Witness

People died for it. Those were the words that came from me. I have been playing a little of Daniel’s three friends at work. You see, right now, everyone else is working ten hour days seven days a week to finish a large project. I told my boss that that was a line I wouldn’t cross. I was going to keep the Sabbath whether or not I kept my job. The laws in our state support me in this, and I hope that I have garnered enough good will with my superiors that they know I am willing to work, just not on Sundays.

So, it’s gotten around that I believe in God, and it has been, here and there, a chance to confess my beliefs to my colleagues. One of the new hires asked me why I believe in Jesus. I felt a little tongue tied at first. There was no preliminary, just the question.

It’s hard to boil down, into one response, the very center of your life. It’s hard to describe something simple simply. I think my answer, what came out of me, revealed something to me about me.

You see, my religious life has been haunted for a long time by an unconscious error. I think it first took form as a child when I heard the bit about loving your neighbor as yourself. Well, I thought, I’ll just hate myself because it would be impossible to love my neighbor. God’s worked that out of me, over time; or He is, I should say.

The echoes of that error are still there. As Chesterton points out, it is not the vices but the virtues which are the most dreadful when unmoored from orthodoxy. There is a veneer of humility over my pride, and it is real humility. In part, I have tried to despise myself, which is a Christian idea.

I’m rambling. What I mean is that I took a good idea, what might be called humility, into something that wasn’t humility. I was humble unto the point of pride; I was too prideful to have anything to do with myself. I could not look at myself. However, I think God has been leading me to self-reflection, which means, on a foundational ground, the knowing of myself. Some people are inordinately fond of looking at themselves, and that is a type of pride. I took a step beyond that and became too prideful to even stoop to my level. I must now be humble enough to really look at myself.

So, I have been trying to keep my eyes and ears open for any sign of me. Who knows when I might pass by, when I might rise above the mere reflexive actions of everyday life and shock myself by a real moment of being?

So, I saw myself, for a moment, in that unreflective answer. My coworker helped to find me off guard, and we pounced on me while unaware. I can give you many thought out apologies for Christianity, and generally, I am a Christian by intellect more than anything else, but here, for a moment, tongue tied, what came out of me? The martyrs.

Now, I know, intellectually, that there are many martyrs for many a differing worldview than that of Christianity. There are heartfelt believers of evil ideologies like Socialism, and there are sincerely religious people of other faiths who have died for what they believe in.

I quickly added the rambling addendum of first having to come to certain philosophical conclusions about God before believing in one particular religion, but that wasn’t the actual path my life took. I believed because I saw belief. I loved because I was loved. I can, as it were, build a philosophical rampart around this core which I would call true, but the Truth is found past these truths.

If we meditate upon God, the nature of Him, the יהוה in the Pentateuch or the Εγω Ειμι in the Gospel; if we must say, I am, when we call upon God, here I saw some aspect of being, some part of me that is, that resonates like a tuning fork. There was a man upon this earth who died and lived again, and those who loved him died to tell his story.

Yes, quotes from Hamlet keep floating through my mind in this navel gazing project. Polonius, that foolish proverb-monger: “To thine ownself be true,” he says. I do not know yet if those words are foolishness or wisdom; perhaps, like all proverbs, there is a wisdom in knowing when to be wise.