Our Fathers

Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism  By Paul C. Vitz.

If Sigmund Freud had not existed, modern man would have had to create him. It was Freud, of course, who popularized the notion that God is a “projection” of unconscious infantile needs, and thus only a comforting illusion — a theory recently articulated by the Governor of Minnesota, Jesse “the Body” Ventura. But Sigmund “the Brain” Freud beat Ventura to the punch in contending that God is a delusion and a crutch for the feeble, but even earlier than Freud, as Vitz points out, was Feuerbach, on whom Freud depends heavily in his dismissal of faith as neurotic wish-fulfillment. Nietzsche was perhaps too abstruse to become a popular phenomenon like Freud, but Vitz, a professor of psychology, puts him on the couch as well. “Intense atheism,” as Vitz calls the creed of militants such as Freud and Nietzsche, is pervasive among today’s intellectuals, and the prevalent argument against theism is still the Feuerbach-Freud one.

Faith of the Fatherless turns Freud’s “projection theory” on its head, arguing that the theory provides more insight into atheism than theism. This reversal is supported by the biographical evidence Vitz has collected, showing that the childhoods of prominent atheists were marked by absent or defective fathers. Freud’s father was apparently weak, sexually deviant, and religious. Friedrich Nietzsche loved his father, a Lutheran clergyman, but the beloved father, never in good health, died when Friedrich was five years old. Later, Nietzsche, the philosopher, attributed this to a deficiency of “life force,” associating his father’s weakness and illness with Christianity, which he claimed actively rejects the “life force.” The Dionysian excesses of Nietzsche’s philosophy and his obsession with power are, in this view, the projection of psychological preoccupations.

The list of prominent atheists with “defective fathers” (dead, neglectful, or abusive) is long. Marx vigorously rejected his father’s bourgeois values, including his superficial conversion to Christianity; Hitler and Stalin, atheists who were also tyrants, were repeatedly beaten and humiliated by their fathers; and Mao Zedong hated his autocratic father. Vitz examines a veritable Who’s Who of modern atheism, including Voltaire, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, H.G. Wells, Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Ellis. Perhaps even more telling than the biographical sketches of atheists are the counterpoised sketches Vitz has compiled of well-known believers and their fathers. Prominent believers in the fatherhood of God, Vitz finds, have generally had very good relations with their earthly fathers.

This book is an engaging analysis of psychological factors in religious belief and disbelief. Vitz also has material on the history and anthropology of religion that refutes the idea that the history of religion resembles Oedipal development as propounded in Freudian theory. And glib assertions about the evolution of religion, Vitz shows, are patently false. This adds force to Vitz’s argument that atheism is motivated by factors other than theism’s ostensible lack of credibility.

As long as we keep in mind that none of this subjective material has any bearing on whether there actually is a God, it seems to be useful to correlate belief and unbelief with feelings about the world formed during childhood, and Vitz reminds his readers that there are likely to be “painful memories” underlying an atheist’s “rationalization of atheism.”

Vitz takes no pleasure in the record of childhood abandonment, abuse, and betrayal that correlates with rejection of God. Much as we welcome his exposure of the foibles of the crankish doctor who imagined a dubious Oedipal drama in the psyche of every five-year-old boy, it is saddening to learn that some of the antagonists we encounter in our efforts to be forthright about Christian faith are atheists because the world is to them a forlorn place. Very early in life, apparently, some people get a view of their prospects for salvation, however they might imagine it, that is dismal. Barbed rejoinders to expressions of contempt for religious faith are not the best way of dealing with atheists. Kindness, gentleness, self-control, and other virtues commended by St. Paul will probably be more effective.

The Hunter S. Thompson of Evangelical Writers

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
review by Mike Dodaro 

I started reading this book while standing in the aisle at Borders. Then I sat down. Finally I bought the book and read it over the next couple of days. Don Miller is an honest and insightful writer who has found a way to go to church without getting mad. He has thrown in with the fruit-nut fringe, but he seems to be right in his observation that this crowd asks more questions and listens to your answers, at least, a little better than most of those jingling the keys to their SUVs. He's got it right when he says it would be nice to walk into a church and feel, after chatting with the locals for a while, that God likes me. One exception on his list of engaging fruit nuts is the prominent writer, now itinerant book-store preacher, who wrote about fishing and baseball before he became a left-wing ideologist. My gut response was similar to Miller's after sitting through one of David James Duncan's sermons promoting his book God Laughs and Plays. I wrote a review of that book in line with Miller's take that made Duncan enthusiasts so mad it is now at the bottom of the Amazon ratings.

I honestly can't imagine how Don Miller ever got started with the religious book publishers. He shows up like a featured speaker at Bible camp, after weeks of camping out with hippies, still unshaved and smelling of pot. Apparently, the publishers have figured out that there is gold in the gutter, along with churches like Mars Hill in Seattle. One suspects that Miller's church, Imago Dei, in Portland has the same raunchy ear-splitting music. It may be Miller got his start with the academic slummers, like the professor who edits SPU's Image Journal and helps to send out graduates of the Christian University who still seem to identify with punk rock, not the Dead Poets Society. However it happened that Miller is in print and a best seller, I'm convinced he's the real deal. I'm less mad at trendy, fruit-nut Christianity and CCM after listening to him for these several hours. But Image Journal still frosts me.

Unforgivable Sins

God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right  a review by Mike Dodaro

When David James Duncan was a boy his mother made him go to church. He's still mad about it. His book, "God Laughs and Plays; Churchless Sermons" could as well be titled "God Laughs at People Who Still Go to Church, and, Himself, Prefers to Go Fishing and Play Baseball". Duncan says he's a Jesus loving non-Christian. His "Sermons" sound a bit like old revivalism, but he vilifies religious people who engage in politics the way preachers used to condemn drinkers and card players. In Duncan's view anything supported by the Religious Right must be wrong and is probably unforgivable.

In "The Brothers K", the author seemed to have some sympathy for oddly religious characters. Now he fires his indignation telling certain segments of the American populace what they want to hear about the war in Iraq and the Religious Right. In Duncan's view the war is misconceived by hypocrites and plainly evil. He doesn't tell us what God thinks of the religion of people who fly airplanes into buildings or blow up buses and restaurants, but he's certain God has no tolerance for religious metaphors used by presidential speechwriters. The idea that there could be any resonance between the "light that shines in the darkness" and Western human rights and freedom is anathema. I don't know what he makes of this kind of language as found in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, or the speeches of Martin Luther King.

There are many groups on the left seeking advocates with religious pretensions who might help divert Christians away from the Religious Right. According to an article April 17th in the Missoula, Montana newspaper, members of the Triad Group prodded Duncan into this book. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners group, who also publishes Duncan, is making a career of slamming the religious right. Duncan acknowledges Wendell Berry as an influence. He and Berry both have nice lyrical gifts for nature writing. Berry is passionately anti war.

Of course, in Duncan's view George Bush has unleashed the four horsemen of the apocalypse by expanding energy exploration and drilling for natural gas. I felt a bit of sympathy with his accounts of birds seeking vainly for drinkable water in regions polluted by saline emissions from gas excavations. Duncan is known for outdoorsy lore, so ecological concerns are close to his heart. We don't expect fiction writers to be experts on economics or science when they evoke the emotional impacts of complex issues. We might hope for some awareness of complexity before they spew indignation.

Duncan quotes John Calvin on human depravity and then announces with a smirk, "That's why I don't go to church." Calvin can sound as pompous as Duncan at full tilt, but, he is a bit more rigorous in his theology. If Duncan knew as much about history as he knows about fishing he'd be aware that isolating people's deeply held beliefs from politics has never been possible or desirable. Calvin's appraisal of human nature was at the core of American Puritanism, which had a fair share of influence on people who drafted a Constitution that institutionalized skepticism about human nature in the separation of powers. Like all ideas, religious doctrines have consequences. Until very recently in this country Calvinism was part of an established culture of self restraint.

Duncan has built up a following writing fiction. Apparently people listen when he rants about politics. Now he feels qualified to be a prophet with his Gnostic gospel. It's true that Jesus denounced the religious authorities of his era, but the current situation, in which liberationist creeds are the norm, is a complete inversion of the puritanical shibboleths of Jesus' era. Some Religious-Right characters have clout among their followers--Pat Roberson comes to mind--and they sometimes make egregious comments in public, but they are quickly called down from their pedestals. Prevailing opinion runs counter to everything they say. In this context Jesus would attack the authorities of politically-correct nostrums with the same scandalous irony he used on the Pharisees.

Sunday school left some embarrassing gaps in Duncan's religious knowledge. The enthusiasts for his churchless sermons are waving hands and swooning, but they're only about as well informed as he is. Anybody seriously interested in the influence of religion in politics would not be reading this fisherman from Lolo, Montana but responsible scholarship. The sociologist of religion and historian Rodney Stark has just published a new book that would be a good antidote to Duncan's "Churchless Sermons".

Over Ripe for the Harvest

The inconvenience of working for a living in a convenience store

On the way to my office one morning--that is, in the parking lot in front of the glass menagerie I preside over from eight AM to four PM--I was met by a couple of guys with hefty black Bibles and picket signs. Right. They weren't union organizers, not among the highly-skilled practitioners of my retail craft. A boycott of establishments like my place was in progress because of the lurid sex magazines the franchiser has opted to display at about eye level for a ten-year-old.


Now when I was a boy, the girlie magazines down at Winston's Cigar Store were masterpieces of photojournalism. The women in those magazines looked back at you with enigmatic expressions reminiscent of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. A kid could walk away with an eyeful without feeling women were creatures on the level of featherless birds just hatched, and expendable--pull their heads off and throw them to the cat if you felt like it. The stuff on the racks now is as explicit as a gynecology textbook, and the death and dismemberment in the stories is going to leave you with a pretty foul stench in your nostrils if you read it.

So I'm somewhat in sympathy with the people who would like to cut the association, in their kids' minds, of sex with violence whenever they run down to my store for a gallon of milk. For a few days I went about my work while the Vigilance Trolls were doing theirs. Who am I to criticize? Nearly everything I sell is detrimental in some way. Cigarettes, beer, and wine are just the tip of the iceberg in our sea of toxic substances. Just try to imagine what goes into those sausages floating in the bottle on the counter top. And who is going to protect people from the rest of the magazines on the rack, or the newspapers?

But it's hot out there, and the traffic in my place is pretty slight on some afternoons. You'd think people advertising a boycott would have enough sense to bring a thermos full of something cold to drink. Instead they come inside and anti up three quarters each for Pepsi Colas. So much for the principle of the thing.

"I thought you guys were on a campaign to boycott my porn parlor. And don't you know this stuff is bad for you? It's nothing but sugar water and caramel coloring." They looked at me like I was really a crank.

This goes on for a few days. They sweat and slurp Pepsi while I go on corrupting the youth with my magazines and opera tapes, until one of them realizes I'm gullible enough to maybe join up with their crusade. It shows all over me, apparently. Must be my body language. I like people, in spite of everything, and I will generally hear anybody out. Some of the things they say are pretty wild, but, you know, I come up with some crazy ideas too.

Some of their literature gets into my idle hands. From then on, my carefully protected cubicle of sanity is in jeopardy. I thought I was a Christian, but nobody asked me before they started the interrogation. Am I sure that I know that if I die tonight, I'll go to heaven? Have I asked the Lord into my heart?

Where I go to church we have a prayer book that gives you some idea of what you're in for if you join up for the duration. These guys seemed to think that was more trouble than it was worth. You have to go to the source. E.T. phone home, I guess, is the idea. I had to admire their sense of commitment. After all, they looked like management material, and they could have probably been on a career track with some good company.

They got me to the Revival Meeting on my usual weakness--free music. Maria Castinetta was singing and giving her testimonial. Would I just keep an open mind, and come along for the ride? This blond prima donna was great on the old recordings available at the public library. At the Revival she came in wearing a leopard skin coat. In the middle of August!


I admit, the air conditioning was on a little too high in the red-carpeted auditorium. When Ms. Castinetta got down to business, her singing was over amplified, and it wasn't what it used to be. The bloom of youth was gone from her top notes, and a wide wobble had developed in the voice. If what I had heard on the recordings was the bloom of youth, this was the last rose of summer. Too many seasons blooming on the battlefield at the Met had withered her.

I'm not saying that only has-beens end up at revivals. I was there, and, so far, thank God, I never have been. Over a thousand people must have been crammed into that auditorium for one grand fandango of everything gaudy and tasteless you can imagine. Besides the opera diva, there were a couple of ball bashers from the world of the sports arena. They were built like the Gladiators who used to massacre Christians.  Then the businessmen started hyping Jesus as if he were another contestant in the ring with the big cola contenders. You can see why these churches are growing; they outdo every hypester on the continent at his own game.

After Ms. Castinetta's heroineic exertions, the music got worse and worse. It was appalling. Grandioso e Pomposo doesn't come close to describing it. Electronic synthesizers flooded the room and half of outer space with god-awful noise--an argument against the existence of God if I ever heard one. Why does He permit it? If God is good! The monstrous spiral was winding down into some abysmal black hole. As the artistic holocaust came to an end, in a moment of blessed relief, a preacher's voice began to extend an invitation to all present who had not made a decision for Christ.

"Come all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and in me, you shall find rest for your souls." This is it! I thought.

I had to take more medication for my nausea, but I got down there. In the heat of the press--thank God now for that air conditioning--I was found and ministered to by a couple of volunteers. Seriously wounded, I was dragged from the battlefield.

Inherit the Hot Air

A new documentary, Inherit the Hot Air, now incontrovertibly demonstrates that the theory of evolution is not a theory. It must be factual or Richard Dawkins would already have been stoned dead by creationists. Only restraint sustained by a rational minority, who can understand the reasoning in Dawkins' insufferable condescension, prevents him from being targeted by the Fundamentalist jihad. Salman Rushdie has survived because a mere billion fanatics pursue him. The herd mentality being what it is, any day now Dawkins could be attacked at one of his book signings or speaking engagements by throngs of fanatics who outnumber his readers by... well, it's difficult to say whether creationist fanatics outnumber the readers of best-sellers sold by Dawkins, but chances are pretty good that a brawl at Barnes and Noble would not go well for the author of The Self-Promoting Gene, The Blind, but Clever, Watchmaker, and let us not forget The God-Awful Delusion, which shows that disparaging something about which one knows very little dispels ignorance and superstition.

A Better Grade of Prisoner

When things have gotten badly out of hand, humor is sometimes a relief. Carl Grant is a comedian who, in one of his routines, tells a story about Lester Maddox, Governor of Georgia circa 1970. Commenting on prison riots in his state, Maddox is supposed to have said, “I don’t think that we’re gonna see much improvement in this situation until we start gettin’ a better grade of prisoner.” After a pause for timing, Carl adds, “Here’s a man who’s gotten right to the heart of the problem. Of course! We’ve been letting a lot of riff-raff into our jails.”

One might agree that this story, possibly not apocryphal, shows how the right order of things is subverted by the problem of human character. To say that we have this problem in our churches is sounding less and less outrageous, and it doesn’t seem we’ll see much improvement until we start getting a better grade of sinner.

The liturgical innovations, cultural accommodations, and recent scandals in the church could provide comedians with material to compete with that available from politicians. Unfortunately, it’s not funny and it’s not really new material. John the Baptist must have elicited derisive laughter when he called the clerics of his day a bunch of snakes. Bear with me for a moment in this line of reasoning. People who claim moral authority in the community are too often discovered and exposed in vices that make the sins of the laity pale by comparison.  Humor is a defense of sorts, but the doctrinal accommodation and innovation that is laughable now can become venerable tradition with the passing of time. The Archbishop of Canterbury is inducted into the Welsh order of Druids and conservatives are amused, but an elementary knowledge of the syncretism evident in Christmas and Easter might give one pause. It’s hard to say whose indignation is more ironic, that of the accommodators and innovators in the church or that of those who oppose them.

The renunciate communities of the third and fourth centuries, in their contempt for the flesh, opposed a growing worldliness in the church. Flagellants and Stylites interpolated Neo-Platonism into the Judeo-Christian tradition to a degree that can be measured by Augustine’s Confessions, wherein we find his conviction that becoming a Christian, were he to do it properly, would require putting away his mistress. Despite the fact that this woman had been the venerable saint’s companion for years and born him a son, marrying her was out of the question, because, by this time, celibacy had become the norm for observant professional Christians. Spiritual athleticism led to communities of religious for whom chastity was the ideal. It led to a celibate priesthood. The scandals of the past decade should force, at least, a re-examination of the now traditional norm.

In American church history there have always been those who insist that priestly celibacy creates a dissonance with the Pauline injunction that a bishop should be the husband of one wife. This has long been a staple of Christians in the Campbellite tradition who, in their zeal for the faith once delivered to the apostles, disregard both history and tradition. Campbellite Churches of Christ idealize congregational autonomy–as in the synagogues of the Pauline era and, emphatically, not as in the formerly pagan basilicas of the Roman Empire. These Christians used to be prone to quoting Jesus in his now problematic instruction that his followers not refer to their guru as father. How shocking it is when it comes to light that religious orders professing celibacy have been the habitat of those engaged in sexual excesses that bring out pagans with pitchforks, and that a denomination of the church in the tradition of Alexander Campbell, professing local autonomy, provided Jim Jones sufficient latitude to perpetrate mass suicide.

Late night comedians will find humor even in these things. The line between cynical humor and irony is perhaps a matter of serious intent. Jesus seems to have been capable of both humor and irony. Was making a laughing stock of the clerics of his time what made him into a magnet for controversy? Interesting in this regard is that he attacked both the liberals and the conservatives. Then the Pharisees were the traditionalists and Sadducees the accommodators. Now any paraphrase of irony in the sayings of Jesus would have to find a way to lampoon the moralistic a-moralism that is now politically correct, especially as it is evident in the church.

In view of the historical and contemporary outrages perpetrated by the church, what rankles isn’t so much what the church teaches as the authority it claims for its doctrines and moral pronouncements. It would seem that the metaphor of the offending eye is Jesus engaging in the bitterest irony with regard to moralism, whether religious or postmodern. Do I have to draw a picture?

“You have heard it said by pro-lifers and by anti-war activists that you must not kill, but I say to you, whoever exacerbates ideological divisions to sell books and get speaking engagements is guilty of murder. Whether you think you have the truth or that there is no truth, you are wrong. If you would be perfect, pluck out the eye that follows a swaying skirt. Cut off the hand that pumps gas into your SUV. It’s better that you go into judgment maimed than suffer the punishment of those who impale ordinary people on the horns of a dilemma the resolution of which seems obvious to you.”

A further irony in all this is that not engaging in this kind of irony might have kept Jesus and the prophets from becoming martyrs.

Prophet without Honor

      Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands, and I have vanquished one perniciously hissing toilet.  It wasn't pretty!  With a sneer I threw down the innards I had ripped from its gaping abdomen and sheathed my pipe wrench.  With a little imagination you can make something out of nothing.  My wife humors me because she has been gently suggesting for months that I put a stop to that incessant leak.  We've probably wasted enough water to flood California's Imperial Valley. 

      I've been busy preparing a final decisive refutation of Wellhausen's source-strata theory of the Pentateuch.  Rigorous scholarship, for me, takes concentration, especially since my Hebrew proficiency went limping southward from Tell el-Amarna some years ago.  And my eyes are bad.  But as I was saying, Wellhausen is just hashed-over Hegel.  Friederich Hegel hash!  You don't have to worry about it, really.  I was just explaining all this to the guy who was watching me at the hardware store to make sure I didn't rip open the celluloid package and steal the parts I needed, instead of buying the whole toilet repair kit.  German scholars swallowed the presuppositions of Hegelian philosophy, and it's been nothing but gastric pain for the rest of us. 

      While we're on the Pentateuch, it was Adam's supremely bad judgment upon hearing his wife's advice that is responsible for my cursed toilet.  Picking that sour mango--or whatever it was--meant I would have to spend half the day, after all these millennia, on my knees.  You know the contortions involved in turning a wrench in a corner under a gurgling porcelain tank to remove rust encrusted fittings.  Talk about groveling.  My imprecations at this humiliation invoke some Canaanite deity. 

      I have better things to do.  A writer writes.  I'm not Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but as I was saying about the curse, "By the sweat of your brow you eat bread in this world." 

      Couldn't I have been exiled?  There is some nobility in that.  I have the patience of David waiting it out at the Cave of Adullam.  But that's another story, a rather long one I'm afraid.  I could have written it but, the toilet valve... .  Exile?  Persecution?  No, just sweat and grime.  On Friday evening you repair the toilet.  Sunday morning's lesson relates King David's conquests, and then you go to work on Monday with neither pride nor passion.  I suppose having more than a glimmer of what is wrong can be the beginning of hope. 

      When the mountain of the Lord's house is established above the hills, there will be no leaky plumbing.  All nations will flow to it.  And all the drains will flow unclogged away from it.  Roto-Rooter will go out of business.  The swords of David's renegades and Saul's army will be beaten into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks.  This sublime prophecy comes from a period when cultic impurity and social injustice had polluted the city of Jerusalem to the degree that God's judgment was about to fall.  In 586 BC the Babylonians leveled Jerusalem.  Still, Isaiah's soaring lines mount up over the ruins of the city. 

      I'll survive my chores.  Probably next week I'll manage to dig up the crab grass along the curb, while Isaiah's immortal verse rings in my ears: "As the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and the dry grass sinks down in flames, so their root will be as rottenness, and their blossom go up like dust."  Clip, clip.  The Wisteria is getting so out of hand I have to drive over it to get to the carport.  Isaiah had advantages, lips touched by a seraph with a burning coal.  I'll have to hang on.  Taking the long view, I can hope the Lord will find better things for me to do than grinding my knuckles while wielding the wrong sized wrench on rusty metal.

The Fighter

      "All right!" Marv yelled.  "You're supposed to be such a fighter!  Let's see if you're up to your reputation."  Marvin Scott was a body builder, a railroad brakeman who pumped iron.  He was big, about 6' 4", and he carried bottles of vitamin supplements in his travel bag.  The man he was yelling at, Fred Radburn, was a switchman.  He was smaller, but mean.  He'd been in jail many times for brawling.  They stood glaring at one another, and their confrontation was beginning to draw onlookers.

      Jake Langdon had seen the fight developing.  With twenty years senority as a car foreman, he knew all the men involved.  He watched from one of the high portals of the Roundhouse as trainmen came from around the railroad yard.  An idling diesel droned beside him.  Outside the mens voices erupted again.  Somebody had grabbed Fred by the elbow.  The violence of his reaction riled everybody.  Men in coveralls struggled, their boots tearing up the cinder roadbed.  A hot sun glared off steel rails branching into the distance.

      Most of these men were too old for this.  Fred overpowered them and broke loose.  "Listen!" he yelled, "When I fight, I mean business.  This hulk wants a fight, and I intend to give it to him.  Anybody else interested?"  Sweating and a little cross eyed, he surveyed the group of potential contenders.  Nobody moved.

     Jake saw an opportunity as he walked up behind the others in the stand off.  "There isn't going to be any fight," he said.  His tone of voice was a little shaky for such a big man.  This sort of thing brought back too much trouble from his own past.  But he stepped over a pair of rails into the middle of it.

      Marv wasn't so sure anymore that he wanted to risk having an eye gouged or getting a knee in the groin.  Fred was in earnest and intent on getting him to back down, which he was now ready to do, if he could find a face-saving way out.  They stood, eyes locked.  Fred was breathing heavily.  Marv stood with feet wide apart and fists clenched at his sides before an open-doored boxcar.

      Jake had done a favor a few months ago for Marv, some welding on his camper pickup.  He thought he might be able to reason with him.  "The engineer can't leave town without a brakeman, Marv," he said.

      Marv was either ignoring him or too intent on his adversary to respond.

      "Go back to your Sunday School lessons, Jake," growled Radburn.

      Nobody laughed.

      Marv glanced at Jake.  Jake gave him look intended to convey just how dangerous Fred was right now.

      Blackbirds crowed from the cattail slough along the tracks.  A switch engine moving a cut of boxcars smoked in the west end of the yard, then the crash of couplers coming together echoed against the adjacent hillsides.

      "Stafford's waiting for his train orders," Jake said.  He reached for the yellow papers folded into the pocket of Marv's overalls.  Marv caught his wrist as Jake removed the orders.

      Jake didn't resist, and Marv took the orders out of his hand.  Jake said, "If Stafford turns you in, it'll be your job."

      Marv was still watching Radburn who now just smirked at him.

      "Not so eager to fight anymore?"  Radburn queried.

      "Maybe not," Marv answered.  He turned away cautiously and headed down the tracks toward the Roundhouse.

      A switchman lit a cigarette as he headed back to his work.  Carmen in yellow hard hats returned to the Roundhouse.  A few men waited at the yard office for a report from men who were headed in their direction.

      "Come on Fred," said one of the switchmen.  Radburn joined the group and left.

      Jake went back to his welding.  Lord, have mercy!

      A week or so later Fred needed some fast repairs on a lumber flat car with air-pressure problems.  He came into the Roundhouse and hollered, "Hey, Fat Boy.  How's about sending your car toads out to fix the brakes on this hunk of junk?"  He was pointing at a number on the trainsheet.

      Jake flinched at the reference to his weight, but he got the work done in time to get the lumber flat into Fred's train.  Switchmen are the roughest guys on the railroad.  The brakemen and engineers have time to sit and talk for hours on the engines.  They learn to be sociable.  Switchmen work year round out in the weather.  It's harder to be friendly when you're making up trains in dust storms and blizzards.

      It was several months before Jake had any futher dealings with Fred Radburn.  But unfinsihed business has a way of bringing people together again, especially in a small town.  Jake ran into Fred one Friday evening in a parking lot where he had stopped to pick up some fishing lures for his son.  Fred was apparently headed for the tavern next door to the tackle shop.

      "How you doing, Fred?"  Jake caught him off guard.

      When he recognized him, Fred greeted Jake with the sarcasm he had come to expect from Fred.  "Hey, Sunday School; how you doing, man?"

      "Fine."

      "You going to the Tav, Jake?  I'll buy you a beer."  Fred noticed Jake was a little cool to him, and since nobody was looking, he figured he could afford to drop the sarcasm.  "Sorry, I forgot you don't drink."

      Jake considered the offer.  He wanted to have a conversation with Fred, but he knew he would end up having to leave before the party was over, so to speak.  Either way he was going to offend Radburn.

      "Thanks anyway, Fred," he offered.  "My wife has dinner waiting at home."

      That was the end of Radburn's hospitality.  He reacted like he'd been whipped.  "Too righteous to sit 'n bull with me, Jake?"

      Jake swallowed the anger that surged up in his chest.  "No, Fred," he said softly, "I just have a family to take care of at home."  Fred was backing him up against a parked car.

      "A good Christian family!"  Radburn said sarcastically.

      "A Christian family," Jake replied.

      "Christian families give me a pain, Jake.  My old man was so sanctified, he went to church three times a week.  He was always humped over his Bible.  He wouldn't even talk to the neighbors because they threw a couple of beer bottles over the fence once."

      "Maybe the neighbors wouldn't talk to him, Fred."

      "Why would they want to?  All he said was 'the Lord this,' and 'the Lord that.'  The first cuss word anybody said, you'd think they had walked up and spit on him.  He was righteous, Jake.  Just like you."

      "I'm not particularly righteous, Fred, just forgiven. My wife used to wait half the night for me to come home from the tavern."  Radburn looked at him suspiciously at this remark.  Jake added, "The grace of God is more like a handout for transients than a paywindow.  Didn't your dad ever talk about... ."

      "My dad and I didn't talk much, Jake.  He was too busy, mostly with church."

      "Your're crowding me at little here, Fred.  I'd like to get better acquainted, but why don't you come over for dinner sometime.  I think you would enjoy a home cooked meal more than that tavern chile.  Right now I have to go to the tackle shop."

      Fred backed off.  "I'll let you know, Sunday School," he said.  Thanks for the invitation anyway.  Sorry about being pushy."

      Fred went back to his car.  Maybe he would come for dinner, maybe not, but as Jake crossed the parking lot he noticed that Fred got in his car and drove away instead of going into the tavern.

The Teacher

      Paula Richmond spent the first nineteen years of her life on a farm west of Great Falls, Montana.  She was married one very wet spring when the hills were more lush with grass and wild flowers than anybody could remember.  Two years later, in 1941, the farm boy she had wed went to war in Europe.  He came home only to be buried.  Friends unloaded his body from the train, and there was a memorial service in Great Falls at the Lutheran Church.  "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." 

      Life on the land alone, even with the love of family and neighbors, was more than Paula could endure.  She gave their wedding endowment, a two-room house and a few acres of range land, back to her father-in-law, packed a footlocker and trunk, and made her farewells.  The train took her to Seattle where she worked for the Boeing Company for the remainder of the war.  Always a reader and a good student, she enrolled in evening classes at Seattle Pacific College.  In a few years she was a sixth grade teacher across the ship canal in Ballard.

      The spring of 1950 was a dreary one even for the drizzly Northwest.  When school recessed for the summer, the children would ordinarily have found Vacation Bible School a cross to bear, but this year the weather was so bad they didn't seem to mind.  Paula loved the children as if they were the family she had been denied.  Volunteering to teach was natural for her.  Teaching was her life, whether in school or in church.

      The second day of Bible School the sun came out.  The children were ecstatic.  A high tolerence for noise is part of an elementary school teacher's constitution, and Paula was able to enjoy the sunshine flooding through windows of the church classroom.  It was nearly noon.  Her brood would be finished for the day in thirty minutes.  She spoke to a boy intent on the drawing before him on the table.

      "This is good, Douglas!  You like to draw, don't you."

      The boy looked up at her, pleased that she had noticed his work.  The day's promise seemed greater for her interest.

      "May I hang this on the bulletin board when you're finished?"

      Douglas took the drawing and pencils home with him and spent the rest of the afternoon putting the finishing touches on his drawing.

      Paula went home for lunch and changed into more comfortable shoes.  The weather was so splendorous that she walked down to the ship canal.  Fishing boats and cruisers rocked in the foaming water that was rising in the locks.  Salmon were braking water along the far edge of the canal.  The decks of the boats were so near you could hear Norwegian fishermen joking in their sing-song English while they waited for the bell.

      Leaning on the rail, an unshaved gate tender was watching as Paula sat down on a bench with wrought-iron arm rests.  The man spit his chew of Copenhagen over the rail and brushed back his thinning hair with his hand.  His job as a gate tender led nowhere, and fortunately or unfortunately, he was smart enough to realize it.  He saw Paula take a fountain pen and tablet of paper from her bag.  She glanced in his direction and seemed unconcerned that he had noticed her.

      The bell rang, and the man stopped the pedestrians who had been crossing a roped-off catwalk along the top of the water gate.  He whistled and motioned at the controller in a glassed-in cabin on the other side of the water.  The water level had now risen as high as that on the far side of the gate.  Boats were untied, and after the gate opened, they continued, a few at a time, on their voyage toward Lake Union.

      Paula's letters to her mother and father back in Great Falls were always folded into the envelope with a prayer.  They had moved into town now, and her brother was tending the farm.  He and his wife had three kids.  It meant a lot to Paula to stay in touch, and she got back as often as she could on the train.

      Another bell rang.  The sun was bright on Paula's pad of paper.  She looked up and saw the gate tender sit down cross legged on the grass with his lunch box.  He was just far enough away not to disurb her, but close enough that he could hear her if she said anything.  She smiled politely.  It was a warm enough smile that he moved a little closer and held up a thermos bottle.  She shook her head.

      "Nice day," he said.

      "Isn't it."

      "It'd be a lucky feller gets a letter from you," he said, testing the water.  She didn't look like the type to freeze you out.

      He was smiling at her, his teeth stained with tobacco.  Not much older than she, he was as rough as the hull of a boat from which the barnicles had not been scraped.  "My parents," she said.  "I'm writing to my parents."

      "You better write your sweetheart.  He'll think you've taken up with a fisherman."

      "No need to worry about that," she answered.

      As if to finish for her, he said, "You're a one man woman; there'd be no doubt."

      This made her feel a little self conscious, but conversation came easier.  He must be on his coffee break, just passing the time.

      She listened long enough to learn he was from Klamath Falls, Oregon, a lumber town near the California border.  After the war he had drifted from one logging camp to another.  She gathered he was not too well liked by the other loggers.  He had ended up in Seattle with the intention of working the fishing boats to Alaska.  Apparently he hadn't hit it off too well with the fishermen either.

      "During the war, I had a farm job that allowed me a draft deferment," he said.  "If I could go back and do it all over again, I'd enlist.  The recruits on the troup trains coming through Klamath Falls on their way to Ft. Lewis thought I was a Mennonite or something.  They yelled out the windows at me--called me 4F.  I don't know what I was, but I kept my deferment."

      "My husband had a deferment as well," she heard herself saying, "but he volunteered."  A great deal of pain came back suddenly.  She remembered the prayers at the memorial service and how her neighbors had assured her that Dwayne had done the right thing.  She had studied history to satisfy herself that he had.  Somebody had to.

      This man's trouble was that he agreed with her.  Most of the men with whom he had worked would have been able to accept him if he could have lived peaceably with his own conscience--even though most of them had served in the armed forces.  Many had wept bitter tears in their chaplain's office, but on the burned-over pastures of France and Germany they had learned to kill.  In the long run, even their nightmares couldn't dislodge the feeling in their gut that it had to be done.

      A gull shrieked overhead.  Sunlight glared on the canal.  "If I had it to do over again, I'd marry a Mennonite," she said, partly out of sympathy.

      He shook the last drop of coffee out of his red cup and screwed it back on the top of the thermos bottle.  "There are still some valleys where the sweet grass grows," he answered.  "I guess you make your bed where it's greenest.  I don't sleep very well anyplace.  My father told me this might be how I'd end up."

      "You have some of that problem either way, I think," she said.  "Try to get on with your life.  God could have made us perfect and saved himself a lot of trouble, but it seems he didn't."

      "Don't know about God," he said.  "The Bible is a little beyond me."

      "Do you go to church?"

      "I do, now and then; that isn't the point.  I can't read."

      He was getting up to leave.  Paula let his last words hang in the air for a moment before she answered.  She finally said, "If you want to learn, I'll help you."  He looked back at her as he put his lunch box under his arm.  "You might ask for me at Calvary Lutheran."

The San Mateo Gospel

     I don't want to be irreverent.  At my age you start to think about what you will say to God when an account must be rendered for every careless word.  For a writer, every careless word rings with disturbing resonance.  Let's not be careless.  But some stories have to be told.  And some have to be retold, because people haven't been listening to the old version, or maybe they have heard it too many times and they're missing the point of the story.

     If I create a character who lives in these pages, will the man of history be offended, whose life and words I can only paraphrase?  An American vernacular rendering can't be worse than the version that is proffered in every marketplace.  Try to wash your hands of it, and on the edge of the sink is a purple plum of a tract that offers you a choice--an indigestible salvation or Hellfire.  I hope I will be forgiven for offering an alternative to something that can only make you sick.  My fast-food version of the story of Jesus can't be what the fresh original was, but I've lived long enough to know an imitation when I see one.  I call my version of this venerable story, The San Mateo Gospel.  I've written what I have written.

      The genealogy of the man who is called God with us goes back fourteen generations in the old country.  All these people were good Catholics, a fact verifiable by the books of the priests.  There's not a dissenter on the record. 

     Now the birth of Jesus happened this way:  When his mother Maria Gonzales was engaged to marry Joe Lopez, before her mother ever let the two of them out of her sight, Maria went to the doctor and found out she was pregnant.  This was a mystery of the Holy Spirit, but we didn't know that then!  Joseph was a nice boy and didn't want to disgrace her, so he decided to quietly cancel the wedding.  But while he was trying to find a way to tell Maria, he had a dream in which an angel appeared to him and said, "Don't be afraid to marry this girl; her child is a miracle of the Holy Spirit and blessed by the church.  She will have a son, and you will call him Jesus.  He will save his people from their sins."  We had heard this for generations: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel which means 'God with us.'" 


Joe woke up and thought it over.  He decided to go ahead.  After all, he loved her.  She had the baby, and, of course, they called the child Emmanuel Lopez Gonzales.

      Jesus was born in Bethel, a small town in Texas, back in the 1950's.  Astrologers from California came and asked, "Who is this prophet who has been born?"  But governor Harrah heard about it and he thought an Hispanic child having visitors making charts could only mean trouble.  "Just what we need," he said, "Some weirdos coming 'round to get the farm workers stirred up."  The straw bosses were cynical.  These Mexicans, to them, were a bunch of superstitious Catholics who had too many children and lived out of the backs of their pickups. 

      The governor had a conference with the astrologers and found out a little more about them.  They had been troubled for years before they would admit to one another the content of their recurring dreams.  When they did start talking about it, the images and the stars seemed to indicate a child born in Texas was some great personage.  They packed up their apparatus in their VW bus and hit the road.

      Harrah heard all this and made a few phone calls of his own.  He rang up the prophecy experts at Dallas Theological Seminary to find out where the second coming of Christ was supposed to take place.  "The Valley of Jehoshaphat," they said.  "For to you will come the true governor of my people."  Fine.  The true governor of Texas, however, figured he would kabosh this nonsense before it got out of hand.  He told the astrologers to go find the child and then come back and tell him where he, too, could pay his respects.  They heard him out but went their own way.  Their star guided them to the place where the child was (I don't know how, either) .

      Suitably astonished, they went into the house Joe and Maria had rented 'on the cheap' in El Paso and offered gifts and honors in their old tradition.  Their dreams warned them not to go back to the governor.  They headed for Las Vegas. 

      Joseph was also warned in a dream to clear out of Texas.  That red-neck governor had a gang of vigilantes out to destroy the child.  Joe was no fool.  He took Jesus and his mother on a night train and went to California--pronto.  There he enrolled in a community college and studied hard.  It was horrible back in Texas.  The governor's gangsters committed atrocities that the Mexicans still remember.  You may have heard about the great Texas chain-saw massacre.

      The governor eventually died.  Joseph, still in California, dreamed again.  An angel told him they could safely visit their families in El Paso.  They packed up their station wagon and drove for two days in the heat.  But the present governor of Texas was the son of that old bigot, Harrah.  After a few weeks they hit the road again and knocked around for a while.  After some serious travel they settled in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.  Maria remembered the Bible passage: "He shall be called a Nazarene."

      When the time was ripe, and Jesus had grown and was a young man, John the Southern Baptist started preaching out in the plains states, "Repent!  For God's revolution is at hand."  Again, this was in the Bible, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness.  Smooth out the main road for the Boss."  Now John wore only wool and leather like a Hutterite.  He ate whatever he could shoot in the sagebrush country: prairie chickens, pheasants, even jack rabbits or rattlesnakes if he had to.  But urban folks went out to his camp meetings to hear him preach.  Confessing their sins, they were baptized by immersion in the Missouri or the Platte.  But when clergymen came out from the theological seminaries, John called them a bunch of snakes!  "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" he raged.  "Repent!  And stop saying to yourselves, 'We are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.' I tell you, God is able to raise up WASPs from the stones in this Okie riverbank.  Even now, an ax is hacking into George Washington's cherry tree.  Bear fruit or burn!"

      Lots of preachers get wild, but John seemed to be able to control his fast ball.  And he was a team player.  "I immerse you in water," he said, "But he who is coming is the real Rainmaker.  He will immerse you in the Holy Spirit and christen you with lightning.  I'm not worthy to lace up his boots.  He carries a pitchfork to thrash out the grain, and the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

      With this intro you can bet people were watching closely when John pointed out Jesus Lopez coming to be baptized.  John would have prevented him.  He said, "I need to be baptized by you."

      But Jesus answered, "It's only right for us to observe this ritual of willing obedience."  Then John consented.  When Jesus was baptized he came up from the water, and the sky over the wide plains opened to eternity.  As softly as a meadow lark gliding down from a telephone wire, the Spirit of God descended and alighted on Jesus.  A voice out of the blue said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am mightily impressed."

      Jesus was led off into New Mexico to be tempted.  After more than a month in the desert without anything to eat, he was so starved he started to hallucinate.  The devil came to him and said, "So you're the Son of God!  Then why are you hungry?  Make bread from these stones.  You know what I mean."

      But Jesus answered, "You have gambling casinos and chorus lines within a two-hour drive, and you tempt me with bread?  The guys pumping the slot machines in 'Vegas' have stomachs full of beef and brew.  So what kind of jackpot are they trying to pull down?  What they're starved for is the word." 

      The devil took him to Salt Lake City and set him on the pinnacle of the Mormon Temple.  "Okay, hotshot.  Fling yourself down.  The Biiiible says, 'The angels won't even let you stub your toe.'"

      Jesus told the old fraud, "It also says... .   Well, something in the spirit of 'you shall not try flamboyant stunts to prove your faith.'  Maybe that's Saint Ignatius, but you get the idea." 

      The devil still had his best material, foolproof with these liberator types.  From the penthouse of a New York high-rise, he showed him the world of political power and big business and said, "You can have your ideal world, but don't think you're going to make it happen without doing a little business for me.  Some of my biggest producers started just like you."

      Jesus answered, "In spite of my fairly normal employment here, I have an insurmountable conflict of interest.  I'm already in business with your principal competitor."

       With a shrug, the devil left him. 

      Angels came and led him to a cool place by a spring.  The sun went down as he sat and watched long strands of grass play in a stream of water that flowed out deep and clear from among the rocks.

      When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been arrested like an prairie squatter, he went back to Pennsylvania.  His time had not yet come.  Even so, he was a bit much for the folks around Nazareth.  What do you say to a fellow who quotes Ignatius, Clement, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, and Jerome, yet seems never to have heard of Bruce Springsteen.  To make it easier for his parents, he left town and traveled up through the Great Lakes Region.  He ended up in Chicago.  This was said to fulfill prophecy: "The land of Zebulon of Naphtali, toward the sea, across the Jordon, Galilee of the immigrants.  The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."

      From then on Jesus took up the Baptist's cry, "Repent!  God's revolution is a hand."

      As he walked along the waterfront one evening, he saw two brothers loading their trucks.  They were teamsters.  He said to them, "Work with me and you'll move men, not cabbage and potatoes.  My union doesn't work for the mob."  They knew Jesus Lopez and already trusted him.  They must have, to walk away from their trucks.  Two other brothers, Jim and John Zebedee also parked their rigs on a lot owned by their retired father and went along with this migrant with the street-wise eyes.

      Jesus and his new cohorts went all over the state.  His proclamation of the revolution of God really had an impact.  He spoke in civic centers and in churches.  The thing is, he didn't just preach and move on to the next engagement; he healed peoples' diseases miraculously, or so it seemed.  The reporters were there.  He became a big media commodity.  More sick people were brought to him--cripples, people with pains of all sorts, psychotics, epileptics, and paralytics--and he healed them.  He drew enormous crowds everywhere he went, all without promoters or advertising agents.

      Having drawn a big crowd in a park in Cincinnati one day, he stood in an amphitheater, and taught:

      "Blessed are the alienated and depressed.  The revolution of God is theirs.

      "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

      "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.  And the aggressive and self-assured?  Trying to bull their way to the front of the herd, they trample one another.

      "Blessed are you who hunger and thirst to be good, for you shall be satisfied.  An appetite only for self-expression is enough to make you vomit.

      "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

      "Blessed are you who do what you do for the pure love of it.

      "Blessed are you who work to end conflict and controversy, for you shall be called the children of God.  Careerist hagglers can go to hell!

      "Blessed are you who are persecuted because you are good.  You are the revolution.

      "Blessed are you when people revile you, persecute you, and slander your name on my account.  Celebrate.  Your reward is of astronomical proportions.

      "You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how is it to be restored?  Good work done to satisfy a self-conscious sense of virtue touches no one.  It's only friction.

      "You are the light of the world.  A city of good can be built without a lot of witless proselytizing and gives hope without a harangue.  Let the ideologues battle.  You work patiently for results, for your light is the good you do.  From it comes the inspiration to revolutionize culture.

      "Now, somebody is going to say I come to abolish the Bible and our snake-infested church.  I have come, not to abolish but to revitalize them.  I tell you, 'til the sky is rolled up and we come out to take our bows, not a comma, not a dot will be nullified in the Bible or in the church's tradition.  Whoever then teaches bad faith and relaxes word or tradition resists God's new order.  Whoever teaches them shall be a hero of the revolution.  We need all the help we can get!

      "I tell you the truth, unless your goodness exceeds that of our liberal and conservative moralists, you will never see God's universal laws.  You have heard it said by the pro-lifers and by the antiwar activists that you must not kill, and whoever kills is liable to judgment.  I say anyone who is angry with another is liable; whoever insults another should be brought into court; and whoever says, 'You idiot!' could be hanged.  So if you are bowed at the altar, and remember you have offended somebody, forget about the sacrament, and go make amends to your neighbor.  Then approach God in your meditations, your prayers, and your sacraments.

      "Make friends with your accuser while on your way to court lest you incite him to greater severity and he prosecute you to the nth degree of the law.  You could end up in the 'slammer' with the televangelists and Lyndon LaRouche.

      "You hear a lot of preaching against adultery and other sex sins.  I say, if you have a promiscuous imagination, you are already guilty.  Throw out your television set if it offends you.  It won't be as dark without it as it is in Hell.  If your right hand rule produces marvels of electronics while you, the engineer, are led about by the fly of your pants... what a ridiculous case you are.  I wouldn't make divorce easier, but harder.  Serial marriages are a travesty of the institution.

      "Again you have heard, you shall be as good as your word.  A lie is a lie.  But I say, don't make hidebound promises and commitments.  Don't swear by heaven and earth or by the government.  Don't swear by your head; you might lose it.  Anything more than yes or no is an evil sham.

      "You have heard, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Sue the bastards!  But I say, do not resist one who is evil.  Turn the other cheek.  If anyone sues you, settle out of court as generously as you can.  If you are drafted into service by civil authorities, serve above and beyond the call of duty.  Give to the poor, and don't refuse borrowers who impose on you.  It's human nature to love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say, love your enemies, and pray for those who harass you.  In this way you become children of God, who is above all partisanship.  He makes the sun to rise on the good and on the evil alike and sends the rain on the just and the unjust.  If you love those who love you, what is your reward?  Even politicians do that.  And if you greet only your brethren, what more are you doing than is natural?  Any 'yuppy' pagan does as much.    You must be perfect, as God is perfect.

      Beware of public display of piety.  There's no great significance in making a production of your charity.  Politicians love to do this in public meetings and on television.  They have their reward.  Rather, give inconspicuously, and your charity will be noted by God.  When you pray, don't be like the fundamentalists who love to stand and pray in church and in restaurants to be observed by other people.  They have their reward.  But when you pray, go into your study and shut the door.  God will hear you.  And save your breath; long prayers are a pain in the neck.  God knows what you need."

      Here he was moved.  People were listening even though he was being a bit long-winded, himself, on this occasion.  He looked around at faces in the sunlight and eyes that reflected his serenity.  Children ran along the edges of the crowd, their voices clear as the sound of water in the old iron-stained fountain that gushed forth in the shade of the trees.  "Pray," he said, "In this way:

Eternal Transcendent God

Your Name is a Holy Fire

Reform the world

Make it conform to your desire.

Give us a living for our humble toil

Forgive us

As we forgive

Together we have failed

Push us
But not too far

Spare us the confrontation with evil

Greater than we can bear.

      "If you forgive others, God will forgive you.  Otherwise why expect gracious treatment from God?

      "Whatever you do in a sacramental way, let it be between you and God, not a demonstration.  Okay, so you don't smoke and you don't drink.  Can you resist desserts?  All kinds of things can be accomplished through self-control.  The higher power even comes to your aid, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous.  But let's not be heroic about self-denial.  Keep the reasons for your abstinence and the goal in mind, not the appearance of virtue.  Nobody else can help, so why put on a show for them?

      "Don't expend your best efforts making money and seeking recognition.  A certain kind of success is here today and gone tomorrow.  Enrich yourself spiritually.  What you prize will grow to strengthen or consume you.  Your spiritual eye is your guide.  If you discern correctly, you will move with the resolution that comes from knowing the truth.  Anxiety and pain await you at every turn, if your vision is clouded.

      "You can't work for two managers--conflict of interest again.  And you know the worst distraction: you are no good to God--or for anything else--if your real objective is money.  Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about earning your living, not even for the shirt on your back.  Isn't life more than the chore of sustaining it?  Look at the birds.  Do they have careers?  Yet they are fed.  Don't we belong in the world as much as they do?  And who can add years to his life by being driven?  As for clothing, think of the wild flowers on the plains.  They weren't manufactured in a sweat shop in the garment district.  Yet the Pope doesn't dress as well.  If God so clothes the prairie grasses which flourish for a single spring then burn, will you not fare as well, oh ye of little faith?  What shall we eat?  What shall we drink?  What shall we wear?  Grinding out your days to secure these things is known as the protestant work ethic.  They didn't get it from me!  "God knows what you need.  Seek his revolutionary goodness, and you will have security as well.  Do not be anxious about tomorrow.  Today's trouble is enough."

      There were a few people with Bibles out in the crowd.  Some of them were hotly pursuing him in the pages of their big books.  The long-haired enthusiasts weren't quite as rigorous, but they added their running commentary in King-James Bibleese.  Jesus seemed to bear down a little here on this group of Christians--as much as he was prone to, during these early laps of his marathon.  He was still able to smile.  "Don't condemn other peoples' lifestyles if you don't want to be condemned as well.  The severity of your judgment with regard to others is the degree of severity that will be applied to you.  And the generosity of your giving will be the measure of what you receive.  Why do you see the grain of sawdust in your neighbor's eye, but ignore the 2x4 in your own?  How is it you see so clearly to correct others?  You bunch of hacks, brace up your own disreputable houses.

      "Now you have learned a few things.  Don't run out to convert everybody you meet.  There are people who don't want to hear the truth.  Don't try to read Milton to a junk-yard dog.  And your pearls of wisdom and tolerance are not likely to be appreciated by chauvinistic pigs.  In either case you could get torn apart.

"Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you; for everyone gets pretty much what they're asking for.  Who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?  If you bastions of selfishness give good things to your children, how much more will God give to those who ask?

      "You have heard this one before, but it still is news: However you want to be treated by other people is how you should treat them.  This is the essence of the Bible, and it's a good rule upon which to create a nurturing fellowship in the church.  The interesting thing about it is that it doesn't ask you to love unconditionally.  Would you want people to let you carry on in a manner that would embarrass Falstaff until you die prematurely of cirrhosis of the liver?  But this requires a kind of thinking we Bible thumpers aren't used to.

      The way you think is nearly as important as what you think.  Authoritarian thinking erects a fence between people of ideologies.  You have to look for the narrow gate in this barbed wire of abstractions between the gun-control lobby and the National Rifle Association; between the environmentalists and the oil drillers; between the social planners and the supply siders; the Republicans and the Democrats; the saved and the damned.  There is a wide gate that leads to destruction.  This is the way of spineless liberalism.  Sartre is being mobbed like a rock star in that concourse by pop-existentialists.  A certain kind of tolerance is similar to intoxication.  But don't think the narrow gate is tended by nice conservative folks who will want to look at the date on your ticket and hear you recite Invictus.  Sorry to say, the difficult gate that few find is the one politely opened by an old mathematics professor when he has examined your work.  Have you gone off in one of the multitudes of erroneous digressions that lead away from the solution to our problem?

      "Beware of preachers who talk to you as sweetly as your grandmother but are mercenary vampires.  You will know them by what they neglect.  Is fruit gathered from a plastic shrub in the lobby of a hotel?  A good tree bears fruit.  A phony tree should be hauled out and thrown into the incinerator.  You don't have to listen to a sermon to see that some jerk is more interested in money and a big following than he is in helping the poor in spirit.

      "Not everyone who says, 'Jesus, you're my boss and best friend' will be accepted in our organization.  Only those who practice what I have been telling you.  Someday many people will say, 'We preached the name of Jesus; we counseled in his name; we healed in his name.'  So what is this name?  A magic word?  Why didn't you do what he told you?  Go to hell.

      "Everyone who understands what I say and does it will be like an engineer who builds from the principles of good design.  A well structured building isn't going to collapse.  If you don't practice what I've been telling you, you're headed for disaster."

      People were astonished at Jesus' teaching.  He spoke with an authority not available to preachers or politicians.  With a few words he was able to silence the great crowds that followed him.

      As he left the park, a man with AIDS came up to him and said, "If you will, you can cure me."

      Jesus seemed not to notice the sores that covered the man's face and hands.  He put an arm around him and said, "I will."

      Immediately, the man's strength returned.  The blotches on his skin faded without scarring.  Jesus said, "Don't talk about this to anyone, but go to the health department and get tested for the record."

      Out of another crowd came an Army colonel who, with a desperation you wouldn't expect from an officer in uniform, said, "My secretary is paralyzed and in terrible pain."

      Jesus said, "I will come and heal him."

      But the colonel answered, "I am unworthy to have you in my quarters.  Give the order, and he will be cured."

      Jesus was amazed.  "I havn't found much of this kind of resolution in the church," he said.  "I tell you, many people who don't know the salvation equation or the slogans will come to celebrate with the saints, while some enthusiastic 'Christians' grind their teeth outside in the dark."  Looking like a leathery-skinned cadet, Jesus stood eye to eye with the soldier.  "It's done just as you have resolved," he said.  The secretary was healed at that instant.

      Entering Peter's house, Jesus saw Peter's mother-in-law lying sick with a fever.  He touched her hand, and the fever left her.  She got up and made "rigatoni al burro" for dinner.

      That evening many people who were mentally ill were brought to him.  He cured them without counseling or drugs.  He also healed peoples' physical ailments in his miraculous fashion--just like in the Bible.

      When the crowds got to be too much, Jesus and his group went by boat to a retreat spa with a prominent minister.  The man said, "I will go with you wherever you wish."

      Jesus answered, "I live like a migrant laborer."

      Another said, "I'll follow you, but let me spend the next year or two with my stricken father."

      But Jesus said, "He doesn't even know you anymore and might as well be in an institution."

      In their small cruiser returning to the city, they ran into a storm so severe the boat was in danger of being swamped by the waves.  Thinking they were all going to have to get into life preservers, they woke Jesus from a sound sleep.  The boat rocked terribly in the wind, but Jesus stood and held up a hand that calmed the storm and the waves.  In the awesome stillness that followed he said, "Why were you afraid?  Have you no faith?"  They looked at him with eyes like tuna just netted and thrown out on the deck to gasp their last.

      Nonetheless, the storm had blown them off course. The shoreline where they landed the boat was a wooded landscape near a cemetery.  Two homeless psychotic men who had been living among the gravestones came out violently to meet them.  They swore and gestured in the way "crazies" do at no one in particular until they saw Jesus.  Then they cried out in unison, "What have you to do with us, GodMan?  Have you come to torment us before the time?"  Now there was a house nearby with wrecked cars in the yard and a few pigs rutting about in the dirt.  The madmen’s demons begged, "If you exorcise us, send us into the pigs."

      "Go," he said.

      The pigs stampeded into the lake and splashed around until they drowned.

      Bewildered, the demons' former hosts sat down on a log.  They talked calmly with one another.  They seemed to be concerned that they had been living on their capital instead of investing prudently.  The poor folk who had been alerted by the squalling pigs came out of their house.  They took off in one old clunker car of several on their property.  Reporters got ahold of their story, and it ended up in all the supermarket tabloids.  After that, Jesus was asked to leave the Chicago area by the Kiwanis Clubs and the JCs.

 ...  This paraphrase is now available as a Kindle book. One of the requirements for publishing in that format is to remove any other full digital editions.

For the rest of the story, see Kindle edition