I discovered on the bathroom floor a bright red paperback book of poetry titled Satan S—s. I have a history with the persons living here, and it all came flooding into my interpretation of my little find. I bristled like a porcupine.

Then I caught myself: This is just the kind of thing Christians do wrong—hasty, superficial conclusions; not granting the benefit of the doubt; operating out of fear; not listening. See no evil, hear no evil.

What if C.S. Lewis had titled his very Christian book on the devil Satan S–s rather than The Screwtape Letters? He could very well have. I will take a look at this red book. I will read the poem that it is named for.

Sure enough, the poem is no defense of Satan, but an unexpurgated account of his assaults on the author’s mind. And the woman can write, my God, she can write. I was hooked, but it was brutal—the reconstituted shards of  childhood incest, the detritus of damaged goods. A third of the way through I prayed, “Lord, give me light!” Do I enter into hell with her, the better to love heaven? Do I let my daughter? That was in the afternoon, and at night in bed I opened my Bible at the bookmark and read:

“. . . he took away the foreign gods and the idol from the house of the Lord, and all the altars that he had built on the mountain of the house of the Lord and in Jerusalem, and he threw them outside the city” (2 Chronicles 33: 15).

Now all I have to do is figure out whether that timely bit of Scripture was God’s answer to my prayer.

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They say, “No one wants to live to be 100 except the guy who’s 99.” Michael DeBakey, the world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon who invented the roller pump that made open-heart surgery possible, was a mere 97 when he said “no” to a heart operation to fix a main artery. But his family said “yes,” and the procedure bought him two extra years of productive life.

DeBakey is the kind of example that drives me nuts. I personally don’t think I would feel good about consuming medical resources that could go to someone half my age (assuming this was a zero-sum game)—or about being ahead of a 20-year-old on a list of organ donor hopefuls.

On the other hand, I don’t think I would feel good about living in a country that bumps me off a list because of some arbitrary, government-mandated age requirement (“Too old for health care”), or that doesn’t consider a procedure “cost effective” for me because the actuarial tables say my life’s not worth living anymore. I’d like to make that decision myself. It reminds me too much of the SS “selections” at Auschwitz, where new arrivals were directed either into the work force or the gas chambers depending on their perceived fitness.

Charles Krauthammer is as baffled as anyone about how President Obama is going to pay for his “vastly expanded welfare state.” Assuming that Obama is not totally off his rocker, the conservative commentator has come to the conclusion, by picking up on the president’s hints about “additional adjustments” in the health care system, that the money to pay for his ambitious plans will come from rationing. This, surmises Krauthammer, is the real aim of Obama’s “comparative effectiveness research,” to be carried on by a new government agency that will assess the relative effectiveness of treatments.

I like the idea of CER if it means an end to unnecessary procedures, and to cover-your-behind redundancy of testing. (I’m wondering if my upcoming MRI is really necessary, or just a hyper-conservative measure done more for my radiologist than for me.) Is there a wise man in the house?

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The most disturbing Three Stooges episode was the one where our bumbling heroes portraying failed actors were about to jump off the roof of a building (that’s not the disturbing part). Suddenly they were distracted from their endgame plans by the sound of piano music wafting up from somewhere. Following the siren to its source, they discovered a millionaire at the keyboard who just happened to be looking for talent to promote.

The Stooges’ act was a hit with the man, and their careers and lives were salvaged. Just as the wealthy benefactor was about to double their salary, two men in white coats entered and each took an arm to escort him back to the insane asylum. The man pouted that he wanted to go back by train. Obligingly, one of the white coats retrieved a toy locomotive from his pocket, to the great delight of the lunatic, who made “choo-choo” noises all the way to the exit.

I hate it when that happens—when I fall for some suave and sophisticated salesman, and in the end he’s babbling to himself and tugging at buttonholes for pink elephants. Months of avuncular assurances by President Obama that Middle Eastern terrorist types are not bad but just misunderstood left me with my mouth agape when he said “Oops!” as blood filled the streets of Tehran. No men in white coats carted him off but he was found mumbling that “no doubt any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks.” Really?

Which now makes me skittish about his health insurance plans. He’s being characteristically suave. But your average fifth grader knows the math is iffy, and I wonder if Obama will end up the first patient in his new nationalized insane asylums. And will we be close behind?

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There is a little story right out of the Twilight Zone, found in the first book of Kings. It has always frightened me, but I just now understood why.

We are not told their names, but one personage is a “man of God” who is sent from Judah to Bethel to deliver a divine sign against King Jeroboam. At the messenger’s word the king’s hand is withered, and at his word it is restored. The king thereupon invites the man of God to dinner. But the invitation is firmly rejected: “If you give me half your house, I will not go in with you. And I will not eat bread or drink water in this place, for so was it commanded me by the word of the Lord, saying, ‘You shall neither eat bread nor drink water nor return by the way that you came’” (1 Kings 13:8-9).

Now there happened to be an old prophet in the same town, who upon hearing of all that the man of God had done, sent his sons to fetch him. When they overtook him the sons invited him for dinner. The man of God declined, stating his reason as before. But the prophet said to him, “I also am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the Lord, saying, ‘Bring him back with you into your house that he may eat bread and drink water’” (v. 18).

The man of God went with him. As the two men sat at the table, the prophet looked at his guest and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Because you have disobeyed the word of the Lord and have not kept the command that the Lord your God commanded you, but have come back and have eaten bread and drunk water in the place of which he said to you, “Eat no bread and drink no water,” your body shall not come to the tomb of your fathers.’” (vv. 21-22).

After this forbidden meal, the man of God got on his donkey and rode away, but he met up with a lion on the road and it killed him.

In an eerie sequel, when the prophet heard of the man of God’s death, he calmly instructed his sons to saddle his own donkey, and he went and took up the other man’s body and buried him in his own tomb.

And the reason this story scares me so much is because I believe that for most of my Christian life I have heeded the words of godly men over the Word of God.

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My daughter had a birthday party a couple of weeks ago for her 4-year-old. She sent out invitations to 22 adults and 15 children, with an RSVP phone number. She received no replies.

It just so happens that the previous day I had coffee with a young woman who is in charge of putting together functions for the local seminary community. She told me, “People don’t RSVP anymore.” Jacki learned when she sent out digital invitations with those little boxes to mark “yes,” “maybe,” or “no” that nowadays “yes” means “maybe,” and “maybe” means “no.” This would be a good tip to include in a primer for foreigners immigrating to the United States from more civilized countries, along with other necessary code-breaking tidbits, such as the proper American interpretation of “Let’s do lunch.”

The psychology of deadbeat RSVPers is speculative. It could be that no one wants to be first to say yes to a venture. Or perhaps we are keeping our options open for a better offer. Hey, life is a smorgasbord. But a sinking tide lowers all boats. And the more that people don’t RSVP, the more an atmosphere is created where people don’t RSVP.

Meanwhile, back at the truth, Jesus says “Let your yes be yes” (Matthew 5:37). And King David, in the Spirit, says that the kind of person God loves is the one “who swears to his own hurt and does not change” (Psalm 15:4).

My daughter, not knowing who would show up, baked way too many cupcakes, which have boomeranged here and now sit on my kitchen table. Would you like some with me? RSVP by tonight or they may be gone.

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After President Obama’s visit to Notre Dame in May, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday editorial section ran a debate of the two sides of the abortion issue under the title “Does abortion allow for common ground?” I read both positions to a certain 15-year-old I know, who is no lover of God. I asked that she take mental note of the respective apologists’ arguments, as I meant this to be an exercise in analysis and rhetoric, and not particularly a proselytizing session. First up was Dayle Sternberg, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood in Pennsylvania.

Ms. Sternberg used her 1,000 words to make the following points:

• There is a critical need to prevent unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
• Our schools provide inadequate sex education.
• Abstinence-only education was expensive and ineffective.
• Birth control has high failure-rates.
• Women spend a lot more money than men on health-related services.
• Women often put the health of their children before their own, and neglect themselves.
• A majority of Americans support good sex education.
• Sex-education must be fact-based.

When I finished Sternberg and glanced up at my 15-year-old, she had a puzzled look on her face. She expressed surprise that the abortion rights proponent had not even mentioned the question of the status of the baby (or fetus, or products of conception, or whatever they’re calling it these days). She found all the statistics on unwanted pregnancies and failure-rates of birth control to be oddly beside the point.

I then proceeded to read the anti-abortion side, contributed by Edell Finnegan, director of the Pro-Life Union in Pennsylvania. It mainly highlighted two facts: that human life begins at conception and that abstinence is 100 percent effective. My 15-year-old deemed the pro-lifer to have the better argument.

But she told me she is still pro-choice. Her reason? She said she doesn’t like a bunch of white guys in Washington telling her what to do with her body.

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As recently as 2006, Jon Corzine believed that marriage was between a man and a woman. But the governor of New Jersey has come into the light—and just in time for his reelection campaign—and is now espousing “marriage equality.” “Equality” is an unbeatable word, a magical incantation. This is doubtless why the same-sex marriage political organization that has warmed up considerably to Corzine since his conversion calls itself Garden State Equality.

No one need prove that the governor’s evolution represents progress and not regress. Of all the unexamined beliefs we 21st century types carry around that color our whole day like a drop of dye completely colors the water in a glass, the notion of progress seems to be the deepest habit of the mind. C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory about:

“. . . the belief that human history is a simple, unilinear movement from worse to better—what is called a belief in Progress—so that any given generation is always in all respects wiser than all previous generations. . . . the whole world was wrong until the day before yesterday and now has suddenly become right.”

As the demon Screwtape in Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters wryly observed of human nature, we don’t particularly ask ourselves regarding a proposed course of action whether it is “good” or “righteous” or “true,” but rather:

“Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way History is going?”

Gov. Corzine has put his finger to the wind and gotten his answer. In 1593, the Protestant Henry of Navarre, also a man who would be king, is rumored to have said, “Paris vaut bien une messe” (Paris is well worth a Mass). And thus did Henry IV become the Catholic monarch of France.

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I got a letter from an inmate a few days after Father’s Day. Normally a guy who likes to stay as busy as possible in the prison—painting, reading the Bible, helping other guys—that Sunday he took six naps and still felt wiped out. He said he figured on Father’s Day there would be more than the normal number of Sunday visits. He described the scene, a scene most of us will never see:

“You can (we can) hear the phone ring up at the desk when the front office calls for somebody for a visit. But in the mornings, after 8:30, often a phone ring precedes the C.O. getting on the intercom and calling up for a visit. So every time the phone rang this morning you could see guys (actually feel it more than see it) kind of pause in whatever they were doing to listen for their name. Maybe. But as I say, only a few guys ended up getting called. At least from this unit. I think only three. At least that’s all I heard.”

Someone else dear to me (call him “C”) was released from county jail last Monday. When he was first admitted, he was hard pressed to prune the number of names of close friends and relatives down to the six that the jail would allow on his visitor’s list. As time went by, and authorized people never came, he would resubmit the list with new names of people who assured him they would come. Over time, expectations were increasingly lowered. In the end, he may as well have had only me and my mother on his list.

Now C has been released and a few friends have come around to welcome him and hang around. I remember when he was in jail that he had said he would have a long memory for who were his real friends—and who weren’t—when he got out. But if he ever asks me about it, I will suggest he go easy on the no-shows. I remember this postscript to the story of Job’s lonely sojourn in the valley of the shadow of death:

“And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job. . . . And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house. And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him . . .” (Job 42:11).

I suppose you can do one of two things with this if you are Job—or C. You can kick the bums out and say, “Where were you when I needed you?” Or you can smile and privately chalk one up to human nature and say, “Come on in, friends—let’s celebrate.”

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“Hypocrisy is a lot more helpful in preserving morality than moral equivalency is.” —Rush Limbaugh, June 25

Thus spaketh the radio talk show host whose every breath keeps President Obama’s joy from being complete, just as Mordecai’s kept Haman’s joy from being complete (Esther 3:2,5; 5:9,13). His eloquent quip on the radio program was in response to letters from the moribund section of the Republican choir, in the aftermath of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s adultery disclosure, who whine, “See Rush, we told you the Republicans have to give up the moral values issues; they’re killing us! Moral issues don’t hurt the Democrats because they have no standards.”

“Hypocrisy is necessary,” Limbaugh began, leaving us to squirm for a moment, wondering if he’s finally gone too far. But a half-decent Bible student would have immediately recognized borrowed capital from the Apostle Paul:

“If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’. . . For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died” (Romans 7:7-9).

Like Limbaugh himself, Paul likes to state relative things in absolute terms, the better to arrest our attention: Of course it is not absolutely true that “if it had not been for the law I would not have known sin.” (But our “knowledge” would have been the vaguest and murkiest of things.) It is not absolutely true that “apart from the law, sin lies dead.” (We would still be guilty for violating God’s holiness.) It is not absolutely true that we were “once alive apart from the law.” (We merely thought we were.) The fact that “when the commandment came, I died,” is otherwise stated by saying that what died was my vain imagining that I was alive.

It is always good to know that one is dead if one is dead. It is always better to know one’s true condition, which is why the burning sensation experienced by a hand accidentally rested on a hot stove is, for all its present unpleasantness, preferable to the absence of touch sensors in the body resulting in the greater unpleasantness later on that one has cooked one’s flesh to the well doneness of a porterhouse stake.

Therefore I would have to agree with Mr. Limbaugh that “hypocrisy is a lot more helpful in preserving morality than moral equivalency is.” Hypocrisy keeps alive the notion of right and wrong in our recalcitrant hearts, if only in as a faintly flickering votive candle. The doctrine of moral equivalency that calls all actions equal would love to smother morality in its sleep with a pillow. The problem with it is that it is against reality. I personally have never come across of adultery that didn’t result in third degree burns.

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“It’s amazing how much people can be deceived by flattery.”

Those unflattering words were spoken by an anonymous Iranian politician of the aging Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has buttered like toast to keep his job as president. According to the June 29 Newsweek, “Khamenei supports him because he sits like a mouse in front of him and kisses his feet.”

I suspect that we have all used flattery, and we have all been flattered successfully. Flattery is widely used because it works. True is the Proverb that says “A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet” (29:5). Ask any public figure who has stumbled into the net of adultery and chances are the bait was a woman assuring him of his unsurpassed greatness (6:24), which confirmed the opinion he already secretly held of himself: “For he flatters himself in his own eyes, so that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated” (Psalm 36:2).

Flattery fells the tallest of trees; it is the most astounding phenomenon, as the Iranian politician observed. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius’ deftness with it led Caesar like a sheep to the Senate and his death. Defusing Calpurnia’s warning dream that would have kept the leader home on the ides of March, he told his lord that its troubling symbolism “signifies that from [Caesar] Rome shall suck reviving blood, and that great men shall press for tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizances.” Caesar like that version better.

King Lear was brought down by the flattery of two of his three daughters. Regan’s opening words in the play are too treacly to be believed by anyone but their intended target: “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space and liberty.” But she only gets the Silver; her sister Goneril gets the Gold: “I profess myself an enemy to all other joys which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear Highness’ love.”

How different Jesus was. Where Caesar pushed away the offered crown “thrice, every time gentler than other” and “would fain have had it,” no one was ever able to wear Jesus down. He seemed to go out of his way to not answer the Pharisees nicely. He spoiled the best parties. The anonymous Iranian told Newsweek that in his susceptibility to flattery, Ayatollah Khamenei is “like anyone who is in power for such a long time.” He would better have said: “anyone but One.”

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