossomed into a beauty of soul, Wolkenlicht never imagined; for he soon loved her enough to attribute to her all the possibilities of her face as actual possessions of her being. To account for everything that seemed to contradict this perfection, his brain was prolific in inventions; till he was compelled at last to see that she was in the condition of a rose-bud, which, on the point of blossoming, had been chilled into a changeless bud by the cold of an untimely frost. For one day, after the father and daughter had become a little more accustomed to his silent presence, a conversation began between them, which went on until he saw that Teufelsbürst believed in nothing except his art. How much of his feeling for that could be dignified by the name of belief, seeing its objects were such as they were, might have been questioned. It seemed to Wolkenlicht to amount only to this: that, amidst a thousand distastes, it was a pleasant thing to reproduce on the canvas the forms he beheld around him, modifying them to express the prevailing feelings of his own mind.

A more desolate communication between souls than that which then passed between father and daughter could hardly be imagined. The father spoke of humanity and all its experiences in a tone of the bitterest scorn. He despised men, and himself amongst them; and rejoiced to think that the generations rose and vanished, brood after brood, as the crops of corn grew and disappeared. Lilith, who listened to it all unmoved, taking only an intellectual interest in the question, remarked that even the corn had more life than that; for, after its death, it rose again in the new crop. Whether she meant that the corn was therefore superior to man, forgetting that the superior can produce being without losing its own, or only advanced an objection to her father's argument, Wolkenlicht could not tell. But Teufelsbürst laughed like the sound of a saw, and said: "Follow out the analogy, my Lilith, and you will see that man is like the corn that springs again after it is buried; but unfortunately the only result we know of is a vampire."

Wolkenlicht looked up, and saw a shudder pass through the frame, and over the pale thin face of the painter. This he could not account for. But Teufelsbürst could have explained it, for there were strange whispers abroad, and they had reached his ear; and his philosophy was not quite enough for them. But the laugh with which Lilith met this frightful attempt at wit, grated dreadfully on Wolkenlicht's feeling. With her, too, however, a reaction seemed to follow. For, turning round a moment after, and looking at the picture on which her father was working, the tears rose in her eyes, and she said: "Oh! father, how like my mother you have made me this time!" "Child!" retorted the painter with a cold fierceness, "you have no mother. That which is gone out is gone out. Put no name in my hearing on that which is not. Where no substance is, how can there be a name?"

Lilith rose and left the room. Wolkenlicht now understood that Lilith was a frozen bud, and could not blossom into a rose. But pure love lives by faith. It loves the vaguely beheld and unrealised ideal. It dares believe that the loved is not all that she ever seemed. It is in virtue of this that love loves on. And it was in virtue of this, that Wolkenlicht loved Lilith yet more after he discovered what a grave of misery her unbelief was digging for her within her own soul. For her sake he would bear anything—bear even with calmness the torments of his own love; he would stay on, hoping and hoping. —The text, that we know not what a day may bring forth, is just as true of good things as of evil things; and out of Time's womb the facts must come.

But with the birth of this resolution to endure, his suffering abated; his face grew more calm; his love, no less earnest, was less imperious; and he did not look up so often from his work when Lilith was present. The master could see that his pupil was more at ease, and that he was making rapid progress in his art. This did not suit his designs, and he would betake himself to his further schemes.

For this purpose he proceeded first to simulate a friendship for Wolkenlicht, the manifestations of which he gradually increased, until, after a day or two, he asked him to drink wine with him in the evening. Karl readily agreed. The painter produced some of his best; but took care not to allow Lilith to taste it; for he had cunningly prepared and mingled with it a decoction of certain herbs and other ingredients, exercising specific actions upon the brain, and tending to the inordinate excitement of those portions of it which are principally under the rule of the imagination. By the reaction of the brain during the operation of these stimulants, the imagination is filled with suggestions and images. The nature of these is determined by the prevailing mood of the time. They are such as the imagination would produce of itself, but increased in number and intensity. Teufelsbürst, without philosophising about it, called his preparation simply a love-philtre, a concoction well known by name, but the composition of which was the secret of only a few. Wolkenlicht had, of course, not the least suspicion of the treatment to which he was subjected.

Teufelsbürst was, however, doomed to fresh disappointment. Not that his potion failed in the anticipated effect, for now Karl's real sufferings began; but that such was the strength of Karl's will, and his fear of doing anything that might give a pretext for banishing him from the presence of Lilith, that he was able to conceal his feelings far too successfully for the satisfaction of Teufelsbürst's art. Yet he had to fetter himself with all the restraints that self-exhortation could load him with, to refrain from falling at the feet of Lilith and kissing the hem of her garment. For that, as the lowliest part of all that surrounded her, itself kissing the earth, seemed to come nearest within the reach of his ambition, and therefore to draw him the most.

No doubt the painter had experience and penetration enough to perceive that he was suffering intensely; but he wanted to see the suffering embodied in outward signs, bringing it within the region over which his pencil held sway. He kept on, therefore, trying one thing after another, and rousing the poor youth to agony; till to his other sufferings were added, at length, those of failing health; a fact which notified itself evidently enough even for Teufelsbürst, though its signs were not of the sort he chiefly desired. But Karl endured all bravely.

Meantime, for various reasons, he scarcely ever left the house.

I must now interrupt the course of my story to introduce another element.

A few years before the period of my tale, a certain shoemaker of the city had died under circumstances more than suggestive of suicide. He was buried, however, with such precautions, that six weeks elapsed before the rumour of the facts broke out; upon which rumour, not before, the most fearful reports began to be circulated, supported by what seemed to the people of Prague incontestable evidence. —A spectrum of the deceased appeared to multitudes of persons, playing horrible pranks, and occasioning indescribable consternation throughout the whole town. This went on till at last, about eight months after his burial, the magistrates caused his body to be dug up; when it was found in just the condition of the bodies of those who in the eastern countries of Europe are called vampires. They buried the corpse under the gallows; but neither the digging up nor the reburying were of avail to banish the spectre. Again the spade and pick-axe were set to work, and the dead man being found considerably improved in condition since his last interment, was, with various horrible indignities, burnt to ashes, "after which the spectrum was never seen more."

And a second epidemic of the same nature had broken out a little before the period to which I have brought my story.

About midnight, after a calm frosty day, for it was now winter, a terrible storm of wind and snow came on. The tempest howled frightfully about the house of the painter, and Wolkenlicht found some solace in listening to the uproar, for his troubled thoughts would not allow him to sleep. It raged on all the next three days, till about noon on the fourth day, when it suddenly fell, and all was calm. The following night, Wolkenlicht, lying awake, heard unaccountable noises in the next house, as of things thrown about, of kicking and fighting horses, and of opening and shutting gates. Flinging wide his lattice and looking out, the noise of howling dogs came to him from every quarter of the town. The moon was bright and the air was still. In a little while he heard the sounds of a horse going at full gallop round the house, so that it shook as if it would fall; and flashes of light shone into his room. How much of this may have been owing to the effect of the drugs on poor Lottchen's brain, I leave my readers to determine. But when the family met at breakfast in the morning, Teufelsbürst, who had been already out of doors, reported that he had found the marks of strange feet in the snow, all about the house and through the garden at the back; stating, as his belief, that the tracks must be continued over the roofs, for there was no passage otherwise. There was a wicked gleam in his eye as he spoke; and Lilith believed that he was only trying an experiment on Karl's nerves. He persisted that he had never seen any footprints of the sort before. Karl informed him of his experiences during the night; upon which Teufelsbürst looked a little graver still, and proceeded to tell them that the storm, whose snow was still covering the ground, had arisen the very moment that their next door neighbour died, and had ceased as suddenly the moment he was buried, though it had raved furiously all the time of the funeral, so that "it made men's bodies quake and their teeth chatter in their heads." Karl had heard that the man, whose name was John Kuntz, was dead and buried. He knew that he had been a very wealthy, and therefore most respectable, alderman of the town; that he had been very fond of horses; and that he had died in consequence of a kick received from one of his own, as he was looking at his hoof. But he had not heard that, just before he died, a black cat "opened the casement with her nails, ran to his bed, and violently scratched his face and the bolster, as if she endeavoured by force to remove him out of the place where he lay. But the cat afterwards was suddenly gone, and she was no sooner gone, but he breathed his last."

So said Teufelsbürst, as the reporter of the town talk. Lilith looked very pale and terrified; and it was perhaps owing to this that the painter brought no more tales home with him. There were plenty to bring, but he heard them all and said nothing. The fact was that the philosopher himself could not resist the infection of the fear that was literally raging in the city; and perhaps the reports that he himself had sold himself to the devil had sufficient response from his own evil conscience to add to the influence of the epidemic upon him. The whole place was infested with the presence of the dead Kuntz, till scarce a man or woman would dare to be alone. He strangled old men; insulted women; squeezed children to death; knocked out the brains of dogs against the ground; pulled up posts; turned milk into blood; nearly killed a worthy clergyman by breathing upon him the intolerable airs of the grave, cold and malignant and noisome; and, in short, filled the city with a perfect madness of fear, so that every report was believed without the smallest doubt or investigation.

Though Teufelsbürst brought home no more of the town talk, the old servant was a faithful purveyor, and frequented the news-mart assiduously. Indeed she had some nightmare experiences of her own that she was proud to add to the stock of horrors which the city enjoyed with such a hearty community of goods. For those regions were not far removed from the birthplace and home of the vampire. The belief in vampires is the quintessential concentration and embodiment of all the passion of fear in Hungary and the adjacent regions. Nor, of all the other inventions of the human imagination, has there ever been one so perfect in crawling terror as this. Lilith and Karl were quite familiar with the popular ideas on the subject. It did not require to be explained to them, that a vampire was a body retaining a kind of animal life after the soul had departed. If any relation existed between it and the vanished ghost, it was only sufficient to make it restless in its grave. Possessed of vitality enough to keep it uncorrupted and pliant, its only instinct was a blind hunger for the sole food which could keep its awful life persistent—living human blood. Hence it, or, if not it, a sort of semi-material exhalation or essence of it, retaining its form and material relations, crept from its tomb, and went roaming about till it found some one asleep, towards whom it had an attraction, founded on old affection. It sucked the blood of this unhappy being, transferring so much of its life to itself as a vampire could assimilate. Death was the certain consequence. If suspicion conjectured aright, and they opened the proper grave, the body of the vampire would be found perfectly fresh and plump, sometimes indeed of rather florid complexion;—with grown hair, eyes half open, and the stains of recent blood about its greedy, leech-like lips. Nothing remained but to consume the corpse to ashes, upon which the vampire would show itself no more. But what added infinitely to the horror was the certainty that whoever died from the mouth of the vampire, wrinkled grandsire or delicate maiden, must in turn rise from the grave, and go forth a vampire, to suck the blood of the dearest left behind. This was the generation of the vampire brood. Lilith trembled at the very name of the creature. Karl was too much in love to be afraid of anything. Yet the evident fear of the unbelieving painter took a hold of his imagination; and, under the influence of the potions of which he still partook unwittingly, when he was not thinking about Lilith, he was thinking about the vampire.

Meantime, the condition of things in the painter's household continued much the same for Wolkenlicht—work all day; no communication between the young people; the dinner and the wine; silent reading when work was done, with stolen glances many over the top of the book, glances that were never returned; the cold good-night; the locking of the door; the wakeful night and the drowsy morning. But at length a change came, and sooner than any of the party had expected. For, whether it was that the impatience of Teufelsbürst had urged him to yet more dangerous experiments, or that the continuance of those he had been so long employing had overcome at length the vitality of Wolkenlicht—one afternoon, as he was sitting at his work, he suddenly dropped from his chair, and his master hurrying to him in some alarm, found him rigid and apparently lifeless. Lilith was not in the study when this took place. In justice to Teufelsbürst, it must be confessed that he employed all the skill he was master of, which for beneficent purposes was not very great, to restore the youth; but without avail. At last, hearing the footsteps of Lilith, he desisted in some consternation; and that she might escape being shocked by the sight of a dead body where she had been accustomed to see a living one, he removed the lay figure from the couch, and laid Karl in its place, covering him with a black velvet pall. He was just in time. She started at seeing no one in Karl's place and said—

"Where is your pupil, father?"

"Gone home," he answered, with a kind of convulsive grin.

She glanced round the room, caught sight of the lay figure where it had not been before, looked at the couch, and saw the pall yet heaved up from beneath, opened her eyes till the entire white sweep around the iris suggested a new expression of consternation to Teufelsbürst, though from a quarter whence he did not desire or look for it; and then, without a word, sat down to a drawing she had been busy upon the day before. But her father, glancing at her now, as Wolkenlicht had used to do, could not help seeing that she was frightfully pale. She showed no other sign of uneasiness. As soon as he released her, she withdrew, with one more glance, as she passed, at the couch and the figure blocked out in black upon it. She hastened to her chamber, shut and locked the door, sat down on the side of the couch, and fell, not a-weeping, but a-thinking. Was he dead? What did it matter? They would all be dead soon. Her mother was dead already. It was only that the earth could not bear more children, except she devoured those to whom she had already given birth. But what if they had to come back in another form, and live another sad, hopeless, loveless life over again? —And so she went on questioning, and receiving no replies; while through all her thoughts passed and repassed the eyes of Wolkenlicht, which she had often felt to be upon her when she did not see them, wild with repressed longing, the light of their love shining through the veil of diffused tears, ever gathering and never overflowing. Then came the pale face, so worshipping, so distant in its self-withdrawn devotion, slowly dawning out of the vapours of her reverie. When it vanished, she tried to see it again. It would not come when she called it; but wheng remained buteft knocking at the door of the lost, and wandered away, out came the pale, troubled, silent face again, gathering itself up from some unknown nook in her world of phantasy, and once more, when she tried to steady it by the fixedness of her own regard, fading back into the mist. So the phantasm of the dead drew near and wooed, as the living had never dared. —What if there were any good in loving? What if men and women did not die all out, but some dim shade of each, like that pale, mind-ghost of Wolkenlicht, floated through the eternal vapours of chaos? And what if they might sometimes cross each other's path, meet, know that they met, love on? Would not that revive the withered memory, fix the fleeting ghost, give a new habitation, a body even, to the poor, unhoused wanderers, frozen by the eternal frosts, no longer thinking beings, but thoughts wandering through the brain of the "Melancholy Mass?" Back with the thought came the face of the dead Karl, and the maiden threw herself on her bed in a flood of bitter tears. She could have loved him if he had only lived: she did love him, for he was dead. But even in the midst of the remorse that followed—for had she not killed him?—life seemed a less hard and hopeless thing than before. For it is love itself and not its responses or results that is the soul of life and its pleasures.

Two hours passed ere she could again show herself to her father, from whom she seemed in some new way divided by the new feeling in which he did not, and could not share. But at last, lest he should seek her, and finding her, should suspect her thoughts, she descended and sought him. —For there is a maidenliness in sorrow, that wraps her garments close around her. —But he was not to be seen; the door of the study was locked. A shudder passed through her as she thought of what her father, who lost no opportunity of furthering his all but perfect acquaintance with the human form and structure, might be about with the figure which she knew lay dead beneath that velvet pall, but which had arisen to haunt the hollow caves and cells of her living brain. She rushed away, and up once more to her silent room, through the darkness which had now settled down in the house; threw herself again on her bed, and lay almost paralysed with horror and distress.

But Teufelsbürst was not about anything so frightful as she supposed, though something frightful enough. I have already implied that Wolkenlicht was, in form, as fine an embodiment of youthful manhood as any old Greek republic could have provided one of its sculptors with as model for an Apollo. It is true, that to the eye of a Greek artist he would not have been more acceptable in consequence of the regimen he had been going through for the last few weeks; but the emaciation of Wolkenlicht's frame, and the consequent prominence of the muscles, indicating the pain he had gone through, were peculiarly attractive to Teufelsbürst. —He was busy preparing to take a cast of the body of his dead pupil, that it might aid to the perfection of his future labours.

He was deep in the artistic enjoyment of a form, at the same time so beautiful and strong, yet with the lines of suffering in every limb and feature, when his daughter's hand was laid on the latch. He started, flung the velvet drapery over the body, and went to the door. But Lilith had vanished. He returned to his labours. The operation took a long time, for he performed it very carefully. Towards midnight, he had finished encasing the body in a close-clinging shell of plaster, which, when broken off, and fitted together, would be the matrix to the form of the dead Wolkenlicht. Before leaving it to harden till the morning, he was just proceeding to strengthen it with an additional layer all over, when a flash of lightning, reflected in all its dazzle from the snow without, almost blinded him. A peal of long-drawn thunder followed; the wind rose; and just such a storm came on as had risen some time before at the death of Kuntz, whose spectre was still tormenting the city. The gnomes of terror, deep hidden in the caverns of Teufelsbürst's nature, broke out jubilant. With trembling hands he tried to cast the pall over the awful white chrysalis,—failed, and fled to his chamber. And there lay the studio naked to the eyes of the lightning, with its tortured forms throbbing out of the dark, and quivering, as with life, in the almost continuous palpitations of the light; while on the couch lay the motionless mass of whiteness, gleaming blue in the lightning, almost more terrible in its crude indications of the human form, than that which it enclosed. It lay there as if dropped from some tree of chaos, haggard with the snows of eternity—a huge mis-shapen nut, with a corpse for its kernel.

But the lightning would soon have revealed a more terrible sight still, had there been any eyes to behold it. At midnight, while a peal of thunder was just dying away in the distance, the crust of death flew asunder, rending in all directions; and, pale as his investiture, staring with ghastly eyes, the form of Karl started up sitting on the couch. Had he not been far beyond ordinary men in strength, he could not thus have rent his sepulchre. Indeed, had Teufelsbürst been able to finish his task by the additional layer of gypsum which he contemplated, he must have died the moment life revived; although, so long as the trance lasted, neither the exclusion from the air, nor the practical solidification of the walls of his chest, could do him any injury. He had lain unconscious throughout the operations of Teufelsbürst, but now the catalepsy had passed away, possibly under the influence of the electric condition of the atmosphere. Very likely the strength he now put forth was intensified by a convulsive reaction of all the powers of life, as is not infrequently the case in sudden awakenings from similar interruptions of vital activity. The coming to himself and the bursting of his case were simultaneous. He sat staring about him, with, of all his mental faculties, only his imagination awake, from which the thoughts that occupied it when he fell senseless had not yet faded. These thoughts had been compounded of feelings about Lilith, and speculations about the vampire that haunted the neighbourhood; and the fumes of the last drug of which he had partaken, still hovering in his brain, combined with these thoughts and fancies to generate the delusion that he had just broken from the embrace of his coffin, and risen, the last-born of the vampire race. The sense of unavoidable obligation to fulfil his doom, was yet mingled with a faint flutter of joy, for he knew that he must go to Lilith. With a deep sigh, he rose, gathered up the pall of black velvet, flung it around him, stepped from the couch, and left the study to find her.

Meantime, Teufelsbürst had sufficiently recovered to remember that he had left the door of the studio unfastened, and that any one entering would discover in what he had been engaged, which, in the case of his getting into any difficulty about the death of Karl, would tell powerfully against him. He was at the farther end of a long passage, leading from the house to the studio, on his way to make all secure, when Karl appeared at the door, and advanced towards him. The painter, seized with invincible terror, turned and fled. He reached his room, and fell senseless on the floor. The phantom held on its way, heedless.

Lilith, on gaining her room the second time, had thrown herself on her bed as before, and had wept herself into a troubled slumber. She lay dreaming—and dreadful dreams. Suddenly she awoke in one of those peals of thunder which tormented the high regions of the air, as a storm billows the surface of the ocean. She lay awake and listened. As it died away, she thought she heard, mingling with its last muffled murmurs, the sound of moaning. She turned her face towards the room in keen terror. But she saw nothing. Another light, long-drawn sigh reached her ear, and at the same moment a flash of lightning illumined the room. In the corner farthest from her bed, she spied a white face, nothing more. She was dumb and motionless with fear. Utter darkness followed, a darkness that seemed to enter into her very brain. Yet she felt that the face was slowly crossing the black gulf of the room, and drawing near to where she lay. The next flash revealed, as it bended over her, the ghastly face of Karl, down which flowed fresh tears. The rest of his form was lost in blackness. Lilith did not faint, but it was the very force of her fear that seemed to keep her alive. It became for the moment the atmosphere of her life. She lay trembling and staring at the spot in the darkness where she supposed the face of Karl still to be. But the next flash showed her the face far off, looking at her through the panes of her lattice-window.

For Lottchen, as soon as he saw Lilith, seemed to himself to go through a second stage of awaking. Her face made him doubt whether he could be a vampire after all; for instead of wanting to bite her arm and suck the blood, he all but fell down at her feet in a passion of speechless love. The next moment he became aware that his presence must be at least very undesirable to her; and in an instant he had reached her window, which he knew looked upon a lower roof that extended between two different parts of the house, and before the next flash came, he had stepped through the lattice and closed it behind him.

Believing his own room to be attainable from this quarter, he proceeded along the roof in the direction he judged best. The cold winter air by degrees restored him entirely to his right mind, and he soon comprehended the whole of the circumstances in which he found himself. Peeping through a window he was passing, to see whether it belonged to his room, he spied Teufelsbürst, who, at the very moment, was lifting his head from the faint into which he had fallen at the first sight of Lottchen. The moon was shining clear, and in its light the painter saw, to his horror, the pale face staring in at his window. He thought it had been there ever since he had fainted, and dropped again in a deeper swoon than before. Karl saw him fall, and the truth flashed upon him that the wicked artist took him for what he had believed himself to be when first he recovered from his trance—namely, the vampire of the former Karl Wolkenlicht. The moment he comprehended it, he resolved to keep up the delusion if possible. Meantime he was innocently preparing a new ingredient for the popular dish of horrors to be served at the ordinary of the city the next day. For the old servant's were not the only eyes that had seen him besides those of Teufelsbürst. What could be more like a vampire, dragging his pall after him, than this apparition of poor, half-frozen Lottchen, crawling across the roof? Karl remembered afterwards that he had heard the dogs howling awfully in every direction, as he crept along; but this was hardly necessary to make those who saw him conclude that it was the same phantasm of John Kuntz, which had been infesting the whole city, and especially the house next door to the painter's, which had been the dwelling of the respectable alderman who had degenerated into this most disreputable of moneyless vagabonds. What added to the consternation of all who heard of it, was the sickening conviction that the extreme measures which they had resorted to in order to free the city from the ghoul, beyond which nothing could be done, had been utterly unavailing, successful as they had proved in every other known case of the kind. For, urged as well by various horrid signs about his grave, which not even its close proximity to the altar could render a place of repose, they had opened it, had found in the body every peculiarity belonging to a vampire, had pulled it out with the greatest difficulty on account of a quite supernatural ponderosity; which rendered the horse which had killed him—a strong animal—all but unable to drag it along, and had at last, after cutting it in pieces, and expending on the fire two hundred and sixteen great billets, succeeded in conquering its incombustibleness, and reducing it to ashes. Such, at least, was the story which had reached the painter's household, and was believed by many; and if all this did not compel the perturbed corpse to rest, what more could be done?

When Karl had reached his room, and was dressing himself, the thought struck him that something might be made of the report of the extreme weight of the body of old Kuntz, to favour the continuance of the delusion of Teufelsbürst, although he hardly knew yet to what use he could turn this delusion. He was convinced that he would have made no progress however long he might have remained in his house; and that he would have more chance of favour with Lilith if he were to meet her in any other circumstances whatever than those in which he invariably saw her—namely, surrounded by her father's influences, and watched by her father's cold blue eyes.

As soon as he was dressed, he crept down to the studio, which was now quiet enough, the storm being over, and the moon filling it with her steady shine. In the corner lay in all directions the fragments of the mould which his own body had formed and filled. The bag of plaster and the bucket of water which the painter had been using stood beside. Lottchen gathered all the pieces together, and then making his way to an outhouse where he had seen various odds and ends of rubbish lying, chose from the heap as many pieces of old iron and other metal as he could find. To these he added a few large stones from the garden. When he had got all into the studio, he locked the door, and proceeded to fit together the parts of the mould, filling up the hollow as he went on with the heaviest things he could get into it, and solidifying the whole by pouring in plaster; till, having at length completed it, and obliterated, as much as possible, the marks of joining, he left it to harden, with the conviction that now it would make a considerable impression on Teufelsbürst's imagination, as well as on his muscular sense. He then left everything else as nearly undisturbed as he could; and, knowing all the ways of the house, was soon in the street, without leaving any signs of his exit.

Karl soon found himself before the house in which his friend Höllenrachen resided. Knowing his studious habits, he had hoped to see his light still burning, nor was he disappointed. He contrived to bring him to his window, and a moment after, the door was cautiously opened.

"Why, Lottchen, where do you come from?"

"From the grave, Heinrich, or next door to it."

"Come in, and tell me all about it. We thought the old painter had made a model of you, and tortured you to death."

"Perhaps you were not far wrong. But get me a horn of ale, for even a vampire is thirsty, you know."

"A vampire!" exclaimed Heinrich, retreating a pace, and involuntarily putting himself upon his guard.

Karl laughed.

"My hand was warm, was it not, old fellow?" he said. "Vampires are cold, all but the blood."

"What a fool I am!" rejoined Heinrich. "But you know we have been hearing such horrors lately that a fellow may be excused for shuddering a little when a pale-faced apparition tells him at two o'clock in the morning that he is a vampire, and thirsty, too."

Karl told him the whole story; and the mental process of regarding it for the sake of telling it, revealed to him pretty clearly some of the treatment of which he had been unconscious at the time. Heinrich was quite sure that his suspicions were correct. And now the question was, what was to be done next?

"At all events," said Heinrich, "we must keep you out of the way for some time. I will represent to my landlady that you are in hiding from enemies, and her heart will rule her tongue. She can let you have a garret-room, I know; and I will do as well as I can to bear you company. We shall have time then to invent some plan of operation."

To this proposal Karl agreed with hearty thanks, and soon all was arranged. The only conclusion they could yet arrive at was, that somehow or other the old demon-painter must be tamed.

Meantime, how fared it with Lilith? She too had no doubt that she had seen the body-ghost of poor Karl, and that the vampire had, according to rule, paid her the first visit because he loved her best. This was horrible enough if the vampire were not really the person he represented; but if in any sense it were Karl himself, at least it gave some expectation of a more prolonged existence than her father had taught her to look for; and if love anything like her mother's still lasted, even along with the habits of a vampire, there was something to hope for in the future. And then, though he had visited her, he had not, as far as she was aware, deprived her of a drop of blood. She could not be certain that he had not bitten her, for she had been in such a strange condition of mind that she might not have felt it, but she believed that he had restrained the impulses of his vampire nature, and had left her, lest he should yet yield to them. She fell fast asleep; and, when morning came, there was not, as far as she could judge, one of those triangular leech-like perforations to be found upon her whole body. Will it be believed that the moment she was satisfied of this, she was seized by a terrible jealousy, lest Karl should have gone and bitten some one else? Most people will wonder that she should not have gone out of her senses at once; but there was all the difference between a visit from a real vampire and a visit from a man she had begun to love, even although she took him for a vampire. All the difference does not lie in a name. They were very different causes, and the effects must be very different.

When Teufelsbürst came down in the morning, he crept into the studio like a murderer. There lay the awful white block, seeming to his eyes just the same as he had left it. What was to be done with it? He dared not open it. Mould and model must go together. But whither? If inquiry should be made after Wolkenlicht, and this were discovered anywhere on his premises, would it not be enough to bring him at once to the gallows? Therefore it would be dangerous to bury it in the garden, or in the cellar.

"Besides," thought he, with a shudder, "that would be to fix the vampire as a guest for ever." —And the horrors of the past night rushed back upon his imagination with renewed intensity. What would it be to have the dead Karl crawling about his house for ever, now inside, now out, now sitting on the stairs, now staring in at the windows?

He would have dragged it to the bottom of his garden, past which the Moldau flowed, and plunged it into the stream; but then, should the spectre continue to prove troublesome, it would be almost impossible to reach the body so as to destroy it by fire; besides which, he could not do it without assistance, and the probability of discovery. If, however, the apparition should turn out to be no vampire, but only a respectable ghost, they might manage to endure its presence, till it should be weary of haunting them.

He resolved at last to convey the body for the meantime into a concealed cellar in the house, seeing something must be done before his daughter came down. Proceeding to remove it, his consternation as greatly increased when he discovered how the body had grown in weight since he had thus disposed of it, leaving on his mind scarcely a hope that it could turn out not to be a vampire after all. He could scarcely stir it, and there was but one whom he could call to his assistance—the old woman who acted as his housekeeper and servant.

He went to her room, roused her, and told her the whole story. Devoted to her master for many years, and not quite so sensitive to fearful influences as when less experienced in horrors, she showed immediate readiness to render him assistance. Utterly unable, however, to lift the mass between them, they could only drag and push it along; and such a slow toil was it that there was no time to remove the traces of its track, before Lilith came down and saw a broad white line leading from the door of the studio down the cellarstairs. She knew in a moment what it meant; but not a word was uttered about the matter, and the name of Karl Wolkenlicht seemed to be entirely forgotten.

But how could the affairs of a house go on all the same when every one of the household knew that a dead body lay in the cellar?—nay more, that, although it lay still and dead enough all day, it would come half alive at nightfall, and, turning the whole house into a sepulchre by its presence, go creeping about like a cat all over it in the dark—perhaps with phosphorescent eyes? So it was not surprising that the painter abandoned his studio early, and that the three found themselves together in the gorgeous room formerly described, as soon as twilight began to fall.

Already Teufelsbürst had begun to experience a kind of shrinking from the horrid faces in his own pictures, and to feel disgusted at the abortions of his own mind. But all that he and the old woman now felt was an increasing fear as the night drew on, a kind of sickening and paralysing terror. The thing down there would not lie quiet—at least its phantom in the cellars of their imagination would not. As much as possible, however, they avoided alarming Lilith, who, knowing all they knew, was as silent as they. But her mind was in a strange state of excitement, partly from the presence of a new sense of love, the pleasure of which all the atmosphere of grief into which it grew could not totally quench. It comforted her somehow, as a child may comfort when his father is away.

Bedtime came, and no one made a move to go. Without a word spoken on the subject, the three remained together all night; the elders nodding and slumbering occasionally, and Lilith getting some share of repose on a couch. All night the shape of death might be somewhere about the house; but it did not disturb them. They heard no sound, saw no sight; and when the morning dawned, they separated, chilled and stupid, and for the time beyond fear, to seek repose in their private chambers. There they remained equally undisturbed.

But when the painter approached his easel a few hours after, looking more pale and haggard still than he was wont, from the fears of the night, a new bewilderment took possession of him. He had been busy with a fresh embodiment of his favourite subject, into which he had sketched the form of the student as the sufferer. He had represented poor Wolkenlicht as just beginning to recover from a trance, while a group of surgeons, unaware of the signs of returning life, were absorbed in a minute dissection of one of the limbs. At an open door he had painted Lilith passing, with her face buried in a bunch of sweet peas. But when he came to the picture, he found, to his astonishment and terror, that the face of one of the group was now turned towards that of the victim, regarding his revival with demoniac satisfaction, and taking pains to prevent the others from discovering it. The face of this prince of torturers was that of Teufelsbürst himself. Lilith had altogether vanished, and in her place stood the dim vampire reiteration of the body that lay extended on the table, staring greedily at the assembled company. With trembling hands the painter removed the picture from the easel, and turned its face to the wall.

Of course this was the work of Lottchen. When he left the house, he took with him the key of a small private door, which was so seldom used that, while it remained closed, the key would not be missed, perhaps for many months. Watching the windows, he had chosen a safe time to enter, and had been hard at work all night on these alterations. Teufelsbürst attributed them to the vampire, and left the picture as he found it, not daring to put brush to it again.

The next night was passed much after the same fashion. But the fear had begun to die away a little in the hearts of the women, who did not know what had taken place in the studio on the previous night. It burrowed, however, with gathered force in the vitals of Teufelsbürst. But this night likewise passed in peace; and before it was over, the old woman had taken to speculating in her own mind as to the best way of disposing of the body, seeing it was not at all likely to be troublesome. But when the painter entered his studio in trepidation the next morning, he found that the form of the lovely Lilith was painted out of every picture in the room. This could not be concealed; and Lilith and the servant became aware that the studio was the portion of the house in haunting which the vampire left the rest in peace.

Karl recounted all the tricks he had played to his friend Heinrich, who begged to be allowed to bear him company the following night. To this Karl consented, thinking it would be considerably more agreeable to have a companion. So they took a couple of bottles of wine and some provisions with them, and before midnight found themselves snug in the studio. They sat very quiet for some time, for they knew that if they were seen, two vampires would not be so terrible as one, and might occasion discovery. But at length Heinrich could bear it no longer.

"I say, Lottchen, let's go and look; for your dead body. What has the old beggar done with it?"

"I think I know. Stop; let me peep out. All right! Come along."

With a lamp in his hand, he led the way to the cellars, and after searching about a little they discovered it.

"It looks horrid enough," said Heinrich, "but think a drop or two of wine would brighten it up a little."

So he took a bottle from his pocket, and after they had had a glass apiece, he dropped a third in blots all over the plaster. Being red wine, it had the effect Höllenrachen desired.

"When they visit it next, they will know that the vampire can find the food he prefers," said he.

In a corner close by the plaster, they found the clothes Karl had worn.

"Hillo!" said Heinrich, "we'll make something of this find."

So he carried them with him to the studio. There he got hold of the lay-figure.

"What are you about, Heinrich?"

"Going to make a scarecrow to keep the ravens off old Teufel's pictures," answered Heinrich, as he went on dressing the lay-figure in Karl's clothes. He next seated the creature at an easel with its back to the door, so that it should be the first thing the painter should see when he entered. Karl meant to remove this before he went, for it was too comical to fall in with the rest of his proceedings. But the two sat down to their supper, and by the time they had finished the wine, they thought they should like to go to bed. So they got up and went home, and Karl forgot the lay-figure, leaving it in busy motionlessness all night before the easel.

When Teufelsbürst saw it, he turned and fled with a cry that brought his daughter to his help. He rushed past her, able only to articulate:

"The vampire! The vampire! Painting!"

Far more courageous than he, because her conscience was more peaceful, Lilith passed on to the studio. She too recoiled a step or two when she saw the figure; but with the sight of the back of Karl, as she supposed it to be, came the longing to see the face that was on the other side. So she crept round and round by the wall, as far off as she could. The figure remained motionless, It was a strange kind of shock that she experienced when she saw the face, disgusting from its inanity. The absurdity next struck her; and with the absurdity flashed into her mind the conviction that this was not the doing of a vampire; for of all creatures under the moon, he could not be expected to be a humorist. A wild hope sprang up in her mind that Karl was not dead. Of this she soon resolved to make herself sure.

She closed the door of the studio; in the strength of her new hope undressed the figure, put it in its place, concealed the garments—all the work of a few minutes; and then, finding her father just recovering from the worst of his fear, told him there was nothing in the studio but what ought to be there, and persuaded him to go and see. He not only saw no one, but found that no further liberties had been taken with his pictures. Reassured, he soon persuaded himself that the spectre in this case had been the offspring of his own terror-haunted brain. But he had no spirit for painting now. He wandered about the house, himself haunting it like a restless ghost.

When night came, Lilith retired to her own room. The waters of fear had begun to subside in the house; but the painter and his old attendant did not yet follow her example.

As soon, however, as the house was quite still, Lilith glided noiselessly down the stairs, went into the studio, where as yet there assuredly was no vampire, and concealed herself in a corner.

As it would not do for an earnest student like Heinrich to be away from his work very often, he had not asked to accompany Lottchen this time. And indeed Karl himself, a little anxious about the result of the scarecrow, greatly preferred going alone.

While she was waiting for what might happen, the conviction grew upon Lilith, as she reviewed all the past of the story, that these phenomena were the work of the real Karl, and of no vampire. In a few moments she was still more sure of this. Behind the screen where she had taken refuge, hung one of the pictures out of which her portrait had been painted the night before last. She had taken a lamp with her into the studio, with the intention of extinguishing it the moment she heard any sign of approach; but as the vampire lingered, she began to occupy herself with examining the picture beside her. She had not looked at it long, before she wetted the tip of her forefinger, and began to rub away at the obliteration. Her suspicions were instantly confirmed: the substance employed was only a gummy wash over the paint. The delight she experienced at the discovery threw her into a mischievous humour.

"I will see," she said to herself, "whether I cannot match Karl Wolkenlicht at this game."

In a closet in the room hung a number of costumes, which Lilith had at different times worn for her father. Among them was a large white drapery, which she easily disposed as a shroud. With the help of some chalk, she soon made herself ghastly enough, and then placing her lamp on the floor behind the screen, and setting a chair over it, so that it should throw no light in any direction, she waited once more for the vampire. Nor had she much longer to wait. She soon heard a door move, the sound of which she hardly knew, and then the studio door opened. Her heart beat dreadfully, not with fear lest it should be a vampire after all, but with hope that it was Karl. To see him once more was too great joy. Would she not make up to him for all her coldness! But would he care for her now? Perhaps he had been quite cured of his longing for a hard heart like hers. She peeped. It was he sure enough, looking as handsome as ever. He was holding his light to look at her last work, and the expression of his face, even in regarding her handiwork, was enough to let her know that he loved her still. If she had not seen this, she dared not have shown herself from her hiding-place. Taking the lamp in her hand, she got upon the chair, and looked over the screen, letting the light shine from below upon her face. She then made a slight noise to attract Karl's attention. He looked up, evidently rather startled, and saw the face of Lilith in the air. He gave a stifled cry threw himself on his knees with his arms stretched towards her, and moaned—

"I have killed her! I have killed her!"

Lilith descended, and approached him noiselessly. He did not move. She came close to him and said—

"Are you Karl Wolkenlicht?"

His lips moved, but no sound came.

"If you are a vampire, and I am a ghost," she said—but a low happy laugh alone concluded the sentence.

Karl sprang to his feet. Lilith's laugh changed into a burst of sobbing and weeping, and in another moment the ghost was in the arms of the vampire.

Lilith had no idea how far her father had wronged Karl, and though, from thinking over the past, he had no doubt that the painter had drugged him, he did not wish to pain her by imparting this conviction. But Lilith was afraid of a reaction of rage and hatred in her father after the terror was removed; and Karl saw that he might thus be deprived of all further intercourse with Lilith, and all chance of softening the old man's heart towards him; while Lilith would not hear of forsaking him who had banished all the human race but herself. They managed at length to agree upon a plan of operation.

The first thing they did was to go to the cellar where the plaster mass lay, Karl carrying with him a great axe used for cleaving wood. Lilith shuddered when she saw it, stained as it was with the wine Heinrich had spilt over it, and almost believed herself the midnight companion of a vampire after all, visiting with him the terrible corpse in which he lived all day. But Karl soon reassured her; and a few good blows of the axe revealed a very different core to that which Teufelsbürst supposed to be in it. Karl broke it into pieces, and with Lilith's help, who insisted on carrying her share, the whole was soon at the bottom of the Moldau and every trace of its ever having existed removed. Before morning, too, the form of Lilith had dawned anew in every picture. There was no time to restore to its former condition the one Karl had first altered; for in it the changes were all that they seemed; nor indeed was he capable of restoring it in the master's style; but they put it quite out of the way, and hoped that sufficient time might elapse before the painter thought of it again.

When they had done, and Lilith, for all his entreaties, would remain with him no longer, Karl took his former clothes with him, and having spent the rest of the night in his old room, dressed in them in the morning. When Teufelsbürst entered his studio next day, there sat Karl, as if nothing had happened, finishing the drawing on which he had been at work when the fit of insensibility came upon him. The painter started, stared, rubbed his eyes, thought it was another spectral illusion, and was on the point of yielding to his terror, when Karl rose, and approached him with a smile. The healthy, sunshiny countenance of Karl, let him be ghost or goblin, could not fail to produce somewhat of a tranquillising effect on Teufelsbürst. He took his offered hand mechanically, his countenance utterly vacant with idiotic bewilderment. Karl said—

"I was not well, and thought it better to pay a visit to a friend for a few days; but I shall soon make up for lost time, for I am all right now."

He sat down at once, taking no notice of his master's behaviour, and went on with his drawing. Teufelsbürst stood staring at him for some minutes without moving, then suddenly turned and left the room. Karl heard him hurrying down the cellar stairs. In a few moments he came up again. Karl stole a glance at him. There he stood in the same spot, no doubt more full of bewilderment than ever, but it was not possible that his face should express more. At last he went to his easel, and sat down with a long-drawn sigh as if of relief. But though he sat at his easel, he painted none that day; and as often as Karl ventured a glance, he saw him still staring at him. The discovery that his pictures were restored to their former condition aided, no doubt, in leading him to the same conclusion as the other facts, whatever that conclusion might be—probably that he had been the sport of some evil power, and had been for the greater part of a week utterly bewitched. Lilith had taken care to instruct the old woman, with whom she was all-powerful; and as neither of them showed the smallest traces of the astonishment which seemed to be slowly vitrifying his own brain, he was at last perfectly satisfied that things had been going on all right everywhere but in his inner man; and in this conclusion he certainly was not far wrong, in more senses than one. But when all was restored again to the old routine, it became evident that the peculiar direction of his art in which he had hitherto indulged had ceased to interest him. The shock had acted chiefly upon that part of his mental being which had been so absorbed. He would sit for hours without doing anything, apparently plunged in meditation. —Several weeks elapsed without any change, and both Lilith and Karl were getting dreadfully anxious about him. Karl paid him every attention; and the old man, for he now looked much older than before, submitted to receive his services as well as those of Lilith. At length, one morning, he said in a slow thoughtful tone—

"Karl Wolkenlicht, I should like to paint you."

"Certainly, sir," answered Karl, jumping up, "where would you like me to sit?"

So the ice of silence and inactivity was broken, and the painter drew and painted; and the spring of his art flowed once more; and he made a beautiful portrait of Karl—a portrait without evil or suffering. And as soon as he had finished Karl, he began once more to paint Lilith; and when he had painted her, he composed a picture for the very purpose of introducing them together; and in this picture there was neither ugliness nor torture, but human feeling and human hope instead. Then Karl knew that he might speak to him of Lilith; and he spoke, and was heard with a smile. But he did not dare to tell him the truth of the vampire story till one day that Teufelsbürst was lying on the floor of a room in Karl's ancestral castle, half smothered in grandchildren; when the only answer it drew from the old man was a kind of shuddering laugh and the words "Don't speak of it, Karl, my boy!"

A Love Letter

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:31:00 +0000

Hey love, how are you doing? I know I'll see you today, but I wanted to express my thoughts to you in writing. Do you remember the last time we took a walk? I really enjoyed that and hope we can do it again soon, especially now that the leaves are turning. I have a hard time choosing my favorite season. Right now it's definitely Autumn, but when Spring comes, I'm likely to change my mind again. ;)

Anyway, I'm writing you now in order to clarify some things about our relationship. I know it seems fuzzy sometimes, so I thought we needed to have a DTR—a define-the-relationship talk. (It's nothing to worry about. I'm not leaving you, so just get that out of your mind now. :) I just need you to pay attention to what I'm about to say.)

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Okay. For my part, I want you to know in no uncertain terms that I am yours—irreversibly, eternally, unapologetically. I have long since passed the point of no return. I can do nothing but give everything I am to you. I would empty myself out for you. My love for you burns white-hot at the core of my being. I love you! I love you! There are no borders to my heart to keep its contents back; all my passion and being flow out toward you in an endless rush! There is no wall that can hold back the ocean of my love for you. It touches every far horizon and fills every deep gulf. And if there was anything in me that wasn't one with all the rest of who I am, in that surging tide, it would drown and be lost to the sea forever. There is not a part of me that can do or be anything else in relation to you but love—my love consumes every will, every faculty. What is left of me, except my love? I am love, for you. All that I am, all that is in me, my entire person loves you. There is no hope for recovery. There is nothing of my makeup that could be unattached from you without being utterly destroyed—without unbecoming what it is—because every element of me is an element of love. Can I make myself any clearer? :) I love you. I adore you. Nothing is able to change that.

But we both know there is something wrong. I know you're committed to this relationship; you're in it for the long haul. I'm not questioning your fidelity. The problem, as I see it, is that you say you know I love you, but everything else about you betrays a deep-set insecurity about "us." You seem conflicted between two different pictures of our relationship: one in which you are secure, in which there is nothing you can do to make me leave you or love you less; and one in which you walk perpetually on the edge of my tolerance, on pins and needles. You vacillate between two ideas about who I am: one that desires your good and loves you so much he can do nothing but forgive you when you wrong him; and one that withholds himself, walking about with a wounded, begrudging pride when you wrong him.

But, darling, my love is a bottomless cave—it swallows up all evils, but returns refreshing air. Forgiveness is not a question! I offer you unequivocal acceptance! I always act for your good! I cannot abuse you! I cannot withhold myself from you! You don't have to grasp after me like I'm not always there! There is no moment—do you get that?—no moment in which I do not hold you in my heart with the greatest of affection! So how can you always go about trying to get into my good favor like you aren't already there, and pursue me like you've not already won me, and right wrongs that have already been swallowed up in forgiveness? How can you be so uneasy? You don't have to be anxious about winning my attention! How many displays of affection do I have to give you to prove my love? How many flowers have I given you? How many little gifts? How many times of laughter? How many quiet moments of simply being with you? How many soft words have I whispered: some when you knew you needed them, and some when you least expected them? You don't have to try so hard to be loved by me—you don't have to try! You're okay! You've not arrived; I know that. But you're learning; your growing. We're on this journey together. You're with me, so you're okay. We're okay! I love you! Everything will be alright! I promise. Take things one day at a time. Don't rush yourself. Just learn to live in my love in the daily march of life. I'll be there. There won't always be roses, but you have my heart. Just relax, lean into me, and allow yourself to be loved; and you will make me the happiest person in the Universe.

Truly yours—if ever it could be said,
God

"Smoke" by George MacDonald

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Lord, I have laid my heart upon thy altar
But cannot get the wood to burn;
It hardly flares ere it begins to falter
And to the dark return.

Old sap, or night-fallen dew, makes damp the fuel;
In vain my breath would flame provoke;
Yet see—at every poor attempt's renewal
To thee ascends the smoke!

'Tis all I have—smoke, failure, foiled endeavour,
Coldness and doubt and palsied lack:
Such as I have I send thee!—perfect Giver,
Send thou thy lightning back.

"Finding an Unseen God: Reflections of a Former Atheist" by Alicia Britt Chole

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:48:00 +0000

"There is only one reasonable response when a God—whose reality you have denied—pursues you."

You could have guessed that someone could write a book with a subtitle like "Reflections of a Former Atheist" any number of ways. One way might be sappy and clichéd. A second might be polemic and combative. Another might be condescending, or glib, or sardonic. But you might not have guessed that, instead, this book would be refreshing, gripping, and original. Or how about artful and intelligent? Whether she knows it or not, Alicia Britt Chole has given us a glimpse at what a masterful writer can do with a difficult subject and a dichotomous audience. Reasonable Theists and Atheists alike can appreciate this little book's big presence.

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From the moment I opened the Table of Contents (Literally. Have a look.), I knew "Finding an Unseen God" was going to be an interesting read. And it was. The book alternates between two threads: her reasons for her now "former Atheist" status, and the story behind it all—going back to the beginning of her childhood. The net: you begin to feel that you know this young Atheist, you understand (if not accept) her reasons for being an Atheist, and you understand (if not accept) why she can now say that she not only believes that God exists, but believes in Him, as well.

Through the weaving reason and experience, Alicia confesses why her belief does not mean for her intellectual high treason and why Atheism can mean intellectual integrity.

Atheists will find the Christian Chole respectful, level-headed, and even partially affirmative. She says,

"Some would say that the Atheist disbelieves too quickly. Perhaps. But then, perhaps some Theists believe too easily.... Atheism still makes sense to me and I am delighted whenever I meet a practicing Atheist. No doubt my past biases me, but I find Atheists to be thoughtful, intelligent, concerned about the world, and grounded in reality."

Theists will find the former-Atheist Chole challenging, inspiring, and even tonic.

"...not having grown up in this faith, I had very few preconceptions of what followers of Jesus did and did not do. No doubt, more than a few were puzzled by the dissonance between my clearly earnest faith and still-in-formation theology. But the close-to-blank slate gave me the freedom to focus on simply knowing God as opposed to worrying about if it looked like I knew God."

"Finding an Unseen God" not only traces the course and pulse of Alicia's life, believing and unbelieving, it provides sound reasoning for integrity in the dialog between Theists and Atheists. Atheists can sometimes be heard demanding of believers of any kind, "Prove to me the existence of deity." Theists often reply with the regretful explanation that God's existence cannot be proven empirically. Alicia comments,

"When the tables are turned, however, I think the honest Atheist might say, 'But God's non-existence cannot with finality be proven.' I agree. Why, then, is it considered ethical to ask the Theist to absolutely prove what the Atheist knows cannot be absolutely disproven? Theists are challenged to do the impossible, and then their failure is entered as evidence that their beliefs are misplaced.
"This is not a cry for mercy. It is a cry for integrity in the discussion."

Chole does not ask Atheists to consider an easy, ignorant Theism. Instead, she describes a God who isn't afraid of being questioned:

"What a relief it was for me to discover that this continual questioning did not make God nervous. Interrogatives do not irritate God. Emotionally charged query does not shut God down. Over the past quarter century I have come to the conclusion that God is, after all, rather secure."

"Believing" she says, "does not mean that you will no longer have questions.
"Believing does not mean that you will turn off your brain.
"Believing does not mean that you will enter into a relationship with God in which you can bribe him to do your will.
"Believing does not mean that you will live in denial about real, raw life."

She describes a God who pursues personal relationship and who loves indiscriminately.

"When this pursuing Presence caught up with me, it did not crush me with anger or cause me to cower in the corner with shame.... love itself was redefined. God's love had a backbone. God's love was strong and volitional: a trust-inducing blend of unreserved devotion, full knowledge, and acceptance so lavish, so complete, that it was healing.
"The one reasonable response? Surrender.
"God was. My worldview was irreparably altered....
"It was true that God's existence would change everything. But I had never intentionally lied to myself before, and I was not going to start then."

Though more directly written with Atheists and Christians in mind, whatever your conviction, "Finding an Unseen God: Reflections of a Former Atheist" is a very appreciable read, one I personally found both fun and stimulating. And at 164 pages and interwoven with very well-written biographical story, it's a breeze to be sure. This is a book I'm proud to have on my shelf.

"Finding an Unseen God: Reflections of a Former Atheist" by Alicia Britt Chole

What's in a Name?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:33:00 +0000

I am not my name. I am not my face. I am not my thoughts, my feelings, or my physical body. Those are all things I have, but none of those things I am. So, who am I?

Identity is famously difficult to define. I can answer, "I am David Gregg," but do you know who I am because you know my name? I am not my name. It's a great deception to think you know a person when you know little more than a name and a face. At parties you can say, "Oh, yeah, I know David," because we have been introduced, but in the naked meaning of the phrase "I know him," just how true is it? When you ask me, "Who are you?", the best and most truthful thing I can do is shrug and say, "I am who I am." I cannot tell you who I am—I cannot describe my identity to you in words—but if you take the time to get to know me, you will learn who I am, by experience, in relationship.

Now, let's consider a scenario.

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A man enters into a wildly unexpected encounter with the true God in a land and time full of pantheons and patron deities. They speak and presently God gives the man a mission to speak to others on His behalf. Bemused by the unusual request and the very odd circumstances he has found himself in, the man musters the courage to ask the Almighty Shaper of Worlds a question! He asks, "But—and don't get me wrong here, I know you are God, God—but... who are you? Uh, if I am to speak on your behalf, Lord, who should I say sent me? Are you Ra? Baal? Are you Dagon, Chemosh, or Anu? Who are you, if you will excuse my asking?" To this, God wisely responds, "I am who I am." "Certainly. ...But who is that, Lord?" the man sheepishly dares. "That is the question of the ages, son. You'll just have to find out. You think you will know who I am if I give you a name? You think your people's many problems will be solved if they simply switch the word-name of deity in their prayers, when their hearts are so far from me? No. A name will not help you. If I give you a name, you will think you know me. And you will not try to know me as a person if you think you already do. What you need is an invitation to know me. So, when your people ask you, 'Who is this god you speak for?', tell them, 'I asked Him the same thing, and He said, "I am who I am."' And when they ask, 'And who is that?', as you have, perhaps they will begin to seek the answer to that question themselves... and come to know me—who cannot be known in a name."

God's "I am who I am" was, above all else, an invitation to get to know him. It may have meant other things when God said it to Moses; the language experts say it may be translated more than one way. Perhaps God also meant for us to understand that He is the self-existing source of all things from "I am that I am," but I strongly suspect that those metaphysical determinations about the nature of God's existence and essence were secondary (though nonetheless present) to the more immediate question, "Who is God?" Much more is involved in that question than the problem of God's makeup as deity. That is better asked by "How is God?". "Who is God?", on the other hand, has more to do with God's identity, which is a question of person, not merely of substance.

What good is a name, if you don't know the person? "I am who I am" is as much an invitation as it is anything else. Who is God? He is who He is. Who is that? I guess, you'll have to find out. And there is no other way to that knowledge than by relationship, through experience, as has been true for every other person you know.

Juliet: Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Romeo: I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
...
By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am.

(William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet", Act II, Scene II)

Fairness Is the Line

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:28:00 +0000

Fairness is metallic. It is joyless. It is good only by default—only because it is not evil. It is the line that delineates what is good to do and what is not, but it is just the line—not the path. It says, "Beyond this point are higher things, better things. Beyond this point is love." Fairness is the line—the closest thing to doing evil we can still call "doing good."

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Fairness is the line between to opposite horizons: darkness and light. It is the twilight that is itself not yet darkness, but that cannot quite be called very light, except by comparison to heavy darkness. It is the point one foot past which, in one direction, a traveler can be confidently declared to be in the light, and in the other direction, just as equally in the darkness. It is the first point that really seems light to a man who stands deep in the darkness. But many things stand in the darkness, in evil, with toes hung over the line, seeming good to themselves merely by proximity to the line. Indeed, they can make out vague shapes in the darkness, and they are quite proud. But the further you walk away from the line, up the path of love, toward the gilded, broadening light, the dimmer the line appears to you when you turn around to give it a look, the drearier its surrounding environment, and the closer the line looks to the dark horizon on the other side—because the farther you are from a place, the closer it looks to everything else in that direction you are far from until the whole collection of distant things in the same direction becomes a single thing you can point at and call "over there." Fairness is a great distance from the horizon on love's side—like the trickling light of the very early dawn is very far from the white-hot passion of the high noon sun.

Fairness is a good thing to begin upon, if you must, because it is, after all, not itself darkness; it even seems to have been created for this reason: if one cannot love, one can at least be fair. But it is not—oh, do not be tempted to think—even bright enough in that spot to tell where a stone landed if you tossed one casually from you. It isn't that bright. But you will make out your hand, so that you may see what it does. And that is a start.

But how is Good satisfied in that? Fairness demands its own rights; it is not selfless. It allows; it does not give. It begrudges; it does not delight. It is exacting; it is not generous. It is harsh; it is not merciful. It is mechanical; not gracious. It is mathematical; not beautiful. It is just; it is not love. Fairness measures all things in equal proportion; love gives all things without reserve.

Fairness cannot even be a virtue! The thing that calls you to meet the minimum requirements of the law, or of the ethics of personal relationships, is not a virtue. The thing that calls you to exceed the requirements of the law, or the demands of civil relation, is a virtue. The Decalogue, all morality, most personal grievances, and many of the world's commonest pet-peeves call for the fair, the right, the just from people. And that is good. Let it be.

But if all God wanted was for everything to be just just, then biological robots would have been the sure-bet inhabits of this Earth. Something is given, something of exact value is paid back; a deed done for another, and a deed precisely it's twin in return; an action, and a directly proportional reaction—these are the ways of gears and levers and physics, dull grays and metallic clanks, not lovers.

Above all things, be a lover. Give freely. Be unscrupulously merciful. Allow the beauty of people loving each other without claiming rights, without holding expectations, without demands, agendas, and manipulations—loving and moving and giving and deferring—remind you of dance. Let it remind you of art and other things robots cannot do. Let it remind you that there are greater things than to be merely lawful, to have merely your rights, to pursue merely wages.

If you see even the Bible tell you "Do what is right," remember that it goes on to say, "Above all, love." John said, "This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Those who do not do what is right are not God’s children; nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters." Yes, do what is right, but do not stop there. God's children are found doing right, certainly. But they are found doing much more than that! Love always does what is better than merely right. It is at least right. If love is "not against the Law," and it "fulfills the Law," and it is "the greatest," then there can never be a time in which it is a wrong decision to do what is loving and gracious over what is fair and just.

But remember, when you are trying to love, to expect to find yourself attempting to make an alloy of love and fairness. It's easy to reason yourself into loving only those who love you in return. But that's a tepid, weak love, not in the pattern of God's unconditional love, which is a wild, fiery, potent thing. So Jesus said, "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them."

But then, there are also times so momentous that to choose to do what is fair, rather than to do what is love, is to keep your friend, or enemy, or husband, or daughter, back on the line in the twilight beside yourself—a critical opportunity missed to pierce through the haze with the light and step forward with them into a new day. You think your nagging someone to do what is right—to do what is their just portion—or your demands for fair treatment and equal work will accomplish your goals? You are sadly mistaken. Fairness may be moral, but it doesn't inspire anyone to do anything. Oh, maybe on this occasion or that, something may get done out of resentment, guilt, or shame...

But is that what you want? Just what is fair and no more? Love fulfills the Law. The Law can't even do that. When voices shouting for fairness, justice, and rights only get enough to fill shallow pockets, love produces what is better than fair, better than just, and better than right! Tell me which is the "more excellent way"!

In order to fulfill the commonest law... we must rise into a loftier region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life and makes the law.... The law comes to make us long for the needful grace—that is, for the divine condition, in which love is all, for God is Love.

(George MacDonald)

There is no fair in love.

"Lycabas" by George MacDonald

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:54:00 +0000

I only just discovered this poem. But already it is a favorite. I believe MacDonald here is writing from his experience as a father of eleven children—four of whom preceded him in death, along with some of his earlier grandchildren. This man knew suffering. But he also knew hope.

Read, and learn from a man, embattled by the continual march of time, who grew the more wise for it.

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LYCABAS

"A name of the Year. Some say the word means a march of wolves,
which wolves, running in single file, are the Months of the Year.
Others say the word means the path of the light."

O ye months of the year,
Are ye a march of wolves?
Lycabas! Lycabas! twelve to growl and slay?
Men hearken at night, and lie in fear,
Some men hearken all day!

Lycabas, verily thou art a gallop of wolves,
Gaunt gray wolves, gray months of the year, hunting in twelves,
Running and howling, head to tail,
In a single file, over the snow,
A long low gliding of silent horror and fear!
On and on, ghastly and drear,
Not a head turning, not a foot swerving, ye go,
Twelve making only a one-wolf track!
Onward ye howl, and behind we wail;
Wail behind your narrow and slack
Wallowing line, and moan and weep,
As ye draw it on, straight and deep,
Thorough the night so swart!
Behind you a desert, and eyes a-weary,
A long, bare highway, stony and dreary,
A hungry soul, and a wolf-cub wrapt,
A live wolf-cub, sharp-toothed, steel-chapt,
In the garment next the heart!

Lycabas!
One of them hurt me sore!
Two of them hurt and tore!
Three of them made me bleed!
The fourth did a terrible deed,
Rent me the worst of the four!
Rent me, and shook me, and tore,
And ran away with a growl!
Lycabas, if I feared you a jot,
You, and your devils running in twelves,
Black-mouthed, hell-throated, straight-going wolves,
I would run like a wolf, I too, and howl!
I live, and I fear you not.

But shall I not hate you, low-galloping wolves
Hunting in ceaseless twelves?
Ye have hunted away my lambs!
Ye ran at them open-mouthed,
And your mouths were gleamy-toothed,
And their whiteness with red foam frothed,
And your throats were a purple-black gulf:
My lambs they fled, and they came not back!
Lovely white lambs they were, alack!
They fled afar and they left a track
Which at night, when the lone sky clears,
Glistens with Nature's tears!
Many a shepherd scarce thinks of a lamb
But he hears behind it the growl of a wolf,
And behind that the wail of its dam!

They ran, nor cried, but fled
From day's sweet pasture, from night's soft bed:
Ah me, the look in their eyes!
For behind them rushed the swallowing gulf,
The maw of the growl-throated wolf,
And they fled as the thing that speeds or dies:
They looked not behind,
But fled as over the grass the wind.

Oh my lambs, I would drop away
Into a night that never saw day
That so in your dear hearts you might say,
"All is well for ever and aye!"
Yet it was well to hurry away,
To hurry from me, your shepherd gray:
I had no sword to bite and slay,
And the wolfy Months were on your track!
It was well to start from work and play,
It was well to hurry from me away—
But why not once look back?

The wolves came panting down the lea—
What was left you but somewhere flee!
Ye saw the Shepherd that never grows old,
Ye saw the great Shepherd, and him ye knew,
And the wolves never once came near to you;
For he saw you coming, threw down his crook,
Ran, and his arms about you threw;
He gathered you into his garment's fold,
He kneeled, he gathered, he lifted you,
And his bosom and arms were full of you.
He has taken you home to his stronghold:
Out of the castle of Love ye look;
The castle of Love is now your home,
From the garden of Love you will never roam,
And the wolves no more shall flutter you.

Lycabas! Lycabas!
For all your hunting and howling and cries,
Your yelling of woe! and alas!
For all your thin tongues and your fiery eyes,
Your questing thorough the windy grass,
Your gurgling gnar, and your horrent hair,
And your white teeth that will not spare—
Wolves, I fear you never a jot,
Though you come at me with your mouths red-hot,
Eyes of fury, and teeth that foam:
Ye can do nothing but drive me home!
Wolves, wolves, you will lie one day—
Ye are lying even now, this very day,
Wolves in twelves, gaunt and gray,
At the feet of the Shepherd that leads the dams,
At the feet of the Shepherd that carries the lambs!

And now that I see you with my mind's eye,
What are you indeed? my mind revolves.
Are you, are you verily wolves?
I saw you only through twilight dark,
Through rain and wind, and ill could mark!
Now I come near—are you verily wolves?
Ye have torn, but I never saw you slay!
Me ye have torn, but I live today,
Live, and hope to live ever and aye!
Closer still let me look at you!—
Black are your mouths, but your eyes are true!—
Now, now I know you!—the Shepherd's sheep-dogs!
Friends of us sheep on the moors and bogs,
Lost so often in swamps and fogs!
Dear creatures, forgive me; I did you wrong;
You to the castle of Love belong:
Forgive the sore heart that made sharp the tongue!
Your swift-flying feet the Shepherd sends
To gather the lambs, his little friends,
And draw the sheep after for rich amends!
Sharp are your teeth, my wolves divine,
But loves and no hates in your deep eyes shine!
No more will I call you evil names,
No more assail you with untrue blames!
Wake me with howling, check me with biting,
Rouse up my strength for the holy fighting:
Hunt me still back, nor let me stray
Out of the infinite narrow way,
The radiant march of the Lord of Light
Home to the Father of Love and Might,
Where each puts Thou in the place of I,
And Love is the Law of Liberty.

Love, Not Law, as a Standard for Conduct

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:58:00 +0000

Before reading this, I strongly encourage you to read the last post, "Cliff Notes on Galatians," an abridged version of the theological substance of the Galatian Epistle.

The way I understand Paul on the theme "love versus law" in Galatians—and this is radical coming from a (now former) Pharisee, mind you—is something like:

"It's no longer beneficial for you to judge your actions by asking 'Is this against the Law, or according to the Law?" Instead, judge your actions by asking 'Is this what love does, or is this not what love does?'

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"Love is a better 'standard of conduct,' because it is more comprehensive than the Law. Love will tell you what shouldn't be done, but even more so, it will tell you what should. It analyzes your motives and requires actual transformation, and it reflects the character and nature of God. It is at once both simple and deep: being one thing easily identifiable once you know it, and the one answer universally applicable to every question of action. There is nothing that is more practical, yet it is at the same time inexhaustibly rich, abstract, and profound. Every theologian, poet, and philosopher to ever live could waste themselves on fishing out its truths without successfully plumbing its depths, and every pragmatic man of simple action could find in it his final, universal principle of living and the ultimate how-to to every human interaction and question of morality.

"All the Law is summed up in this one thing: Love. Now that you are free from the Law and have the Spirit of God in you, it isn't important to spend your time analyzing your conduct for its compliance with a list of rules. It's not all about that. What is important is accepting the full weight of truth of God's love and letting it overflow out of yourself in every way that you relate to God, Humanity, and Creation."

Cliff Notes on Galatians

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:06:00 +0000

What follows is an abbreviated version of Paul's open letter to the Believers in the province of Galatia. It does look rather lengthy, but it is quite shorter than the entire letter. If you want to get the gist of it quickly, this does the job well. It is portions of the actual text from the New Living Translation, without reference numbers or commentary. I would have left out the ellipses, to help keep the thought intact, but I wanted you to see where there is a larger development of the discussion—hopefully, awaking your desire to read more, the whole thing. Galatians is amazing, and my desire is that this briefer snapshot will give you a greater appreciation for what I consider to be one of the most pivotal and succinct pieces of theological discussion in the New Testament.

Many Christians know "verses," but few know the books of the Bible well enough to be able to explain the place those verses have in the whole piece, or the progression of thought throughout the book, or even the overall sense of it—despite the fact that the books or letters themselves, and not the "verses" or "chapters," are the smallest units of literary division in the New Testament, as intended by the authors.

While this abbreviation cannot serve as a substitute for reading the Book as a whole, it will give you a clearer picture of these things than can the "verses" or "chapters" individually. It will give you a thirst for more. Enjoy it, as I have.

The next post will be my thoughts on Paul's words here.

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"Some so-called Christians... sneaked in to spy on us and take away the freedom we have in Christ Jesus. They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish regulations. But we refused to give in to them for a single moment. We wanted to preserve the truth of the gospel message for you... You and I are Jews by birth, not 'sinners' like the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law.... No one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.

"But suppose we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely not! Rather, I am a sinner if I rebuild the old system of law I already tore down. For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law—I stopped trying to meet all its requirements—so that I might live for God. My old self has been crucified with Christ.... I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die....

"Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. How foolish can you be? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort?... But those who depend on the law to make them right with God are under his curse, for the Scriptures say, 'Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands that are written in God's Book of the Law.' So it is clear that no one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say, 'It is through faith that a righteous person has life.' This way of faith is very different from the way of law, which says, 'It is through obeying the law that a person has life.' ...

"Through Christ Jesus, God has blessed the Gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham, so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith.

"Dear brothers and sisters, here's an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or amend an irrevocable agreement, so it is in this case. God gave the promises to Abraham and his child. And notice that the Scripture doesn't say 'to his children,' as if it meant many descendants. Rather, it says 'to his child'—and that, of course, means Christ. This is what I am trying to say: The agreement God made with Abraham could not be canceled 430 years later when God gave the law to Moses. God would be breaking his promise. For if the inheritance could be received by keeping the law, then it would not be the result of accepting God's promise. But God graciously gave it to Abraham as a promise.

"Why, then, was the law given? It was given alongside the promise to show people their sins. But the law was designed to last only until the coming of the child who was promised.... Is there a conflict, then, between God's law and God's promises? Absolutely not! If the law could give us new life, we could be made right with God by obeying it. But the Scriptures declare that we are all prisoners of sin, so we receive God's promise of freedom only by believing in Jesus Christ. Before the way of faith in Christ was available to us, we were placed under guard by the law.... And now that the way of faith has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian. For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus....

"Think of it this way. If a father dies and leaves an inheritance for his young children, those children are not much better off than slaves until they grow up, even though they actually own everything their father had. They have to obey their guardians until they reach whatever age their father set.

"And that's the way it was with us before Christ came. We were like children; we were slaves to the basic 'spiritual principles' of this world. But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, 'Abba, Father.' Now you are no longer a slave but God's own child. And since you are his child, God has made you his heir....

"So now that you know God (or should I say, now that God knows you), why do you want to go back again and become slaves once more to the weak and useless spiritual principles of this world? You are trying to earn favor with God by observing certain days or months or seasons or years.... I plead with you to live as I do in freedom from these things, for I have become like you Gentiles—free from those laws....

"Tell me, you who want to live under the law, do you know what the law actually says? The Scriptures say that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave wife and one from his freeborn wife. The son of the slave wife was born in a human attempt to bring about the fulfillment of God's promise. But the son of the freeborn wife was born as God's own fulfillment of his promise. These two women serve as an illustration of God's two covenants.... And you, dear brothers and sisters, are children of the promise, just like Isaac. But you are now being persecuted by those who want you to keep the law, just as Ishmael, the child born by human effort, persecuted Isaac, the child born by the power of the Spirit.

"So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don't get tied up again in slavery to the law.

"Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit to you. I'll say it again. If you are trying to find favor with God by being circumcised, you must obey every regulation in the whole law of Moses.

"But we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith the righteousness God has promised to us. For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love.

"You were running the race so well. Who has held you back from following the truth? It certainly isn't God, for he is the one who called you to freedom. This false teaching is like a little yeast that spreads through the whole batch of dough!...

"For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don't use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' ...

"So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves.... When you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.... The Holy Spirit produces... love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit's leading in every part of our lives....

"Those who are trying to force you to be circumcised want to look good to others. They don't want to be persecuted for teaching that the cross of Christ alone can save. And even those who advocate circumcision don't keep the whole law themselves. They only want you to be circumcised so they can boast about it and claim you as their disciples.

"As for me... my interest in this world has been crucified, and the world's interest in me has also died. It doesn't matter whether we have been circumcised or not. What counts is whether we have been transformed into a new creation. May God's peace and mercy be upon all who live by this principle; they are the new people of God."

If you like, read the next post, consisting of my comments on Paul's discussion here.

Light and the Pursuit of Truth

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:27:00 +0000

While reading¹ "Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood" by George MacDonald, I was struck by his description of seeking the truth as living in the light—the sunlight—in the twenty-fourth chapter, "Failure." MacDonald can always be found embedding nuggets of nonfiction-like discussions in the midst of a good fictional story. It's one of the reasons I enjoy his fiction so much.

What follows is the relevant quote from "Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood," as well as a related quote from a nonfiction essay, "Light," from his "Unspoken Sermons, Third Series."

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At length I came in sight of the keeper's farm; and just at that moment the moon peeped from behind a hill, throwing as long shadows as the setting sun, but in the other direction. The shadows were very different too. Somehow they were liker to the light that made them than the sun-shadows are to the sunlight. Both the light and the shadows of the moon were strange and fearful to me. The sunlight and its shadows are all so strong and so real and so friendly, you seem to know all about them; they belong to your house, and they sweep all fear and dismay out of honest people's hearts. But with the moon and its shadows it is very different indeed. The fact is, the moon is trying to do what she cannot do. She is trying to dispel a great sun-shadow—for the night is just the gathering into one mass of all the shadows of the sun. She is not able for this, for her light is not her own; it is second-hand from the sun himself; and her shadows therefore also are second-hand shadows, pieces cut out of the great sun-shadow, and coloured a little with the moon's yellowness. If I were writing for grown people I should tell them that those who understand things because they think about them, and ask God to teach them, walk in the sunlight; and others, who take things because other people tell them so, are always walking in the strange moonlight, and are subject to no end of stumbles and terrors, for they hardly know light from darkness.
[from Chapter 24 of "Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood" by George MacDonald]

"This then is the message," he says, "which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." [1 John 1:5]... Whatever seems to me darkness, that I will not believe of my God. If I should mistake, and call that darkness which is light, will he not reveal the matter to me, setting it in the light that lighteth every man, showing me that I saw but the husk of the thing, not the kernel? Will he not break open the shell for me, and let the truth of it, his thought, stream out upon me? He will not let it hurt me to mistake the light for darkness, while I take not the darkness for light. The one comes from blindness of the intellect, the other from blindness of heart and will. I love the light, and will not believe at the word of any man, or upon the conviction of any man, that that which seems to me darkness is in God....

Neither let thy cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light, while it looks to thee dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. But, of all evils, to misinterpret what God does, and then say the thing as interpreted must be right because God does it, is of the devil. Do not try to believe anything that affects thee as darkness. Even if thou mistake and refuse something true thereby, thou wilt do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than thou wouldst by accepting as his what thou canst see only as darkness. It is impossible thou art seeing a true, a real thing—seeing it as it is, I mean—if it looks to thee darkness. But let thy words be few, lest thou say with thy tongue what thou wilt afterward repent with thy heart. Above all things believe in the light, that it is what thou callest light, though the darkness in thee may give thee cause at a time to doubt whether thou art verily seeing the light.
[from "Light" in "Unspoken Sermons, Third Series" by George MacDonald]

¹ Technically, I was listening to an audiobook version from Librivox.org. To see how I am progressing in "Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood" and, when I'm finished, my review of the book, please click here.

My Writing Style

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:57:00 +0000

I want people to have to sit and think about what they're reading. I want them to interact with it intellectually and emotionally and come to conclusions. If I make people think, I'm a very happy writer, even if they end up disagreeing. But I don't want people to just agree or disagree. I want them to think. And this affects my writing.

Unfortunately, it sometimes means that some people become confused. It's hard to find a balance between "thinking too much" for the reader and "not thinking enough" for them. The one makes skimmers out of people, who don't really engage what they're reading. The other unnecessarily hinders their comprehension.

So, if my writing is too dense or too general or doesn't address an issue that you believe to be important to the topic at hand, then please interact with me!

Many of you already do, on my website, on Facebook, or on SimpleChurch.com. My readership is spread out. So, the comments I get occur on three different sites —some comments are public and some are not. But I appreciate every single one of them. And I appreciate every one of you. Your insights are insightful :) and your words are gracious. I have the best readers of all the bloggers I know, and though I'd write if no one could read and sing if no one could hear, I am honored and blessed and bettered by your contributions. And even though you may sometimes, or often, have to re-read a sentence just to "get it" or look up a word on OneLook.com, you put up with my awkward style, and I am immensely grateful for that.

Thank you!

The Crowded Middle: Addendum

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:02:00 +0000

A reader, Ron, who commented on "The Crowded Middle" at SimpleChurch.com, brought up an important issue:

I think I know where you're going with this but I'm not sure what a "good man" is seeing as how the Lord has pointed out that there is no "good" in men.

After reviewing the rest of his comments (which were very good, check them out), I decided I had better clarify.

What follows is the substance of my response: essentially a commentary on the article. It addresses the issue Ron raised and rewords my thoughts on "The Crowded Middle."

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Thanks Ron for the comment! I appreciate your bringing up the definition issue within the rather broad subject of morality—i.e. that God's "good" is very different from our own. I assure you I didn't forget it. ;)

I wasn't trying to make that differentiation here, though that is a very important issue, because I thought it to be implicit (and to keep the essay as brief as possible). In light of the conscience that we all bear (though with increasingly less motivating influence the more twisted an individual becomes), everyone has a sense of what "good" is—our vision is blurrier than God's, but we generally "get the picture." I am here contrasting the "evil" kind of man in the worst sense (whom I think all sane humanity would recognize given a decent showing, even if some may side with him) and the "good" kind of man in the best sense (whom all sane humanity would also recognize, even if some people might pervert or ignore it's interpretation). Implicit in that contrast is that the "good" kind of man of which I am speaking in the first paragraph—the "ideal" you might say—is the man who is made good by God (in the sense of justification) and is continuing to develop in good by God's definition (in the sense of sanctification). There can be no other kind of "best" man.

In the second paragraph, I discuss "the crowded middle," in which I purposely focus on simple morality. Obviously, I'm not saying there isn't a difference between "good" and "bad." Instead, without clarifying what definition I'm using for "good," I intended the reader to interpret it for themselves, because this paragraph applies to all definitions of "good." This is because it only addresses the general categories of people's actions, without attempting to be specific. So, generally, I expected the common meaning of "good" and "evil" to come to people's minds.

If the common criminal (or the more-or-less average person who commonly crosses the morally-questionable line) really cares about the way people perceive him, then he will to some degree "listen" to his conscience, if for no other reason than the preservation of his reputation, because he knows his conscience is similar to theirs—it tells him "This is too wrong, even for you" and that is precisely what others would think. So, he is kept from evil even worse still and its condemnation and we are kept from its presence and effect.

If the "decent" guy really cares about people's judgments of him, he won't want to do anything that jeopardizes his social standing. So, he wouldn't be likely to do any of the radical acts of goodness that goodness might compel him to do (because, let's face it: extreme goodness is usually radical even to people we consider "good folks"). His mother and father would think it's crazy. His co-workers would laugh at him and "talk." Many would question his motives or sanity. He wants to be like everyone else, and thereby win their approval. (Who didn't learned this in high school? It doesn't stop when you graduate.) Some of these people are Christians and some are not, but it doesn't seem to matter much to those who are, and it won't matter practically until they are willing to, as you said, "lay their lives down" and begin to develop in the way of Christ which is infinitely better morally (and in every other way).

So, both groups of people maintain a fairly close resemblance to one another (so much so that, compared to men of great evil, they are all considered rather normal). They stick pretty tight to the middle line—the "bleh." This is the pull of peer pressure in all society. In regard to Evil, society's pull is beneficial: we don't live in the presence of wickedness nearly as gross and prevalent as we would otherwise and the people who would do those unspeakable acts of wickedness don't, which, of course, is better for them as well. In regard to Good, society's pull is degenerative: hardly a soul pushes the frontlines of virtue, nearly everyone is content merely eating, drinking, and being merry, and scarcely can we find even a Christian who reminds us of Jesus. Furthermore, history has shown that morality within societies inevitably decays, which means that the baseline—the "normal" around which both the (subjectively) "slightly" bad and "slightly" good orbit—slinks gradually closer to the Evil side of the spectrum until the society's eventual collapse. This should all the more urge us to know God, to live loved and love in kind, to embody His goodness, His grace, and His liberty in increasingly radical, abnormal ways.

....I always appreciate a swift reply prompting me to clarify! Thank you!

[If you haven't already, read the original article, if you like.]

The Crowded Middle

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:29:00 +0000

An evil man who does not care for people's judgments of him is the worst kind of evil man. He cannot even contain his lower nature for the selfish benefit of his reputation. If that is true, then it is also true that a good man who does not care for people's judgments of him is the best kind of good man. He will not even placate his lower nature for the benefit of his reputation. Each of these two men is capable of doing anything he can imagine after his own kind: one to evil, one to good. Each of these two men is freed to live like his heart would have him live: one twisted, one right. Each lives in intellectual honesty, because he allows his actions to reflect the real state of his conscience.

All people who decide their courses of action based upon the judgmental thoughts of others are crowded together in the middle between these two extremes. Among them, there is little difference between the good and the bad. This is my definition of mediocrity. Neither group does anything extraordinary. The one group never does anything "too bad," and the other never does anything "too good." Certain things are "too bad" even for common criminals. Good that is purely good becomes seen as "radical" or "idealistic" even to "good" people, either because hardly anyone ever does it or because any person who does demonstrates that they aren't really as good as they would like to think they are.

You have more important things to mind than refuting false claims about yourself or absorbing your time with the attempt to convince stubborn people of your reasons. God will see that more good, by His meaning of "good," will be done when you are silent, however hard it may be, than when you are decrying your accusers and justifying your good intentions. It's just as ultimately futile to boast of what you haven't done as it is to boast of what you have.

If you live, live to God; if you die, die to God (Romans "14:8"). If that means anything to you, let it mean that you leave your defense with God, as well.

[There is a second part to this article, one which clarifies the first a great deal. Read "The Crowded Middle: Addendum."]

God Doesn't Love You for a Reason

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:46:00 +0000

God never loved you for a reason. God loves you.
(Wayne Jacobsen)

There is great truth in Jacobsen's off-the-cuff words from an episode of The GOD Journey podcast. He speaks about our impulse for merit—our striving to be worth loving. And he is right. There is absolutely no way we can make ourselves either more or less worth loving.

Though, I don't doubt that there is something that makes us "worth" loving in some very deep sense, but I'm sure I don't know the whole truth of the matter (and mystery in a relationship makes the whole thing more exciting). What I do doubt and fully deny is whether any of the usual things we think can make us worthy of being loved actually can.

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So, for every practical purpose, God doesn't love you for a reason. He loves you. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

He loves you, and not for any action or ability or quality that you can manipulate, formulate, postulate, propagate, or create. If there is indeed a reason we can know, it has more to do with your origin and the core makeup of your soul than anything you can quantify. And in that reason, even if it be solely a reflection of God's character and nature and nothing else, He loves you uniquely, but still not more or less than any other person—just as a father would love his children, and just as the God-figure in The Shack said "I'm especially fond of that one" and then said it of every one.

Your Father—the Source of your life—adores you and He'd have you crawl onto His lap and tug at His beard, if only you knew Him like that. A tragedy! To be loved so richly and think yourself a pauper! And then to deny His displays of affection, His attempts toward your good—to deny that you own whole galaxies worth of tenderhearted love in your Father's eyes and go on eating meat from dumpsters and cursing life! Ah, good thing it is He doesn't love for a reason!

Oh, but don't be condemned! There is no fear in love! Love doesn't carry forward last month's negative balance! If you remain dispirited because He loves you richly and you love Him poorly, you forget He doesn't love you for a reason! His love is completely without respect to your merit. Love, of this kind, is also called "grace" and forgiveness is a grace. And if it is a grace, then it cannot be earned; it is given. It doesn't need to be asked for—only, we usually need to ask for it before we will trust that we have it. God doesn't need reconciled to us. We need reconciled to Him.

Trust from the place you are. You cannot manufacture trust. God will win you to it. You will trust Him more when you know more how He loves you, and that comes when you know Him more, the way He really is. Your trust is exactly proportional to how convinced you are of His love, which itself is exactly proportional to how well you know Him. Be patient (but be passionate); He is patient. And He will win you to it.

Seek Him. Look everywhere for Him. —Except, that makes it sound like He is hiding. But He isn't. He is at times subtle, but usually it only seems that way because our senses are dulled to the ways He speaks to us and reveals Himself to us. One day He may woo you to Him by a pinecone or the reflection of light on a door handle just as He might on another day by a sermon or a book or a prayer. He speaks to us in people's scars and the stories they tell over dinners and late-night games of cards. He reveals Himself in epiphanies and gradual increments so intangible that months or years may pass before you even realize a significant change has occurred.

But know child: He is your Father—yes, your Papa and Daddy, more loving, affectionate, wise, and strong than any mud-and-clay parent could be. You are His darling. Hop into His lap. Cry, laugh, or complain, and nuzzle close, curl up into His arms and rest. He'll hold you, wipe your brow, and whisper you songs.

You may be an adult in relation to people of Earth. But in the same way you cannot be more than a small child to Him. So while it may seem very childish to talk like this about your relationship with "Papa," that is precisely why it is true. You are a child. So, you must in a sense be childish. After all, He is your Father and what else is there left for you to be?

Why I Don't Like Church Names

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:28:00 +0000

Some of my friends already know I don't like church "names." They're so odd to me. (Not my friends, the names.) It's like naming your group of friends: "We are 'Awesome'—'Awesome Group of Friends, Springfield'—and we believe that you too can be awesome! Because that's what we're all about! Welcome to Awesome."

Or, it's like:

"I'm going to Hudson."

"What? Is that a town around here?"

"Oh, no, my family name is 'Hudson.' We're going to have dinner with my parents and my sister, so I said, 'I'm going to Hudson.'"

"But you can't go to who you are. That doesn't make any sense!"

"Well, hmm... you're right. But we've been saying it that way since my great-great grandpa or something. It doesn't do any harm."

"Yah, except the moment you start referring to it that way, you start thinking of it that way, and pretty soon your children think of your family as an event and a tradition. And you'll be fighting that for the rest of your life."

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But I'm particularly annoyed by "First" churches. Really? You were first? Are you in competition with the other churches?: "Ha! We got here first! Nah nah nah nah nah nah!" Or, "We've been here the longest! That proves something!" All it proves is age and that we've made the Kingdom into a competitive sport. Oh, how darling! Who really cares who was first? ...Other than the people who wish they were, or those poorly misinformed folks who think "First" is a denomination and actually means something. (I've come across several of those.)

Really, back hundreds of years ago, who's idea was it to call their community of believing friends by a name?

I imagine it probably started with place names. "The church* in Troas" may have eventually become "The Church of Troas" and when, because of the hardness of their hearts, people tore away, they didn't want to call themselves "The Other Church of Troas" (because that sounds tacky), so they decided on "The Harmony Church of Troas", because, they felt, that's what best described their vision: harmony. And... well, you can easily imagine where it led from there. Here we are now!

Understand me, here: I'm not trying to be critical in a cynical way, rather I think it is pretty funny. I'm chuckling.

But to be a bit more serious: I am a little mad about it. Just what the heck are we thinking? It totally wrecks the beauty and purity of what the Body of Christ is supposed to be! It makes a lively, relationally-oriented community made up of people who believe God out to be an organizationally-oriented religious club, location, or event. It makes a family into a team. And when you "join" a team "of faith," the faith becomes a game and you can't help but feel better about yourself because you are on what you perceive to be the winning team. Competition with other teams is, without having to think one moment about it, the automatic sociological response to joining a team. It's you versus them.

Don't believe me? Just listen to the way people talk about their church! I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, so I won't even bother to quote anyone.

Once it gets this far, it stops being about people and starts being about numbers (although, to be fair, it is never so cut and dry as this—or at least I hope not). And that's what people on the outside will think of it immediately. That's what people on the inside will come to think of it eventually. And down the road, no one will scarcely be able to perceive that anything is wrong with the picture. You call it by a name and that's what you get. You don't get a family of people. You get a roster and a point scale. Because you treated it like a team.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me crawl up into a ball and weep." Words are power things. If you call your friend "stupid" or "ugly" and keep calling him that—no matter how obviously untrue it may be—he will begin to doubt himself and will eventually accept it as truth. Adolf Hitler even said it of bold-faced lies: "If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough and often enough, the people will believe it." And if that is true of lies (as Hitler clearly demonstrated), then surely it must be true of half-truths, which are much easier to accept.

Remember what was said in the scenario I gave?: "...the moment you start referring to it that way, you start thinking of it that way, and pretty soon your children think of your family as an event and a tradition. And you'll be fighting that for the rest of your life."

Words shape worldviews and ideologies and revolutions. I know it's hard, and I know everyone else does it, and I know this is totally opposite of the standard paradigm, but don't allow yourself to make into something less what is intended to be something so much more.

Be a "Hudson." Be a part of Christ's "body." Be Father's loved child. Be the community of people who have been absolutely—I love it!—changed by the happy news about God.

Be more than a product of easy slips.

* Understand that "church" (really Greek's "ekklesia") was a simple, everyday word and functionally meant "community," especially to Jewish hearers who were accustomed to hearing it used repeatedly in the Greek versions of the Old Testament for "the jewish community"—not at all the loaded, technical word we use today.

God, as Truth and Mystery

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Moses receives three successive visions of God: first he sees God in a vision of light at the burning bush (Ex. 3:2); next God is revealed to him through mingled light and darkness, in the "pillar of cloud and fire" which accompanies the people of Israel through the desert (Ex. 13:21); and then finally he meets God in a "non-vision", when he speaks with him in the "thick darkness" at the summit of Mount Sinai (Ex. 20:21). [Kallistos Ware, in the chapter "God as Mystery" from "The Orthodox Way", St Vladimir's Seminary Press: 1979. 13]

First, He shows me that I can know Him. Then, He shows me that I cannot define Him. First, He shows me that He is. Then, He shows me that He is more. First, He shows me that He is Truth. Then, He shows me that He is Mystery.

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He demonstrates a fascinating flair for helping us balance our understanding of Him and our glorious inadequacy to do so.

I say it is glorious because it is this very inadequacy (and His depth by contrast) that creates the opportunity for discovery. My finiteness and His infiniteness create the potential for adventure in our relationship with each other. If He were finite, then the ocean could be mapped. I could find an end and the story would conclude, or continue in purposeless boredom.

But instead I delight in exploring His inexhaustible reaches, and He delights in giving me my delight. He shares Himself with me, and I share myself with Him—the difference being that His gift to me continually comes, and mine is but a drop. But this does not mean that the relationship is one-sided! No.

Because He is infinite, our relationship together is infinite. It is an interminable and inexhaustible, intimate connection, because relationship is about responding to each other, and when one gives without end the other receives without end. And, as anyone who has loved the purest kind of love can attest, giving is a kind of receiving. Together we share an infinite source of joy, which is our relationship with each other—I in Him, and He in me in Him, unending.

First, He says, "You can know me." Then, He says, "But I am more than you can fully know. There will always be more." And I say, "So exciting!"

And so, it is in our relationship with Him that we find both our fulfillment and thirst!

In the very nature of being—that is, God—it must be hard (and divine history shows how hard) to create that which shall be not himself, yet like himself. The problem is to separate from himself that which must yet be ever and always and utterly dependent on him, and to separate it sufficiently that it shall have the existence of a free individual. Only so shall it be able to turn and regard him—choose him, and say, "I will arise and go to my Father." Only so shall it develop in itself the highest divine of which it is capable—the will able to side with the good against the evil, the will to be one with the life whence it has come and in which it still is....

Hence the final end of the separation is not individuality. That is but a means to it. The final end is oneness—an impossibility without the prior separation. For there can be no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where there is but one. Two at least are needed for oneness. And the greater the number of individuals, the greater, the lovelier, the richer, the diviner is the possible unity. [George MacDonald, in his essay "Life" from "Unspoken Sermons, Second Series" as edited in "Your Life in Christ" by George MacDonald, ed. Michael Phillips]

Not a Wound and Not a Weight

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:57:00 +0000

I don't know about others, but I have a confession to make. When I say it, let it sink in: I used to walk away from hearing (or remembering) the story of the Cross with a distinct feeling of heaviness, not a distinct feeling of overwhelming love. I would feel shackled to a mysterious burden, a darkness, and it never occurred to me to question it.

Now, I don't want to say that the actual events of the Day of the Cross should be a pleasant "memory" for us, but the Cross should very definitely unlock us from our weights and our shame. The Cross should be our freedom. And true freedom is meant to be felt, like when a cool wind lifts from us a veil of oppressive humidity. True freedom is deep and fresh and is known by those who have it by it's stark contrast to anything that is not freedom.

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When we come to the Cross, we shouldn't carry away from it the weight it was designed to relieve, the shame it was determined to destroy. We, as children of the King, shouldn't be consumed with thoughts of judgment and our unrighteousness, because the Cross settles these things. We should carry away from the Cross the absolute rest of knowing we are forgiven. The comforting freedom of knowing we are loved. The stubborn confidence of knowing that God accepts us as righteous. That what God believes of us is true of us in actuality—not just in theory.

We should not carry away from the Cross what we brought with us to the Cross.

My concept of the Cross was sick for a very long time. I felt as if it were a wound in my memory I was trying very hard to imagine was not a wound.

Let it be a jewel and not a wound.

And if it isn't for you, then change whatever you have to about what you believe to see that it is. Because whatever the Cross is or isn't, it must be your liberty from the old human and filth. It should be above all things the inauguration of your rest. It is a symbol of your freedom. Not a symbol of your failure. It should stand for God's love. Not for your inadequacy. It should remind you of your new humanity. Not of your "old man."

But this means that you must never, never conceive of the Cross apart from the Resurrection. They are not separate elements of your redemption.

The Cross is the dying of the twisted child squashing spiders in his self-made cell.* The Resurrection is the creation of a new kind of humanity—a child rejoicing in life and dancing in the light.

We are not just wiped-clean or cured versions of our old selves. We are brand new beings never dirtied or twisted. We are reborn. We are new creations. And, in the final resurrection, the remnants of our old selves, these bodies and minds, will slough off and be replaced with new ones, as the birthing that has begun will be completed.

Think about it.

* See "A Letter to American Boys", a short story by George MacDonald. Read it online. Listen to the free audiobook. Review it.

Love and Manipulation

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:42:00 +0000

I have been contemplating some things from the 17th-century theologian and founder of Rhode Island Roger Williams, contemporary Christians and co-hosts of The God Journey podcast Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings, and author of "The Shack" William Paul Young... lots of things. Things like liberty of conscience, love, relationships, and control. I'm not spending the time right now to write out a full exposition, but I'll leave you with a few quotes that will get you started on a train of thought, a brief discussion of control in relationships, and a couple of additional quotes to prompt you to continue the train of thought past where I've taken you.

Grace is God's acceptance of us. Faith is our acceptance of God's acceptance of us. (Adrian Rogers)

We are more sinful than we ever dared believe, but through Christ we are more accepted than we ever dared hope. (Timothy Keller)

The problem is most of us don't know we're loved, therefore we don't live like we're loved, and because we don't live like we're loved, we do all kinds of stupid things to ourselves and to others that God calls "sin." (Wayne Jacobsen)

It seems to be a natural human habit to motivate people by guilt, shame, and fear probably because it is so very easy. You manipulate relationships in order to get people to do what you want them to do because you need to be in control of everything. The more control you get, the more your sense of security and validation. You coerce people to do something for you that you would like for them to do, but when you coerce them to do it, they do it with false motives. You coerce people to conform their lives according to your standard of conduct, but when you coerce them, they do it with the wrong intent. And if they do not do what you want, if they do not meet your expectations, then you try your best to resolve the issue with conflict, or you give up and allow the relationship to splinter. But this is not unconditional love.

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It's a pattern that is apparent in every human being. You need to feel loved and you need to feel secure, so you manipulate the people and the circumstances in your life, even in subconscious action, to attempt to convince yourself that these things are true. But the moment you bring control into a relationship, you rob your friend of the joy of giving what he could have given in love, and you rob yourself of the joy of receiving what he could have given in love. You cheat yourself of real opportunities for love and security. You cheapen so many friends by making them your pawns. And you reflect your own qualities upon God, expecting Him to act the same way toward you that you do toward the people in your life. But this is not unconditional love.

On a good day, coercion produces hypocrisy; on a bad day, rivers of blood. (Roger Williams, paraphrased)

You will accomplish more in the next two months developing a sincere interest in two people than you will ever accomplish in the next two years trying to get two people interested in you. (Tim Sanders)

How Then Shall We Vote?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:36:00 +0000

It's just passed 3:30am on the 5th of November, 2008, and the U.S. presidential election is nearly at a wrap. And if by some divinely-orchestrated miracle of ignorance you haven't already heard: Mr. Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States of America.

But this isn't about that. Well, okay. Sort of it is.

Although this comes a little late for you to apply to your decision-making process for the 2008 election, my hope is that you will perhaps give it some thought for the next general election or the 2012 presidential election. Here it is:

...Alright, so I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said, but that's actually my point. I wanted to forward you to an article written by Derek Webb. Derek said all the things I would have said here, only better. Sure, that's not much of a complement... but, well, just trust me. Read the article.

Conscience is the issue in "How Then Shall We Vote?".

Seeking Significance in Realized Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:07:00 +0000

These past six months have been almost unbelievably transformational for me. Lots of things have happened in my heart and in my life. Recent stories of faith, prayer and community hang in the air. There is much to talk about. That's for sure. And I may get to some of it eventually on this blog, but I wanted first to share with you a bit of the path God has taken me down in these last two months especially.

The thing is that I've really been working through issues of validation lately. To be honest, I feel like I have to produce in order to be significant, like I have to be doing something in order to justify my existence. It's the "do to be" disease.

You see, my particular drug is dreams.

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I'm a Visionary-Advocate personality type (MBTI), and true to form, I have these dreams that I want to pursue ("visionary"), and I badly wish to help other people catch those dreams ("advocate"). But there's the rub. It is such a struggle for me to not draw my identity and sense of worth from my dreams... but rather draw my identity from who God has proclaimed me to be in His love, and to allow the motivation for whatever serving I do for Him to come out of the overflow of my heart, not out of my seeking for self-validation through any personal standard of "success."

My identity has issued from my dreams and my power (or lack thereof) to "micromanage" the Kingdom to conform to the idea I have in my mind of the way it ought to be. And if things are going poorly by my estimation, then I get depressed because my security rests in my ability to meet some performance-based criteria. If things are going well by my estimation, then I feel temporarily fulfilled. But the satisfaction is empty, like trying to pull water out of a dry well.

It's the same misstep as the one God spoke of by Jeremiah. Jeremiah recorded these words:

For my people have done two evil things:
They have abandoned me—
the fountain of living water.
And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns
that can hold no water at all! (Jeremiah 2:13 NLT)

Father said something similar in Isaiah's prophecy:

Come, all of you who are thirsty.
Come and drink the water I offer to you.
You who do not have any money, come.
Buy and eat the grain I give you.
Come and buy wine and milk.
You will not have to pay anything for it.
Why spend money on what is not food?
Why work for what does not satisfy you?
Listen carefully to me.
Then you will eat what is good.
You will enjoy the richest food there is. (Isaiah 55:1-2 NIrV)

I'm talking about a shifting of my heart's pursuit. From pursuing validation (and security, identity, satisfaction...) through a realized dream, to pursuing a persistent nearness to the God who doesn't care whether I accomplish my dreams if I never learn to live in the overwhelming acceptance I have in His grace. After all, "Grace is God's acceptance of us. Faith is our acceptance of God's acceptance of us" (Adrian Rogers, from Freedom from the Performance Trap).

One of the most freeing things someone ever told me was something I heard in one of The God Journey podcasts with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings. Wayne said, if I may recite it from my poor memory, "I don't care if you don't do anything for a year, if you learn to walk in Father's affection."

When I heard that, it really sank deep in my soul: God isn't looking for me to produce for Him; He is looking for me to rest in Him.

Now, let me tell you: that's hard to swallow for someone who has done almost everything for twenty-five years with performance-based, works-righteous motives! That's difficult to step out of. That's a deep mire of ingrained religious caca. And I'm sick of it. I've felt like an employee in God's production plant for all my life. And all I want is a real-life relationship!

But now—wouldn't you know—I'm finding that I'm relationally-challenged, having worked with machines for so long. But thank you, Papa! You are showing me the ropes of this relationship with You!

And my reader friend, whoever you are, I want you to know that there is rest in our Father. There is complete rest. He is our eternal Sabbath (Hebrews 4). He is our permanent Vacation. And when you are all caught up in the DOs, know that as far as He is concerned, there is only DONE. "You are trying to earn points with someone who is no longer keeping score" (Wayne Jacobsen).

It is finished. (John 19:30)

What the law could not do... God did. (Romans 8:3 CSB)

Winter Months

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:21:00 +0000

Every oak
Holds tightly
To the last moment
'Til it can hold no longer
To its beauty

And then it stands
Without adornment
In a cold world
For months

But to all the trees
Who lose their leaves
I promise, I promise,
I promise...
There will be a spring!

Faith and Prejudice

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Last week, I participated in a Bible study on James 2:1-13. I enjoyed the discussion and the progression of James' argument, so I thought I'd reproduce my perspective on the passage here.

James passionately implores us to refrain from any sort of partiality. His reasons may strike you.

He begins,

My brothers and sisters, favoritism is not consistent with faith in our Lord Jesus Christ—the Glory of God. (James 2:1)

The New Living Translation has it: "How can you claim to have faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ if you favor some people over others?" I think that James' implication is pretty clear: something doesn't jibe with having both faith in Christ and prejudice.

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James follows with an example of favoritism, and then a brief explanation—for the sake of this particular example—of why it makes no sense to honor the rich above the poor:

For example, suppose someone comes into your meeting dressed in fancy clothes and expensive jewelry, and another comes in who is poor and dressed in dirty clothes. If you give special attention and a good seat to the rich person, but you say to the poor one, "You can stand over there, or else sit on the floor"—well, doesn’t this discrimination show that your judgments are guided by evil motives?

Listen to me, dear brothers and sisters. Hasn’t God chosen the poor in this world to be rich in faith? Aren’t they the ones who will inherit the Kingdom he promised to those who love him? But you dishonor the poor! Isn’t it the rich who oppress you and drag you into court? Aren’t they the ones who slander Jesus Christ, whose noble name you bear? (2:2-7 NLT)

He explains how favoritism and prejudice break the Old Covenant Law. He reminds us that God despises any form of partiality. It's not just a trifle. He continues:

If you really carry out the royal law prescribed in Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. But if you show favoritism, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

For whoever keeps the entire law, yet fails in one point, is guilty of breaking it all. For He who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." So if you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you are a lawbreaker. (2:8-11 CSB)

But then, he returns to his original point to resolve the issue he left us with in verse 1: How is it that partiality and faith in Christ are mutually exclusive of each other? It's interesting to see the direction James takes with his reasoning. He lifts the weight of his argument off of the Old Covenant Law onto the New Covenant "law":

Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of freedom. For judgment is without mercy to the one who hasn't shown mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. (2:12-13 CSB)

So, James compares the Torah Law with this "law of freedom." James has already mentioned a "law of freedom" in his epistle—at James 1:25, where he exhorts us to always keep at the forefront of our minds our identity—the reality of the freedom we have in Christ—and to live according to that reality of freedom and grace. But what is this talk of a New Covenant "law"?

Paul uses similar terminology in his open letter to the Christians at Rome. We pick up his argument in Romans at 3:1-30:

Then what advantage has the Jew [over the Gentile]? Or what is the value of circumcision?... Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.... Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. (ESV)

Well, what is a law? It's as the NIV has it here, a "principle"... a principle that is followed, a rule of action. So, when Paul says that there is no room for the Jews to boast in their nationality as though it made them any closer to God than other nations, he explains that this is because there is a principle of faith that needs to be considered. That principle of faith is "that a man is justified [made right with God] by faith apart from observing the law [of works]" (NIV). The "law of faith" is the principle of relationship that allows people like you and me to be reconciled with our Father, God. It is, in other terminology, "the Gospel." It is "Grace."

So, when James says, "favoritism is not consistent with faith in our Lord Jesus Christ" and "speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom" (TNIV) what does he mean? What's the connection?

He means that "the law of freedom" motivates us to love, greatly and equally, all people. Why? Because "the law of freedom" is the truth of freedom from condemnation. How do we know this? Because Paul said,

No condemnation now exists for those in Christ Jesus, because the Spirit's law of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. (Romans 8:1-2 CSB)

By faith in Christ, by having confidence in the power of God and His love for us, we are set free from the chains of sin and death, because there is no longer any condemnation over us. A condemnation is "a sentence of judgment which condemns some one to do, to give or to pay something." We are no longer criminals being judged. We are no longer condemned to attempt to pay the penalty from crimes too numerous to count. We are free. Rather than condemned, we have been forgiven.

A condemnation is also "an expression of strong disapproval," which is also something that does not exist for us in Christ. We are—you are—totally approved of God. He accepts you. He loves you. He validates you. He considers you valuable to Him. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.

But how then can we, who have been forgiven of our incalculable debts, go on with unforgiveness in our hearts? How then can we, who have been accepted despite ourselves, go on rejecting others based upon our formulated criteria? How then can we, who are loved unconditionally, go on distributing love to others according to how they meet our standards?

Do you favor one person above another, because the one is "cool" and the other is decidedly "not"? Do you love and approve of one friend who is mature, thoughtful, and loving, but look down upon another in condescension who is immature, whiny, and selfish? Do you hang out only with people you find pleasant and avoid people who are annoying, are irritable, or have poor personal hygiene? Do you find yourself surrounded with people who hide well their sins on the inside, but wouldn't dream of befriending people who wear their sins on the outside? Do you stick close to your comfort zone when your comfort zone tells you to socialize only with people of your own ethnicity? Do you give the best seats to the rich?

It is with all this in mind that James continues his thought with, "What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don't show it by your actions?" (James 2:14 NLT)

Jesus taught the same thing:

Then Peter came to him and asked, "Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?"

"No, not seven times," Jesus replied, "but seventy times seven!

"Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn't pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.

"But the man fell down before his master and begged him, 'Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.' Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.

"But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

"His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. 'Be patient with me, and I will pay it,' he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn't wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.

"When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, 'You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?' Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.

"That's what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart." (Matthew 18:21-35 NLT)

Do you see then why "favoritism is not consistent with faith in our Lord Jesus Christ"?

But...

If someone merely listens to the message and does not live it out, he is like someone who gazes at his own face in a mirror. For he gazes at himself and then goes out and immediately forgets what sort of person he was.

Ah! "But," he says!

But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out—he will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:23-25 NET)

I'd like you to read that again, in the Contemporary English Version, to make sure you get the point:

But you must never stop looking at the perfect law that sets you free. God will bless you in everything you do, if you listen and obey, and don't just hear and forget. (1:25)

You are free. You are forgiven. You are accepted. And you must hold onto that truth with a deathgrip. There is no room for shame or guilt or any other form of self-condemnation. Because "there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus." There is only love. There is only grace. And when you fix your eyes on that—that is faith. It is confidence in God's love and promise: stubborn faith in stubborn promises.

Grace is God's acceptance of us. Faith is our acceptance of God's acceptance of us. (Adrian Rogers)

This freedom will change the way you look at others. It will change the way you act. Eugene Peterson sums it up pretty well with his paraphrase of James 2:14-17:

Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn't it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?