A metaphor

After Exodus 20:13 and Matthew 5:21-26 

Murder is a metaphor,

meaning much more

than it implies. Murder

encompasses any kind

of destruction of people,

a body, a mind, a heart,

a reputation. It doesn’t

have to be acted out or

spoken. The heart rages

and is guilty. The mind

thinks, and is guilty.

The lips speak, and are

guilty. The hands act,

and are guilty. Murder is

any form of destruction

of life. And it is forbidden;

thou shalt not.

 

Photograph by Jr Korpa via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Hometown – poem by Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

 

Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor – Larissa Phillips at The Free Press.

The value of life

We recently watched “The Letters,” a movie (via Netflix) about Mother Teresa. It was based on some 50-years of correspondence she had with her assigned spiritual advisor, Father Celeste van Exem. It turned out that Mother Teresa’s faith was actually rooted in what she knew was a “darkness” in her soul, the darkness being the feeling that God had abandoned her combined with doubts about her faith.

And you think, “Mother Teresa? Really? She had doubts? She felt abandoned?”

Yes, she did indeed. And those feelings and doubts were intimately wrapped up in her faith.

Perhaps it was a coincidence that we were watching this movie a few hours before the mass murders occurred at the gay club in Orlando. Perhaps not. We watched a story about a woman who lived her faith, embracing the dying and untouchables on the streets of Calcutta’s slums, and then the next morning heard about a gunman who walked into a club and started firing, killing 50 people and wounding scores more.

The contrast couldn’t be greater. What Mother Teresa’s faith told her was that every life has value – and in the eyes of God, every life has the same value. Education, wealth, political power – none of these matter when it comes to the value of each human life. A child with Down’s Syndrome is just as valuable as a corporate CEO.

It was discouraging to see how quickly Orlando became an opportunity to score political points: Trump on immigration, President Obama and Hillary Clinton on gun control (joined by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois). Fifty people had been murdered, and all our national politicians cared about was scoring election points.

Juliet Stevenson as Mother Teresa in a scene from "The Letters"

Those 50 people mattered. They had value. Their lives meant something. We should grieve before we start trying to score political points.

The taking of their lives diminishes all of us.

I have Facebook friends who post regularly on the need for evangelical Christians to stop being what they call “one-issue voters” (abortion) and considered the broader context of social concerns (human trafficking, race, poverty, and other social justice issues). I read these posts, and I wonder if I’m seeing a thinly disguised pitch to convince me to vote for the party that openly and regularly endorses abortion, something I’ve never been able to do in more than 40 years of voting.

I know no other way to say it. Abortion is the denial of the value of human life, and my understanding of that value is tied up in my faith. Asking me to disregard it or to not consider it in how I vote is asking me to disregard my faith. “So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, is the neglect of receiving Jesus,” said Mother Teresa. “It is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child…” She said that at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 3, 1994, with the First Lady in attendance.

I’m not a one-issue voter; I can’t be, because the actual record of both major political parties is abysmal (policy is what you do, not what you say or only include in your platform). But I do see abortion as the social justice issue, one that wraps human trafficking (it’s become big business, after all), poverty, and race together in one horrible practice.  And it’s based on the lie that some human lives are more valuable than others.

Mother Teresa saw Jesus in the dying, the diseased, the cast off, the poor. She would also have seen Jesus bleeding and dying on the floor of an Orlando gay club. And she would have seen Jesus on the operating table of an abortion clinic.

Top photograph by Xoan Seoane via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Murder and Other Acts of Literature”

Our local library has a little shop on the main floor, operated by volunteers from the library association, where it sells gifts, sundries, and quality used books. I usually gravitate to the bookshelf near  the window, where one can find hardback and quality paperback mysteries for $5.00 and sometimes less (like the occasional half marked price sale). The books are donated, and culled out from the mountains that will be sold at the annual book sale.

Not long ago I found Murder and Other Acts of Literature, edited by Michele Slung, and as soon as I looked at the table of contents, I knew the shop was going to get my $5.00. In this rather intriguing collection of stories about (mostly) murder, one finds authors like William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Isabel Allende, A.A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling, Anthony Trollope. Isak Dineson, Louisa May Alcott, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, and some 12 more of equal or greater literary fame. It was published in 1997.

A.A. Milne, he of Winne-the-Pooh fame, and Louisa May Alcott writing about murder?

Well, yes. Sort of. These stories are all classic murder mysteries. In some, the murder is never solved. In others, the reader knows the murderer from the start.

Instead, these are stories, literary stories, that involved murder to some degree.

In Muriel Spark’s “The Portobello Road,” the story is narrated by the ghost of a woman who died some years before. It turns out that she’s accidentally haunting the person who killed her. Alice Walker’s teenaged heroine goes calmly about the business of killing a man in “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.” Paul Theroux’s “The Johore Murders” has an embassy official figure out what the local police can’t (and this story comes closest to a traditional murder mystery).

Michele Slung

Rudyard Kipling’s “Mary Postgate” is a story of World War I, grief, and how a woman passing middle age “does her bit” for the war effort. In “The Woman and the Parrot,” a parrot repays kindness with kindness. Louisa May Alcott tells a story of star-crossed lovers who happened to be Shakespearean actors in “A Double Tragedy: An actor’s Story.” A.A. Milne’s “In Vino Veritas” present a police detective and a mystery writer who find a twist within a twist.

Slung had edited quite a number of similar collections, including I Shudder at Your Touch (1991); Living with Cannibals and Other Women’s Adventures (2000); Murder for Halloween (2010); Garden of Reading: Contemporary Short Fiction about Gardeners and Gardening (2012); and many more.

Murder and Other Acts of Literature, properly speaking, isn’t really a collection of mystery stories. The stories, or most of them, have a more literary bent, which is what one would expect from the authors. But who knew Faulkner could tell a gripping tale of justice gone wrong, with a prison mystery to solve to boot, in a story like “Monk?”

Related:

Author Q&A with Michele Slung – Washington Independent Review of Books.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.