Wednesday July 8, 2009
Undefinable virtues
By Jim Taylor
An eleven hour drive, alone, gives ample opportunity to reflect on other drivers’ habits.
And I must say that, with one or two minor exceptions, they were very good. No one did anything stupid.
Don’t confuse stupid with illegal. In truth, almost every driver was doing something illegal – minor speeding. Not wearing seatbelts. Rolling though stop signs. Failing to signal lane changes…
But the closest thing I saw to “stupid” were a few drivers who plodded along just under the speed limit while a kilometre-long line of cars formed behind them waiting for a chance to pass.
But generally, everyone applied common sense and courtesy. Which occasionally means breaking the rules. Because the rules are simply an attempt to codify common sense and courtesy.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to enforce common sense. Governments can legislate rules of the road, safety standards, training procedures… But legislation will never prevent someone from dozing off at the wheel.
As I’ve heard said, you can prohibit someone from doing wrong, but you can’t make them do good. You can create laws against murder, fraud, extortion, theft, assault, lying… But can’t force anyone to be kind, thoughtful, loyal, generous…
Generosity, for example, has to be voluntary. If I’m forced to give a certain percentage of my income away, if I have no choice, I’m more likely to feel resentful than compassionate.
Hidden underpinnings
Idealistic people often claim that all religions and cultures value the same things — honesty, truth, altruism, compassion… I’m not sure they’re right. I suspect that some societies placed their highest value on ruthlessness, revenge, deceit, and duplicity. The ancient Vikings might have been such a society — Norse legends suggest that not even their gods played fair. Wall Street might be another.
It did occur to me that our society is built on trust. Of course we lock our doors at night and hold onto our credit cards – that’s just common sense. But we trust that the vegetables in the grocery store haven’t been poisoned; that the post office will deliver our mail intact; that a neighbour won’t plunder our carrot patch at night…
A society built on distrust would quickly degenerate into a seething cauldron of every-man-for-himself paranoid individualists. There could be no family, no friends, no partners.
I see that demonstrated on the highway. When I pass a huge semi-trailer unit, I have to trust that he will not swerve into my lane and crush me like a cockroach. When I enter a two-lane bridge with steel girders on both sides, at 100 km/hr, I have to trust that the person approaching me equally fast will stay on her side of the yellow line. Because as we pass in opposite directions, only inches separate us.
Maybe our highways give us a clue. Common sense and courtesy can’t be defined; violations of them can be. Perhaps the values that are truly universal are those that can’t be enforced or precisely defined.
If, as those idealists claim, all religions espouse the same basic values, they will be the values that defy definition. Any attempt to quantify love, kindness, compassion, loyalty, inevitably becomes either a maximum or a minimum – an extreme rather than the imprecise but practical middle ground we take for granted.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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PROMOTION STUFF…
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For a lighter look at life, faith, and the lectionary, I recommend my friend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it by sending a note to [email protected]
For other web links worth pursuing, try
Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
Dan Strizek’s Gathering Place for Creation Spirituality
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write [email protected] to get onto her mailing list.
Jim Henderschedt’s occasional e-zine, Fresh Water, subscribe by writing him, [email protected]
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