Unaware

Dear Eugene,

Last night I watched a movie that I've meant to watch for a long time.  In fact I almost passed it up again: busyness, what else?

Father Leary : I didn't realise you hated me that much.
Father James Lavelle : I don't hate you, at all.
Father Leary : Then, why?
Father James Lavelle : It's just you have no integrity. That's the worst thing I could say about anybody.

Yes, not that he is a heathen, an adulterer, or even a killer.  The worst thing that can be said about a man is that he has no integrity.

What is integrity?

It has to do I think with a man's reverence (for what?), what he deems sacred and how he lives into that conviction despite all the confusion and convulsion in life posing imminent threat to his living humanly.

In the movie there is a brief image of one man leaning on a casket that will soon be loaded onto an airplane to take the body "back home," and another man talking to him, casually and inaudibly to the rest of the world, both seemingly workers at the airport, baggage-loaders, decent men making decent living, but at the moment for using the casket as an armrest a bar stand an oversize luggage just like every other, they have became men with no integrity, like Uzzah--which ironically in Hebrew means strength.

The lack of integrity is just that, that it's not even a "sin," that we are not aware of what is so twisted in us, that we remember what we ate but not the face of the server, pray for our food but not the farmer, go from one busyness to another blind and deaf to the business of God.

Yours, Alex