faith | Janie B. Cheaney

April 28, 2021April 30, 2021

Come into the Garden

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with gardening: on in April, off in August. I suspect this is common; everybody gets excited about a clean patch of black, soft soil, and ecstatic when the first bean plants poke their brave little necks into the sunlight. For the first few weeks I run out to see how much has sprouted, how much has blossomed, how much has—oh joy!—matured into edibility.

Each plant has its own personality. I don’t like peas that much, but plant them anyway because I love how they twine their little tendrils around the wires, like a baby instinctively closing a fist around a finger. And the way pole beans blindly seek something to climb on—you can see them feeling the air, reaching, joyfully wrapping (or collapsing if you don’t get around to putting up that fence. Cornstalks don’t need no support from you—they provide their own, thank you very much.

Then comes July.

The soft ground is baked to slate gray, leaves are drooping and changing color, and bugs are gleefully sharing the produce. Squash bugs don’t even share—they destroy. The first time I saw a full-size tomato worm I almost screamed. (The first hint of tomato worms is that the top branches of the plant are stripped. Color that was on the plant is now inside the worm, which why you can’t see them until—suddenly!—you can.)

Summertime is travel time, too, so the weeds took advantage of my absence to come out and play. By the time I get back, they’ve established themselves as master. It’s too much to keep up with! The garden seems to reflect my discouragement in every drying leaf and misshapen bean: we give up. Just put us out of our misery.

But I’m not giving up. This year will be different. Two main reasons, which I hope will provide the formula for a successful garden:

p/p + m_{2 =}S (i.e., success)

P is for preparation divided by pickup. In all the years we’ve lived here, we haven’t owned a truck. Who needed a truck, with a trusty station wagon and a rusty trailer? The station wagon is long gone and the trailer is a pain to hook up and haul around. So this year, this pickup:

Which makes hauling manure and compost a snap. (Unloading it is not so snappy, but getting it someplace to unload was the real challenge, now solved.)

M is for maintenance x maintenance. Once we’re all planted, one hour/day should keep the weeds down and the produce up. Maybe some extra watering at sundown, if needed. Bugs are a given, but if I ride herd on them maybe they won’t ride herd on me. No travel plans either, so no big gaps in the maintenance continuum.

Wishful thinking? Well, we’ll see.

If the main point was food for the table, no cost/benefit analysis would stand for it in these days of plenty. Gardening is about exercising dominion over creation, as humans were created to do. I suspect that’s why it strikes a chord in so many hearts—at least the hearts of those who don’t have to do it. (Subsistence farmers may just as often have their hearts broken.) It’s a skill and an art and takes a bit of time and experience to learn. I hope I’ve put in enough time and experience by now because I don’t have much left of either.

This summer, I hope to walk into the garden in the cool of the morning, with a touch of the same wonder felt by the first gardeners. Their experience went awry, giving us thorns and weeds and earning our bread by the sweat of our brow. But a new day was on the way:

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.
G.K. Chesterton

Gardening is an act of faith. There’s always another dawn, another spring, another Easter—until there isn’t. When all those things cease, we’ve reached our goal and can happily lay down our trowels and rakes. Unless there’s gardening in heaven, too. I wouldn’t be surprised.

March 22, 2021March 22, 2021

Every Good Thing

A picture book published last September is scoring stars in all the children’s-book review journals: I Am Every Good Thing. The book celebrates boyhood—particularly black boyhood—as a radiance of joy and exuberance and possibility.

Words and phrases like “good to the core,” “star-filled sky of solutions,” and “perfect” overstate the case. Other thoughts, like “I am the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound” are more puzzling than clarifying. But the truly disturbing page, near the end, shows our hero with an unmistakable halo. “I am what I say I am” is the facing text.

I Am, or I Am Who I Am—Does that remind you of anyone?

I can understand the need for a book like this. Boys have been medicated and castigated and exhorted to act like girls for the last twenty years or so; about time they are appreciated for the rambunctious risk-takers they are. Black boys, especially, need inspiration to grow into strong and capable men.

But I’m not sure that the self-affirmation expressed in the title is the best way to go about it.

In fact, I’m sure it’s not.

You don’t have to be convicted of original sin to see the problem here. The title is patently untrue. Boys are not every good thing: while lively and funny, they can also be self-centered, aggressive, reckless, impetuous, and thoughtless. (My five-year-old grandson is a lot of good things, but I could tell you some stories . . .) Both boys and girls lack plenty of good things, like maturity and good judgment. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature, the very definition of a child.

Now, wait a minute, the author and illustrator might object: we don’t mean it literally. Or maybe they do. I don’t know, and the casual reader or first-grader who finds this book thrust at him by his reading specialist won’t know either. If the intention is the build his confidence, this reminds me of the self-esteem movement that began in the 1980s. I call it sticker-sheet confidence, because it seemed to consist of handing out accolades like exclamatory stickers (Awesome Work! You Rock!!)

The Self-esteem Movement, as a conscious Movement, was gradually buried under a pile of evidence that self-esteem is not endemic to good character. In fact, it may actually be inimical to good character. Building confidence is not a matter of telling kids they’re awesome, but helping them along the road to becoming awesome. That’s a lifelong process.

And they’ll never be as awesome as a halo-crowned figure identifying himself as I Am. Assuming godlike status is not the key to success. We have it on good authority that that’s the road to destruction.

February 16, 2021February 16, 2021

Ravi’s Postmortem Fall

How deep must your perversion be to think that you can get away with this stuff forever? The only way I can explain it is that you must be psychotically double-minded, or you must not really believe in God.

Rod Dreher, The American Conservative Feb. 12, 2021

Dreher is being typically emotional. Reporting on Christianity Today‘s reporting on Ravi Zacharias, he recoils in horror at this “vile man.” I don’t disagree, though given what we know now, it would have been better for Zacharias if all the vileness had come out while he was still alive and could see what his sin had done. That would have been an opportunity to repent.

But really, he had many opportunities , especially in the last few months when he must have known his time was short. He could have confessed. Or he could have destroyed all his phones and emails. The fact that he did neither of those tings indicates that he was living on an unreal plane.

Every conscious, deliberate sin, from adultery to tax cheating, requires a certain double-mindedness.

“Psychotically double-minded” seems the more likely of Dreher’s alternatives, but double-mindedness may be more common than he thinks. In fact, it may be the default position of all of us, including Christians. Every conscious, deliberate sin, from adultery to tax cheating, requires a certain double-mindedness. A Christian man who berates his wife, an elder who makes nasty comments about troublesome church members, a pastor who develops a gambling habit, a Sunday school teacher who constantly talks down her husband. And me, who wastes an hour and a half on Netflix when I should be checking up on my neighbors.

We all know what we should do, or shouldn’t do. The scripture we swear by is very clear. But on the way to action, knowledge gets sidelined. We shuttle it into a storage room called “Holy to the Lord,” where we make our sacrifices and holy acts. And then we claim our “free time” to do what we want.

Ravi Zacharias traveled the world, spoke at conferences, wrote dozens of books that sold millions of copies, counseled celebrities and world leaders. In that role, in that room, he may have (probably did) believe every word he was saying as the head of RZIM: the name, the legend. Once outside that persona he was a slight, elderly man with chronic back pain. Perhaps one justified the other. RZ spoke a blessing over Ravi. When he prayed with women he was preying on, when he told a partner she was his “reward” for godly service, he might have been sincere, in an all-too-human, double-minded way.

All idols replace Christ. Idolatry is the primary temptation.

“The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer. 9:17), and the first person my heart deceives is me. Could Ravi have made an idol out of RZ? (Naming a ministry after himself, or consenting to it, seems unwise in the first place.) Given the convoluted reasoning we tend to indulge in, he may have indulged himself with a clear conscience. He may have atonement for himself as his own high priest in his holy capacity, crowding out the Christ he claimed to serve.

All idols replace Christ. Idolatry is the primary temptation. This sad saga should, if nothing else, serve as a warning to the rest of us: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (I Jn 5:13).

October 13, 2020October 13, 2020

Beating Still

Death can be confusing, and confounding. A friend’s brother died very suddenly a few weeks ago—he was sitting, then he was standing, then he was falling. Cardiac arrest. Another friend’s husband died six weeks after she brought him home from assisted care. Probably a stroke. My mother passed away almost 12 years ago, just shy of her 88^th birthday, and the cause was never determined. At 88, her body didn’t need a cause. After the first fall she declined rapidly, not wanting to stick around and be a burden to her children, even though we were ready to be burdened. On the last evening, I put my head on her chest to pick up her heartbeat.

I heard the last one, faltering like a footstep seeking purchase. Then stillness.

Through medical science we know when our hearts begin to beat: not to the minute, but definitely to the week, perhaps even the day. But no one knows when his heart will stop—with perhaps one exception.

I think about that sometimes after an early morning run, when I’m winding down and my heart rate it up to a healthy 140. I can feel it in my chest and hear it in my ears and contemplate the many millions of times it has clenched and released. It’s been a steady, reliable little machine for seven decades now. How much longer?

“All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” All the heartbeats, too, and every breath. If he keeps track of the hairs on my head, he must also have a number in mind: 2,575,440,000 . . . 2,575440,001 . . . 2,575,440, 002 . . . When my heart reaches that predetermined number, it will stop.

Once, in a dusty village called Nazareth, a girl who had never slept with a man felt a baby quicken in her womb. She had been warned it was going to happen, but maybe she hadn’t told anyone yet, waiting to see if the angel’s word would actually come true. Imagine the start, her hand on her belly, a quick breath, the news taking shape in her own body. But even before that the little form was growing, and at some time during the fifth or sixth week, his tiny heart began to beat.

Ke-thump, ke-thump, ke-thump. Quickly slipping into the stream of time.

The angels know. The Father knows. Now Mary knows, and her own heart keeps the little one company.

Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump.

Did he know? Was his developing brain somehow aware that it had directed a heart to start pumping, and that it would keep pumping for thirty-three years before grinding to a halt, filling with water, spilling blood when pierced by a Roman spear?

If not then, he would know later. He would know, to the second, when the last drop of blood would fill up the measure and pay the price. His heart would stop once he willed it to stop, after pulling in a last breath and surrendering his spirit.

Then it would lie still in a cold body, wrapped up like a swaddled baby and carefully placed on a stone slab in a tomb. For the next 30-odd hours it would remain still. But then, sometime in the pre-dawn hours of the third day, it started beating again. And all these centuries later, it beats still. For us.

November 13, 2018

The “Nothingness” of Idolatry

A deep dive into the etymology (history and development) of the word idol:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Greek eido’lon (Latin idolon) encompassed the notion of

image in many forms: phantom, idea, fancy, likeness. The Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament, completed around 250 B. C.) appropriated the Greek word to refer to a carved representation, and that’s the usual sense in Hebrew. But the Hebrew word saw’, occasionally translated idol, means a falsehood, a vain thing, a “nothing.” An idol is, in the contemptuous Hebrew sense, “nothing,” and prophets like Isaiah had a lot of fun with the idea: cutting down a tree to carve it, cooking your food over the scraps, then bowing down to it (see Is. 44:12-17).

But an idolatrous “nothing” doesn’t seem like nothing to an idolater, and that’s the danger of it.

One intriguing use of the Greek applies the word to a reflection in water or a mirror. Other classical uses include an effigy, a counterfeit, an imitation, an insubstantial appearance (such as a shadow), a mental fiction or fantasy, a false conception. The wisdom of etymology subtly unfolds—who would have guessed this many shades of meaning for a word usually associated with crude images made from wood, metal, or stone?

Take “reflection.” Aside from the myth that gives “narcissism” its name, this form of idolatry is a cartoon image, the smitten individual gazing at himself in a mirror while surrounded by fluttering hearts. We’re too sophisticated for that, or almost. I’m old enough to remember a video that made the rounds during the 2004 election: John Edwards, the Democrat candidate for V-P, taking 14 minutes to comb his hair in front of a mirror just before his one televised debate. (To be fair, he possessed exceptional hair.)

Most of us don’t fall in love with our reflections. But we do project, and the things we love become part of us, and when we pursue them, we pursue that which feeds, builds, expands, and often flatters us. It’s possible to fall in love objectively—that is, for the object itself. An aspiring ballerina loves dance for its own sake, as an athlete loves the game, a reader loves literature, a hiker loves mountains. But in time the temptation to identify with the object of our affection can overtake us. We no longer pursue out of love, but out of pride, possessiveness, or position. Get two or more enthusiasts together and clock how long before arguments break out. The more vehemence, the greater the personal investment.

When does enthusiasm become idolatry? That’s hard to say. When life makes no sense without it, when it brings pain—even when it dries up, suddenly and completely, because it couldn’t sustain your passion forever.

Idolatry is tricky, twisty, and deceptive. And ultimately, an illusion—a “nothing” after all. The only sure remedy is Reality Himself.

October 16, 2018

Invasive Love

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;

His love endures forever . . . .

Psalm 136:1

Psalm 136 notably includes the refrain, “His love endures forever” in every alternating line. The Hebrew verb translated “love” is hesed. Some translations focus on the “forever,” making use of a linking verb (e.g., “His love is everlasting”). Speaking as a non-scholar of Hebrew, I’m sure that’s grammatically correct, but might not be the best interpretation. God’s hesed (often translated “steadfast love,” “lovingkindness,” “unfailing kindness,” “mercy,” etc.) endures. More than that, it actively endures. It’s not a feeling extended toward us, but a tool (or weapon) continually wielded on our behalf.

Suppose Psalm 136 read something like this:

His thoughts dwell longingly on us.

His love is everlasting.

He rehearses our many excellent qualities.

His love is everlasting.

He’s already picked out the ring.

His love is everlasting.

Tomorrow he intends to pop the question.

His love is everlasting.

Though human-like emotions are attributed to God (our emotional nature comes from him, not the other way around), they are not manifested in ways especially human, like a besotted young man contemplating the girl who’s captured his heart. Almost all the non-refrain lines in Psalm 136 are active. Even violent: He struck down, brought out, divided, overthrew, led out, killed, gave, remembered, rescued. “Mighty wonders” are the tokens of his love. Steadfast love is not a generalized benevolence, but a frightfully specific, focused, burning, overpowering force.

In English, love is both a noun and a verb. In Hebrew, hesed implies action—a reaching, searching, interfering kindness that speaks more of the lover than the object. It invades our space and shakes us awake, bundles us up and pulls us out of destruction. It outlasts time, and endures. Endures conflict, indifference, disobedience, rebellion . . .

Most of all, it endures us.

August 10, 2018

You’ve Got a Lot of Nerve

Arise, O Lord, in your anger;

Lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies

Awake for me; you have appointed a judgment . . . (Psalm 7:6, “of David”)

Who does this “of David” character think he is? He seems to believe that the Creator and Master of the universe, of the sky with its stars and the sea with its endless waves, is at his beck and call. He has no qualms about marching up to heaven’s gate and yanking on the bell pull, yelling, “Wake up!” Then he lays out a case, such as it is: “I’m the righteous one; they’re the bad guys. Whose side are You on?”

What nerve!

David was a pretty nervy guy, and it didn’t always put him on the side of the angels. But this Psalm and many others demonstrate where his boldness came from. First, confidence (whoever calls on the Lord must believe he exists), then acknowledgment (God is a righteous judge), dependence (Save and Deliver me!) and vulnerability (Judge me according to my righteousness). If he seems cocky, he knows where Square One is. If he seems full of himself . . . it’s not really himself he’s full of. What makes David a man after God’s own heart, rather than just a blowhard, opportunist, or bully, is that he’s after God’s own heart.

No one is more real to him. If the Lord demands nothing greater than faith from David, then David delivers. By faith he demands great things from God, like the terrified disciples crying out, “Master, wake up! Don’t you care if we all drown?” Or the widow who makes a pest of herself, knocking and insisting and demanding until the judge finally gives in.

They’ve got a lot of nerve, and so do we, if we’d only recognize and make use of it.

June 2, 2018June 2, 2018

Envy Is No Fun

What are you good at? That’s where the green-eyed monster* will get you.

I used to make ice cream from a recipe and process I developed myself: a time-consuming project for special occasions. I liked to say it was the best in the world because who could prove it wasn’t? Many years ago I was at a picnic where someone brought a bucked of homemade ice cream. I even remember the flavor: maple. Reader, it was not anywhere as good as mine, and that’s an honest objective judgement. Even so, I was surprised and a bit abashed at how much I resented the praise heaped upon that unassuming tub of inferior dessert. If only I had thought to bring my world-record peach! I was like Mrs. Smith giving Mrs. Jones the stink eye at the county fair because of the former’s purple-ribbon-winning strawberry-rhubarb pie when Mrs. Smith’s blueberry pie clearly deserved it.

Envy. It’s miserable.

Later, when I was more mature with serious ambitions of publishing a novel, any new fiction writer who accomplished that feat, with warm accolades in the New York Times Book Review, was like a stab to the heart. Especially if they were close to my own age, like Carrie Fisher. She already had fame, fortune, cool friends—why did she have to go publish a novel and get it optioned for a movie when the world was waiting for my masterpiece? Or, in less confident moods, how dare she be a better writer than me? I wouldn’t have changed places with her (even without knowing what we know now), unfortunately for me at the time, the world was full of talented fiction writers. And, even after I managed to publish a few novels, the world remained full of more popular, and more well-reviewed, and more awarded-winning novelists, and I knew some of them personally.

Envy is misery.

Now past my fiction-writing stage—probably—I still feel the old familiar twinge over Christian writers more shared, liked, and retweeted than me, especially over subjects I’ve written about. Very silly, on a par with the county pie-judging competition. Worse than silly, actually—it’s a clear violation of the Tenth Commandment. I can say my bouts of envy are less much less frequent and of shorter duration. Sanctification always has its effect, however slowly.

But it’s better to shortcut the process, and Psalm 73 (of Asaph) is just the ticket. Old Asaph put his finger on the problem: “As for me, my feet had almost stumbled. My steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw their prosperity . . .” I mean, look at them! What do they know of struggle? Maybe they won second runner-up in the Miss Radian Baby pageant but after that it was red carpet all the way. What couldn’t I do with all their advantages? My cheeks hurt from insincere smiles when they announced their latest award; my hearty Congrats! over their latest book deal was wrung from a heart of lead.

“But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went to the sanctuary of God . . .” There I learned that my problem wasn’t them. My problem was me. They have their own issues to answer for, but “when my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant: I was like a beast before you.”

Ouch.

An actual beast can be forgiven for a narrow focus and limited perspective; not me. When I try to squeeze my life into a self-focused cheering section, I’m like Nebuchadnezzar clawing for grubs and snails. Nevertheless

I am continually with you [whether I feel it or not]; You hold my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel and afterward you will receive me to glory.

Now, that’s perspective!

It’s also the only lasting cure for the misery of envy: recognition, repentance, worship. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until it becomes a habit. I’m still prodded by the green-eyed monster from time to time, but the prodding is more like peevish pokes. Some of this improvement may be due to age—time’s running out and I have more important things to worry about. But I also have much better things to anticipate.

_____________________________________________

*Othello, Act 3 Scene 3. Another phrasemaking point for Shakespeare.

**Two tips: use a mixture of whole milk (custard) and heavy cream, and whip the cream to soft peaks before you add it to the custard. And don’t skimp on the rock salt.

December 8, 2017

Anywhere with Jesus: a Christian View of a Squirmy Subject

Several years ago I had a preacher friend who provided interesting insights into the pulpit life. During the years of our acquaintance, in spite of normal frustrations with his flock, he could usually count on at least a few encouraging words after each sermon. Except for the time he preached about the temptations of Christ. His text was not the famous showdown in the wilderness, but Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every way has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” The sermon emphasized that the text means what it says; in every way means every way. Including sexual temptation.

That made the pew contingent very uncomfortable. It wasn’t hard to tell. As my friend recalled it, “Usually I get a pat on the back when the folks line up to shake my hand at the door. Like, ‘Good message, brother,’ or, “That one really hit me where I live.’ But for that sermon I got a Hi or a Nice day or something completely irrelevant, like, ‘Uh . . . I like those pants.’” (Note: this was in the 70s, when pants were more interesting than they are now.)

What does this anecdote have to do with the subject of masturbation? And why am I writing about masturbation? To the second question, I’m writing because I was asked about it, and my initial reluctance was overcome as I thought (and read other Christians’ thoughts) about it. Image result for loneliness images

As to the first question: Jesus has everything to do with everything.

The following is written with Christians in mind; I recognize it will make no sense to anyone else.

The Bible, as so many observers point out, has nothing directly to say about masturbation, good or bad. But of course the Bible speaks to a wide range of issues indirectly and it’s up to us to do the hard work of rightly discerning the word of truth. Not to mention searching out what pleases the Lord (Eph. 5:10).

One reason the Bible is silent on this issue is that it might not have been a big problem in that time and place. People tended to marry young, and when they weren’t enjoying marital bliss, or sleep, they were pouring their energies into hard physical labor, religious festivals, or intense partying (think of those week-long wedding celebrations). And considering the housing options of the time, privacy was not an easy thing to come by.

In the law, sexuality was treated matter-of-factly when it came to physical consequences like monthly periods and male discharges (at least some of which had to be nocturnal emissions). Leviticus gives detailed instructions for purification after each one. Why be purified after a natural function that the Lord himself created? I had some thoughts about that here, but for now it strikes me that these laws concern men and women in isolation from each other. There are no purification rites for married sex (unless it occurs during a woman’s time of “uncleanness”), because that is exactly what those bodily functions facilitated . Lawful sexual intercourse is already pure, and it points beyond itself. It’s about relationship at its most intense, intimate, and productive level, and it reflects something of the intense, intimate, and productive relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Our experience on earth, even in lawful matrimony, often falls well short of this ideal. And turning from these Gates of Splendor to the squirmy subject of masturbation is a big step down: awkward and fraught with guilt. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want the Holy Trinity in our walk-in closets or under our sneaky sheets–and really, can’t we have a little privacy here? Surely there’s a place we can carve out for ourselves alone. There must be a place, not just in our homes but in our heads, where we can retreat for a few minutes and relieve a little pressure, purge of those disturbing fantasies, take a quick dip in mindless therapeutic pleasure and emerge clearheaded and ready to take hold of a straight untangled mission. Just wait here, Lord—I’ll be right back.

But . . . seriously?

We know better. “Know ye not that your bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit?” That he goes where we go? That we can’t retreat to our inner sanctum and lock him out?

Nobody knew this better than Jesus did. Nobody was indwelt like he was. Still . . . he was tempted in all ways as we are. All ways means all ways.

Don’t we tend to think that it was really kind of easy for him to resist temptation? Except for that last, of going to the cross—of course that was hard. And maybe the one about turning stones to bread when he was hungry. After a 40-day fast, of course he was hungry! So sure, that was probably a tough one too, but the rest of the temptations he was subject to must not have been that difficult for the man-who-was-God. Or so we tend to think.

And that’s how we underestimate Satan, to our great disadvantage. His most potent temptation is this: Take the fast lane. The lure for Christ was to shortcut the process of “learning obedience through suffering” (Heb. 5:8), to reach across the grand redemption plan, to seize the crown that was rightfully his. Isn’t that the heart of temptation for us–to forgo process and go straight for satisfaction in whatever form it appears? Jesus faced this too, in all ways. He knows our every weakness in the biblical sense of experiencing it, not just mentally acknowledging it, Yet without sin. No shortcuts. He took the long hard way of the cross—meaning that, when it was time to claim his rightful crown, he would not be alone. He would take us with him.

Now . . . all this will likely seem hopelessly abstract to the teenage boy or the frustrated single woman. Christian counselors and doctors make good-faith efforts to reconcile biological drives with biblical principles, a tension stretched further by an oversexed culture and delayed marriage. Some grant that masturbation may be a useful therapeutic tool as long as it doesn’t become obsessive, has no pornographic connections, and is divorced as far as possible from erotic thought (like a good deep-tissue massage). I can’t judge the wisdom of that for any one person. Just a few contrasts to keep in mind:

Sex is intended for relationship. Masturbation is solitary.
Relationships take work. Masturbation is easy.
We are intended for perfect union with Christ. Masturbation is the last place we want him.
This union isn’t sexual, but is better than sex. Masturbation, while it lasts, whispers that there’s nothing better.

My best attempt at practical application is this. If you’ve already given in to this temptation, more times than you care to count, remember that Christ was tempted in all respects as we are. That’s your comfort. Yet without sin—that’s your salvation. You won’t be able to pull him down to your level but he will, in time, bring you up to his. Temptation is a trial but it’s also an opportunity to work on that relationship and begin laying up what will be treasure in heaven: that satisfaction you longed for all your life, fully met and never ending.

November 3, 2017

Air-Tasting

We hear the best things in life are free–how many of us actually believe it? But it’s true that the most vital things in life are free, such as blood, oxygen, and grace. The five senses are free, too: how often do you pause to appreciate them? Especially at the turn of the seasons, when the air can be as rich as wine . . .

The best time comes at dusk. That’s when the essence of day rises to the top, to be poured off over the cusp of nightfall. That’s the time to open a window or grab a chair on the porch: clear your head, close your mouth, and breathe.

Each season has its particular character, tone, and finish.

In spite of its reputation for softness and its penchant for pastel colors, I find the Spring vintages to be least subtle. Spring has a full-bodied, even rowdy character, given drama and depth by rising sap and the mellow dollops of spring peeper. The damp, earthy tones of spring can overbalance the concert—an embarrassment of riches that may cloy. It’s an immature vintage, but at least it’s lively.

Summer is more complex than any other season and, in its way, more insinuating. It owes much of its appeal to the uprush of coolness after a hot day: the sort of dramatic, built-in contrast that could make even cream soda taste riveting. But even without the drama, summer has enough singular virtues to shine: the fresh-cut grass varieties are ravishing; the post-rains deeply satisfying. The dew-at-nightfall labels can be a tad overdone, except for those who enjoy sweet. Of course, those sticky, clinging vintages that don’t lighten up at the end of the day should be outlawed. Fortunately, those are few (at least where I live). More than any other season, summer air links us to childhood–common to all varieties is the lingering aftertaste of chasing fireflies in the field. This reminiscence is the virtue that covers a multitude of sins.

Autumn is smoke and frost and nostalgia: a sudden chill that links youth with age, new beginnings with old melancholy. It’s far more suggestive than the other seasons, yet after all these years I find it a bit of a tease; a complex blend that may appear to mean more than it actually does. The dusty finish can be a bit too dry, for those of us who have many more autumns behind them than ahead.

But to my taste, the finest and purest vintages are the Winters. Remarkably consistent, yet never repetitive, best enjoyed through a window raised a couple of inches in a slightly overheated room. The draft created by a well-stoked wood stove draws it in like a steely stream. Like the summer varieties, winter owes some of its appeal to contrast. After the palate has been stifled in wood and artificial heat all day, winter air sweeps in fresher than fresh, cleaner than clean, an exaggerated, sparkly essence with no hypocrisy whatsoever. Here at the end of the yearly cycle, the master of the banquet gases through the glass and murmurs in awe, “Truly, you have saved the best until last.”

Love surrounds us, not only in objects but in spaces. Air: what could be cheaper or more abundant than fresh air? We’d find out if it were ever cut off; then there would be nothing so dear. But even poured out lavishly from the storehouse of heaven, how rich it is, how sweet, and how divine.