These Pages acknowledge mystery as a major factor in discussions relating God to mankind. We can sometimes push back borders of mystery recognizing and evaluating some elusive evidences in our search. The advancement of an idea or action ought to engage knowledge, conviction, intelligence, and related differentials in advocating any truth, even facts’ meaning, and the implications of the theme of the context. For example: my father’s first marriage failed. Two years later he married the young lady who became my mother. One day he returned from work when I was about 18 months old, and my twin sisters at 3 months. He had tuberculosis, was afraid, left his wife and babies and went to his mother and sanatoriums. He visited his family once for about four weeks, returned to his mother, and died. During ensuing years my mother talked only a bit of him, and his fun loving bachelor ways. One remark she made, almost in passing, well after I was married: When your father came back for that month before he died, I felt deeply sorry for him, but the relationship of marriage was lost. She felt she had loved and lost. She had survived with three children, with no help – or encouragement. One wonders how she did it. His oversight of his family before and after the disease to death gradually formed within me a loss of something about my father. I determined that if I ever married, I would form yearned for family. That ideal has never left me.
It is well that we understand that there is something down deep inside of us that makes us affirmative or negative. It may be formed by or against our earlier experience. Thomas Paine, who contributed so much to the American move for freedom appears to have been a negativist. His arguments appear to be less for the colonies than to get even with Britain – an attitude of revenge. In his day, Paine was noted as reacting to some beastly insults related to his failure in British service. In his book, Treason of the Heart, David Pryce-Jones relates various leading persons with presupposed attitudes which were interpreted as service to some and hatred for others. The author noted that William Hazlitt was totally supportive of Napoleon out of spite to the Tories of his country. William Anthony Hay wrote: Pryce-Jones . . . . captures the irony that many of those who have praised revolution abroad depended on the established order at home for their fortune and privilege. We call it two-faced. The new environment is used for revenge on the old.
Counselors often see ugly motivations in life. In children it leads to ill conduct. In work, in schools, in almost any social context one can express themselves to be beneficial (and may actually prove so) to one, but take away something from another. It has split institutions, even interrupted developmental plans. In the Bible, it was the modus operandi for Nabal, and became a pattern for King Saul. It likely was in the betrayal of Judas. The old honorable process of dueling was to make heroic the murder of persons, or the degrading of them, if they violated you in some way – sometimes a simple insult. So murder, or wounding, was twisted into a virtue. The dead person was guilty, the living vindicated. God will have none of this.
We need to be honest with ourselves. Examining our motivations will inform us of faithful values. Hungry after a fast, Jesus was invited by a sympathetic enemy to eat, by miracle – in the conversation noted above. Jesus refused, giving integrity to his fast. The enemy didn’t care. His purpose was to tempt, and change the agenda outcomes. Jesus refused. Do I mean to serve others without self-benefit as primacy? In selfish context my actions are seen as good, but they may be evil in fact. I have sometimes asked a student why he or she was in this class. On occasion I have suggested change. The student was present for the wrong reason, and I did not want to contribute to the divided purpose from that of the course, and that of an unworthy self-interest. One student wanted me to help him improve in personal skills of expression and personality. He gave little thought to the rules of evidence, of logic, and preferred conduct and purpose. He wanted to get through life with less effort than ethical means and studied communication might take him – as he conjured life. I preferred that he choose some other teacher. Persons tended to his words because of his cleverness, not for substance. The approach appears commonly in society, in both oral and written language, most easily detected in some forms of graphic advertising. (Seek integrity.) *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020