Who I Think I am

I once read where a man had said

"Ye have heard that it was said by them of old, Thou shalt not kill and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of judgment; But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of judgment and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca [a term of abuse], shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire."

When I first read that I thought it was an instance of overdeveloped righteous, or of someone being a fastidious stickler for the rules of good behavior. And I thought the punishment greatly outweighed the crime. And I thought that way until two events came together in my mind and convinced me otherwise.

When I was a pre-school child, I was living in a predominately Polish/Irish Catholic neighborhood. But one of my friends was a little Jewish girl who I will call Rachel.

As I got to know Rachel, I noticed a peculiar quality in her from time to time. She would easily become emotionally hurt and go off for a long time to be alone with her hurt.

Had I at all thought about it then, I would been able to conclude that this had something to do with her being one of the few Jewish children in a largely working class Catholic community which had its problems with the casual anti-Semitism of most largely gentile communities. (I should point out the religious background of my own family was most definitely disposed against anti-Semitism. My parents would not have countenanced any expression of it in our home.)

Anyway, there came a day when Rachel and I were playing, when, apropos of nothing whatsoever, I turned to Rachel and said "Jew." I did not say this word to identify her as a member of an ethnic group, nor did I say this word to identify her by religion. I said this word as if I had preceded it with the word "dirty." And Rachel did not mistake my meaning, for her face, at first mortally astonished, fell with a collapse like that of the most delicate work of stained glass art being smashed by a big crude brick. And Rachel ran off to be alone a long time with her latest hurt.

Later my parents were called, and I was made to apologize. But there was a powerful part of me that did not want to admit I had committed this deed and indeed did everything I could to conceal the fact that I had done it, and tried wriggling of out admitting I’d done it. And I tried to explain it away. But there was also a part of me that knew exactly what I’d done. And things were never the same between me and Rachel thereafter. Something had been done that could not be undone.

That was the first event.

The second event occurred on a sunny Saturday afternoon, again while I was a child. I was lying down watching television and got up to switch the channel from one cartoon show to another, and while switching the channel I came upon a documentary of Adolph Hitler which stopped me in my tracks.

The documentary was displaying a brief strip of grainy film footage of the operations of a death camp. It was a scene of bodies being pushed put down a slide to go into a deep pit. And what I first saw was the body of a small emaciated child going down the slide. When the body got to bottom of the slide one of its legs fell forward across the rest of its body in such a very unnatural angle that I knew immediately that the child was dead. She had in fact been deliberately killed. And it was done by deliberately acting adults.

Being a young child, I had never seen actual death before. But here it was in front of me in all its ugliness and on an inconceivably massive scale.

G.K. Chesterton is on record as saying that adults are generally guilty and so insist on mercy, but children are relatively innocent, and so demand justice. I would correct him only by saying that what they want is not so much justice as wrath. For that is what my small body and mind felt then with every fiber of my young being. "HOW DARE THEY?" screamed my small child mind. And my small mind was filled with what I can only describe as a wrath that was but a tiny reflection of that of the Creator who created my mind and the mind of that child who perished. It was a wrath that I wished would remain as everlasting as the doom I wished would fall all the malefactors who committed these crimes.

The memory of this event is so painful to me that it has taken me the better part of this day to write the above two paragraphs. You see, in order to write it, I had to undo the "healing" that time wrought by the mere fading of memory. And I take some comfort in the assurance that this crime that was committed so long ago remains in God’s eye as if it happened a second ago, and that the wrath He will inflict for it will remain as everlasting as He is eternal.

But, as we all know, it is easier to see the gross crimes of others than to notice the more subtle crimes of ones own self, which only a Supreme Being can see. There came a day when I was allowed to see that to a Supreme Being, the offense I once gave Rachel, and the acts of those murders in the documentary, were one and the same act.

A Supreme Being sits at the top of the Chain of Being, perfect in Himself, perfect in knowledge as to our deeds and our thoughts, perfect in perception as to holiness and righteousness, and who dwells in an eternity that allows Him to see all the moments of our lives as one moment of time going on forever. To such a Supreme Being, thoughts, latent, or otherwise, are deeds indeed. He does not look on our ability to carry out the thoughts we have, but on the thoughts themselves.

And truly, I had occasion over the years to reflect upon that day I sinned against Rachel. And the thing that most strikes me about it is the fact that the impulse seemed to have come out of nowhere. As soon as I committed the sin, I knew it was a sin. So I must have known that it was going to be a sin before I committed it. And yet there was a moment when I had not committed the sin, and then another moment when I had sinned and released all the evils in the world like Pandora and her famous box.

Did I say "impulse?" Perhaps "latency" is a better word. And Chicagoland is a seeming nowhere that a lot can come out of.

Who do I think I am? I think I am a creature in time who became unlike His eternal Creator and who, unless there is some intervention, will experience His wrath for all eternity.

I have learned that some psychiatrists and psychologists treat a good many people in their consulting rooms for what they describe as an irrational fear of going to Hell. Some of these learned healers even think the idea of Hell is itself irrational. I would wonder though if they haven’t considered that if some humans can make a version of it here, why that shouldn’t be reason enough for one to exist hereafter. But in any case, this shows that the idea of eternal Hell, latent in anybody with a conscience, is one of the most unacceptable ideas to modern human beings. It is right up there with the idea of original sin.

And as it is true that there is no amount of labor human beings will not go through in order to avoid the true labor of thinking, there also no amount of thinking that humans beings will not go through to avoid thinking about Hell.

There are several species of false thinking. I am now going to go talk about one that is foundational and two others that are derived from it.