The gifted female artist promised to build the monument using only the finest Carrara marble, quarried in Italy. It would stand sixty-six feet high and be mounted atop a marble platform ten feet tall. Its several sections, when assembled, would weigh 320 tons.
The committee selected a site on La Cabana Hill in the suburb of Casa Blanca. From a vantage point 260 feet above Havana Harbor, Christ Jesus would view the entire bay, the entrance to the harbor, and the city itself across the water.
The faithful of Havana could look across the bay toward the statue — blazing white under the Havana sun — and know in their hearts that Jesus loved them and watched over them.
Marta Fernandez Batista commissioned the Statue of Christ overlooking Havana Harbor.
It took nearly three years of hard work in both Italy and Cuba, but on Christmas day 1958 Marta dedicated the statue for the people of Cuba. From now on Jesus would defend them from every danger, including the danger posed by the brutal Communists against whom her husband’s army — with America’s help — battled valiantly on the eastern side of the island.
Marta didn’t know (how could she?) that six days after the dedication ceremony, she and her husband would find themselves scrambling into a convoy of planes to fly off the island with hundreds of their closest friends — fleeing for their lives — because guerilla soldiers had somehow overrun Santa Clara, her husband’s last line of defense.
The dirty unshaven mostly black soldiers, who belonged to the devil himself — Che Guevara — were poised to swarm into the city like the fire-ants every Christian knew they were.
Marta and her husband escaped the island after a New Years Eve party made famous in the 1974 classic movie, The Godfather Part Two, which featured Al Pacino. They took expensive art and the Cuban treasury with them, but left behind a 1.2 billion dollar debt as well as a history of annual deficits in the hundreds-of millions for the new government to repay.
In the meantime, while the Batista entourage continued to orchestrate its exile, during a freak storm, lightning struck Marta’s beloved statue of Jesus. Its head disintegrated some say and crashed to the ground.
Sculptress Jilma Madera constructed the Christ in the Harbor statue. Some have claimed that she modeled the face after her own.
It was just as well that Marta didn’t see it happen. She had worked so hard to bring this gift of God’s love to the citizens of Havana. The new government — it wouldn’t become a Communist government for a few more years — cleaned up the mess and rebuilt Jesus to his former glory.
As time went on, the powerful Batista family lived out its patriarch’s remaining years in various countries until Fulgencio died of a heart attack at age 72 in Marbella, Spain in 1973.
Marta moved to America where she lived quietly among the upscale and connected of Palm Springs, Florida. She continued giving to charity, the Church, and even hospitals until she too died, in 2006, from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
By all reports Marta was a beautiful Catholic, a Christian, a woman who loved Jesus. But she married a man who John Kennedy once said had run the most repressive and corrupt régime that South America had ever seen.
Havana, under Batista, became a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Sicilian Americans in crime syndicates (years later people started calling these groups, the Mafia) operated profitable casinos, as well as gambling, pornography, and prostitution franchises.
In those days, despite American investment (Americans owned three-fourths of pretty much every category of the economy, including land) dissatisfaction ran deep. Universities became hotbeds of discontent, protests, and demonstrations. Trade unions, the press, teachers, agricultural workers, priests, doctors, and lawyers vented their collective outrage at “yanqui” unfairness and domination.
The entire country, 90% of it anyway, congealed in disgust for the goons who ran everything; who stole the island’s wealth in a seemingly endless orgy of greed. Disgust turned to fear when thugs began a regimen of assassination and torture to keep dissenters in check.
Fidel Castro led a movement against the Batista cartel that included almost every person on the island.
Eventually, Fidel Castro, a brilliant attorney and son of a prominent land owner, stepped up to coordinate the opposition, which had become so complex and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to track, let alone direct. He hired a savvy Argentine physician, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, to help him. As time went on they became close friends and made history together.
After the Batista family and their closest friends fled the island, Castro arrested the men who carried out the assassinations and torture of civilians. The new government executed several hundred for capital crimes. It sentenced hundreds more to long prison terms.
Fidel then broke up his own family’s estate by distributing its land to his family’s employees. This generous act set the tone and example for the program of island-wide agrarian reform which followed.
Christ in the Harbor of Havana, Cuba
The elites in the United States were not impressed. They orchestrated a program of assassinations, sabotage, bombings, quarantine, and isolation against the island that included poisoning its agricultural exports and burning and sinking the ships of its trading partners.
The USA established an embargo so effective that some international companies lobbied Congress to make humanitarian changes, which they did.
The USA embargo continues to the present day despite resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries this year.
View of Havana Bay from the statue of Jesus. Click pic to view.
The decades-long barbarity of the war against Cuba by the United States shocked the modern world. Many observers (outside the United States) continue to wonder how well Cuba might have done had it not endured decades of ”dirty tricks” to undermine its vision.
Some of the methods used to destabilize the island have made it into the public domain where observers have labeled them ”diabolical.” The history of USA-Cuba relations continues to alarm people around the world. Folks wonder if the United States will ever change. They wonder if the empire to the north can change.
A few of the excesses of the fifty-five year war against Cuba are enumerated in my essay, Hey, Guevara.
But to conclude our story…
As for Marta’s statue of Jesus, it continues to guard Havana Bay to this very day. Despite fifty-five years of relentless attack from what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation ever, the island of Cuba and its statue of Jesus still stand.
You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’
Jesus
The wars of Israel were the only ‘holy wars’ in history… there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Those who have waged war in obedience to the divine command (or in conformity with His laws) have represented…the wisdom of government and… put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Saint Augustine
The United States deploys drones like the Scan Eagle and the Predator (which can dispatch Hellfire missiles) to kill people by remote control anywhere in the world.
Readers might notice that the quotes by the three Christians cited above the picture don’t agree about murder. Killing is a moral controversy.
The subject is even more contentious between leaders of religions outside Christianity. It’s a strange thing. In the United States where Christianity is mainstream, pastors sometimes lead the charge towardwar; some endorse capital punishment, so it’s confusing.
Can killing people be a good thing? The Catholic Church developed Just War doctrines to permit good people to kill the wicked under certain carefully crafted conditions such as proportionality, just cause, and last resort.
From my point of view, ideas of Just War fall under the umbrellas of self-justification, rationalization, and delusion. Will anyone admit the obvious? All countries are ruled by elites, and the USA is no exception.
Elites get to be elite through in-fighting, war, intrigue, and politics. They are, for the most part, desensitized to violence. The morality of religion is of no use to them except when it helps to consolidate and enhance their prestige and power. If a philosophy like Just War helps to alleviate the guilt feelings of soldiers they order into combat, they are fine with it.
Elites are, by process and definition, really good at fighting to maximize their advantages. Over time elites become a law unto themselves and develop their world view and their reasons for doing things, which are usually not well-understood by the average people who serve them.
Who wants to take on people who can really hurt them?
In most places, people go-along with their elites to get along. It’s less stressful and much safer to pretend that average people’s best interests are at the heart of decisions made by the wealthy and the powerful — especially as they negotiate deals, wage wars, and craft treaties.
Who wants to take-on people who can really hurt them should they ever choose to?
For their part, our elites tolerate religion, because in the United States at least Christianity seems to encourage citizens to be docile and compliant. Preachers and pastors encourage their flocks to turn the other cheek and obey authorities.
Christian evangelicals don’t challenge military power, and they generally oppose government policies designed to curb the power of individuals who accumulate vast wealth. Some encourage gun ownership and participation in wars — confusing non-Christians who might be under the impression that Jesus advocated pacifism and non-violence.
In the United States, the wealthy have built a powerful military and have used it to kill many millions of people during the past seventy-five years (the modern era). Much of the killing has occurred during periods when the United States did not formally declare war.
A lot of the killing has taken place under continuing resolutions like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which helped to justify the long war in Vietnam.
Another is the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) — passed by Congress on September 14, 2001 — which provided the legal authority for the United States to use military power in perpetuity against any individual, group, or country who dared threaten it.
Only Barbara Lee(no relation to Billy Lee) of California voted against AUMF, the perpetual war resolution of 14 September 2001. President George W. Bush signed it into law on September 18.
Congressional consent is no longer required to wage war. Military force is now forever justified whenever and wherever the United States is threatened. The Congressional authorization of 2001 makes it easier for the USA to kill people, including American citizens living out of country.
One estimate by The Hill — a news organization whose on-line stories are widely read by members of Congress — places the number of killings by USA drones operating outside of war zones since 2001 at 2,400.
TheBillyLeePontificator.com could not independently confirm the estimate, which one of its editors characterized as “bordering on the ridiculous.”
It defies common sense that high numbers of assassinations of civilians could occur outside of warzones without arousing a profound backlash by people of goodwill, she insisted.
Is she right? Does anyone outside of government really know?
History seems to say it’s possible. Over the years the USA has invaded and tried to overthrow many countries, often under the pretext of retrieving businesses that were seized by their host countries.
In most places, the United States has succeeded — temporarily — like in Iran in 1953 where it secured natural gas and oil reserves; in Guatemala in 1954 when it took back the nationalized United Fruit Company; and in Chile in 1973 when it repossessed certain mines that were producing strategic metals.
The problem for most countries is that after the USA retrieves its property it moves in to take over the country, usually behind the scenes using native-born (and ruthless) dictators loyal to the United States.
USA backed fighters killed and wounded 5,000 Cubans during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Cuba captured 1,200 who they added to several thousand political detainees in a trade for medicine.
Every once in a while, takeover fails, like in Cuba in 1961 and in Vietnam in 1972. In those countries, strategic resources were never at stake, so the losses didn’t seem to affect our safety or our economic security. Still, after the fights ended, the USA worked overtime to make sure it ruined their economies by deploying embargos and unleashing its leverage over international banking.
The USA ignited recent wars in the Middle East — Kuwait, Iraq, Syria — for various reasons and continues them to this day. The United States fights terrorists in undeclared wars permitted by AUMF resolutions, which allow it to kill enemies anywhere in the world by remote control using un-humaned drones.
It’s pointless to argue whether the killings are justified or moral, smart or stupid. Many families have been ruined by drones and by war. They don’t care about smart or stupid. They just hurt; survivors wonder what might have been were their loved ones allowed to live.
So, how many people have we killed? How many hurt? How many wounded? How many amputees; how many blinded; how many deafened; how many disfigured? How many orphans? How many widows? How many dreams crushed; how many aspirations demolished?
The picture reveals the lethality of Hellfire missile-strikes. The heat cooks flesh off bones of bystanders who get too close.
How many loves-of-a-lifetime have been dashed on America’s battlefields?
Unless God Himself reveals it someday, we will never know, because during the era of Bush-senior and his general, Norman Schwarzkopf (of the renown German family) no one bothered to track body-counts; no one kept statistics on the maimed and crippled.
Our military says it doesn’t do counts. It’s in bad taste. A country like the USA doesn’t count pelts or put notches on rifles; besides, how does anyone collect the names of entire families destroyed in atomic blasts like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
In those attacks, the genealogy archives of families were obliterated. The files of victims, the records of everyone who knew them, were vaporized.
The directories of the dead in Japan are missing, perhaps forever. Unless resurrected by God, the dead, many of them, are forgotten to the end of time.
The Arlington National Cemetery holds the remains of 400,000 veterans who have served the USA in defense of our way of life. It is a sacred place. A summer job during college privileged me to trim the gravestones of thousands who loved their country enough to serve. A cemetery for those the USA has killed in the modern era, should it ever be built, will be 25 to 150 times larger depending on who collects the dead.
Nevertheless, brave reporters and historians have tried to pull together records where they can find them. I can tell you that the numbers of deaths, executions, and imprisonments in America’s wars are in dispute — with some articles on Wikipedia, for example, frozen in place and fought over by review committees for historical accuracy. The reports are hard reading, disturbing really, because some folks seem to be trying for whatever reasons to understate and misrepresent the carnage.
Despite obvious inaccuracies which defy common sense, the numbers on the internet are the most reliable civilians have. They may perhaps be understated, but they are still large. I’ve included links for those who might want to verify the statistics.
Billy Lee
Notes from the Editorial Board: As everyone knows, the United States is a close ally of Israel. Many prominent Israelis are citizens of the United States, such as former Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff. Some folks, like Billy Lee, consider Israel a de-facto fifty-first state of the Union, much like Hawaii, though he admits there are important differences, to be sure.
Billy Lee has pointed out that since 1948 Israel and the United States have cooperated in a dozen or so wars and flare-ups — among them, the War of Independence, the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War of 1982, the South Lebanon conflict, the first and second Intifadas, the 2006 Lebanon War, the Gaza War, and various operations like Protective Edge — which were fought to secure Israel’s safety and its autonomy.
The USA has spent trillions of dollars to stabilize the Middle East and prop up with money and weapons governments favorable to our side. It has pumped over two-hundred billion dollars into Israel’s economy alone. How many people have been killed in the wars which erupted? Billy Lee doesn’t know.
He seems to think that an accurate figure for war-related killings by the USA should include in some way the deaths inflicted during the many conflicts in the Middle East where the United States was directly involved. He simply doesn’t have the numbers, so he can’t report them. The numbers may be available to others, but they are not included in his analysis.
A similar concern involves NATO, where the United States, again, is partnering with others in wars and conflicts, and is not the sole actor.
As for other conflicts: Billy Lee has added the following list with links to the statistics. The Editorial Board
The names and numbers of people killed in Japan will never be known. USA bombers obliterated their records in the fires they ignited in the Japanese made-from-wood-and-paper neighborhoods and cities.
The War against Japan deserves special mention.
The names and quantities of people the USA killed in Japan will never be known. The Air Force obliterated their records in the fires they set in the Japanese made-from-wood-and-paper neighborhoods and cities.
Beginning in 1945 sixty-seven Japanese cities of consequence were burned to rubble by incendiary night-time attacks involving hundreds of B-29 Superfortress bombers under the command of USA General Curtis LeMay.
During the first attack against Tokyo in March 1945, Lemay deployed 325 bombers to drop a half-million slow-burning napalmcluster-bombs, which killed at least 150 thousand civilians. His bombing of the capital city continued unabated for three weeks; the fire-bombing of the other sixty-six Japanese cities continued for three more months.
Five cities were held back (protected from attack) until August 1945 to permit General LeMay to decisively demonstrate American atomic fire-power. He annihilated two of them — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — with the atomic bombs named Little Boy and Fat Man.
He spared the three remaining targets, Yokohama (Japan’s second largest city, where I lived from 1952-1954), Niigata, and Kokura — after the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945.
Some older readers might remember that Curtis LeMay ran for Vice-President in 1968 on a third-party ticket led by Alabama Governor George Wallace. The two men tried unsuccessfully to derail racial integration in the South, which our Congress had recently mandated.
One of General Douglas MacArthur’s closest aides, Bonner Fellers, described Curtis LeMay’s attacks on Japanese civilians as “the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”
The most conservative estimate of the number of civilians burned alive that I’ve seen in print is 500,000. Some historians have estimated the number to be as high as two million. The Japanese effort to evacuate their cities saved countless lives, but left many millions of women and children homeless, until the cities could be rebuilt after the Japanese surrendered.
Official histories written by the US Air Force claim that ”five months of jellied fire attacks” were ”so destructive” that they ”cremated 65 Japanese cities.” The attacks left ”9.2 million homeless.”
Here are some numbers of interest: atomic bomb attacks in Japan — 225,000 killed; Vietnam War — 3.4 million killed; World War II — 55 million killed; Korean War — 2 million killed; Iraq War — 1 million killed.
This list of wars is necessarily incomplete, because the USA fights secret wars from time to time. In his 1990 book, Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama spoke of one such war against the Chinese and admitted taking millions from the USA to support the effort. He claimed that America’s policy was to destabilize and overthrow wherever possible each and every Communist country in the world. Inside the US intelligence establishment, the suppression is called Strategic Strangulation.
This policy was the reason many Communist societies sealed their borders during the Cold War. Some, like North Korea, still do. Military historians have claimed that the United States dropped anthrax bombs on North Korean troops and their Chinese allies in 1954. This biological terror was unleashed after what historian Richard Rhodes says was a program of US bombing against cities and dams in North Korea that killed two million civilians.
General Curtis LeMay agreed. He led the US Strategic Air Command during the bombing of Korea. In 1984 he bragged before the Office of Air Force History, ”Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population.” It helps to explain why they hate us.
The numbers killed in these secret and not-so-secret wars are argued over; they are not certain or even known — certainly not by civilians who lack security clearances. Mayhem from traumatic wounds is not known.
The consensus seems to be that the total number of human beings killed by the United States since 1940 exceeds ten million. Depending on how it is counted, the number could be far higher. A case can be made that it’s as high as sixty-five million.
In the modern era, the United States has warred against one out of four countries on the earth. I didn’t believe it, until I did the count. Count the number any which way you choose. It’s a big number. And the numbers of wounded and traumatized human beings is certainly enormous, but unknown.
I’d like to think that in the future the United States will resolve its differences with other countries and organizations in a way that doesn’t involve killing people.
The United Nations was established to do just that — peacefully resolve disputes — but the United States runs the place, some say, and others have insisted that the USA is the biggest warmonger on the planet.
It has something to do with its defense industry and the efforts of tycoons to maximize profits for themselves and their shareholders.
I hope it’s not true.
How horrible it is to have so many people killed–And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! Jane Austin, 1811, on the Battle of Albuera
Billy Lee
Postscript: Here is a quotation from wisdom literature, which — who knows? — might help policymakers. I wonder if anyone believes it.
It is by the fear of the LORD that someone turns away from evil. When someone’s ways please the LORD, He makes even their enemies be at peace with them.
I found the passage in the Proverbs of the Bible. See chapter 16.
I guess I should start by saying, sorry. Forgive me for enraging self-righteous Christians who might stumble over this essay and actually read it.
God help me if I nudge anyone to suicide by confronting them with certain sins, which they are simply unable to overcome.
Some Christians point to themselves to show the unfaithful — even those who don’t ask — that Christ Jesus forgives them. He might not forgive other people, sure, because some sins are too grave; unforgivable. But their own sins, well, Jesus forgives them.
I watched a church-congregation change denominations because their members thought its leaders didn’t sufficiently punish a pastor who married his daughter to the woman she loved.
A leader of this congregation published a piece in a widely read magazine to claim that homosexuality was one of the worst sins anyone could commit. The leader got into it, into the details; it was scary to read.
The article scared me, at least. Let’s put it that way.
I don’t want to frighten anyone. My purpose is to challenge modern folks, who claim they are trying to imitate Christ, to soberly examine themselves and make winsome changes.
Why?
Well, I’m a sinner, church friends will tell you — I have a lot to work on, they say. I have a history of showing anger and being judgmental — unsuitable for anyone who claims to walk with Christ, right?
It’s comforting to know that Saint Peter got angry as did John the Baptist and other Bible heroes. Jesus is working on me; my temper seems to diminish as aging overtakes me.
Decades depending on Christ to keep my head above water has taught me that everyone seems to find themselves up-to-their-eyeballs in sin most every day. It takes a tremendous level of self-deception to even breathe sometimes.
Other Christians seem to believe they have overcome many of their basest sins and are serving Christ effectively. I don’t remember ever feeling that way; sometimes I wonder if I’m heaven-material.
Christ has strengthened me against youthful propensity for sexual-sin and temper-tantrums, true. Some might say I back-slide, but it’s been a while. Jesus has somehow made me better than I was, I think.
It’s true.
Some victories might be the result of aging and lowered levels of testosterone.
It doesn’t exactly seem so. It feels like loss of whatever it was that once made me feel like a man. Maybe it’s medicines. Older folks like me, some anyway, take meds each day just to keep going.
For some strange perhaps misguided reason (sour-grapes?), I started asking questions with enthusiasm of clear conscience about activities of celebrity-style Christians. I asked: would Christian heroes of the Bible do things Christians do who live today inside the United States?
Jesus portrayed as a child in the 1977 television mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth.
5 – Would Jesus drive a Cadillac or Tesla? Or take Uber?
6 – Would the disciplesself-medicate with tranquilizers and anti-depressants?
7 – Would John, brother of Jesus, defend the Second Amendment, repeal Obama Care, build border walls, lower taxes on billionaires, or maybe defend politicians and preachers?
Readers might think of some other behaviors unique to the modern world. Are there really any good reasons to argue whether the seven peculiar behaviors in my list are sins? Isn’t it true that sin is not always easily described though it does seem pervasive; without help, humans fall, right?
Many who commit sin rationalize to keep themselves sane. Why not respect their process? Why not provide space for folks to grow spiritually and love Christ? No church does tolerance well — at least none I know. Mistakes get made. Some get hurt. Others feel betrayed.
Jesus patches things up, right? He finds ways to forgive, teach, love, and bind wounds. He makes holiness possible.
Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and life itself.
Does anyone have hope apart from the love of Christ crucified and unharmed?
The entertainment industry learned a long time ago that the way to appeal to the most people is to embrace ambiguity.
Ambiguity permits each consumer to put their own meaning on the art they buy; on music, paintings, theater, books, movies, shows, personalities, and stars.
Ambiguity, when combined with strictly enforced copyright laws — like those of the United States — can help establish a large paying audience, huge money, and wide-spread exposure and influence.
No facial expression is more ambiguous or popular than that of Mickey Mouse. It is vigorously protected by copy-right law.
People like to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. Ambiguity promotes mass participation in cultural processes. This mass participation can alleviate the ennui of alienation for many people.
Elvis Presley created mass hysteria in the USA. Some religious people thought his first name was a scrambled version of the word, Evils.
Elvis Presley sang, you ain’t nothing but a hound dog. What did he mean by it? No one knows, and everyone knows.
The same is true with Bob Dylan who sang, Hey Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me. In the jingle-jangle morning I’ll come following you. No one knows what he was singing about. Yet everyone can tell you what he meant.
The ambiguity of these two artists — one from the nineteen-fifties, one from the nineteen-sixties — permitted both to accumulate the largest fan bases ever, until the Beatles.
John Lennon once said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
The Beatles established an ambiguous sexual identity by wearing their hair long — unusual at the time. They deluged their fans with ambiguous lyrics such as, yeah, you’ve got that something, I think you’ll understand, When I’ll say that something, I wanna hold your hand… and hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. No one knows for sure what they meant, but everyone knows what those lyrics meant to themselves when they first heard them.
Jesus presents ambiguities about himself which have attracted the largest following of worshippers in world history. The most obvious ambiguity is the concept of the Trinity. Is Jesus God, or not? No one knows. Everyone knows.
The Trinity is the central ambiguity of Christianity. God is somehow a combination of person, spirit, and creator.
The concept of the Trinity presents the central ambiguity of Christianity. It has drawn the attention of a spiritually hungry world for two thousand years. It confounds us with a dilemma of logic and meaning which to this day fuels the faith-wars of Christians who, in their quest for certainty, have segregated themselves into over 40,000 denominations.
Every attempt to define the Trinity, to remove its ambiguity and establish certainty, seems to result in a new denomination, a new religion.
The Holy Spirit is sometimes portrayed as a white dove. The olive branch recalls the dove who gave Noah the evidence that the great flood (of judgment) was over.
Of course, many other ambiguities in the Bible have spawned controversies. Abortion isn’t mentioned in the Bible — and homosexuality is barely mentioned — yet both have divided countless churches. Gifts of the Holy Spirit — which are discussed at length in the Bible and should be non-controversial to believers — have divided churches. Some denominations discount gifts altogether, in contradiction to Scripture.
In the 21st century, those Christians who detest ambiguity and worship certainty war with one another in a kind of theater of the absurd. 40,000 denominations?
Really?
Instead of embracing a small amount of ambiguity to unify Christians, a few leaders advocate from time to time certainties of thought and Bible interpretation which divide the faithful. Unity is the last thing these modern Christians seem to want. They lust for certainty.
Certainty is not foundational, according to quantum physics.
Certainty is not biblical, it’s not Christian, it’s not even Jesus. Jesus didn’t stone the woman caught having sex with her married boyfriend, though the logic of the law demanded it. He reasoned with her, encouraged her, and forgave her. He wasn’t logical. He wasn’t dogmatic. He admonished the woman and gave her hope. He acted with all the stupidity and uncertainty of true love, based on a relationship with a messy human being who would never be certain of anything.
The most unambiguous statement Jesus made was this: Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
No one knows for sure what Jesus was talking about when he made this statement. Yet everyone seems to know for sure what he meant. As unambiguous as the statement is, it can’t be literally true today.
No modern person has ever opened their front door and found Jesus standing on the front porch. Not one. Jesus’s meaning is uncertain. To different people, his words mean different things.
For Jesus, his statement had a meaning known to him, but it seems reasonable that his meaning might have nuances depending on the specific person he was talking to. And Jesus was talking to a lot of people, it turned out.
The amount of faith required to access Heaven is small, but uncertain.
The Bible plainly says that we are saved by faith. But no one has perfect faith.
So how much faith does it take to get into Heaven?
Jesus said the amount of faith required to do anything was on the order of a grain of mustard seed, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. How many people have this much faith? Not very many, it turns out. It’s not possible for us to be certain about the quantity of faith required to enter heaven. The amount is small, but uncertain.
In their demand for certainty, many churches fight over doctrine. They fight, because they are populated by people. If history is a guide, we can say with certainty that people love to fight.
One of the amazing things Jesus said was this: God is kind to the wicked and the ungrateful. As someone who has been wicked and ungrateful pretty much everyday of my life (and not proud of it), I love pondering those words. They give me assurance, not certainty, that God will be more gentle with me than I deserve.
God protects the boat and the people it leaves behind in the harbor.
Recently, my church friends, God love them, voted to leave our mainstream denomination to join a conservative denomination of the South, born in the Confederacy of the civil war. People unwilling to get on the boat for unchartered waters face the danger of becoming spiritually adrift. They face an uncertainty that might result in the loss of their religion.
I am one of those who have to face the unpleasant decision to get on that boat or face the dangers of remaining on shore. It’s not a good choice for me. My health has suffered under the stress of a change in my old age I didn’t see coming. The good part is this: people who love Jesus are in the departing boat and on the shore. And Jesus is protecting both the boat and the land it leaves behind.
Sharing a meal with Jesus, and being reassured by him that everything will be set right someday, is a central hope of most Christians.
The comfort Christians enjoy is Jesus, himself, in their homes, eating with them and sharing their life. That’s it. Jesus is all there is for those of us who suffer in this life, and he’s enough. Inside our private spaces, Jesus reasons with us, encourages us, forgives us, admonishes us, and gives us hope. He helps us endure and embrace the will of God, which is almost never our own.
Billy Lee
Postscript: On July 1, 2015 Billy Lee resigned his church and aligned himself with a non-denominational congregation. The Editorial Board.
Blaise Pascal was a man who suffered terribly his entire life until he died at age 39 from a metastasized stomach cancer. His mother died when he was 3 years old; his father when he was 28.
For those who aren’t familiar with his life, let me point out that he was French, raised by his sisters, educated by his father, and very involved in the religious controversies of his time (1623-1662). He was an inventor and mathematician of the highest order. His sufferings — his physical ailments and psychological agonies — are legendary.
I won’t burden people with the details of his life — historians and biographers have written many books to help folks understand this tragic man, if anyone is interested. What I want to do is share, in English, some of the clever things he wrote during his short life and provide a link to his books, if anyone is interested in reading further.
Most of the quotations in this essay were first published some years after his death, gleaned from scraps of paper found among his personal belongings. Had they been published during his lifetime, he might have become even more controversial than he actually was. The added stress of additional criticism from contemporaries might have shortened his life even more.
Blaise Pascal had what modern people would call a negative attitude toward groups like the Jesuits and possibly the Catholic Church, which declared five tenets of his Calvinist-style religious order, the Jansenists, heresy when he was 30 years old and still grieving for his lost father. But mostly, he had a negative attitude toward other people and himself, all of whom he considered to be hopelessly wicked.
Sensitive individuals who suffer like Pascal did, it seems to me, find it more natural than others who live easier lives to think that the world is a hostile place populated by selfish and uncaring people in need of a savior.
Pascal is reported to have said, Sickness is the natural state of Christians. He spoke his dying words in a moment of sublime clarity amid a chaos of physical suffering. He whispered helplessly, May God never abandon me.
Pascal solved several previously intractable problems associated with cycloids.
Below are some samples of Pascal’s thoughts, which I found interesting and a little sad when first I read them many years ago. His ”pensees” seem to be his way of making sense of a world that held no comfortable place for him to lay his head; a world devoid of a mother’s touch to reassure him; a world lacking the medicines and psychological insights he needed to find the peace, freedom from pain, and the joy for living so many of us in the modern world freely pursue.
Blaise Pascal was oppressed by the heightened discernment of a brilliant mind smothered by relentless suffering. His intelligence (contemporaries called him a prodigy) enabled this sensitive man to articulate his suffering through the lens of Christian philosophy, which he adopted as his own.
Here are some of his thoughts:
Myself at twenty is no longer me.
Christian piety destroys the self. Human civility conceals and suppresses it.
It is a bad sign when someone is seen producing outward results as soon as he is converted.
Sleep, you say, is the image of death; for my part I say that it is rather the image of life.
We are standing on sand; the earth will be dissolved, and we will fall as we look up at the heavens.
Life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence as he would in our absence.
Man is nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy…. He does not want to be told the truth.
Each rung of fortune’s ladder which brings us up in the world takes us further from the truth, because people are more wary of offending those whose friendship is most useful and enmity most dangerous. A prince can be the laughing-stock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.
Is it not true that we hate the truth and those who tell it to us, and we want them to be deceived to our advantage, and want to be esteemed by them as other than we actually are?
It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them, since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion.
The most unreasonable things in the world become the most reasonable because men are so unbalanced. What could be less reasonable than to choose a ruler of a state the eldest son of a queen?
When we have heard only one side, we are always biased in its favor.
To the church: There is no need to be a theologian to see that their only heresy lies in the fact that they oppose you.
It is false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity.
Humiliations dispose us to be humble.
It is better not to fast and feel humiliated by it than to fast and be self-satisfied.
God can bring good out of evil, but without God we bring evil out of good.
God will create an inwardly pure Church, to confound…the inward impiety of the proud Pharisees. …. For, although they are not accepted by God, whom they cannot deceive, they are accepted by men, whom they do deceive.
We all act like God in passing judgments.
Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life; and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.
They do both good works and bad to please the world and show that they are not wholly Christ’s, for they are ashamed to be.
Jesus was abandoned to face the wrath of God alone. Jesus is alone on earth, not merely with no one to feel and share his agony, but with no one even to know of it.
Silence is the worst form of persecution.
No one is allowed to write well anymore.
You brand my slightest deceptions as atrocious, while excusing them in yourselves as the [(way of your church)].
Would God have created the world in order to damn it? Would he ask so much of such feeble people?
Persecution is the clearest sign of piety.
Which is harder, to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be, or that what has been should be once more?
All faith rests on miracles.
How happy I should be if…someone took pity on my foolishness, and was kind enough to save me from it in spite of myself.
We must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind.
You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure.
We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.
The proper function of power is to protect.
If everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
Fear not, provided you are afraid, but if you are not afraid, be fearful.
God hides himself. He has left men to their blindness, from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ.
I marvel at the boldness with which these people presume to speak of God.
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.
Who has more cause to fear hell, someone who does not know whether there is a hell, but is certain to be damned if there is, or someone who is completely convinced that there is a hell, and hopes to be saved if there is?
Truth is so obscure nowadays and untruth so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.
“Yet I have left me seven thousand.” I love these worshippers who are unknown to the world, and even to the prophets.
We never love anyone, only their qualities.
Must one kill to destroy evildoers? That is making two evildoers in place of one. Overcome evil with good.
We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
As I write down my thought it sometimes escapes me, but that reminds me of my weakness, which I am always forgetting….
Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.
It is a fearful blindness to lead an evil life while believing in God.
Pascal’s death mask.
That’s enough for now.
Blaise, I pray you have found the happiness in Heaven that eluded you on Earth.
