Jack Pelham

It’s easy to underestimate the difference between the person who tries to do what’s right and the person who always tries to do it! Here are some brief observations from my time on Planet Earth so far:

One huge divide in Christianity is over the question of whether Jesus died so that believers could overcome in their struggle against sin, or so that they wouldn’t have to. The way that people answer that question seems to have a lot to do with what kind of people they are. The ones who are most intent on wanting to be like Jesus, and to be accountable and submissive to him seem to be the most apt to want to overcome their sins. And those who don’t like accountability seem more apt to want to interpret the story of Jesus’ sacrifice as something that absolves them from responsibility for themselves.

I had gathered that he wasn’t the eloquent sort, but it seemed that he had something he wanted to express throughout our conversation. And I think I managed to piece it together at length. It was something like this:

“I don’t have to keep up with principles and precepts and passages and beliefs and doctrines and all that; I joined a church, and they keep up with all that stuff for me!”

We’re all different from each other—to some degree. And we’re all like one another—to some degree.

OK, I get that.

And special attention is being paid to this in cognitive science these days, the idea being that most of us are somewhat “neurotypical”, while others of us are “neurodiverse”—the particular idea of which being that we are somehow, to put it in everyday language, “wired differently.”

Him: “You always have to be right!”
Me: “Thanks for noticing. I wish we both suffered from that virtue.”

“If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.”

Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.

What you don’t know about your own religion is that if you are like most people, certain of your tenets are going to be non-negotiable—even if they are wrong.

Mere ignorance stands invisibly
In the place of what we could know,
As the blank spaces in a warehouse mark
The missing inventory that we would have
Acquired by now had we acquired it by now.

If you were willing
You could listen intently
To the words of Jesus and hear
That he was calling humans to a life of
Love deeper than most will want to realize.
And many think it the end of his calling
But if by chance you were willing
Those same pages would
Call you to a love of
Wisdom and of
Knowledge
Such as
To which few
Will ever attain in
This not-listening world.
And if you should be the sort
Who’ll shush his soul so as to hear
Even to the last whisper of the echoes
Those sacred and ancient pages
Would reveal to your heart a
Calling seldom perceived:
To take up that grand
Moral courage of
The Highest
That you
Should ever
Do what is right
Even as you continue
On this beautiful-ugly Earth.
And only then, my friend
Will you understand
Why it pains me
To hear love
Spoken of
As if it
Were the
Whole of the
Righteous calling.
For love without the rest
Is but an incomplete treasure.
And this truth I am telling you now
Is one that this Earth’s hordes
Of non-listening believers
Are quite obviously
Content not
To know.

He would never forget that late evening when those five foolish maidens came jabbering down his darkened street, their girlsong interspersed and echoing in the quiet of the lane below his rooftop patio. In the few seconds this parade would be in earshot, he would only make out two things distinctly. One was something or other about them searching for an open market at which to buy oil at this late hour. And the other was some nonsensical one-liner about God that he knew could not be right, for he remembered otherwise from the scriptures, he was pretty sure. And then they were gone, their shuffling and cackling fading into the city night.

One thing that will irk many about God
Is that he would have a too late
Designed into the scheme of things.