Living Water, III

This morning I got a phone call from my schizophrenic son. He wanted me to know that should he suddenly die, or otherwise simply disappear--not that this was likely, but just in case--I should make it a point of the most pressing urgency to visit his trailer home and retrieve every page and portion of the world shattering research he has been doing for the last few years. I am under no circumstances to let this fall into his mother's hands. I am to personally gather it, protect it with my life, and bring it to the waiting world.

Contained in these pages, or so he tells me, is material of the most profound nature, the secrets of both the earth and the heavens. If used in the proper manner, it can change the world.

Last night he experienced a moment of the purest sort of revelation. Life, he said, society, religion, politics, culture, the whole interweaving of systems, ideas, and resulting practices, is based on hate. Hate is the foundation, corrupting all from the bottom up, a sterile soil at the depth of the garden, an evil from which nothing good can grow.

We must be transformed, he said. By love.

Revelation indeed. Everlasting revelation.

Well, I'm thinking Deja vu, dude. So many of us seem to be on the same page. And though we may be as wrong as Wellington Boone, we shall nonetheless persist, because our particular wrong is right.

Where is the reward, where the treasure? It is where the heart is, needing nothing, completely sufficient in and of itself. What is accomplished resides in the doing, what is gained is that which is given.

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends.

In loving, therefore; in patience, in tolerance, in kindness, in forgiveness, we commit our hearts not to what is temporal, but to those things which eternally transform, one soul at a time. The reward is new life, day by day, and one could not ask for a better return.

Living Water, I

If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.
--John 7:37-38

I once read a book by fellow named Wellington Boone, a Georgia preacher who had a lot of say about compassion, tolerance, self-effacement, and the sacrificial love of Christ. I have not recovered since. The fool thing has ruined my life.

Here's the trouble. Love in this fine old world is commonly pursued for reward. Yes, when we love, we fully expect to be loved in return (and most often with interest). We serve expecting to be served. Acts of unusual kindness and charity, rare things that they are, anticipate a lively acknowledgment at least, and preferably adoration.

It seems a simple enough equation, a foolproof sort of math. I cannot fault Mr. Boone for having made assumptions which must have seemed like no-brainers. I was right there with him, on the very same page, as it were.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

So said the Beatles. And what better authority could one desire?

Well, the Beatles were wrong. Wellington Boone was wrong. (Jim Baker was wrong too, but that's a different story).

Charity, love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, are received not with thankfulness, but with avarice. He who gives freely from the goodness of his heart becomes to others a perpetual bank account, an eternal fountain of compassion from which more is drawn this visit to the next.

And yet no human soul flows eternal. Do they not see that the pool must shrink? Do they not see that what sustains must itself be sustained?

I am reminded of a bubbling cold spring in the mountains I used to go to. When I was young, no more than knee-high to a sapling, the water from the spring poured forth from the ground just as if from a sink faucet. You could cup your hands and draw out the purest sort of refreshment. And yet little by little, over the years, the flow has slackened, becoming finally a trickle, then a drip, and then nothing. I look now for where the water used to be. I tell the story to my children. But of course a story of water falls far short of the water itself.