Rocks and Hard Places

 These rocks were a short walk from the King's Cross District in Sydney. Fighting the   strong undertow to get back to them was a real "rock/hard place" dilemma.

         
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We’re all familiar with that place between a rock and a hard place. We’ve all been there or thought we’ve been there, only to discover the rock wasn’t that big nor the place that hard.

Matters turned out to be not that serious. Stakes were found to be not that high. Consequences we realized were not that consequential.

This got me to thinking about a real “between a rock and a hard place” moment. One that might be experienced by God, the ultimate judge, as individuals stand before Him awaiting judgement.

In the case of most people, He can probably perform this task with His eyes closed, conceding for the moment that He can probably perform every task with His eyes closed, or might not even have any eyes. Nevertheless, it is His job to put everyone somewhere and it can’t always be easy.

Ordinarily, you’d think He’d take this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” decision in stride. The Bible is dog-gone specific in terms of what we can and cannot do. After all, He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-just and as far as we know, up all night. So nothing is getting past him.

Never Mess with a Nun Named Leo

    Life has a tendency of turning on a dime. At the end of seventh grade, my first year at St. Francis Xavier, I received the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizens award. Sometimes being the new kid on the block, the unknown, has its advantages.

By the next year, that award was old news.

It began as a casual observation, thrown out in haste, and obviously, with little or no thought given to the consequences. After spending most of the afternoon standing in the back of the room as punishment, my three classmates and I had been called to our teacher’s desk to explain our continued misbehavior. Had we shown a sufficient degree of remorse, apologized and promised it wouldn’t happen again, we could have been on our way, but instead we chose to dig that hole that our parents had always warned us about.

The question was a very simple one.

“What do you boys think you’re doing?”

Schoolboys have been asked this question for ages, and the correct response has always been the same. Look down at your feet, shuffle them around a little, shrug your shoulders, shake your head from side to side and then say, “I dunno.”

That is the only acceptable answer. No one really expects you to incriminate yourself. “What do you boys think you’re doing?” has never been a question in search of an answer, but rather a rhetorical assertion that whatever you were doing—and no one really needs an explanation—but whatever it was, was the wrong thing to be doing.

Our teacher was only interested in getting that question out of the way in order to move on to the punishment phase. The request was a formality, an icebreaker as if school were a social event and breaking the rules a party game to be treated as such. Smart kids know this. Of course, smart kids don’t get in trouble.

I accept much of the blame for what happened next because I was the one who responded to her inquiry. My foolish comeback didn’t even answer the question she had posed, but reluctantly, students don’t get do-overs in the classroom the way they do on the playground.

“The other eighth grade is better than ours,” I said, in response to the question, “What do you boys think you’re doing?”

The Thrill of It All

Hell in Earth, a love story was just an idea in my head or it was an idea put in my head by Foo Ling or was it an idea put in Hank Johnson’s head by Foo Ling. But what if I got it wrong or Foo Ling was just pumping Hank or me with misinformation?

What if God and his management team on Erebus aren’t dissecting every single little thing we do and breaking it down into good or evil and then devising elaborate schemes to punish the evildoers? Might there be more to life than committing sins and being held accountable for sins?

Recently I was listening to Frank Ifield’s 1962 hit, “I Remember You.” The high point of the song, the line that I haven’t been able to get out of my head, goes like this.

“When my days are through and the angels ask me to recall—the thrill of it all, I will tell them I remember you.”

Although presumably not divinely inspired (and I realize there is no way of knowing for sure), this line does present a different perspective of God and his relationship to mankind than the divinely inspired Bible. The Bible essentially describes a judgmental God—the tough-love old Geezer in the Old Testament and the more gentle spirit in the New Testament—but always someone who is keeping tabs.

The God of the Bible is absolutely obsessed with how mankind handles the concept of right and wrong. It’s all pretty basic; don’t sin and you go to Heaven, do sin and you go to Hell and like Santa Clause, God is keeping a list.

It’s true that God gave us free will, and in essence, said we have a choice but warned us to make the right choice.

But He also gave us human nature. Even though there is this constant right versus wrong struggle going on within each of us, on the whole, my bet is that God is not that surprised by what we as a race do. Furthermore, I don’t think He even cares.

Except for exceedingly bad and almost universally agreed upon evil persons (Hitler, Attila the Hun, Stalin, Hannibal Lecter), I don’t think God is all that disappointed by the “sins” we commit down here and given the situation that He, Himself, created, I think He expects them. Frankly, I think God has too much going on to even be keeping score.

Consider this: If you were a supremely powerful, all-knowing being capable of building a universe out of nothing but a whim and a prayer, patient enough to let it develop over billions and billions of years*—most of which can only be described as very down time—and yet at the same time creative enough to let a race of humans evolve from virtually nothing into beings actually capable of understanding, to a degree, almost everything in that universe, up to a point, wouldn’t it be mighty petty to just sit up there in heaven and keep track of all the things these humans do wrong?

Maybe God isn’t a judge so much as he is an artist. And if He is an artist wouldn’t He be far less interested in what we did wrong and much more interested in how did we like it. In other words, wouldn’t He want to know what did we like best? What was “The thrill of it all?”

*Note: To get a better concept of just how long a billion years is, consider that if years were money, a billion years would be the equivalent of the cost of a cruise missile, which if dollars were miles, would be the equivalent of 2,000 round trips to the moon.