When I Was a Child I Thought As a Child

No, actually I do have something to add to the article to which I just linked.

If there is a God, I want a good one. I'm not interested in being a sinner in the hands of an angry God. I am a sinner; even when my thinking swings toward the atheistic, I am a sinner. I would love to believe that the power of God also lies in His/Her/Its/Their infinite forgiveness.

I'm about to make a point which might seem obvious to many, but bear with me.

Consider a family whose child has been brutally murdered by an unrepentant man who freely admits his guilt but claims he has done nothing wrong, or that he doesn't care if he did something wrong. I promise, I'm not trying to draw parallels to any recent events; this just happened to be the set-up to the parable that I wanted to use. The family can do one of three things: they can ignore this man completely, treating him as a random act that caused a tragedy; they can hate this man for killing their child; or they can forgive this man whether he asks for it or not.

On the face of it, the choice seems obvious, and it's one which I would have a hard time resisting, were I in that situation: they hate this brazen murderer and want him to suffer. It's natural; who wouldn't hate someone like that. Many people would hate this man even though he didn't touch their lives at all. He certainly seems worthy of hatred.

But hate gives power to that which one hates. By hating someone, they live inside you, causing you pain, because hatred isn't an enjoyable thing, at the core. It can become very pleasant, but it feeds on you, it stunts you, makes it harder for you to love anything, and love is far more wonderful than that visceral thrill of hatred can ever be. So some would make the choice to ignore t this man. You can't give him power over you if you treat him as a non-entity. Ignore him and it's like he goes away. You can grieve and move on.

The trouble with this is that you're still giving power to those you ignore. You have to consciously act to keep from paying attention. Better thinkers than I have pointed out that willful denial and ignorance actually take quite a bit of work, particularly when other things also must be denied or ignored in order to maintain that fiction.

That third option seems like a bad idea, though. Aren't you releasing him from guilt by forgiving him? He doesn't want your forgiveness. Isn't forgiving him the same as agreeing with him? And how can you forgive someone who has taken so much from you, caused you so much pain?  I'm no saint, and I'm pretty sure I would let that hatred fester in my heart and it might eat me alive. And even as I knew that, I don't know if I could forgive a person who took someone I love from me.

Those of the hardcore camp tend to say, "No forgiveness," like it means, "Responsibility." But if my hypothetical family forgives the murderer, justice can still be served. Forgiveness isn't the same as release from punishment. Forgiveness is more for the forgiver than the forgivee.  In modern society, we seem to have forgotten that; we assume that seeking forgiveness is the same thing as seeking a release from culpability.  It isn't. Only by acknowledging your responsibility can you truly seek forgiveness, and forgiveness doesn't release you from an obligation to make good your transgression.  Being a forgiving person doesn't have to mean that you let people do bad things to you and get away with it.

It takes a certain power to forgive. And by making that choice, the family would have power over the man who murdered their child. They would be saying, "You can't make us hurt, make us stick our heads in the ground. You can't own us by your action. And we make this decision whether or not you accept it, and there's nothing you can do about it."  That's power.

Since I'm not Jesus and I didn't really tell a parable but rather gave some thoughts on a situation, let's draw some parallels. 1) For "unrepentant murderer" substitute "God." Suppose that instead of a murder, we're talking about a tornado. I don't want to argue anything other than that people also have three options when encountering a supposed "act of God" which hurts them: they can hate God and ask why God caused it; they can believe God works in mysterious ways or convince themselves that God had no hand in it; or they can forgive God. That's a novel thought, although it does presuppose some things that I'll get into next.

2)For "unrepentant murderer" substitute "humanity." If you're a Christian, you believe that Jesus was God's child (and possibly also God, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.  Hell, you may believe that we're all God's children (I think that's a wonderful belief).  So we've killed at least one of God's children, and a great many of us are pretty unrepentant about it.  We're indirectly responsible for the horrible deaths of may of God's children, really.  And God can either hate us (which would be hard to do if God is love, as many have said, correctly I feel), ignore us (the watchmaker God), or forgive us.  I'd rather God was the third option, frankly.

But that was all a wild excursion: the central point I was trying to make is that I'm a sinner. And I'm a child.  I want a God who's all-powerful in the "magical rain control" way, not in the "being able to be there with us in the storm," kind of way. The whole "that was when I was carrying you" thing comes to mind; notice that Jesus doesn't say, "The times you only saw one set of footprints were because I had gone off to magically make everything better because I love you." I want Magic Jesus, not carrying Jesus, because I'm selfish and childish and I just want my parents to take care of everything.

That's not a good way for God to work, though. If magic Jesus fixes everything, what's the point? We'd have no free will; God would simply decide what was best for us and do it, and we'd have to deal with it. Or God would be unfair and favor some kids over others, because sometimes there are mutually-incompatible "storms" to fix.  Many people believe one or both of those things, although they may not see it that way; either they think "it's all part of God's plan" or they pray and expect Magic Jesus to do what they say because they're special.

I'm reluctant to get my theology from such a campy source, but perhaps God's omnipotence lies in the infinite capacity to carry us. Carry doesn't presuppose that there's any amelioration of whatever made it impossible for us to walk any further; it just says that God is our support when we need a support. Faith is the rock to which we cling when the waves threaten to wash us away. That doesn't say that the rock makes the waves stop.

But as I said, my response is a childish, "If God is so powerful and so good, how can God cause bad things to happen to good people, or if God doesn't cause those things, how can God stand by and allow those things to happen, and in either case, either God isn't all-powerful or God isn't all-good." I want Magic Jesus. And I'm almost positive that that's not how it works. Sometimes things happen and all we can do is weather them. And sometimes things happen because we made mistakes, not because an angry God is punishing us for our sins or because God isn't there. Sometimes it was in our power to save ourselves all along, but we spent all our time ignoring the problem or hoping Magic Jesus would come along and save us.

Again, please read the article to which I linked in the previous post. It is a concept of power which is almost completely foreign to the human way of thinking, which is why it makes sense that it would be true, since God's ways are not our ways. But it also makes sense because despite the childish impulse, a God who was powerful in the way we understand power would be a pretty lousy God to have.

Omnipotence

I'm not in the habit of simply re-linking, but I'm not sure I can add to this amazing piece by David R. Henson.  It crystallizes a lot of things for me. Perhaps it will be similarly illuminating for you.  I'm not necessarily in agreement with everything he says, but it's a way of thinking to which I had never been exposed before in Christian thought.

Sleeping Through Storms: Rethinking Theodicy, Natural Disasters and God’s Omnipotence

The Nature of Things

I wrote an excursion into Christianity and a talk with an apostle, plus what the purpose of religion is (and also some other stuff), but it was long and off-topic, so I'm linking to it here because there was a somewhat causal link at first and you might say they're peas in a pod. You can keep reading instead for a talk with the author of the following passage. Or do both.

If you can talk about it,
it ain't Tao.
If it has a name,
it's just another thing.

Tao doesn't have a name.
Names are for ordinary things.

Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what's real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things.

These two statements have the same meaning.
Figure them out, and you've got it made.

I always approve of down-to-earth translation (although I also completely approve of poetry and think that most things in the KJV sound better than their equivalents in the vernacular of today, albeit that one shouldn't read the KJV as anything but poetry, really) and this one struck me.  As many things on the Internet, it's unattributed (but please let me know where it's from so I can buy the rest).

The thing about translations of Chinese, and the Dao De Jing (or the Tao Te Ching; I'm Pinyin-Wade-Giles agnostic here) is that you can basically take the task of translating the Bible (yes, that English Bible that you've read wasn't originally written in English, and I don't mean to be condescending here but people really do think that) and multiply by some number greater than one. It's hard.  The characters don't mean letters, they mean words, and the nuance of the words is difficult to capture in translation.  Plus, the Dao is pretty vague.  If you've ever read some of the Dao, you know that... well, the Dao that can be read is not the eternal Dao.  Sorry, little Daoism joke there.

The Buddha said that the cause of suffering is desire. The Dao De Jing says that desiring named things causes one to lose touch with the real, the true, that Dao that cannot be named or expressed.  The "suffering" of Buddhism is not just stubbing your toe or being sad. It's existential. It's a disconnect with the truth, or an inability to cope with change. The Dao says everything is always changing, and nothing you can name or try to make concrete is real. "Stop naming things!" says Lao Tzu (or Laozi, but not as familiarly to Western audiences) in our straight-talk above. But he's also saying, "Stop trying to hold on to things." Stop trying to keep things from changing. Stop with the desire.

But Lao Tzu (who exists for the purposes of attribution)... well, you can guess that I had a chat with him, and once we bridged the mutual-incomprehensibility divide, he had some things to say. Li Bai recommended a rice-wine bar, but Lao (he insisted we be on first name terms because he's given up family names and honorifics) just dragged me to the tea house (he's surprisingly sprightly for his age) and we discussed this and that over tea, which was excellent and probably a better choice than rice wine would have been anyway. Edited highlights, because he also talked about the rest of the book.

"Dao is the way. Not like Jesus, but like him as well. Not like the Buddhist Path, and yet like that too. Dao is the way you can't follow. I still can't. I was telling you that you can't follow it because if you try and you can, it's not Dao. Cannot count the number of minds I've completely blown with shit like that. The Zen cats made a whole religion of nothing but shit like that.

"So you're wondering what the point of it is if you can't do it. Change is fact, dig. I dig on the I Ching as well, you know, although I didn't write it. I don't think anyone did. It's just accretion. Probably started out as some cat getting drunk and just grooving. But none of that's in what you've got now. Maybe everyone wrote it. Pretty mind-blowing to think about.

"Change. But what I was driving at was that you cats are too literal. You're too about rules that have to be handed down from who knows when by who knows who, just like the I Ching. Except the I Ching is always changing, but religions and their rules, they don't change because tradition blah blah blah. You're reading books that are older than me and saying they didn't change. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those books, but you can't follow them because they're things, dig?

"Dao ain't a thing, like I said. Go around looking for things and you're gonna wind up bluesville, baby. Lots of cats think they're all that, have all the things ever, but like Dylan said, you know, times are a-changing. I dig on that, you feel me?"

We'll probably hear from Lao again, but for right now, the central point I'd like to make is that sometimes we're too hidebound to beliefs and traditions. Certainly, as humans it's difficult to live in a constant state of flux, and tradition is a powerful thing, sometimes worthy of preservation for no reason other than that it connects us with those who came before us. When change conflicts with tradition, we must examine both.

Belief doesn't need to be set in stone. One can believe in God without believing that one knows every aspect of God, that one's picture of God is the true and only. I'm not just speaking to fundamentalists here; we all have things we "know" to be true which we never consider in the light of new situations.

What does it serve to have a belief that is never tested? Is that a belief, or a blinder? Change happens, and sometimes we hold fast because the change will swing back around, and sometimes we should let go of our beliefs and allow them to be reshaped to get closer to the eternal ideal. But if there's one thing that everyone should take away from this homily, it's that the eternal ideal isn't achievable. The way that can be named, seen, experienced, traveled, is not The Way, capital letters, full stop.

If you name the path, if you mark the path, if you even believe yourself to be on the path, you're missing the point. You can't refine your definition of truth until it becomes true. You can't define truth so specifically that it is always true. Truth is bigger than that. Goodness, faith, love, God, whatever it might be, is bigger than that.

There's more to the Dao than that, but that's what I wanted to take away from this. Stop being inflexible. Stop believing you know what's up, because you don't. Stop trying to tie everything down, because all you're tying down is yourself. Sometimes, there's a truth that's bigger than rules. Sometimes, just because it says so in a book, it ain't so. We're all lost in darkness, searching for the light, but it's the light that matters, not its direction or distance, not the path we take or how often we have to turn along the way.

But in the end, all of that is the dao that can be named. And that ain't The Dao.

Thoughts on West vs. East

Asian religion often seems, in the macro, to focus much more on giving up material things, leaving behind named things, and so forth. People are always listing that as a difference. I could list a bunch of clobber texts from the Bible which say otherwise (far more than for homosexuality or abortion, even if I'm very charitable to those topics and their relatedness to Bible verses). OpenBible does a decent rundown, and I found those in two seconds on Google.  Sure, there are contradictions (yes, the Bible also contains contradictions) but the overarching theme seems to be, if I might be allowed to let Matthew speak for me, "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

In other words, as Matthew told me over a glass of wine (well, he drank wine, I drank water), "Jesus basically was all about love. That was his nirvana, which is pretty cool, if you think about it. So not loving your fellow man means you can't love God, and not loving God is pretty much the veil of Maya, for those of you who swing that way. Yeah, Jesus said 'riches' a whole lot, but he really meant anything material. I mean, the guy washed the feet of the lowest, he gave away everything, including his life, for you miserable bastards, and he was pretty radically redistribute-the-wealth. It was hardcore, man. Do you really think the Pharisees wanted him dead because he was saying he was the son of God? How about the Romans? Their emperors went around saying they were gods, so what the heck do they care if some goat-eater from East FA says?

"Jesus, he was all about love, as I said. Sure, we ate.  Yeah, Jesus wasn't about starving yourself to death in order to love God; God loves you, so Jesus was pretty clear that that meant God wanted us to be happy and love each other. Sure, we had clothes. But you can bet your bottom dollar that if a beggar or a leper came up to JC and asked if he could have clothing, The Son would have gone around in his underoos so that beggar could have clothes.  Because it was Israel, and in case you hadn't noticed, Israel is pretty temperate.  And anyway, we wouldn't have let him; we would have found some clothes for him, because that's what love is.  Sometimes it doesn't mean giving up everything you have; sometimes it means giving something you have to help someone, even if you don't give everything. Yes, JC would like all rich men to give away all they own and live without concern for wealth, because he was hardcore like that. But he would have been okay with a rich man giving away as much wealth as he could.

"The man said plenty about how it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. Guess what: he was talking metaphorically. A 'rich' man and a rich man are two different things. A 'rich' man cares only for wealth and himself, has no love in his heart, and refuses to love others so he doesn't love God. Man, he's already in Sheol. He doesn't get to know God. What worse punishment can there be? That's like a Hindu being stuck in the karmic wheel of rebirth. No God. No nirvana. No ur-being. Whatever you want to call it, that's pretty much self- explanatory, but The Son liked to explain stuff because he was a teacher, and people are, on the whole, pretty stupid. I was stupid as a crate of matzo when I hung out with JC.

"So listen, maybe followers of Christ's teachings look at the whole renouncing of worldly goods thing a bit differently than other religions.  And maybe there's a place for some wealth if used well, and a place for voluntary poverty if that's what lets you love God. But there is no Dao but Dao, man. No God but God, and you can't express Him or His love. You can only try to be a faint echo."

Well, Matt ran a bit long there, but I think he made some good points.  But we're not talking about Jesus or the Bible. We're talking about the Dao. I just wanted to make a point about how East and West aren't really as different as people would have you believe.  I'm not all wishy-washy "Oh they're all the same under the skin." There are differences definitely. But as far as giving up material things, there are similarities and Christians would do well to listen to what Jesus is saying.

At a deeper level, religions (even in Asia) differ as to character of life and the cause of that character. Buddhists believe that life is suffering and that desire causes suffering (boiled down to the point where it's almost useless).  Some Christians seem to believe that life is suffering as well, but many of those believe that the suffering is caused by original sin or by lack of offering yourself up to God. I don't think life has to be suffering for a Christian; the causes of suffering can be more temporal, or they can be related to lack of faith, but that doesn't have to mean that everything in life is unsatisfying.  The boiled down version of Buddhism above does great disservice to the tenets of Buddhism; to say "life is suffering" makes it sound like a living hell.  Suffering can mean having a hard time dealing with change, in which case "desire" might mean the desire to remain static in the face of change, which cannot be accomplished.

A Christian might say, "Put your faith in God to steer you right," in a time of suffering because of change or upheaval. A Daoist might tell you that change is constant and you must simply seek wisdom to find the way (dao means way, as well as a host of other things). A Buddhist would tell you to follow the Noble Eightfold Path to renounce the material. They're all trying to tell you that change can't be stopped, but they have different ways of doing it.

So maybe "suffering" isn't so much "living hell" as it is "separation from the divine." If you worship a deity or deities, suffering is removal from that faith, a loss of connection to the divine. If you believe that there is an eternal Truth that one must learn, being moved away from that truth would be suffering.  Even if you don't believe in any of these things, even if you're a "devout" athiest, you must suffer when you lose connection with whatever keeps you whole. Doesn't have to be mystical or involve flying spaghetti monsters. There are things we care about, and being disconnected from those things (even material possessions) causes suffering.

I don't really have a final thought; this rambled along rather disjointedly.  Life may be suffering, even if we don't feel it all the time. The path may be to give up the world completely, or it might be to love and share that love with everyone, or to cease to be concerned with worldly things, or any one of a billion other possibilities. I suspect that everyone has their own private answer to the question of what causes suffering. It's frequently said that in hard times, you learn what really matters. Often that's applied to belongings or people, but maybe it's just a general clarity of purpose. If so, maybe the point of religion is to bring that clarity without necessarily demanding the hard times. Or to guide you to that clarity when hard times inevitably happen. Maybe. I'm not choosing sides on it. I'll probably have another next time.

Enchiladas Through a Glass Darkly

*Note: this one is Christian in tone. So we've got the "He" for God and Jesus being assumed to be the son of God, and so forth. When talking about the Christian Bible, it's hard to speak of God in a gender-neutral way. I don't think God is a male, but that's a topic for another time.

---

I think one of my favorite passages in the New Testament is 1 Corinthians 13.  I particularly like the Complete Jewish Version (which was produced for Messianic congregations, which is why it has the New Testament in it) because of its poetry.

I may speak in the tongues of men, even angels;
but if I lack love, I have become merely
blaring brass or a cymbal clanging.

I may have the gift of prophecy,
I may fathom all mysteries, know all things,
have all faith — enough to move mountains;
but if I lack love, I am nothing.

I may give away everything that I own,
I may even hand over my body to be burned;
but if I lack love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind, not jealous, not boastful,
not proud, rude or selfish, not easily angered,
and it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not gloat over other people’s sins
but takes its delight in the truth.
Love always bears up, always trusts,
always hopes, always endures.

Love never ends; but prophecies will pass,
tongues will cease, knowledge will pass.
For our knowledge is partial, and our prophecy partial;
but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child,
thought like a child, argued like a child;
now that I have become a man,
I have finished with childish ways.

For now we see obscurely in a mirror,
but then it will be face to face.
Now I know partly; then I will know fully,
just as God has fully known me.

But for now, three things last —
trust, hope, love;
and the greatest of these is love.

It gets quoted at weddings a lot, and I think the middle bit is wonderful for a wedding; it offers a beautiful and lasting definition of love. At a Christian wedding service, it should be one of the first verses quoted. Even at a non-Christian service, you can respect the definition offered.

But all that is missing the point, because the middle section shouldn't be taken out of context. And the whole passage isn't about weddings. It's about holy love, and yes, that can be shown by marriage, but to view it as "romantic" love does a disservice both to the passage and to the love it is being used to describe.

Sometimes "love" in this verse is translated as "charity" instead, and while I disagree with the translation, I can see why it might have been chosen. This is not the love of balladeers, the love of flowers and hearts, the love of a romantic comedy.

No, "love" here is describing difficult love. The love you have when you don't have anything else. The love of your fellow man that makes you care for a stranger for no other reason, the love of your enemies, the love of those who have hurt or failed you, those whom you owe and who owe you, the love of the slave for the master and the prisoner for the jailer. Hard love. In today's world where popular culture seems to demand that we fall in love at first sight and that everything will work out if you just have love, we don't get to hear about hard love much (unless it's an entirely different sort of hard, and that's not a topic I intend to pursue at the moment).

I should preface the following by saying that not only am I not a priest, but I'm also not a scholar of the Bible or of New Testament Greek. I can only base my interpretations on a reading of the various translations which have come down to us. But as we don't have a copy of the original documents in any case (if they find a letter to the Corinthians signed, "Love to all my homies, the Apostle Formerly Known As Saul," then I guess we'll get to find out what he actually said) we're all working in translation, albeit at greater or lesser distances from the source.

John 15:13 (in the King James, because it's the one everyone knows even if they don't know from whence that knowledge comes) says: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Many have interpreted this in the macro sense: e.g. that the greatest devotion to (pick a cause/country/deity/group) is to die in service of it. I find the language interesting though: "that a man lay down his life..." That turn of phrase, "lay down... life," occurs in all but one of the translations to which I have access. The lone outlier says, "give up his life."  And yes, this probably means "die for." But there are words in Greek for "die for" which aren't the same as "lay down life for."  John uses similar wording in other places, and some commentators have argued that he was referring to Christ's sacrifice of his life for humanity as an example of love, but not the be all and end all.

God loves the world; John says as much. "For God so loved the world," that God offered Jesus as a sacrifice to atone for the world. That's a hard love. And maybe that's the greatest love, as John says in 15:13, or maybe that's just an example of the greatest love.

"Love never ends." God has no beginning and no end, and so His love of the world, His hard love, a love constantly tried and tested, a love that persists even when nothing else does, can have no beginning or end. And if God loves the world fully, then we must love it too.  "Friends" may be interpreted to mean just that, but Jesus didn't die for his friends. He died for everyone, for the sinners (well, that's everyone too), the holy, the people of all races and creeds, those who persecuted and executed him, everyone. No exceptions. Whether you believe it or not (for the record, I have my doubts, but I appreciate the thought), Jesus died for you. Isn't that what evangelicals say? Christ died to redeem everyone. He loved everyone. And if he loved everyone, who are we to say whom we should and shouldn't lay down our lives for?

The martyrdom complex of religion has twisted this as well: laying down your life has become synonymous with death, but perhaps it's meant less morbidly. Certainly, there are times when that ultimate step is the greatest love, but perhaps not always. Laying down or giving your life might be a slow martyrdom. It might be making those difficult choices to act with love even when you have nothing to gain, even when you lose. It might be devoting your life to something rather than laying your life down for something.

But I guess, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man devoteth his life to his friends," lacks the punch, and also doesn't teach the lesson: Christ died for you, his friends, for we are all friends in Jesus. Plus, and brace yourselves for a little sacrilege, John was a bit hot for Jesus anyway. I think he took Jesus' love personally. I'm not saying he was gay; have you never had a friend for whom you'd do anything? That's not sexual, but it is a deeper bond than mere friendship.

And 1 Corinthians 13 is talking about that sort of laying down of life. It doesn't say, "Love is patient, love is kind, love dies for its beloved, and that's pretty much it, so go out and find someone to die for." Honestly, while it might seem like the hardest thing, dying for someone is painful but short. Living for someone will eventually kill you (life always does) but it's slow and hard.

So life is slow and hard and painful and we all die. Why don't I just kill you right know, right? But that's not what Paul is saying. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known," (again, King James, because "a glass, darkly" is the one everyone knows, even if it sounds more like sunglasses than a mirror). Yes, it's about what happens after you die, but it's also about what happens when you love. It needs to be taken in context.

He's saying that the only way to see even a glimpse of the face of God is to see His love in our fellow humans and to embrace them as part of the family. A giant, often-dysfunctional, noisy family that we may fight with all the time and may forget to give us Christmas gifts and steal our stereos to buy meth, but a family, and we should love them. We should devote our lives to them. You want to tell me that that isn't the greatest and hardest love? The scripture isn't a call to marriage; it's a call to service. We must love everyone, and love isn't words or thoughts, it's actions. When they are poor or sick or lame or crazy or just plain annoying, we have to love them. That's hard.

But the reward is that we get a sneak preview of God's love, because while we can't approach God's intensity, we can get as close as we can, see through that mirror, darkly, and look on the face of God because it's the face of everyone in creation. We were all made in God's image; I think that animals, plants, and rocks were also made in God's image because God looks like everything, even things that we can't comprehend or imagine. That's why seeing God in others is a mirror; it reflects us as well, shows us that we are loved as well, and it's obscured because God's face is all faces and we just don't have the eyes to see it all at once.

Well, long story short, I had a talk with Paul; he's had the past 2000 years to think about it, and he agreed that the problem was with King James. Paul really meant to say, "Without love, nothing I can do or have matters. Let me tell you what love I mean, because I don't mean the kind you feel for a baseball team (except maybe the Cubs). See? That sort of love. The hard kind, the kind that isn't just going to throw in the towel, the kind that loves with nothing expected in return. Yes, you may think you know things, may think you know what will happen, you may speak wisely even, but all of that is temporary, because we're all going to die, kids. And then you'll know real love. It'll be like when you grow up and suddenly you see the world as an adult. Now, all you can do is love as hard as you can, because that's the best way we have to see God. It's like a mirror that's all covered in schmutz; you can't really see who's in the mirror, but you get a vague idea. So we have this vague idea of love, but like I said, all our ideas and knowledge and everything are going to be vague because they're temporary and partial. God sees all, knows all, etc. so He's up there knowing us, and when you get to know Him it's going to blow your freaking mind. But just remember: all you've got, all you know take with you, all that truly matters in the end, are three things: trust, hope, and love. And the reason why I've been talking about love so much and haven't really touched on trust and hope is because love is the big enchilada. Love everybody. Infinite love to the P-Funk and my boy Grandmaster Flash. Peace!"

That all goes back to the beginning, with weddings. A wedding is indeed a time to celebrate, because through the love of the couple for each other, we can see a faint echo of God. And a wedding is a commemoration of that love, and also that vow to devote one's life to one's partner, which is the greatest love. But it's possible that we shouldn't bring any of the rest of it in just then; leave the, "And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea..." stuff for another day.  Maybe save up the rest of the verses for comfort when someone who loved and was loved in return dies and presumably gets to move the mirror away and see God waiting to give him or her a big hug (I'll talk about the afterlife some other time). The important part is the love, not the death. Trust, hope, and the big enchilada.