“If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.”
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Paused to recalibrate. ODF will return.
As you do not know the way of the wind or how the bones form in the womb of her who is with child, so you do not know the works of God.
Ecclesiastes 11:5
One of my favorite movies is the silly 1985 comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Directed by Tim Burton, the film tells the story of Pee-wee, a man-child who delights in goofy toys, Rube Goldberg contraptions, and his precious bicycle. When his bicycle is stolen, he begins the hilarious search to recover it. Just before the theft, we see Pee-wee visit the local bicycle shop to pick up his handlebar horn which he had left for repair. It’s returned to him by Dottie, a worker at the store who has a none-too-subtle crush on Pee-wee. The crush is not reciprocal. So when she begins to ask Pee-wee for a date, he cuts her off with mock seriousness: “There’s a lotta things about me you don’t know anything about, Dottie. Things you wouldn’t understand. Things you couldn’t understand. Things you shouldn’t understand.” Pee-wee snatches his horn from her hand and quickly exits the store, hiding a self-satisfied smile and leaving a confused Dottie staring blankly after him.
In 2002, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with weapons of mass destruction. His answer would have been at home in the pages of George Orwell’s Animal Farm:
“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Although easy to lampoon, Rumsfeld’s answer is, in fact, concisely meaningful and echoes a well-known proverb:
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is simple. Teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Wake him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise. Follow him.
For the Christian, there is much certainty. The scriptures lay out for us a number of sure things: that God exists and that he loves us, that he has made himself known in his son, that the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ save all who believe, that God dwells within all believers through his Spirit, and that Jesus will return to punish the wicked and reward those who trust and await him. There are many other biblical certainties as well, but they subsist within the grand arc of God’s work in Christ. As Paul reminds the Corinthians, No matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. This covers a lot of ground.
On the other hand, Christians know far less than we think we do—infinitely less. (Unbelievers, of course, know nothing at all, but I’ve discussed this elsewhere.) As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” He might have included theology too. It’s not simply a matter of seek and ye shall find; some things are forever beyond our reach.
There are two kinds of inaccessible knowledge. The first is forbidden knowledge, that which we humans can know but should not. The great example is the knowledge of good and evil embodied as a tree in the garden of Eden. The Lord God commands Adam, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The prohibition is for the man’s own good, for if he eats from it, God tells him, “you will certainly die.” Not all forbidden knowledge is ominous. Just before his ascension, Jesus tells his disciples, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.” This is a nice way of saying that how God runs his business is none of our business. But even at the most basic level there are things we are forbidden to know. James warns us against ignorant boasting: You do not even know what will happen tomorrow. God could tell us, but he’s not going to. The only reliable compass we have to negotiate such pervasive ignorance is faith.
The other kind of inaccessible knowledge is that which by its very nature transcends comprehension. God is forthright about it: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Recognizing this, King David exclaims, Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain! Even faith cannot grasp such things. God informs the prophet Habakkuk: “I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” Moreover, although Paul insists that we now have the mind of Christ, he too exclaims: Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! So high are God’s ways, says Paul, that we don’t even know what we’re supposed to pray for. If not for the Holy Spirit’s intercession, our prayers would be Jabberwocky. When it comes to God, the unknowns are definitely the biggest slice of the pie chart.
Of the things that we are not permitted and will never be permitted to know, the one shown to John about the triumphant Christ may be the most intriguing:
I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.
No one in all creation will learn this mysterious name. Perhaps it is an eternal secret held between the Father and the Son. “No one knows the Son except the Father,” says Jesus, “and no one knows the Father except the Son.” Perhaps we could not grasp it if it were revealed to us. No matter. What we do know of Jesus defies understanding. For example, Paul tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. What are we to make of that? If a blunt known known such as this confounds us . . . well, just seat me next to poor old Job and we’ll call it good.
And so we have it: the fundamental inscrutability of God and the unsurmountable ignorance of humankind. Thankfully, figuring out God has never been the program. Besides, even if we could fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and had faith that could move mountains, without love we would have nothing. God’s love is all of God, and those who receive his love know all that need be known. This known known makes the unknown known. And so Paul prays that we may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. As John declares: God is love. And that, my friends, is the greatest known known of all.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
W. B. Yeats
Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave is a metaphorical representation of the human journey toward knowledge and truth. It depicts prisoners chained in a cave who are able to see only shadows projected on the wall, which they mistake for reality. One prisoner escapes and witnesses the world outside. He returns to the cave to communicate his newfound understanding to the others, but they find his report unintelligible and will not abandon their familiar, if limited, experience. To them, the shadows are not ghostly outlines of real things; they are the things themselves.
This idea intrigued C. S. Lewis who imported it into his novel, The Great Divorce, in which a group of “tourists” take a bus ride to heaven. The narrator of the story notices that he and his fellow passengers are transparent against the heavenly landscape and that the grass doesn’t bend under their feet. He hasn’t the strength even to pluck a daisy growing at his feet. The narrator realizes that the tourists are the same humans as they have always been, but it was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Unlike Plato, Lewis affirms the substantiality of the world. Creation is no mere projection; it is indeed a real thing—but it is merely a thing and not to be mistaken for the creator.
A few years ago, weary of the evangelical Sunday morning set piece, my wife and I made the hour-long trip to Portland to visit St. Mark, a conservative Anglican parish in the hip northwest part of the city. We were stunned by the historic red-brick basilica and the Romanesque style sanctuary with its stained glass windows, fine art paintings, Venetian statuary , and magnificent pipe organ. We attended high mass, which commenced with a tolling of the parish bell and the solemn procession of the robed officiants led by an attendant swinging a smoking censor of aromatic incense. The entire service was meticulously choreographed: we stood, we sang, we kneeled, we prayed, we recited. The priests bowed, and chanted, their elaborate vestments glimmering in the sacred dim. After a brief, surprisingly homey sermon, all were invited to the altar to receive the Eucharist: a wafer, hallowed at the priest’s invocation, and the wine of the Sacrifice, sipped from a chalice offered by his reverent hands. The service ended with the recession of the officiants and the explosive joy of the pipe organ. Smitten by the pageantry and Calvary-centric service, we returned the next Sunday—and each Sunday afterwards for two years.
Attending St. Mark was wonderful. All I had to do was show up and let the grand ceremony wash over me. It was like entering a poem. I was submerged in imagery and carried along by the precise, melodic diction of the ritual. At the end of each service, I emerged from the basilica’s protective womb infused with the sublime, which pleasantly waned during the drive home like the fading glory on Moses’ face. Eventually, however, the spectacle’s power to move me also began to wane; as it became familiar, I found that it no longer satisfied. The poem that at first had buoyed my soul Godward now thwarted me; the liturgy had become a lid. I began to see the elaborate rituals, not as sacraments, but as the pious inventions of men. As God spoke through Isaiah, “Their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote.” The gorgeous displays promising me a feast seemed but empty gestures, and my soul grew lean at that table. I was starving.
This sense of paucity has extended beyond evangelicalism’s well-oiled mechanisms and the operatic theatre of high church liturgy. It has also taken root in unexpected soil: the carefully tended garden of the scriptures. Steeped in the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, I wholeheartedly affirm that the Bible is the final authority for Christian faith and practice, and that it provides the template for divine revelation. Even so, I have discovered—a bit disconcertingly—that the scriptures and all attendant explications are not enough. Contrary to evangelical assumption, I do not find the God of the Bible in the Bible. Yes, I am convinced that this book is essential to my understanding of God and his kingdom. I know that it is the utterly reliable testimony about Jesus Christ. I realize, too, that no amount of commitment or exuberance bears fruit apart from what is found in its pages. And yet I also know that I what I seek is not found within its fine leather covers. “You search the Scriptures,” said Jesus, “because you think that in them you have eternal life. These testify about me.” I don’t want the Bible; I want the Living God.
“You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?”
Human nature seems to impel us toward tangible spiritual emblems. We seem compelled to make the invisible visible, to somehow capture the transcendent within a fixed, visible thing. This is not only a pagan inclination. Even as the glory of YHWH churned upon Mount Sinai in full view of Israel, the people asked Aaron to make them an idol. They brought to him their gold earrings which Aaron then cast in the shape of a calf. When the people saw it they said, “This is your god, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” The terrifying deity hidden within the fiery cloud upon the mountain was too much to bear. The people wanted their deliverer safely encoded within an intelligible device, what T. S. Eliot might have called an objective correlative. Eliot used this phrase to refer to objects, situations, or chains of events used as formulas to invoke particular emotions or states of mind. Aaron’s golden calf was the knowable object signifying an otherwise incomprehensible YHWH, and, like all idols, it functioned as a physical prompt for worship and the associated feelings.
This is exactly what liturgy is: objects, situations, and chains of events as a repeatable formula to invoke mental and emotional states associated with worship. Liturgy isn’t only a feature of the high church; even the most casual congregations have their liturgies. The predictable order of service (welcome, singing, lesson, ministry time), the style of music, the specialized language—all serve to set a tone that congregants are to adopt. Creating this tone is the whole purpose of the liturgy and why so much attention is paid to its elements and their arrangement. The tone is so central that it becomes the measure by which we gauge the success of our worship experience. If we are able to achieve the desired emotional state—whether solemnity or abandon or something in between—we judge the event a success. If we are not able to internalize the tone, we consider the experience less than optimal. Thus, the elements ostensibly employed to direct us toward the invisible God become the very substance of our worship—the “thing” itself.
The problem isn’t liturgy per se. Structure of some kind is necessary for a meaningful corporate experience. In this way, liturgies are like table manners, shared behaviors that enhance fellowship and provide harmonious access to the food. But when protocol hinders eating or is mistaken for the food itself, we have a serious issue. Jesus hints at this when he denounces the Jewish religious leaders who doggedly impose the minutia of the Law: “You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.” Shadow though it is, liturgy (conservative or charismatic) should usher us out of the cave, not acclimatize us to it.
As Isaiah prophesied, Jesus came to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. All our devices of devotion—our Sunday services, our sacraments, our spiritual disciplines, even our Bibles—are, as Paul notes, a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. The incarnation, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus expose our religious ornaments as insubstantial and profitless. Christ is the reality; he is the real bread that came down from heaven.
I think of the many people who grew faint seeking God in the franchised caves of Christendom where they were offered shadows to eat, mere tokens rather than what the tokens were tokens of. I myself have offered such baubles to them, and for this I am deeply sorry. I think, too, of my own hunger, unsatisfied by earnest evangelical gyrations or by high church sheen. I’m famished. I don’t want to play; I want to eat. I want the real thing.
Maybe you do too.
“I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold,
I am alive for ever and ever!”
Revelation 1:18
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—William Butler Yeats
Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood in 1507, but he came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the view on indulgences. Luther attempted to resolve these differences amicably, proposing an academic discussion of indulgences in his Ninety-five Theses. His aim was to inform people of his ideas and spark a debate about what he considered the church’s improper practices and beliefs. Although Luther intended a respectful engagement with the church leadership, Pope Leo X demanded that he renounce his writings. If Luther chose to recant and repent of his works, he could be welcomed back into the Church; if he refused, he would be considered a heretic and could be burned at the stake. At the tribunal, Martin Luther made his bold reply:
“I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”
For this the pope excommunicated Luther from the Roman Catholic Church and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V condemned him as an outlaw of the state. The punishments remained in force at Luther’s death.
It’s easy to romanticize Luther and his courageous stand, but the full import of such actions are rarely recognized in the moment. It is only in retrospect that we are able to measure the true significance. On April 17, 1521, there was no wide acclaim, no Protestant Reformation; there was only Martin Luther, an imperfect man who spoke the truth on behalf of the Bible and his beloved church. He saw how church leaders had abandoned the clear testimony of the scriptures and perverted the message of the gospel. Luther knew the price he might pay for it, but he could not remain silent in the face of compromise, presumption, and disregard. “Here I stand,” he told the tribunal. “I cannot do otherwise.”
Sometimes courage is nothing more than “I cannot do otherwise.” There is no bravado in it or, perhaps, even much hope. Courage doesn’t calculate the chances of success; it merely sees what must be done and asks, “If not me, who?” Courage is an imperative founded on conviction. Where there is little conviction, there is little courage. Courage is conviction made manifest.
For Luther, to recant or stay silent in the face of unbiblical teaching was tantamount to renouncing his faith altogether. He could not play the submissive churchman when the church was being misled by the ministerial powers-that-be. For Martin Luther, the plain testimony of the scriptures was the line in the sand across which no one, not even church authorities, must be allowed to cross. To quietly defer in order to keep the peace would be to exchange the truth of God for a lie and consign Christ’s precious flock to deception and slaughter. The misleading teachings had to be confronted and the drift from Biblical truth halted, so Luther took up the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. He could not do otherwise.
An unfortunate reading of the Protestant Reformation is that it offers the Christian conscience an easy out. If we don’t like a church for some reason—whether it be the pastor, the songs, or the carpet color—we can simply move to a different church down the block and leave the problem behind. (The Migration of the Saints should have its own Wikipedia page.) Luther would be horrified by the ease with which we walk away. For American Christians, however, it is simply freedom of worship with an exchange policy. We’re customers, not custodians.
Luther would also wonder at our reluctance to confront error and drift within our congregations. If our church leadership introduces questionable teaching, policies, or practices, most of us take a decidedly un-Luther-like approach. We may be concerned but keep to the pews with our heads down. Who are we to object? Is that not the responsibility of the elders and the board? If they don’t take issue, we reason, it must be okay. Our reticence is a flag of surrender. With quiet acquiescence we concede the field, and untruth goes marching on.
Of course, the threat of misleading teaching and congregational drift is nothing new. Peter warned the young church about it: There will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies . . . Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. Paul also recognized the church’s vulnerability to error and insisted that an overseer must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. He informed Timothy that opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth. But if gentleness is not effective, Paul counsels Titus to rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith. The point is clear: unsound teaching must be confronted so that the way of truth will not be brought into disrepute.
In John’s Revelation he who was seated on the throne declares that those who are victorious over Satan will inherit life but that the wicked will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. Predictably included among the wicked are unbelievers, the vile, murderers, the sexually immoral, practitioners of the occult, idolaters, and liars. But the transgressors who stand out most on this list are, in fact, named first. They are the cowards. We tend to think of cowardice as a weakness of disposition rather than as an out-and-out sin. The scriptures, however, view it quite differently. The scriptures regard cowardice as a form of treason, a betrayal of truth and duty. In his letter to Timothy, Paul notes that God has not given us a spirit of timidity. Timidity is not shyness; it is cowardice. It is counter to the very nature of God and, therefore, wholly ungodly.
The times call for conviction and courage. If not you, who?
This we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual realities with spiritual words.
1 Corinthians 2:13
The stereotypical image of the Old Testament prophet is an indignant bludgeon of a man sporting wild hair, a beard, crazy eyes, and a ratty tunic who bellows denunciation and certain doom. He is a disrupter, an agent of agitation, an instrument of confrontation. He is possessed by divine fury and conscripted to expose the arrogance and apostasy of men. He is a clear channel for the Word of the Living God and, therefore, intolerable.
The New Testament prophet has been tamed. Since Jesus has perfectly revealed the Father and the Spirit has been poured out upon all believers, the prophet no longer holds his (or her) position as the privileged and exclusive mouthpiece of God. Unlike his Old Testament counterpart whose pronouncements were not to be challenged, the New Testament prophet submits his revelations to the congregation who are directed to evaluate them in light of the scriptures and the testimony of the Spirit. The church, not the prophet, is the arbiter of epiphany. And although in very specific situations he might foretell events, the prophet’s primary role as part of the New Testament church is not to predict the future or enforce mandates but to provide timely insight and impetus.
The great and ongoing prophetic task is to express the inexpressible. The prophet must attempt to articulate an immanent transcendence that he himself cannot fully comprehend. The infinite must contract into a span. The mountain must become a molehill. The Word must become words. The prophet condenses the ethereal vapors of divinity into the cracked jars of language; he is a distiller of Spirit.
A common misconception about the biblical prophet is that he is a passive recipient, that God downloads the message verbatim into the prophet’s awareness, and the prophet, in turn, records the words as delivered. This is how the devotees of the Koran believe their book came about. The biblical prophets did indeed often relay the very words of God as they received them. Thus saith the Lord signals that what follows is exactly what God has uttered, without interpretation or explanation. However, a great deal of the Bible’s prophetic literature is not a matter of mere dictation. Large swaths of Old Testament revelation and nearly all in the New Testament epistles involve heavenly visions and prophetic impressions that had to be rendered in human language. Prophecy is rarely an exact science; there is an art to the oracle.
The prophet’s primary asset is the gift of special sight. He has the ability to see things that the rest of us do not; he is a seer—or a see-er. Prophetic sight is not unlike that of any true artist. For example, what the rest of us would see as a simple, beautiful landscape, Vincent Van Gogh would see as a lusty explosion of color. Here is an except from a letter in which he describes a current project:
It is a view of flat green fields with haycocks . . . And on the horizon, in the middle of the painting, the sun sets in a fiery red glow. It was altogether a question of color and tone, the hues of a spectrum of colors of the sky: first, a violet haze in which the red sun was half-hidden by a dark purple cloud with a thin, brilliantly red border. Near the sun were reflections of vermillion but, above, a band of yellow that turned into green and, higher up, a shade of blue, the so-called “cerulean blue,” and, here and there, lilac and gray clouds catching the reflections of the sun.
This kind of sight cannot be learned; it is a gift. In the case of the prophet, God has granted him both the ability to perceive heavenly realities and the access to them. Ezekiel begins his book with the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. 600 years later, John prefaces his astonishing Revelation similarly: After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” The prophet has a special capacity to apprehend (if not always comprehend) the spiritual landscape, coupled with admission into it.
This does not mean that retrieving divine intelligence is easy. The prophet may be invited into the revelation zone, but fruitfully exploring it is another matter. Major exceptions notwithstanding, rarely is the prophet shown high-resolution images or handed a pre-printed scroll. More often he encounters a domain not so readily construed. I am not talking about some vacuous cloud of unknowing or dark night of the soul propounded by medieval mystics. On the contrary, the prophetic landscape gleams with light and revelation. The prophetic problem is not a lack of divine disclosure; it’s that there is too much. The prophet encounters a mind-blinding brilliance, a radiant roar of many waters that cannot be delineated because it is everything everywhere all at once. The first prophetic challenge is to recognize the particular disclosure. Peter alludes to the prophets who searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. The prophet must pierce the incandescent murk in an attempt to discern the distinct “this/now” that he is seeking. If he is persistent and alert, the epiphany—or a part of it—will coalesce like a figure emerging from mist.
The second prophetic challenge is to articulate what is seen. The seer must condense the raw vapors of his experience into the liquor of human words. This is a difficult task, even for a master of language. Jesus himself grappled to render spiritual truth into words that by nature are imprecise. “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like?” he pondered, “or what parable shall we use to describe it?” His stories and sermons of “what he has seen and heard” are the finest things ever spoken among men, and yet they are fashioned with words that fall short of the very spiritual realities they are intended to convey. The apostle Paul, who, excepting Jesus himself, is arguably the church’s most articulate communicator, also recognized the unbridgeable chasm between human language and the heavenly realities to which they point: The kingdom of God is not a matter of words, he wrote, but of power. Even so, Jesus and Paul did use human language because in this dispensation there is no alternative. Miracles may validate the message, but they do not articulate it. For now, at least, words are necessary.
And so the prophet holds the vision in his mind’s eye, sharpens his pencil, pulls out his lexicon, and carries out his impossible mandate. He scratches, crosses out, ponders, revises, erases, and revises again. He loves the way words can be selected, honed, and linked to intimate the Spirit’s lucent visions. He also resents the words for failing him as he hammers their dull metal into a sorry semblance of epiphany’s exquisite contours. The Spirit will guide but rarely override; he is the Spirit of prophecy, not the prophet.
When the prophet has done his best, he will offer the fruits of his labor for consideration. He has no say in how it will be received. His expectations are modest. Some might understand and take his prophecy to heart; most won’t. But that’s not his problem; he is neither enforcer nor judge. The prophet’s job is to see and then communicate what he sees. He is an artist, a translator, a distiller of divinity. He is no more than that—and no less.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
Psalm 46:4
I said to the river,
Is it true what Heraclitus said, that no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man?
And the river replied,
I am one river from headwater to mouth. A man’s mouth is in his head. That is not much of a span, and certainly not, as Protagoras would have it, the measure of all things. For here I am, but where is Protagoras? Where is Heraclitus? The measure of man is his measure, not mine.
I said,
But you have been defined and your path charted by man’s instruments.
The river splashed my foot and said,
His maps are pretty, but they have no fish in them.
So I said,
But you are constrained, are you not? Must you not follow the path marked out for you by mountain and canyon and stone? Consider this valley. It is humble, but it determines your way.
The river seemed amused and answered,
I shaped this valley. I carved the canyon and exposed the stone. The landscape does not fashion me; I fashion the landscape. Even the mighty mountains appeared only at the waters’ retreat. Water was first. Water defines the land, not the land, water.
Then I said,
Sometimes you overflow your banks and destroy men and what they have labored to build. Why are you so angry?
The river replied,
A river will have its way. It is not anger that swells the flow or propels the torrent. It is justice.
I frowned—
I do not understand. How is this justice?
And the river responded,
Justice restores the balance of things, whether of too much or too little.
I said,
Surely not all those ruined by the flood are guilty!
In answer, the river said,
Justice is not about guilt. It is about right. The good is costly, even for the righteous, especially for the righteous.
I murmured,
This is a difficult thing.
The river replied,
Neither are men the measure of justice. They do not control the river.
I pointed and cried,
Not so! Behold this towering dam! By it men protect themselves from your caprice and harness your current for their industry. They redirect your waters for their profit. You power their hospitals and sweatshops and casinos and churches and whorehouses! You enable their enlightenments, their entertainments, and their engines of war!
The river grew stern and rumbled,
Men do not control the river.
Unnerved, I whispered,
I am thirsty.
The river showed me a quiet pool.
Drink.
I bent to the still surface and sipped. The water was cool and sweet.
I said,
If only all might find this place and drink.
The river then lifted me up. I rose higher and higher, above the valley, above the mountains, beyond the clouds, until I could see the whole of the earth.
Astonished, I exclaimed,
It’s all river!
The river did not respond, but its voice was everywhere.
