"There but for the grace of God, go I."

I have started paying attention once again to the faces around me, and the faces in crowds. I have always been drawn to the desperate and down trodden - the people who have stories to tell. You can see their stories in their faces.

If God is in all of us, the face of god must be in all of us too. For me, it is easier to see the face of God in a face of pain. You will not find the face of God in a woman's fashion magazine or GQ. A face of pain is of a life lived. Not an easy life, but a truly lived life, a life that has been paid for. I have friends who have been through so much, my heart aches for them. I see the face of God in them that they do not see when they look in the mirror.

Anytime someone paints a picture of an angel it is something of beauty, or what we call beauty. If there are angels walking among us, what would they look like? Would they be the homecoming queen or the captain of the football team? Or would they more likely be hidden among the dregs of society? What if they watch us from behind the eyes of a crack whore or junkie? What would be more likely? Mother Teresa spent her life in the slums of Calcutta. Gandhi spent a many years in prison. Buddha left his life of privilege and lived as an ascetic. Jesus went among the lepers. Over and over again we are shown where angels are, yet we look away, cross the street, hold our noses. Angels, it seems, smell bad. They wear unclean clothes, they do not bath often, they sleep in cardboard boxes over the steam vents in our cities. When we see someone who has nothing, someone who is suffering, the words "There but for the grace of God, go I," spill thoughtlessly from our mouths. Really? Doesn't that mean a person suffering does not have the grace of God upon them? Is that the way it works? God places his grace on some, but not others? That doesn't seem like the action of an all-loving God. Unless, of course, those who appear not to have the grace of God serve a purpose our self-centered minds do not grasp. Are they living a life of torment to give us the opportunity to be saints? How many of us take even five minutes out of our week to be a saint to someone?

Many of the saints I have met in my life were atheists. They didn't wait for supernatural intervention to reach out their hand to someone. They believed it was up to them, it is up to all of us to make a difference. They act without the belief of a reward in an afterlife. If there is a great banquet in the world beyond, who will be asked to be seated at the table of most honor? Those who did nothing, those who acted thinking they would be rewarded, or those who acted without a single thought of reward?

When you leave this life, and it will be sooner than you think, what if it is not your family and loved ones who are there to great you? What if it is everyone you were kind to, and everyone you just walked by? What if it is all the people that were killed in wars you so gleefully cheered on? What if it is all of "those people" you did your best not to see?

If you were God, how would you sort the wheat from the chaff?

INTERMISSION - EPISTLE FOR THE DEAD

I posted this four years ago, at the height of the Bush regime and three years into the Iraq War. The United States has a new president. One who one the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, we are still there and now have troops in Afghanistan. We, the public, never seem to learn. Politicians play us for fools over and over again. Young men and women are told they are going to war to defend freedom and the values of their nation. We are told that the war will be short and casualties will be light. We are told everything will be done to prevent civilian casualties. We have been told these new wars are different. We are fighting "terrorists." Anyone could be one. Muslims. Any Arab. Someone from Greenpeace. Someone different. Terrorists are ghosts that move from place to place. Wherever our leaders want to fight, you can be sure there are terrorists hiding there.

Hitler fought terrorists. So did Stalin and Mao.
Think about that this Memorial Day.

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Memorial Day, 2006
I walked among the graves at the Mentor, Ohio City Cemetary today. Mentor has war dead from the Civil War up through today. Wars are a part of the human experience, and the end of the human experience for far too many. Few would argue that the Civil War or World War II were necessary. Other wars, or "conflicts" as we like to call some, are questionable, at best. Walking among the graves of the war dead, The Face of God seemed absent today.



EPISTLE
William H. Gibson

The truth is our wisdom sets my teeth on edge. By everything I know, the death of the animal is fortuitous, meaningless, and total; insofar as man, a maker of meanings, is at the utmost stretch of his talent to bestow upon his dying a purpose, I wish him luck in it; but when each meaning he arrives at is used by him to multiply the deaths it consoles him for, I think I am living among lunatics. Is the decomposition of the flesh hideous? it is a door to the light beyond, said the priests of infinite love, let us kill all who think otherwise. Is our life brief as the grass? we are immortal in the glory of the empire, said the bearers of every flag, let us die to plant it in another place. Saints, patriots, bards, which of them in the name of a greater life has not counselled us to kill and die? From the day I was born I was taught, against the yearning in my bowels for the sun, that I should consent to my death for the illusions believed of my elders; and in all the battlecries of the world, honor, order, liberty, valor, justice, duty, faith, I heard a baaing of sheep, as ignorant as I of what the sounds in their throats meant.

Children, I write this epistle to a punctuation of incendiary bombs my neighbors vote to let fall, as seeds of freedom, upon the heads of children no older than you. I am by trade a maker of fictions, but no word of mine is so counterfeit as the myths by which men who kill and die will ask you to live; the world is a windbag of pieties, that in each age blows multitudes like you into its graves, and weeps over them as blessed. Its touchstone of greatness is bloodletting, Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands, and no king or president is venerable in our thoughts but like the Judas goat has marched a people under the slaughtering hammer. And beneath the baaing of trumpets and dreams, faint, the only sound I hear as fact is the death rattle of each man.

That sound is my premise. I am the elder now, I tell you my wisdom, not one of the dead is blessed; consciousness is all. I am of course less epochal of mind than the statesman, who in eulogy of the corpses that have served their purpose, his, is confident none has died in vain, well done, thou good and faithful servants: a dish I think fit for the devil is the tongue of every man who asks the power of life and death over others. I speak as that ignoble, small-minded, disaffected citizen, servant and master only of his trade, I mean the artist, joyous and haunted by time, who, making of his spittle a shape, a soul, a voice to survive, wants no interruptions by history or its heroes. Selfish and harmless, in love with my life, I tell you no more than what everyone knows, and is ashamed to live by. Consciousness is all, the sun is born in and ends in your skull; the struck match of self in your skull is all.

So much is simple. It may be pinched out in an hour, therefore, burn in this hour; it may persist a half-century, therefore, burn wisely in this hour; but burn. Yet to make of each day an end and a beginning is not simple, and what is self? I have other selves of me, flesh of my flesh, whatever I believe in is of me, and much of a man is outside his skin; men not fools will die for a fool's light as their own. Then burn, believe, die, but, children, I beg you, not for the lies of statesmen, and I think it better to hide and live.I learned these things at the deathbed of my father, between two wars; on the wall hung a poem with a pasted snapshot of his young brother's head, blown apart in the war that began in the year of my birth, and upon the night table sat a clock ticking, ticking the irrecoverable seconds away, and at his shrunken hand a portable radio bleated its news of a worldful of sheep who predictably would soon march under the hammer of another war; I did not intend to be in their ranks. It is a most beautiful earth we inhabit, but not in the eyeholes of the dead. So a savior knew who two thousand years ago said, A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, and that night was betrayed. Are we less than lunatics who, aware we go into the grave at sundown, even in the failing light cannot love, but wrestle each other in? And when I remember what pains I took to hone this grievous and only jewel, my consciousness, I will not surrender it to any leader half in love with death, neither do I wear it in shame; nothing in his head is worth my life.

Daily I hear a whisper in me of the first and holiest commandment, Thou shalt not die.

Not in our time, but one day when there is silence in heaven about the space of half an hour, all the people will voice their right to live in a joyous shout, and the pillars come tumbling down. States, churches, armies, banks, schools, edifice upon edifice cemented in the blood of our bowing to the hammer, will lie in a rubble; the world will be born again as a comedy whose text is blessed are the living. In that day, great men who invite us to die for causes will charm the children as clowns in the parks, and cowardice will be in style, the ancientest virtue which preserves us, all manner of weakness be revered, and over every kindergarten door will be carved, I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. Not in our time, when that primal commandment is only a whisper, served, yet deviously, and in dishonor.

Well, I too shall break it, in the end, and you. Till then, little children, keep yourselves from idols, greet ye one another with an holy kiss, and let us be neither goat nor sheep, but lovers of the sun, which is no fool's light.

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To all of those faces of God, from all cultures and people, who have been mislead to a young slaughter -
Rest in peace.

God at the Airport

I was recently in Florida for a training event, flying in and out of Fort Lauderdale. Arriving at the FTL airport on a sunny Saturday, there was a homeless man collecting donations at the entrance door to the Delta Airlines check in area. I could tell he was homeless because he was wearing a lime-green, official "Shelter for the Homeless" T-shirt.

It is pretty tough to hang around an airport entrance and pan-handle for money these days. The TSA is rather skittish about such things. He must have been cleared for security risks.

As I walked to the door, I promised the man I would come back out and donate once I checked my luggage. All I had on me was a twenty dollar bill and I needed to break it.

After checking in and checking my luggage, I walked down to a shop at the other end of the area and bought a candy bar. Then walked back outside and down to where the man was standing. He smiled a mostly toothless grin, and I said, "I kept my promise!" as I dropped a five dollar bill in among the singles and change. He said "God bless your sir." and I replied with a God bless you, Sir."

I felt good about my act of kindness, and wondered how many people donated to the shelter that day? How many people returning from a vacation costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, just walked on by and did nothing?

A little later I began thinking about how much money I had just spent in Florida, and how I had no right to judge anyone. I only gave the man five dollars, and I broke a twenty to do it. Maybe 25% of what was in my wallet was a good amount, but compared to how much I had spent on food and drinks alone that week, it was nothing.

How much is enough, I wondered?

Some people worry that the people begging for money along the road, on the street, or even outside an airport really aren't desperate. I don't think it is for us to determine that. It's a convenient excuse to say that some may be hustling money, but how many times to we know that someone really is destitute, and do nothing?

God was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida last week where those with eyes could see him in his bright green T-shirt.

"The whirlwind is in the thorn trees."

copyright 2010 - Ted Sky - All rights reserved