is a good woman,” then you belittle the Savior as well. Do you not yet know that the Redeemer approaches you in your spouse? In your partner? Your pastor, parishioner, newspaper deliverer? Would you cut off any one of these? O man, O woman, you have cut yourself off from the Divine Lover who wants your heart, and the Beloved who would take it if it had been offered. Would you assume that the only way to rate an employee is by his efficiency? Or by your unexamined feelings toward her? Would you thereby cancel the rest of this person by a stroke of your managerial pen? But “cancel” means “kill” in affairs of the spirit.
Do you understand that your mood at home (or at Little League or vaca- tions or shopping or the sharing of meals), that your attitude in close communities (celebrations, funer- als, weddings, worship, et. al.) is the air the others must breathe? The disposition you bring (which your presence imposes on the group) is, in that moment, the life or death of their spirits. It is the suffocation of their joy, or else it may grant them sweet, healthy and sparkling inhalations. If by loud sighs and gestures of impatience you condemn the old soul ahead of you in the grocery line, who with shaking hands is counting to the penny cash money for the purchase— then you have lost patience with bald Elisha, the prophet of God. And what of your father and
mother when they descend into their dotage? (Teenagers often suspect that these parents have already entered the fuddy stage, prelude to the dim- mer duddy stage.) If you shoot out the lip at them because of your vaster knowledge, your keener insights, your more contemporary ethic, then you trash the instruments by which the Creator created you. What? Would even grown-up offspring risk
chopping down the vine of which they are the fruit?
And those who assail gays in the company of like-minded friends— assuming that no one gay is injured since no one gay is there to hear them—do not recognize that their opinions become the weather that blows out their doors when they and their companions go out outdoors. Even a veiled reproach is manifested in a voting booth.
And the same may be said of every group that uses its “groupiness” to slander another group in (what is considered to be) private. •••••
So: toss fast-food wrappers on the highway. Toss beer cans abroad. Toss the detritus of your burned-out desires, the souls of those you use and lose, in any corner where you think that others don’t see you. Toss cigarette butts in the urinal, and you
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have once more made my dear friend miserable, she the least of these, the children of Jesus.
And shall you rise up in church, then, protesting your love of the Lord?
But our souls are more accurately represented by the unconscious, habitual act than by acts we plan and pay for. In the former dwells our truer nature. Our love of the Lord is first proclaimed by our care for the face- less, for those who lack the authority to demand our service, but who shall best receive the benefit of it. I am not writing of a democratic
effort at the political equality of all individuals. I am writing rather of Christianity, the elevation of the other for the sake of God who made her and who loves her. I am writing of love.
At the end of every act there stands the Master, cleaning urinals.
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