(Note: Given the recent rash of mass shootings, I was reminded of this article I wrote several years ago on the subject. Specifically my analysis considers the spiritual origins and causes of such violence. The context of the article is the Columbine school shootings, but I think it's still relevant to what's happening today. Also, this was originally written for a Christian magazine and audience, so you'll notice such a worldview predominates throughout. Not the only way to approach the issue, of course, but perhaps you'll find it helpful.)

VENGEANCE IS MINE:
Columbine, Cain and the rising culture of violence in our schools

Imagine how our modern culture might assess history’s first murder.

Brother Cain kills brother Abel.  We ask, what could have led him to do such a thing?  Was he neglected, perhaps even abused by his parents, Adam and Eve?  Were rocks and sharp objects too accessible?  Perhaps it was the resentment of being forced to eat food by the sweat of his brow among the thorns and thistles of his father’s curse before God?  A smug brother?  An overbearing mother?  Most importantly, our society might ask, what conditions could have been changed to prevent this first of human tragedies?

Perhaps none.  In fact, according to Scripture, although Cain and Abel were born after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, there is every reason to believe that the residual benefits of living in ..Paradise.. still had a strong hold on their quality of life.  In other words, their character, their health, if not the conditions of their environment, still had many generations to go before real corruption would have its hand.

So, it’s doubtful that Cain had it so bad as to justify his “temporary insanity,”  as so many in our culture might press if he were on trial for his crimes today.  In truth, he had things almost perfect.  So, why did Cain kill his younger brother? 

Vengeance. 

Cain wanted justice for his loss of favor before God, so he adopted for himself God’s exclusive prerogative to exact either condemnation or mercy in killing Abel.  He was simply obeying the enticement first whispered by ....Eden....’s deceptive serpent:  “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  Deciding that the ultimate sense of good and evil was his to measure, Cain carried out his crime.

The Modern Cain

The foundations of sin laid in ....Eden.... are no different, of course, from the fundamental cause of sin today.  And, just as Cain would play judge, jury and executioner upon his innocent brother, our culture is seeing its youth strike out against their own “brothers”  and “sisters” in much the same way. 

Only now, over the last few years especially, it’s happening in our schools.  And our children’s secular caretakers are scrambling to discover why and, more importantly, what secular conditions they can change in hopes of preventing this “new” phenomena from ever happening again.

But, despite their desires, it is happening over and over, and our schools have become places of fear as much as they are places of learning. In the last five years alone, the country has seen more than 15 separate school shooting incidents, and while statistics show that homicide in the general population has decreased, the massacre of groups, especially on school campuses, has risen dramatically.

Do access to guns, exposure to violent movies, videos, music, and persecution at the hand of bullies serve as a cause for this seemingly novel trend of youth violence?  Certainly.  But, the fact that these exact cultural conditions may be unique to past generations does not naturally dictate that by removing them, we necessarily remove this new brand of violence they are blamed for. 

These cultural influences that have enticed our children to kill their peers are part of the problem to be sure, but they are merely symptoms of  the much deeper, age-old sickness of Cain.

Judgment Day

Just two years ago this April, this sickness revealed itself most notoriously in the hearts and actions of Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.  In a 46-minute killing spree in Littleton, Colorado that they would call their “own little judgment day,” these two boys committed the coldest, most calculated and bloody school massacre the nation has ever seen. 

While there have been numerous school shootings before and after Columbine (most recently in two communities near ....San Diego.., ..California....), none have matched it for its vile ferocity, or for its spiritual implications about a culture that produces children where God has become increasingly irrelevant. 

While the other shootings certainly contributed a part to understanding these implications, Columbine’s complex and chilling story offers us a more comprehensive whole.  In other words, to understand the motives for other school shootings past and future, we could do well to begin with the lessons of Littleton.

In its aftermath, as with every school shooting before, investigators and members of the media again went on their typical search for answers, for how these “normal” kids from such an affluent white suburb could do such a thing.

One such member of the media was Wendy Murray Zoba, a writer for Christianity Today.  Mrs. Zoba went searching too, but, unlike many of her contemporaries who missed the point on Columbine entirely, Zoba’s investigation of the these shootings produced some more than notable conclusions on what the story of Columbine should awaken us to culturally, morally and spiritually.

In her superbly insightful book, Day of Reckoning:  Columbine and the Search for ..America..’s Soul*, Zoba approaches the story of the ....Littleton.... shootings on many levels and from numerous perspectives.  But, in particular, she shows the heart of two violent young men who reflected their culture and followed the way of Cain, borrowing the prerogatives of God and his right to pass judgment on mankind.

Pursuing the recurring questions about what motivated these killers, she and others found the following philosophy on Eric Harris’ personal web site:

My belief is that if I say something, it goes, I am the law, if you don’t like it, you die.  If I don’t like you or I don’t like what you want me to do, you die. . . Dead people can’t do many things, like argue, whine, b—, complain, narc, rat out, criticize, or even . . . talk. . . God I can’t wait till I can kill you people.  I’ll just go to some downtown area in some big-a—city and blow up and shoot everything I can.  Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.

They entered the school library the day of April 20^th, 1999 (reportedly chosen because it fell on Adolph Hitler’s birthday), Harris in his t-shirt with the words “Natural Selection” and Klebold’s t-shirt reading “WRATH” in tall, red, block letters. It was there that they would commit by far the worst bloodshed, killing 10, seriously injuring dozens.

Zoba recounts the words of one witness in the library who survived to tell what he’d seen:  “‘There were a few times girls would ask [them], “What are you doing?  Why are you doing this?”  They answered, “We’ve always wanted to do this.  This is payback.  We’ve dreamed of doing this for four years.  This is what you deserve.”’”

Zoba later documents that these boys considered themselves “evolved”—beyond humanity, beyond good and evil itself—which  might explain the troubling ease with which they carried out their deeds.  Unlike many school shooters who fired their guns out of visible pain and desperation, these young men killed with a determined calm and satisfied glee.

The Fear of God

“There was a corner of their hearts that whispered to Harris and Klebold:  You are your own masters; you don’t have to serve anybody but yourselves,” writes Zoba.  “They were convinced, as Dylan Klebold noted on one of [his home] videos, ‘We’re gonna have followers because we’re so . . . god-like.’” 

The violent fantasy life these two boys entered into wasn’t just about allusions to video games like Doom, or simply emulating Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Ironically, although they are documented as loathing all things Christian, they often imbued their quest for revenge with numerous spiritual themes about the wrath of God, assuming it was theirs to dispense.  Zoba writes:

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold . . . brought “God” into this event at almost every turn.  In the planning stages Harris documented the rampage in the blue spiral notebook he called ‘the book of God.’ . . . Harris said, ‘We have a religious war.’  [Their home] videotapes abound with biblical imagery and ravings against God and Christianity.  Harris said, ‘The apocalypse is coming and it’s starting in eight days.’

Caught up in their delusions of deity, and devoid of any healthy reverence for His name, it was only natural that they’d come to resent the One, True God, and especially, the obedient servants God favored and adored.  Just like Cain:

The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.  Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry?  Why is your face downcast?  If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?  But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” . . . [then] Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him (Genesis 4:4b-7,9b NIV).

The Columbine shooters were further unique from most other school shooters in that they showed a premeditated pattern of striking out specifically against well-known Christians at their school, arrogantly mocking their belief in God before murdering them at point-blank range.

One of these Christian Martyrs was a girl named Rachel Scott.  Recounts Zoba:  “‘They came back up to where Rachel was crying,’ said [Rachel’s sister,] Dana Scott.  And lifting her head by her ponytail, ‘one of them confronted her with the question, “Do you believe in God?” She said, “Yes” and he took a gun to her temple and killed her.’”

While the veracity of some of the accounts were questioned, particularly the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, Zoba writes that most witnesses confirmed that at least three of Harris and Klebold’s victims were well-known Christians, all uniquely and deliberately being shot in the head.

According to accounts collected by investigators, Harris and Klebold, at least implicitly, felt slighted by God for the way they grew up, for how they were treated by their peers, for how life appeared more absurd and meaningless than it did livable. 

In truth, they were suicidal, and eventually took their own lives at the end of their rampage, but they were determined not to leave this world without taking with them as many of those they hated as possible. Justice would be served and while they would probably be remembered in infamy, it was their destiny, they believed, to nevertheless long be remembered.  Writes Zoba:

Feeling victimized and exacting revenge arises from the sense of being empowered to act upon one’s own version of truth as the master of one’s destiny.  It gets messy, however, when one person, in mastering his personal destiny, cuts short the destiny of someone else.

The Death of Vengeance

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed a vile act of murder and rage that will likely haunt schoolyards and classrooms for years to come.  Yet, however notorious their actions might seem to our tabloid culture, what they did has been done from the beginning of man. 

Man cries out in pain for the injustices of this world, and often seeks his own murderous justice in return.  But, just as history’s first son exacted the price of his own pain on his brother, God’s only-begotten son paid the ultimate price of pain for us all through His death on the cross.  God’s righteous wrath on mankind was rendered on the only man who deserved none, rendering vengeance’s ultimate demise.

“There is so much that is wrong in this world, so much that is unjust and unavenged,” Zoba writes.  “These unanswered injustices, and the judgment due them, come together on the cross.” 

She later writes:
 

The cross was necessitated before the first shot was fired, in fact before the first murder in human history registered.  The cross was necessitated because of the part of the human heart, theirs and ours, that inclines to go the wrong way, to become like God.  The impulse is the same, only in lesser degrees, in us all when we convince ourselves that we don’t have to serve anyone or answer to anybody as we live our own God-likeness and assume his prerogatives.

Life on this earth is so fleeting, and often so painful, so evil, that in the smallest ways to the most destructive, we all tend to believe the Edenic lie that in “knowing good and evil,” we can somehow hold fast against our own mortality and corruption, and “not surely die.”  But, we all will die someday short of Christ’s return, whether in the quiet sleep of old age or, God forbid, as the victims of our violent culture.  No one is immune—not even our children.

But, in the face of evil, we can turn to the One who is good, whose Lordship over our lives can supercede our urgings to try to master the chaos that surrounds us, and whose resurrection from the dead has conquered death itself, giving us hope for a life eternal—free of pain, and full of everlasting justice.

Theologian, N.T. Wright:  “To pray ‘deliver us from evil’ or ‘from the evil one’ is to inhale the victory of the cross, and thereby to hold the line for another moment, another hour, another day, against the forces of destruction within ourselves and the world.”*

So, by the power of the cross, we hold the line.
 

*  All the following excerpts from Mrs. Zoba’s book are used by permission of Baker Books Publishing. 

* From The Lord & His Prayer.  Used by permission of Eerdman’s Publishing.

I hate to admit this, but there's a side of me that sometimes enjoys the idea of oncoming disaster.

Maybe I'm too detached and numbed by the virtual world of movies and television, where a 10.5 earthquake sends California into the ocean or an ice age suddenly covers all of North America.

It's not that I welcome the human suffering that disasters bring. The death, distress and turmoil that have resulted in such events as 9/11, Katrina, or most recently, Gustav, are in no way to be celebrated or made light of.

So, perhaps my fascination with disaster is just immature fancy and should be subdued. But, one thing that excites me about any larger than normal upheaval is it feels revolutionary—it often serves as a type of wakeup call for humanity to get its priorities back in order.

That's one of my thoughts as I observe the onset of potential disaster in our country's economy. I see people writhing in pain and gnashing their teeth at the gas pump and on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange. Some of their anxiety is genuine, in my view. Some of it isn't.

Where is our fear really based? What if we took our fears to their extremes? What if we did lose our whole 401k? What if we lost our house to foreclosure? What if all the gas stations closed and we couldn't drive to work anymore? What if we had to file for bankruptcy? What if all the banks failed?

Would there be suffering? Sure. And, some of that suffering would in no way be welcome—no money for healthcare, babies without necessary food, sickness, perhaps death. But, I wonder if for most people, the fear and the suffering wouldn't necessarily be as bad as we want to make it out to be.

I think the nightmare many fear is sourced in some corrupt mutation of what was once a good dream. The American Dream. The American Dream grew out of the foundation that anyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All Americans should be afforded the opportunity to make a life for themselves, to pursue that which brings contentment and, dare I say, meaning and purpose.

But, what is it that truly brings life and happiness? Is it the freedom to use our credit card for daily expenses and make only the minimum payment every month? Is it the liberty to pursue the latest fashions, the latest IPhone, the largest high definition TV? Is it the opportunity to build equity in a home only so we can buy an even bigger home? Is it the pursuit of so much material good that both husband and wife must work full-time and rarely see each other or their kids?

Certainly, I could go on and on. And, I don't claim to be above the attractions of materialism. I do consider myself, however, to be a "recovering addict". Over the last 4 years or so, I have moved from holding a nice corporate job that I felt was devoid of meaning, to pursuing a life in service to others. My wife and I now work part-time, took the equity in our previous home and bought a more modest house out in the country at half the price, and are seeking to prioritize our lives as best we can.

Our first year in this experiment was one of the happiest in our marriage. We were already seeing a payoff from running away from the flow of a material-obsessed culture. For instance, more than just living from paycheck to paycheck, we often had no money for the mortgage with just a few days before it was due. But, every month, without fail, the money somehow came in. Every month. Right on time. We were truly happy in one sense because money wasn't something to argue about. We didn't have any!

Again, I don't claim everyone would have this experience, but I do wonder what we really need to be happy and to survive. If, as I said above, we live in constant fear of losing everything, is it possible that our definition of "everything" is a little out of whack? As is often said, people who lose their house in a fire instinctively cling to what's really important—each other. The absence of money or material possessions can wake us up to what's important.

The American Dream, in its purest ideal, is worth pursuing. But, left to its own devices, without any deeper foundation, I think the American Dream can lead to the American nightmare such as we're getting a taste of today.

In my view, there's a deeper dream, a truer happiness that's worth pursuing. A "Kingdom" dream, if you will. As fan of Jesus and what he did when he walked our soil so long ago, I see a man who lived a dream. He was King who had a Kingdom dream. But, it wasn't a dream of riches, or comfort, of retirement, etc..

He was, in the most practical sense, a homeless man. He had no large home, nor did he have a large mortgage. He traveled from place to place in service to others. He had little to no money. What he did have, he shared with his community and those he traveled with.

He had no technology, no internet, no television, no MP3 player to distract him from the real world. He had no car, so he didn't need to fill his gas tank. He walked everywhere. His pace was slower. He could truly notice and embrace the world around him. Sure, he paid his taxes to Caesar, but I don't think he was overly-obsessed with how his taxes were spent.  He made his most important investment in the Kingdom of God.

Today, we debate whether a bunch of rich, greedy corporate hounds should be bailed-out by our government (and our tax dollars) with the hope that our economy won't go under. I go back and forth on this issue and will let better minds debate it among themselves.

But, what gives me the most peace is that this King living his Kingdom dream offered me—a rich, greedy, materialism-obsessed human—a bail-out that goes much deeper than any temporary band-aid for our economy. He lost everything, so I could have Him, who truly is everything.

And, he didn't just give me the opportunity to pursue some future happiness in Heaven. He offered me life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a Kingdom that is present today, "at hand" in the here and now. He offered a kingdom that exists in the eyes of the poor in spirit, in the humble of heart, in the peacemaker, in the ones who love God and others more than themselves.

That's a dream worth "waking up" to. That is, as long as we choose to wake up from the nightmare. As scary as the nightmare can be, upon waking, it soon seems brief, fleeting, and is soon forgotten.

A beautiful woman died the other day.  And, for my own life, I have no reason at all to complain.

Jacqui was to turn 28 in a month or so.  She was a gorgeous, petite girl with striking eyes and auburn hair.  She was filled with love and with an amazing energy for life.  She was married just under 2 years to a wonderful man.  But, she died.  Of cancer.

I went to her funeral with that sick feeling in my stomach.  Why this tragedy?  Why would God allow such a wonderful young woman to be taken so soon?  The scale of this injustice seemed almost too high to fathom.  It was so absurd, so cruel, that amidst the anger, all I could do was laugh. 

So, I prepared myself for my internal role at this service.  To remember her, yes, to mourn her, but what I perhaps most anticipated was to join in with all the others in an angry cry to God.  "How could you do this?!!"  I imagined perhaps we'd all be shaking our fists at heaven and condemning God for his rank stupidity and carelessness.

But what awaited me there was something altogether different.  What I found wasn't some paltry jury full of vindictive,  bitter God-haters, but a group of family and friends who had come to celebrate a miracle.  Through personal stories and the pastor's eulogy, I was reminded that Jacqui's life, although way too short, was one of victory.  And that nothing so simple as death could stifle that.

By her own public admission, Jacqui had been delivered from a past of hopelessness, where in a sense, though still living and breathing, she was already dead to anything that mattered.   She had a baby daughter while still in her teens.  Her life was devoted to the numb pleasure of drugs and recklessness, falling in and out of selfish, superficial relationships.  Her behavior became so bad, that the powers-that-be removed her daughter, and so the one good thing she had produced in life was also taken from her.

But, then, in her early 20s, she started attending church and the miracle, although slowly, began to happen.  Within a few years, she began to see that there was more to life than her own self-destructive desires, that God had a plan for her to rise out of the pit of her own making, and that no matter who she had been, God wanted to breathe into her a new life and a fresh start.  She became free of the drugs, met and married a man who didn't run when things got tough, and after everything, achieved a goal she once may not have thought possible--she was given her daughter back. 

Sitting at her funeral, I was reminded that amidst her past failures and future triumphs, Jacqui embodied two characteristics that I have found to be crucial to knowing true happiness--humility and gratitude.  Jacqui was humble.  After committing herself to God and seeing the changes he was working in her life, she knew that any value or worth that she had came solely from him.  She once offered to help out around the church, but felt so unworthy at the time that she asked if she could serve in a capacity where she would "remain unseen."  The process of change was long and tedious, but when she made a particular commitment to alter her behavior, she stuck to it.  At one point, feeling she was perhaps falling back into the overwhelming desire to do drugs again, she independently entered rehab to make sure the change would stick.  Her humility strengthened her resolve to rise above who she had once been.

And, Jacqui was grateful.  She saw that she'd been given a precious gift, and that, no matter what future lay before her, she would never take it for granted.  So, when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and was progressively given news that her body was failing her, her sense of humility and gratitude never left her.  In the latter stages of her sickness when all physical hope was lost, she wrote a friend a letter in which she referenced a passage of Scripture that had encouraged her deeply: 

We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.  We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair;  persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed...All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.  Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.*

Freed from her own self-indulgence, Jacqui was able to see that 1) we should be humbled by the fact that none of us are guaranteed our next breath, and that, 2) we should be grateful for the life we have been given.  And because of her commitment to God and his Son, Jacqui knew that the life she'd been given would go on forever.  And that her miraculous transformation of character, her new husband, the return of her daughter, were just a small taste of what that new life would be like.  Jacqui was humble.  She was grateful.

So, I look to my own life and see that it's not about what's happening around me, or even what's happening inside me, i.e., my health, etc., but how I choose to respond to it all.  Believe me, I can often find myself griping about the smallest offense, or the silliest disappointment, but for my own life, I just have no reason to complain. 

You see, I often don't have control over what will happen to me when I step out of bed each day, but I do have control over my perspective.  When I'm feeling down about my life, about the people who've hurt me, about how I'm not getting my just due, or even about how God could allow people like Jacqui to suffer and die, there are specific traits that are missing from my psyche.  I'm not truly humble.  And, I'm not grateful.  When I really get honest with myself, I have far more reasons to be humble and grateful than I have reasons to complain.

But, the hurts and disappointments of life keep coming at us, don't they?  So, amidst my own self-indulgence, this true perspective of life must be renewed each day.  My perspective must ultimately be about who I am before God in the context of eternity, more than who I am in this relatively short visit to planet Earth. 

If you find yourself in the pit of depression, despair or bitterness, I know that this might seem like a tall order.  But it is possible.  Sometimes, it needs to just begin with a single area of focus, and we can grow from there.  So, I'll start with Jacqui.  I am humbled by her amazing life and am most grateful to have known her.  And now, not surprisingly, my life is a whole lot brighter for having entertained that thought.

* 2 Corinthians 4:7-9,15-18

Have you ever heard of Viktor Frankl?  He was an author and psychotherapist who died about 9 years ago at the age of 92.  Among his other accomplishments, he wrote a great book called Man's Search For Meaning.  This book begins by showing the way Dr. Frankl would start out his therapy sessions with a new patient.  Many of these patients would come to him at the end of their rope, wallowing in despair, and Frankl would start out by asking a simple question:  "Tell me, why don't you just commit suicide?"  Seems like a pretty counterproductive way to begin therapy, wouldn't you say?  But, faced with such a stark question, these people, no matter how far gone in their hopelessness, were forced to come up with a credible answer.  Why were they still alive?  What sense of meaning made life worth living?

Frankl felt entitled to ask such a question because he himself had discovered the answer.  His answer came in the concentration camps of Nazi occupied Europe.  A Jewish Austrian, he was thrown into the camps for most of the war and, of course, barely survived (most around him didn't).  He was stripped of every layer of humanity left him, and survived on what is most basic to life--at least, what he discovered was most basic. 

You see, he was sent to the camps with his beloved wife, but they were immediately separated, and he never saw her again.  But, there was one thing that kept him going while in the camps--he could never actually be sure what happened to her.  And his faith in that little uncertainty gave him hope.  At the depth of his despair, he knew that he had to stay alive and live on.  Why?  Because, no matter how faint the odds, if it was even possible that there was someone out there who loved him and who he loved in return, he had a reason to live.  Just this prospect alone gave his life meaning.

The idea that he learned and passed onto his patients was that Life is Relationship.  If life has any merit, any meaning, it's that we have the opportunity to love and be loved.  Sometimes we need to be asked a startling question or endure a crisis to realize this, but this understanding exists within all of us.  As goes the cliche, 'no one on their deathbed ever wished they spent more time at the office.'  But, it's not a guarantee, it's an opportunity, and it becomes something like a gift.  For Frankl, it was his wife.  For us, it could be a friend, a father, our spouse, our children.  The sum of our worth or accomplishment in life is measured, not by how much money we have, how beautiful we are, how famous we are, but by the richness in our personal relationships. 

But even in these relationships, we're often faced with the sickly reality that we're all pretty messed up as human beings.  We often hurt and are hurt by the ones we're closest to, often as much as we help, and being human, we're also subject to another relational hurt--the pain of sickness and death--the pain of seeing a loved one suffer or even die.  So, as much significance as we can get from our human relationships, they too can often fail us, and we're left hungering for something more.

To me, that's why God is the ultimate necessity for life and meaning.  But, perhaps you're one who asks the question, 'how can I have a relationship with someone I haven't even seen?  How can that give me meaning?'  Well, it's a bit like Dr. Frankl.  He had faith in even the remote possibility of his wife's existence, and that gave him hope.  And, if we really search inside, even when we're feeling the most hopeless or cynical about life, we'll know that there is a God out there who loves us.  Think about it.  If in the deepest parts of our soul we realize that the only thing that gives life meaning, the only thing that makes life worth living, is our personal relationships, then doesn't it make sense that the source of that life would also be personal, and relational?

In the face of our despair, we can have faith in this "little uncertainty," that there is someone out there who won't ever leave me, who won't let me down, who deeply loves every stitch of my existence.  Even when all my human relationships seem to be falling away, I know there is one out there who can be the father, the sister, mother, brother, the spouse or loved one I may have never had.  And, on top of that, there's a bonus.  As I get to know this loving God, I can also see my human relationships more infused with the integrity and love I always wanted from them.

Do you know when God first noticed something was wrong with the world he'd created?  It wasn't Eve and the apple.  It was Adam, standing by himself in the garden.  In the face of his glorious creation, God saw that something was still incomplete:  He said, "It is not good that man should be alone."  And, still today, we all feel this in our deepest heart.  It is not good for us to be alone.  We are not complete as human beings until we are in relationship.  With others.  With our Creator.  And he is out there, loving us right now, and waiting to be loved by us.  In my highs and in my lows, that's what keeps me going, and makes life worth living.

I love movies.  For good or ill, they have had a major impact on my life.  I'm a fan of most genres—comedy, romance, drama, action. 

As a fairly analytical human, I was thinking a while back on what makes a great movie…great.  Certainly there are many ingredients—good writing, talented actors, a visionary director, striking cinematography, etc.  But, I asked myself—are there more intangible qualities in the greatest movies that go even deeper, that elevate a movie to a higher level, leaving us somehow changed?  

Two qualities came to the surface—Character and Wonder.  The most impacting movies (whether the impact is pure entertainment or something deeper) tend to excel in both of these areas. 

Indiana Jones in Raiders Of The Lost Ark comes to mind.  Indy's character was larger than life.  He was a brilliant archeologist, handy with a whip, a hard-luck romantic, relentless to a fault.  And also, none of the characters around him, no matter how minor, were wasted.  Even if they just helped to paint the backdrop of a smelly bar in Tibet or a marketplace in Cairo, they all had an energy and color.  And the world Indy encountered was also full of wonder—menacing Nazis, exotic locations, mystic and holy dangers.  The more recent epic, Lord Of The Rings, is of course another classic example of this—a cast of unforgettable characters against a vast and complex world of wonder.

In some movies, it's not so much about the character amidst his or her world, but rather the wonder we find in the character himself.  In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson's character is a wonder to behold, a man whose neurotic peccadilloes alienate him from the one thing he wants most—someone to love.  And, Helen Hunt, the eventual object of his love is more of a wondrous character in the simplest sense, that even in her own loneliness, as Jack tells her, "you say what you mean, and you almost always mean something that's all about being straight and good."  We see in this film how the character of the human spirit is a wonder in itself—we're complex, we're simple, we're full of mysterious emotion, and we're all crying out for generally the same things.

In one of my favorite movies, To Kill A Mockingbird we see the innocent character in the little girl, Scout, and the wonder of childhood as she explores and seeks to understand the joys and the evils of her small town in Alabama.  Her father Atticus is a towering wonder of a character—resolute, wise, compassionate.  Boo Radley (my cat is named after him) represents all that is fearful in childhood—he is unknown, his reputation is built far more on shadow and suggestion than anything real.  And yet, he turns out, as a grown man, to have the heart and purity of a child.  But we find that Boo also has the strength, like Atticus, to protect the weak and stand up for what is right.  I could go on and on about the character and wonder to be found in virtually every frame of this film.

Some of you will remind me that Mockingbird is actually based on Harper Lee's brilliant novel, and that these qualities are just as relevant to great literature as they are to movies.  And, I'd agree.  I actually began this blog with the medium of film as more people tend to watch movies than read books nowadays.  But, character and wonder have long been, I think, the supreme ingredient in great literature as well. 

And, that leads me (my regular readers knew I'd go here eventually), to what I believe is the greatest storytelling of all time, the ancient story of the Old and New Testaments.  The Bible is a fascinating book in that while its ultimate purpose is relational, i.e., it's meant to draw us into a closer encounter with our Creator, the medium God often uses toward this end is fantastic storytelling.  And, again, character and wonder are to be found everywhere in its pages. 

Moses, for instance, is quite a character, to say the least.  He's this bag of massive neuroses—he's terribly insecure about his ability to accomplish anything for God, and is seen in a fairly comedic scene arguing with the Almighty ad nauseum about this fact.  He asks, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?"1 

Like so many of us, Moses knew that his character simply wasn't up to the task.  But, God doesn't then give him a pep talk to build his self-esteem.  What he does is ask Moses to focus on something else—the character and wonder of his Creator.  God tells him, "I will be with you… I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform among them."2 

God wanted Moses to live in a state of wonder as he trusted in the character of his Maker.  And, in the cinematic fashion that we've marveled at in such movies as The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt, God then imbued insecure, little Moses with the character of someone who could stand up to one of the most powerful men on Earth.  Moses delivered over a million people from the hopeless bondage of slavery by demonstrating the wonderful miracles of God.  He became the hero of God's amazing story.

We often go to movies and read books merely to escape from the hopeless drudgery of our daily life.  We would love to imagine that we could live the life of that hero we find on the silver screen or in that epic novel, where life is full of meaning and color, where we're clear about the quest at hand, and determined to see it to the end.   But, then we leave the theater, or close the book, and return to what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation". 

But, do you realize that God, the author of the greatest story ever told, has included you as a character in His wonderful quest?   An ancient poet said that from your innermost parts, you "are fearfully and wonderfully made,"3 that you are a part of God's wonderful, creative works.  And that, for you to play the character that God has given you to play, you must simply live your life in wonder about Him and the character of His Son, this "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace"4—this Jesus.

God has created us for this quest.  You, the actor in God's story…Are you ready to play the part?

1 Exodus 3:11

2 Exodus 3:12, 20

3 Psalm 139:13-14

4 Isaiah 9:6

Jean Valjean was "a very dangerous man." 

That was the description written about him on the yellow passport he carried.  After nineteen years of horrible imprisonment for the small crime of stealing a loaf of bread, he was set free.  But, although now outside the prison walls, he knew he was still a prisoner, and the paper he carried proved that to all he encountered. 

Upon his arrival at a certain French village, he stopped at an inn and was rejected--the innkeeper was alerted that he was an ex-convict.  He left the inn, and children followed, throwing stones at him.  Even the local jailer rejected him, saying he'd need to be arrested again to find any lodging there.  Finally, to his astonishment, he was received by the local Bishop, the Monseigneur Bienvenu.  The Bishop gave him hot food on silver plates and a warm place to sleep. 

But, even after this kindness Valjean was no less hardened.  His long imprisonment had sealed his hatred for this society, this world, and he trusted no one.  So, in the middle of the night, he left, after stealing the Bishop's precious silver plates.

In the morning, the Bishop answered a knock at his door to find Valjean, bound in chains, in the custody of the local police who had caught him with the stolen silver.  Breaking his parole, he would certainly be taken back to prison.  This time, for life.

"Ah, there you are!" said the Bishop, looking toward Jean Valjean.  "I am glad to see you.  But I gave you the candlesticks also, which are silver like the rest, and would bring two hundred francs.  Why did you not take them along with your plates?"

Jean Valjean opened his eyes and looked at the Bishop with an expression which no human tongue could describe.  As the police released him and left, he felt like a man who is just about to faint. 

The Bishop approached him, and said, in a low voice, "Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man."  Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of this promise stood confounded.  The Bishop had laid much stress upon these words as he uttered them.  He continued solemnly:

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good.  It is your soul that I am buying for you.  I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!" *

***************

The story of Jean Valjean is about human bondage and freedom, which those of us in the United States are reminded of as we celebrate our Independence Day.  But, this story goes beyond the important ideas of the civil freedoms we enjoy in our Constitution.  We are right to celebrate our civil freedoms.  We are indeed privileged to live in a society where we are generally free from the tyranny of Kim Jong-il's North Korea, Stalin's U.S.S.R., or Hitler's Germany.  

We are free to worship, we have freedom to speak our minds, to live where we like, etc.  But, there are other tyrannies that can imprison us, aren't there?--prejudice, hatred, selfishness, guilt, depression, recklessness, etc.  To the eyes of others, we may seem to be perfectly free human beings, but still, like Valjean, we may walk in hopeless bondage.

But, if we are free to do what we like, why do we still walk in chains?  Well, sometimes these chains are placed on us by others.  A young child might be unmercifully teased in the school yard, a woman may spend years verbally and physically abused by her husband, an accomplished man may be passed over time and time again for a promotion because of the color of his skin.  Our world can be most cruel, and often, due to circumstances beyond our control, we find ourselves trapped in prisons from which we cannot escape. 

Sometimes our bondage is of our own making.  Jean Valjean certainly understood that his initial imprisonment was of his own doing.  And, originally, his sentence was only 5 years.  It was only after multiple escape attempts that it was lengthened to 19 years.  In these cases we understand that freedom isn't just about what we choose to do, it is also about what consequences result from our actions.  A man may be free to drink as much alcohol as he desires, but if his drinking leads to addiction, divorce, a lost and lonely life and perhaps even death, is he really free in his freedom? 

We are only free when our choices lead to a freedom that transcends human choice.  I think this goes back to the premise I mentioned in a previous blog, that Life is Relationship.  If life is relationship, then the ultimate freedom we could ever hope for is to be found when our choices move beyond our right to our own autonomy, to a life bound by the mandates of true relationship.  To a life of freedom that comes from divine grace.

Jean Valjean was a hard man, rejected and forgotten by most of society.  This Bishop not only welcomed him with food and rest, but purchased his soul for God with the gift of reprieve from a return to prison, and with the wealth of silver to start his life anew.  With this kindness, Valjean was now compelled to live his life for others, not out of harsh condemnation, but because of a freedom received that he in no way deserved.

As a follower of Jesus Christ, I find myself compelled to live according to this same freedom.  It is said that "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death." **

Did you know that, in a nutshell, freedom was the main thrust of Jesus' mission here on Earth?  He came to "proclaim freedom for the prisoners...to release the oppressed."  He provided a release for people from the bondage of their own circumstances, self-inflicted or otherwise--he restored relationships, he fed the hungry, he healed the sick.  He taught people how to live a life beyond their own selfish choices so they could enjoy life to the full. 

This is the freedom God wants for us all.  Yes, he wants us to be free from all that binds us.  But, he ultimately wants us to be free for one another.  So, like the moment you commit yourself to your spouse in marriage, forsaking all others, only to find the freedom that comes from love and family, God wants us to bind ourselves up in his love, and commit our lives to following him. 

Some have said that none of us are truly free unless we have been liberated.  The Bishop had been liberated by Christ's example and therefore liberated Valjean, and Valjean liberated many in return.  Valjean left the Bishop that morning and devoted his life to seeking all that was good and to helping his fellow man.  He was still pursued by those who would condemn and imprison him, but he lived for the sake of the poor and the oppressed, and was forever free of his slavery to hopelessness and hatred by that one small act of grace.  Freely he received.  Freely he gave.

Have you been liberated by grace?  What will you choose to do with it?

Is this not the fast which I choose, to loosen the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free and break every yoke?  Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into the house; When you see the naked, to cover him; And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?...If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness--then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom will become like midday.  And the LORD will continually guide you, and satisfy your desire in scorched places, and give strength to your bones; You will be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. ***

On this Independence Day, I am proud to be an American.  But, most of all, I am humbled to be free to live for God...and for you.

*     This combination of paraphrase and direct quotation is taken from the novel, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo.

**   Romans 8:1-2

*** Isaiah 58:6-7,9b,10b-11