Authority

You see, when I write about ‘God’, your feelings of wary skepticism (or perhaps sincere curiosity) are very different to when you see a homeless person – eyes cloudy and unfocused from too much drug use – begging for money and condemning those ‘merciless individuals’ who pass him by without a second glance. Who, for the right reasons or not, choose not to continue subsidizing his/her destructive lifestyle in the name of Christ. Furthermore, your feelings morph again, perhaps into reprehension or disgust, for the self-righteous quack turned priest professing his love for ‘the Lord’ for everyone to see. As if shouting, “Yes, it is I who knows the Truth. I, alone am special. Come and repent your sins so that you may be forgiven”. One look at them tells you that they either do not know what they are talking about, or that they do not truly believe it – they do not possess deep conviction.

“There is but one law in the world!’ roared the podgy priest. ‘Divine law! The whole of nature is subject to that law, the whole of earth and everything that lives on the earth!’… ‘I admonish you all, good and pious people,’ yelled the priest. ‘Don’t believe the sorcerers, don’t turn to them for advice or aid!”

– Time of Contempt, Andrzej Sapkowski

Yet, if you are a disagreeable man (or a highly disagreeable woman), you might actually listen when a former caporegime (captain) of the New York Colombo crime family comes out of prison extolling Jesus Christ.

“I spent eight years in prison, twenty-nine months and seven days in the hole. I was in solitary for almost three years…I got to tell you, that’s not easy. You know, regardless of what anybody says, we weren’t meant to be solo, we’re meant to be social.”

– Michael Franzese

Or when Khabib Nurmagomedov says:

“Everything, God give you.”

Suddenly, you have a little more respect for this ‘God’. You don’t understand who this ‘God’ is; you find it confusing that their ‘God’ sounds different to the goody two-shoes ‘God’ in your head; you don’t understand why you feel that it is cool and instinctively want to imitate the Fast & Furious crew in joining hands at a dinner table. But you easily understand that Khabib can beat the shit out of you without even trying; so in the presence of such blatant yet real mercy, you deign to humble yourself ever so slightly.

Or perhaps, you consider yourself ‘intelligent’, ‘rational’, ‘superior’, and so proclamations from dumb brutes like Khabib Nurmagomedov prove nothing. After all, you spend your time comfortably sitting in an armchair mentally taking apart people like Khabib – snidely reassuring yourself that your ‘intellect’ separates you – only imbeciles display their aggression so brazenly; no you are far too clever for that.

Even now, as you read these words, you may have a disbelieving laugh on your face. You find it hard to admit to yourself that what is written resonates with you; part of you rebels, you feel slightly queasy as you are unsure what the writer’s intentions are, “What’s the catch?”. Per chance it is too intellectually heavy, such that you might go away and meditate on what you have read for a few days. Along with that disbelief is a feeling of wonder (or denial): this writer has articulated what you know and feel to be the Truth. Or instead, you might have half a smirk and half an annoyed look of impatience, “Get on with it, this is all rather too easy for me to understand and take apart; what makes you think you have the authority you pretentious thorn in my side?”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sage. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Then there are those we consider to operate outside us. Those we regard with a kind of accepting envy; who seem without sin, who have been ‘good Christians’ their whole lives. Some of these people really appear to embody that cherubic purity and innocence. Children belong in this category. And we leave these people alone; for we fear that if we insist on corrupting their purity with our loathing, resentment and all that one detests about the world, then we are simultaneously crushing that tiny part of good still within us. A carefully preserved white shimmering sphere surrounded by an abyss of darkness.

As I attended years 1-3 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan: part of the school curriculum was to recite from a text called the ‘三字經’ (Three Character Classic). And though I barely remember anything; nor have I studied its historical significance; it is remarkably salient that these are its first two verses.

「人之初，性本善」

《三字經》