....one breath away!
The phone rang:
"Yes?"
"This is M, want to join us for some stewed wild rabbit and wine?"
"I thought hunting season was in the winter!"
"It is, but this is a long story. I will explain when you get here. How about it, will you join us? John is coming too."
"We just ate supper, but I will certainly stop by, if only to keep you company!"
The setting was majestic. It was a cool summer night on the Island of Karpathos. We were at a country home on the eastern mountainside getaway, known as Katothio. This was an area where families with properties stayed in the summer and tended to their fruit trees, wheat fields and small livestock during the long hot summers of years past. Today, Katothio is a great place to spend the summer quietly with absolute privacy. M is probably my best friend on the Island. He is 75 years old and has been blessed with good health. He looks great for his years and joins me on most of my mountain trail excursions every summer. M's place at Katothio is a traditional Greek country home built with stones and mud. A cement coat was used to smooth the walls inside and out, which was then painted with the traditional white. It was a three room home as I recall, with a large family bedroom, a kitchen and a small bathroom. The patio was vast, the floor of which was finished with large flat stones, irregular in shape and size, cemented together. The interface between each stone was painted with a white stripe just like you see on postcards of the Greek Islands.
The smell of food was everywhere. You have to understand, the rabbit was just an excuse. M's wife, was busy cooking all sorts of other things as well. Turns out, what was to be a get together of three or four, was in fact an informal sit down dinner for ten people. In addition to me and John, there was M and his wife, his nephew with his wife and son, and three more guests including a retired teacher and his wife. Several tables were lined up in the center of the patio in such a way, so that it was possible to sit together and enjoy each other's company and conversation. I wasn't hungry, but I did nibble on the fresh salad, the homemade sausage, the fresh cooked greens and of course on the rabbit.
Turns out, that in the late afternoon of the day before, M was on his way to the beach to start his mountain climb, when he saw this very large bird, struggling to fly away with something big. All this was happening in the middle of the dirt road, maybe twenty yards from his car, right in front of him. After appraising the situation quickly, he realized that a hawk had killed a massive hare, which was so large, that the bird could not fly away with it. Having seen the oncoming car, the bird sank its talons into its prize, but could not ...get off of the ground with the bunny! Ever the opportunist, M jumped out of the car, ran toward the hawk which abandoning its prey, flew away. Hence, the fresh kill made for a rare summer delicacy, and a topic for some laughs on that memorable evening.
The wine was special. Homemade with Karpathian sun sweetened grapes, probably from two to three years before. After a couple of drinks, the discussion turned from the food, to the weather, to the tourists, to our children and to the present. Suddenly, the following statement was made:
"This is what life is all about. Good food, good wine, and great company in a beautiful setting. We must enjoy this while we are still alive because when we die, there is ...nothing!"
I was stunned! I couldn't believe what I had just heard. I started to respond by saying, "...but, the Holy Scriptures tell us that we have Paradise to look forward to if we live ..." I wanted to say, "a Christian life", but I was interrupted:
"The Holy Scriptures, the Holy Scriptures..."
I immediately understood that this was not a good time to discuss the Bible. Any comments from me would not have been welcome on this topic. I was left to ponder, reflect and try to understand how these good men, who live good clean lives, who go to church on Sunday can be so oblivious to the fact that paradise does await us and could be just ....one breath away!
21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
Matt 7:21 (NRSV)
posted by aperitis | 12:22
2 Comments:
I would suggest that M's agnosticism is clear evidence of the reason for God's Creation. His attitude, as you decribe, was saturated with pride; not boastful, arrogant pride, for he seemed to be a humble man, but the pride of skepticism, the pride of his reluctance to believe without placing his fingers into the holes in His hands and his hands into His side.
I touched upon this in a post of mine:
Between the moment that we are conceived and the moment we die, something is supposed to happen, and that something is not simply the biological imitation of plant life – growth, consumption, excretion, procreation and decline. If the Creator has a purpose, then creation by definition facilitates that purpose…and that purpose is inheritance. Just as children do not inherit the wealth of their parents until they mature, so too mankind cannot inherit the wealth of their spiritual parent until we mature. Mature is defined as "The state or quality of being fully grown or developed." Spiritually, man is wholly immature without the test of uncertainty to demand contemplation about purpose and the subsequent moral choices that matter....
But the greatest test of uncertainty is not simply spiritual growth, for such an effort by itself is doomed to be inadequate. The greatest test is first and foremost to understand, internalize and embrace the divine purpose, which implies mastery of the greatest impediment to our inheritance: "I." Just as military discipline breaks down an immature, self-centered recruit and then rebuilds that soldier into a part of a powerful team, so too the uncertainty of life breaks down the arrogance of man in order to prepare him for the divinity that lies ahead.
M is here on this earth to master unbelief that manifests itself in M's life as a nihilistic belief in nothing beyond the physical. God desires M to be deserving of his inheritence as a child of God. I am greatly saddened that he holds so much earthly wisdom and insufficient spiritual wisdom.
Living in the Light of Judgment Day
In medieval Europe, powerful church leaders taught ordinary people that this life is a temporary pilgrimage, a time of preparing for the eternal state. Everyone understood that they would one day stand before God on judgment day to face his fearful sentence. The greatest painter ever to depict the judgment was Michelangelo. Many believe that his awesome fresco of the last judgment (painted 1536–41 for Pope Paul III) in the Sistine Chapel, along with the even more famous frescoes on the chapel’s ceiling, is the most important art produced during the Renaissance. I have stood before it in silence with its powerful reminder that I, too, will face an eternal Judge one day.
The conviction that one must live every day in preparation for judgment day pervaded everyday life in those days to an extent we cannot imagine. In fact, contemporary people often live by the reverse belief: this life is all there is, so enjoy it to the fullest. It’s hard to think about a contemporary painter creating a great masterpiece about the coming day of judgment and then being taken seriously by the world’s artistic community.
Revelation 20 is another such masterpiece, literary rather than visual, and centuries older than Michelangelo’s great work. Despite the difficulties in interpreting portions of the chapter, the central theme is overwhelming. We have misread the chapter if we come away from it unmoved. I must bow before it in silence also, with its powerful reminder that I too will face an eternal Judge one day.
In 1834 a young Englishman named Edward Mote wrote a poem he titled “The Gracious Experience of a Christian.” One of the stanzas included these words:
I trust his righteous character,
His council, promise, and his power;
His honor and his name’s at stake,
To save me from the burning lake.
After American musician William Bradbury wrote a tune for the words in 1863, it became a dearly loved gospel song under the title, “The Solid Rock.” Mote’s last stanza expresses the heart’s desire of Christians everywhere as they realize the seriousness of judgment day:
When he shall come with trumpet sound,
Oh, may I then in him be found;
Dressed in his righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.
Easley, K. H. (1998). Vol. 12: Revelation. Holman New Testament Commentary; Holman Reference (383–384). Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
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