| 3:20a |
LilyDale by Christine Wicker
I've been reading a pretty good book on the history of the Lilydale Assembly- a spiritualist community in upstate NY (it's America's oldest continuous spiritualist town).
The author, Christine Wicker, is discussing a tragic event in the past of one LilyDale resident, Lynn Mahaffey. She asks what the event meant to Mahaffey.
“It meant I would go on believing that love is in control.”
And is it? Can you? Wicker asks.
“”Of course it is. If it isn’t, then forget it. Nothing makes sense. That’s the end of joy, that’s the end of hope. But I do believe it. I believe that our greatest sorrows lead to our greatest joys. I believe they can. If the horrors we see around us come into our lives, we will endure and find meaning in them. The bruised reed I will not break. The flickering flame I will not quench. That’s the promise. This unconditional love is in you and you can trust it.”
“Even if we die?” Wicker asks.
“What do you mean, even? Especially if we die, that’s not the worst thing that can happen to us.”
Wicker, who claims she was raised Christian (Baptist, specifically) is suspicious and skeptical of such a worldview. This is the way she says she was taught to see the world growing up, “ I wasn’t a Baptist anymore but I still knew people are bad and that you have to keep them tied down and trussed up. You have to curb their evil impulses. People can’t go around doing whatever they want. The world depends on us to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others, and it doesn’t make one bit of difference that doing so makes us miserable and ill tempered and the kind of long suffering cranks no one in his right mind wants to be around. We aren’t here to be happy, we’re here to be good. Most of us don’t have what it takes to be good, so we have to be guilty.”
Wait, what? Now, tell me which person has just described the essence of the New Testament? |