Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for June 5, 2005

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Close But No Cigar

In his story "The Purloined Letter" Edgar Allan Poe's main character, Monsieur Dupin, tells of a game people used to play with a map. Let's say it was a map of France showing and naming its counties, cities, towns, and villages in large or small letters. The rules of the game were simple. One player would select a locality's name and challenge the other players to guess what it was. Now normally a novice at the game might select one of the localities printed tinier, less apparent letters. But the really shrewd player would choose the name of F R A N C E itself, because, being printed in the largest letters and spaced across the whole map, it was very likely to be overlooked by everybody - "by dint of its being excessively obvious".

You could say that's the very reason the religious leaders of Jesus' time overlooked him entirely. Like the usual player of Dupin's game, they, too, had this tendency to study only fine print, assuming that's where they might find the answer to the
quiz of human existence. And all the while Jesus walked among them like the name of
F R A N C E written across the whole landscape of the times in which they lived.

By that I mean, smallness was their preference. Their concept of God had become petty. They saw him merely as the Chief Justice of the Cosmic Supreme Court, author of a million petty ways of doing things; the source of minute rules covering everything from Sabbath behavior and hygiene. They saw him as narrowly partial to his chosen people and disdainful of Samaritans, Syrians, prostitutes, publicans, to "different" people in general. (All of which makes one suspect that this aloof, biased and irritable God was more a reflection of themselves than the original and intimate God of the Bible who walked with Adam in the cool of the evening and dined in triplicate with ancient Abraham outside his shepherd's tent.)

And since Jesus didn't fall within their narrow concept of God and their God's way of doing things, they ultimately wrote him off. Oh yes, when he first came upon the scene valuing people more than rubrics, saying things like the Sabbath was made for people and not people for the Sabbath; when he did not hesitate to dine with a public sinner or to allow himself to be touched by a prostitute; when he began to forgive people's sins as though it were the easiest thing in the world to do, they did become curious and concerned. They sent delegations to size him up, to match him against the standards of the ominous God they worshipped and found him totally out of synch. They couldn't contain him within the old wine skins they had brought along. His responses to their three dimensional questions had a strange, four dimensional ring to them. And so they turned away to continue their tedious search for the answers to life amid the footnotes of their tradition.

And yet there was Jesus in CAPITAL LETTERS, as large as LIFE itself, as large as true God must be: caring, forgiving, healing, uttering parables loaded with grace, ready to lay down his life for everyone and anyone - the incarnation of the only God worth believing in, a Creator of unrelenting understanding and compassion.

You know the old sayings about a person's not being able to see the forest for the trees and never trust a mathematician out of square roots. Therein lies a warning to all of us. Never allow yourself to miss the obvious truth by too much analysis. Our creed is a simple one: God is LOVE and whoever abides in LOVE abides in God and God in him - and her!

-- Geoff Wood