Saint Augustine Describes God to Himself

What, then, are You, O my God—what, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is Lord but the Lord? Or who is God save our God? Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet possessing all things. You love, and burn not; You are jealous, yet free from care; You repent, and have no sorrow; You are angry, yet serene; You change Your ways, leaving unchanged Your plans; You recover what You find, having yet never lost; You are never in want, while You rejoice in gain; You are never covetous, though requiring usury. That You may owe, more than enough is given to You; yet who has anything that is not Yours? You pay debts while owing nothing; and when You forgive debts, lose nothing. Yet, O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what says any man when He speaks of You? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb.

- Saint Augustine, Confessions, I.IV

"The Shining" and the Death of Sin

I was a wee lad when I became a Stephen King fan; he is almost solely responsible for inciting me to love reading when I was young, and as a teenager I read every one of his novels. Regardless of one's opinions about the subject matter (people have understandable problems), no one can deny his talent as a writer of characters that often seem more real than the flesh-and-blood folks we live with from day to day.

I recently reread The Shining (Stanley Kubrick's film, which is the one everyone knows, can't hold a candle). I was seventeen the first time I read it, and I remember being thrilled by the story; but I'm not seventeen anymore. Now I'm thirty, and about to be a father—the story was wildly different for me this time around. While still thrilling, there was a sort of desperation in the thrill, the feeling that every father is actually not so far from Jack Torrance's horrific screw-up. 

Because in fact, Jack's not a bad guy. That's why the book is so much more compelling than the movie—Jack Nicholson gives you the impression his character is  nuts before he ever gets to the hotel. The novel's Jack Torrance is a regular joe, a thirty-ish recovering alcoholic trying to love his wife and kid and mend his past mistakes. The haunted Overlook Hotel exploits his frailty and pushes him to do its bidding—basically turns him into a walking robot that will accomplish its ends. As little Danny tells his mother when Jack begins his roque mallet rampage, "That's not Daddy doing those things—it's the hotel." 

What was different for me this time around was that I saw myself in Jack, especially in the middle sections of the book, before the hotel actually had a hold of him. He struggles not so much with temptation at that point, but with the idea that he's not going to live up—that no matter how hard he tries or how much he loves his wife and son, he won't be able to help making a mess of it. He doesn't lack resolve, but hope—he has the desire, but doesn't think he has the power to carry it out.

Sound familiar? I felt that same familiarity—that echo of prayers I've prayed in the past—reading Romans. Paul says, "For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing." (Rom. 7.18-19). And like when Danny said "That's not Daddy doing those things—it's the hotel", Paul says, "Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me" (7.20).

Paul calls it a law (7.21)—sin lives in my body, and there's nothing in me that can stop it. I have no power over it myself (7.18); even the good that I do, if I do it on my own steam, is sin (Rom. 8.8, John 15.5, cf. 1 Cor. 10.31). What felt so tragic about The Shining this time around was knowing that if Jack had had the ability to resist the hotel's draw, he would have made a pretty good dad. But he didn't, and neither do we—none of us have the ability to resist sin's pull and weight. We have tasted and seen that the Lord is good (Ps. 34.8); we have found pleasure in His presence (Ps. 16.11). And yet we've found this same law at work in us: the sin we cannot resist.

At least, not on our own. This is where The Shining falls short, and this is where the Gospel comes through. The Gospel tells us we don't have to rely on futile willpower anymore. Now, we rely on Jesus, who has given us much more than heaven. His death gave us the power not only to resist the sin dwelling in us, but to kill it (Rom. 8.13).

     His Word has made us clean (John 15.3).

     He will help those who wait on Him (Hab. 2.3, Is. 40.28-31).

     He is a solid help for us because He was tempted like us (Heb. 2.17-18).

     He has all authority, and He has given it to us (Matt. 28.18).

     His divine power has given us all we need to be godly (2 Pet. 1.3).

     We can do all things through Him, because He strengthens us (Phil. 4.13).

     We are more than conquerors in Him (Rom. 8.37).

    The weight is off our shoulders—any good we manage for Him is His own doing (Gal. 2.20).

     

Christ's cross frees us to live out the grace that has been shown to us. Our case is not lost; our story is no longer a horror story. The condemning power of sin is dead (Rom. 8.1); now we are free and able to kill its effective power. The Shining is a good cautionary tale, but it is incomplete; it's not enough for Jack to come back to his senses long enough to weep forgiveness and die with the ghosts.

In our True Story, Jesus rescues us far more completely. The hero wins; the villain loses; the child gets to grow up with his Daddy, and they really do live happily ever after.

That Was Me, Not Too Long Ago

It's not surprising that if we're rooted in God's Word, we hear His voice everywhere. 

Over the holidays this year I reread Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon". The short story was later expanded into a novel of the same name, made into a movie with Cliff Robertson (which earned him an Academy Award for best actor), and adapted again numerous times on stage and screen. The movie's good, but the short story is brutal and beautiful in a way the movie can't come close to touching. It's short enough to be a one-sitting read (and I read slowly), but even that succinct, it's crushing. 

Keyes tells the story of a mentally handicapped man named Charlie Gordon who undergoes an experimental operation to increase his intelligence artificially. His I.Q. more than triples; over a period of weeks he becomes a bonafide genius, recording the process in a series of progress reports he writes every so often. At the beginning he writes like a five-year-old ("Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on."), and after the operation improves little by little; by the middle of the story he's talking like Stephen Hawking.

There is one particularly difficult moment in the story: Charlie, still getting used to being brilliant, is eating dinner in a restaurant. A dishwasher who is clearly mentally handicapped breaks some plates. The manager yells at him; the restaurant patrons laugh and tease. The boy, not realizing they're making fun of him, laughs along with them. Charlie laughs too—it is funny, after all—but then realizes the irony of the situation; not too long ago, he was the one laughed at, and he was the one laughing along. This realization infuriates him; he stands up, yells at the clientele, and storms out of the restaurant.

Charlie finishes his progress report like this:

     How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence. It infuriated me to think that not too long ago I, like this boy, had foolishly played the clown. 

     And I had almost forgotten.

     I'd hidden the picture of the old Charlie Gordon from myself because now that I was intelligent it was something that had to be pushed out of my mind. But today in looking at that boy, for the first time I saw what I had been. I was just like him!

Not too long ago

Reading this I realized how often I do this—how often we all do. How often do we get frustrated with unbelievers not following God? not believing? stubbornly resisting Him? persisting in sin and thinking they're doing nothing wrong?

Why do we react this way? Because we've forgotten that not too long ago we were in the same situation.

When Paul is teaching Titus how to pastor his church, he says that the congregation should be gentle and courteous to everyone. Why? "For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. " (Titus 3.3) 

He says, "Be courteous to those who are disobedient, and hateful, because we have all been disobedient and hateful. And what changed wasn't us."—

"But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, HE saved US, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy" (3.4-5, emphasis added).

Why are things different for us now? Because God showed us mercy. That's all. The dividing line between us and them is a cobweb a light breeze could tear through. We must always keep our old sin before our eyes (cf. Psalm 51.3, "my sin is ever before me"), because it helps us to remember how desperate our situation was, and that it is only God's strong hand that yanked us out of it and has held us out of harm's way.

So doing, when we consider our frustrating, unbelieving neighbors, we will realize we're no better, and show them the same mercy God showed us.