100 Prison Meditations: Cries of Truth from Behind the Iron Curtain (18 page)

Do Not Brood About Yourself

Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5) is not the same thing as brooding about the state of your soul. Man is simply what he is just as every other element in nature. If you simply
are
what God created you to be, a creature in His image, nobody will ever call you to any account. “There need be no accounting made” with those who worked at the repair of the temple in Jerusalem “because they deal faithfully” (2 Kings 22:7).

Man began to judge his own state and to discover that he was naked only after he had listened to the serpent in the garden of Eden instead of obeying God.

A greater percentage of women are diagnosed with breast cancer among those who continually check for it than among those who do not. The same danger lies in the self-examination and dissection of one’s soul. The more one is sensitive to sin, the more one will be aware of it—as opposed to one whose heart is hardened toward sin. However, too much self-examination can lead to self-love and self-righteousness.

A thorough self-examination is not even possible, because you cannot be a judge in your own cause. This is an elementary rule of justice.

According to Gödel’s incompleteness theory, no system can explain its own consistency without recourse to concepts that the system itself cannot generate. The criterion upon which you judge yourself must come not from your own mind, but from outside. But it remains your own mind that decides which outside criterion to adopt. Thus any attempt to judge yourself is futile. Men of different opinions judge themselves according to various criterions.

Hitler was sure he did well to exterminate the Jews. Jesus’ judges were sure that they did well to sentence Him. A sinner sins even in trying to determine his own sin and to evaluate true repentance.

Examine yourself only whether you have faith, as the Scriptures enjoin: whether you believe there is a greater intelligence than your own who has thought about everything, who shapes and directs your life; then enter into a calm attitude of mind.

The Hebrew word
avon
means “sin” as well as “punishment.” The very fact that you are a sinner is punishment enough, causing you to miss the inexpressible joys of righteousness. Do not add useless self-flagellation to your punishment.

There is a secret in your sinfulness. Cain, after killing his brother, said
Gadol avoni minso
, which, literally translated, is, “My sin is great by its being borne” (Genesis 4:13).

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). The sins become white through the greatness of the sin-bearer. Because sin is in itself such a terrible punishment, Jesus took it upon Himself. It was His joy to do so. To be a sin-bearer is His most beautiful crown. By entrusting your sins to Him, you add a jewel to His crown.

Examine yourself only to see if you are in faith, if you believe your sins to be white as snow because they now belong to Jesus, and, with this, enter into peace.

The Red Dragon

Behold, a great, fiery red dragon” (Revelation 12:3). Why is this dragon, whose intent is to devour the Christ child, colored red?

Sin is also associated with red. It would seem that to speak about the color of sin would have as much sense as speaking about the melody of a fruit, but God says, “Let us reason together…

Though [your sins] are red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18). So sin is red and righteousness is white.

It was no accident that Communism and Nazism, the two great anti-Christian movements of our age, both chose red flags. Not only did they fulfill a prophecy, but the choice also derived from a source deep within the experience of mankind.

The French psychologist Alfred Binet related an experiment with a hysterical woman whose body was paralyzed on one side. When a dynamometer was placed in her right hand, she could squeeze it to register only 12 kg. If she was shown a red disk, the pressure of her squeeze was immediately doubled (“Researches about the alterations of conscience with hysterical persons,”
Philosophical Magazine
, vol. 17, 1889, France).

Goethe, who developed a theory of light, also attributed dynamic character to the color red, which he distinguished as being an active color.

Every color is a suffering of light, because colors are produced by light breaking through a prism. Red is its greatest suffering.

Animals can be driven mad by showing them a piece of red cloth. Toreadors make use of this fact in bullfighting. All primitive people have a predilection for red, and so do little children.

White is not actually a color, but the fullness of light, light which has not passed through a prism. The righteous will stand before Christ, the Lamb of God, clothed in white (Revelation 7:9). In contrast to the color of the dragon, white is the color of quietness, of contemplation, the good part chosen by Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:42).

The servants of the red dragon delight in the sight of blood. Persecutors have shed rivers of martyrs’ blood. The righteous, on the other hand, are givers of life.

In a world dominated or terrorized by the red dragon, in a world where love is scarce and relationships are icy, the righteous bring the warmth of love.

No scientist can explain how it is that a stream of warm water, the Gulf Stream, flows between the cold waters of the ocean, which form its walls—how that moving hot stream exists within the motionless cold. So the righteous, clothed in white, journey toward heaven through a world inhabited by passionate red monsters, a world which, in contrast with the radiant love of the righteous, is icy and cold.

Strange Expressions in the Hebrew Bible

Biblical Hebrew is a very poor language, with only 400 word stems. For this reason it contains many homonyms and strange expressions which we often find contain spiritual messages. A few examples follow.

Elisha asks his teacher, Elijah, “Let a double portion of your spirit be upon me” (2 Kings 2:9). There is of course no quantitative measurement of spirit, so these words might seem senseless, but among the Jews, the eldest son commonly received a double portion of inheritance. Thus Elisha’s words imply, “Make me your principal spiritual heir.”

Some adversaries of the Jews wrote a letter to the Persian king Artaxerxes, saying among other things, “We are salted with the salt of the palace” (Ezra 4:14 in the original Aramaic). Salt of the palace is an expression for “salary from the king.” The English word “salary” also derives from “salt.”

We read, “Saul was the son of one year in his reign” (1 Samuel 13:1 in Hebrew). This was a manner of saying that he was childish as a ruler.

Kavod
means both “glory” and “heavy.” These homonyms express the spiritual truth that it is a glory to carry heavy burdens for the love of God.

Lekoneh
means “to get as result of a relationship of love” or “to conceive.” Eve says,
Qanithi
, “I have gotten a man from the Lord” (Genesis 4:1) when she gave birth to her first son. Later on, the word became used for “buying.” The Jews did not intend commerce to be a cold, selfish transaction, but rather a relationship in which, governed by love, two parties exchange needed items. Let Christian merchants profit by this teaching.

Leshaal
means “to ask” as well as “to lend.” Thus, to lend (
leshaal
) to everyone who asks (
shaal
) is a teaching inherent in the very fiber of the Hebrew language.

The name of the first king of Israel, Saul (
Sheoul
in Hebrew) means “lent.” Therefore “as long as he [Samuel] lives, he shall be lent to the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:28) could also be translated, “Samuel shall be Saul to the Lord.”

Hattath
means both “sin” and “sin offering.” God said to Cain, “If you do not do well,
hattath
lies at the door” (Genesis 4:7). It is well for every man who has committed
hattath
, a sin, to remember that by so doing he has brought Jesus, the sin offering, near to him, ready to forgive. Thus Jesus, too, is me before God as Samuel was Saul.

The Bible speaks about men baptized for the dead (1 Corinthians 15:29). When certain Christians were martyred, others who had wavered until that time, encouraged by the martyrs’ example of faith, came to take their place in the church and were baptized.

When a believer fails, another can—through fasting, mourning, praying, and working twice as hard as before—make good the loss that the kingdom has endured. Therese of Avila taught, “When you see a sister sinning, be thou much holier so that God may receive the same amount of love.”

You too can be a shield for another before God, replacing through your excellence in faith someone else’s frailty.

Punishment for Children

Some youths mocked Elisha “and said to him, ‘Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!’ So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the Lord. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths” (2 Kings 2:23,24).

What the children were mocking was probably not just baldness, but perhaps something like the tonsure of Catholic priests in earlier times, which may have been used by Jewish prophets. But why such a harsh punishment for a childish prank?

Our modern concept is that a child cannot be held responsible for wrong behavior. Everything is blamed on society, family, school, or the police; children’s crimes are usually attributed to poverty, although the majority of poor children do not commit crimes, and many offenders have more money than those they rob.

The ancient Jews believed, however, that a child should not commit crimes, a child should not steal, should not mock religion, and if he does, he should receive due punishment.

Still, why was the punishment so severe?

Jews believe that Elijah still walks on earth in disguise, and one legend tells of a man who asked to walk beside him to learn from him the ways of God. In beggars’ rags, they sought hospitality at a poor man’s house. The poor man received them in a friendly way and shared the milk of his own cow with them. In the morning, leaving the house, Elijah cursed the cow and it died. The second night they asked the hospitality of a rich man. The rich man spoke harshly to them and sent them, without food, to sleep in his barn. In the morning Elijah advised the man to dig in a certain place and the rich man found treasure buried there. Later Elijah and his companion met a child, who kindly went out of his way to give directions. When they passed a bridge, Elijah pushed the boy into the river where he drowned. At last Elijah’s companion could not bear it any longer and asked for explanations. Elijah said, “The cow I cursed had anthrax. If I had not killed it, the family would have been poisoned. The rich man whom I made even richer, although he was bad, was involved in big financial speculations. The treasure will encourage him to even wilder schemes with the result that in the end he will lose everything he has. The loss will make him wiser and soften his heart. In the good child I saw criminal tendencies. He would have destroyed his soul and broken the hearts of his parents, had he continued to live. I saved him by giving him death.”

There are men like Elijah with special endowments from God who can see criminality in children before it has developed, as botanists distinguish what future flower will grow from what to us is just a seed. Only such enlightened men are licensed to a severity forbidden the ignorant.

It is not correct for those who are ignorant to judge whether Elijah was entitled to do what he did. We should rather learn to maintain a careful watch over our children and never to prefer our children to God. If they sin, they must be punished, and, in extreme cases, rejected.

Children are responsible for what they do. As St. Therese of Avila sought martyrdom among the moors at the age of seven, so a wicked child must atone for his wickedness.

Learn From Flowers

As Christians, we should know something about flowers. Jesus taught, “Consider the lilies” (Matthew 6:28). He calls Himself “the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys” (Song of Solomon 2:1). Without this biblical teaching, we would never have had Masefield’s lyric at the end of “The Everlasting Mercy.”

We can learn from flowers not to be disturbed that the Christians are constituted of so many denominations. There are 35,000 varieties of orchids alone.

The number of Christian denominations has to increase even more. Our ultimate hope is for every believer to be an Abraham, a friend of God and a man under God’s direct guidance, each to be his own denomination. Men differ from each other. Each person will have his own gifts and visions, and uniting them will be a profound love that transcends their differences of view.

Flowers do not quarrel with each other. The right relationship between denominations and believers is mutual admiration.

Secondly, every flower is wisdom personified. God has given orchids a masterly variety of shapes for the purpose of multiplication.

The Mediterranean’s Ophrys resembles a female wasp and emits a similar odor to attract the male wasp. In the wasp’s attempt to mate with the plant, he picks up pollen masses, which eventually brush off onto another flower. The Santa orchid has a platform which resembles a nectar-bearing flower, so it attracts bees in search of nectar which it does not have.

Australia’s flying-duck orchid springs a trap when an insect lands on its lips. With a jerk, the orchid tosses the intruder into a cup formed by petals around a green column. The escaping insect carries away pollen masses to deposit on the next flower.

Other orchids display other curiosities to attract specific pollinators (
National Geographic Magazine
).

Christians also wish to multiply. Paul writes, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might win those who are under the law; to those who are without law, as without law…to the weak I became as weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:20–22).

Christianity has an amazing multitude of approaches, all of them correct so long as we pursue the one aim: ever to increase the Church of Christ.