Dear Theophilus, 

As I promised you in the last letter, I will continue now with the same topic, the topic of salvation.

I mentioned that we must also become actors in the drama of salvation and this was the point of the Law in the Old Testament. The Law is there to train you (as actors are trained). You are given a code of behavior and you practise this until you become more proficient. But this training has a limit and you come to the point where the preparatory work (the rehearsal) is over and you are ready for the actual play. With the coming of Christ, we are no longer in need of tutors such as the Law but are ready to follow Him as our director and take our cues from Him as we get ready for our opening night.

In a sense, all of life is a preparation for the first night when the focus of the spotlight will be on us, the moment of our death. All of your life is a rehearsal, a preparation for this and you do not want to fail. Somehow, death which we avoid thinking about all our lives, is at the center of things. This resolution of things, the wrap-up of the play, occurs for us at the personal level, but also occurs cosmically - the universe will cease to exist at some point. At our death we leap into the terrifying unknown, but faith is our ally to help us cope with something whose demands are beyond our control. In order to understand this better, we need to look at death and explore this.

There are writings about St. Francis which are called the Fioretti. St. Francis probably represents one of the most striking examples of what it means to follow Christ and what I propose to you is to briefly consider St. Francis. St. Francis came from a wealthy family, his father being a successful cloth merchant. St. Francis was struck by hard his father worked in order to become wealthy and Francis came to the realization that it takes hard work to become poor, as well. There is a dramatic confrontation between Francis and his father in which Francis takes off his clothes, hands them to his father declaring that he has another father in heaven and he is going to follow Him. At one point, the followers of St. Francis ask him what it means to be joyful. If you were to give sight to the blind, if you were to make the lame walk, or you were even to make the dead alive - this still would not represent perfect joy. So, the disciples ask - what is perfect joy? And the answer they get is so totally unexpected that it throws their and our world upside down. Francis says to them to imagine that they come to the door of an inn and knock on the door. It is raining outside and it is bitterly cold and they are unimaginably hungry. The door is opened by an angry porter who rudely closes it in their faces and then they stand in the cold and wet in absolute humility, without anger and bitterness. This, says St. Francis, is perfect joy, and this, I may add, is perfectly meaningless for us, because we see the world through eyes that have been moulded with the values of the spirit of the age. Francis' explanation is very simple. What have you that has not come from God? Nothing and therefore we have nothing to be proud of. But, as St. Paul writes, I can boast in my sufferings because they are mine, something totally mine, and are used to overcome the bloated ego, which is a necessity for salvation to occur, and which brings joy. There is a point that I must emphasize here. There is no great merit or virtue in suffering in itself - there is immeasurable merit and value in suffering for the love of someone and that someone, for Francis, was Christ.

Remember my talking in the previous letter about St. Paul saying that we are dead in sin. Well, one of the results of that deadness is that our values and the way we see our lives and what is important in them, have become so skewed that the message of Christ is incomprehensible to many of us. Get, get, get, consume, consume, consume, seek your pleasure and comfort over everything - these are the call words of our day. When a different message attempts to be heard, it becomes drowned in a cacophony of accusations of otherworldliness, of pie in the sky, of self-torturing. Do we really believe what Francis says in the story above; sadly, many of us would say no and the reason for this is that we do not want to die and this is central to salvation. We have atheists, by and large, not because they have been argued out of believing in the existence of God but because they do not want to accept what believing in God leads to. This is hidden under the subterfuge of unbelief.

What St. Francis says is that what hurts in us is not what is essential in us. We hurt because we are in a process of change, of transformation, of transition and this is always painful. Human beings can take reality only in very small doses and then retreat to the safe comfort of life as usual. The process of liberation of the human spirit is shocking (probably, a better word would be traumatizing) for us but, it is unavoidable. Once we truly realize this, then we are well on our way to salvation which culminates in death.

It is interesting to see that people seek hardships sometimes to ,prove a point. A mountain climber will hazard his life to climb to the top of a mountain to prove something to himself. The pain and the danger of the exercise are an inherent part of the undertaking. There is a deeply seated need in us to die to the old self and this is sometimes expressed outwardly in undertaking which are fraught with danger. The cleansing of the soul can be an after-death cleansing or a leading-up-to death process of painful disentanglement from the world. The final wrap-up of the drama is death and it has to be this way because we are so tangles up .in this deathly life of sin that the only way we can ultimately be freed is through our physical death. But the prelude to this death, the preparation and the rehearsals, occur in our everyday dyings to our selfish interests. These sometimes may seem pointless and sometimes bizarre and meaningless, but we must remember that they are a form of training. We cannot avoid this - we must, at some point enter the agony of the last moment and if we are prepared, then it will go easier on us and if not....

There is a curious section in the Seder which itself is a part of the celebration of Passover. After the third cup of wine has been drunk, the cups are refilled including an extra one and the door is opened, ostensibly to allow Elijah in. What follows seems strange in light of the celebrations and joy of the feast. What comes now are verses of denunciation of heathens. This enactment highlights the plight within which man finds himself. The door is opened but the expected guest does not come in. It is in the darkness out there that something is, something more awe-ful and more beautiful and more intense than we can imagine or face. But the challenge of being human is that we have to enter that darkness, that terror, and embrace it. This darkness is hell and destruction to the cowardly and the sinful but, it is bliss to those who have been cleansed. It is as if all or lives we have been gently peering at a light and our "eyes" are slowly getting used to it so that when we get a blast of unimaginable light on our "opening night", we can withstand it and become capable of enjoying it. Those who have lived their lives in darkness are overwhelmed and experience unimaginable pain. You have realized, I am sure, that I am trying to explain the inexplicable but I hope that my floundering words have managed to convey at least a little of what is taught in our faith.

I would like to draw your attention to what is called apocalyptic literature, that is, literature which tries to portray what happens in the end times. Omitting the often lurid pictures portrayed by these writings, I would like to focus your attention on a fact common to much of this literature. The destruction of the world will have to be complete because without that, renewal cannot take place and this is required not of just the cosmos, but of the person.

And now, Theophilus, I began with a quotation from Shakespeare and I will end our discussion by referring to Shakespeare, again. I don't know if you are familiar with his play "King Lear" but this play deals with three daughters of a king, Lear. Only one of them, Cordelia, remains faithful to the king and does not betray him but accepts the nothing that her father king has become in his mad condition. It is this reconciliation of Cordelia with the mad Lear, the Lear who has become "nothing" that immediately leads to her death which is her freedom. She embraces this "nothing" and leaves this life. Much of our literature deals with these themes and tells us clearly that we have to become transformed and accept this tremendous mystery that we often speak about glibly called God. If only people appreciated the power and majesty of God, maybe then they wouldn't be so ready to talk about Him as if they, mere humans, were the ultimate arbiters of all creation.

I have written the above words with a certain amount of trepidation because I realize how pale and insufficient they are in describing the reality that call salvation. But words are all that I have to offer you and maybe they will be helpful to you. Salvation is a deep mystery, expressed in literature in various images which consistently paint the danger and the pain and the awe-fulness of it all but, we must hang in, because that is what it means to be human and our rewards will be, and are presently, beyond all our imaginings.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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