Are you honest? Are you fair?

Saturday, cigarette #2
On the porch watching the snow, 11:45am

At one time in his life, Pip had the ambition of memorizing lots of Bible verses. (I would accuse him of having a convert complex, but there's this whole thing about motes and beams in people's eyes.) To this end, he started sending out "Verse Of The Day" emails. For reasons clearest to himself, he got on a Jeremiah kick that started with this one: I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me (Jeremiah 32:40).

I've put a lot of leg-work into the questions "Why does God makes us fear him?" and "Why does He conceal things from us?", mostly because I am unsatisfied by the easy answer of, "Well, it's a consequence of the Fall. If we had stayed pure, God would have no reason to keep the truth from us, or make us fear him. He does the former in order to accommodate our imperfect minds which would only pervert the truth if we had it, and he does the latter to keep us in line, you know, so that we 'will never turn away from Him.'"

In C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, Cupid hides his appearance from his wife Psyche even though she clearly can handle the truth when it's given to her, and in Scripture God forbids the Tree of Knowledge even in Eden, pre-Fall. This makes it sound like Truth-with-a-capital-T (i.e. Cupid's identity, and whatever the Christian analogue for Cupid’s identity is) must be subordinate to something else.

Truth is subordinate to something else! It is not The Big Thing that we're searching for! It can be sacrificed for greater, more important goods! (If you ask me, the Something Else that truth is subordinate to is Love/Grace, which is interesting, because it means that secrets and concealment are a part of love, or, at the very least, not contradictory to it. It is also interesting for anyone who says that the Pythagorean Brotherhood, an organization with the motto "Conservatism reborn in brotherhood," is a forum for seeking truth.)

As for fear, I really don't think that it's a convenient short-cut for God to keep us in his thrall. The chapter from Jeremiah that Pip picked makes fear sound like a means to an end, and I don't think it is. I think it's its own end, which means that fear is also part of Love. For those of you keeping score at home, Love now includes keeping secrets and making the beloved fear you.

Well, it's not like He never told us love would be terrible as an army arrayed with banners.