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Dear Eugene,

I learned from you that C. S. Lewis penciled these words in the flyleaf of his copy of Friedrich von Hügel's "Eternal Life":

“It is not an abstraction called humanity that is to be saved. It is you…your soul, and, in some sense yet to be understood, even your body, that was made for the high and holy place. All that you are…every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp about yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to him. He made those ins and outs that He might fill them.  Then He gave your soul so curious a life because it is the key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in Him.”

Is this good news or bad news?  We want to be "saved," but do we want to be known?

Christmas almost, talks and tunes about love peace and joy up in the air, stuffs we are supposed to breathe in and in turn puff out to contribute our share in kind to the dreamscape of goodwill and--may I use a brutalized religious term--salvation?  If things aren't that bad we wouldn't want them to be good so badly.  Look at the energy and money and troubles we pumped into this fantasy...

But we are lying to ourselves.

I don't want any stranger in the mall to come up and get intimate with me.  I don't seek to be heard, let alone understood, in a Christmas party.  I expect God, if there is one, to speak no new word to me before during or after Christmas.  The church wraps up Salvation and sometimes puts a ribbon on top, even cherry, and it's pretty much a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that I heard isn't that hard to somehow incorporate and normalize into my already driven and purposeful life; the subsequent treatment plan I might resist but even that is no hard medicine people say--it's mainly about showing up on Sunday.  Salvation is a switch at the back of my head to turn me from bad to good: use this shampoo and you will smell good, donate to the food bank and you will feel better, put up your Christmas tree and all the dark corners of your life are already getting brighter.  Say Yes to Jesus and you are fixed up for good.

And I read again what Lewis wrote above.  If in my decades of church life I was told even once what he said here, something along the line and no need to be as profound, I would have known better to not participate in the brutalization of God's gift and manhandle first my tender self and then the fragile souls around me for years on end.  And if I did insist on participating at least I couldn't say I wasn't aware of my brutality.  Now the second half of my life (if that's how its length will play out) is about retracing my steps of violence and often being confronted by the sight of irreparable damages I've done.

A friend just texted me that she'll come to my church's Christmas dinner theater, and the shame of having once killed her with my words purportedly about love and possibly even God instantaneously welled up from my deep reservoir of regret and tormented me all over again.  Her text is a forgiveness that I don't deserve.

Yours, Alex

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