On Commending Dishonesty When It Works

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Doris from Rego Park

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She died in 2003, and unless you follow all-night sports radio in New York, you would not have  heard of her. In fact, the woman satisfied all the criteria for perfect obscurity. Into her fifties, she lived in Queens with her parents, elderly Jews who fled the Holocaust. She suffered from neurofibromatosis - Elephant Man's Disease - that required frequent operations to remove skin tumors from her face and body. She had lung cancer and a chronic cough. She had an autistic compulsion to memorize factoids and arrange small objects in straight lines. She never married, she never learned to drive, and she never worked beyond menial office jobs. Her name was Doris Bauer. Under most circumstances, she was the kind of person who elicits pity - an emblem of lives that amount to little and never quite begin. She's the kind of person you think of when you're alone on dark, cold nights, appraising your accomplishments and wondering if they add up to a...
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When You Wash Your Face, Remember Your Baptism

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And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Martin Luther believed all people were born contaminated by original sin, and baptism was a sacrament of spiritual cleansing. He didn’t want us to forget it. “When you wash your face,” he said, “Remember your baptism.” I must wonder what this tells us about the hygiene habits of medieval Europeans. Was the spiritual act of face washing a daily or weekly or monthly habit? But apart from that, one must ask: Do I remember my baptism – really? A couple years ago, when one of our Lutheran Diakonia teachers asked who remembered their baptism, I was the only person to raise my hand. This I remember: On 6 November 1966, while fighting the Cold War at an Air Force base in England, I was persuaded by the rele...
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John the Baptist called his listeners snakes and told them they were going to Hell. And still he attracted huge crowds. What an amazing gift he had. John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?" (Luke 3:7-10) It must be an ecclesial form of the Stockholm Syndrome that crowds will flock loyally to prophets of the wrath to come. One of modern literature’s most vivid examples of this type of preacher is Amos Starkadder, patriarch of a seedy Sussex farm in Stella Gibbons’ book Cold Comfort Farm . Sigmund Freud was st...
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