Guest Column
Sabbath/Easter-Passover
- Sabbath/Easter-Passover
- By Sanford "Sandy" Goodkin
- April 7, 2007
Good Sabbath, Happy Easter, Happy Passover!
The mixture of liberties, to think what you are, to practice your precious liberties.
"The God Who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." (Thomas Jefferson) The aim was to protect us from the inevitable stresses of liberty and of tyranny. Kings behave like kings and power makes even the mediocre seek out royal powers.
"Religion and liberty must flourish or fall together in America. We pray that both may be perpetual" (RevWilliam Smith on the day that George Washington took over as commander of the Continental army)
There are some who are cast to be great leaders, with vanity to be controlled and recognized by the leaders themselves. There are very few Washington's-who was an aristocrat born to his tasks-fewer still than Lincolns, who rose above poverty, to become one of the greatest of our thoughtful, most articulate leaders.
And then there are others whom we have never met, but to whom we are devoted on faith alone-more powerful in their absence than those Whom we have ever met, like our mysterious God and Moses and Jesus. Mother Nature is the idiom for beauty, temperament and Spring. Our values bring us reason to explain the seasons, to enjoy their appearance.
History teaches us that we have almost infinite capacity to expand our ingenuity, to nourish our intellect, and to achieve beyond our physical grasp. When we doubt, we shorten our stride; when we expand our understanding , we leap over most real and imagined obstacles; when we study man's history we are stunned by our capacity for enduring cruelty: slavery, remorselessness, persecution, torture, and inhumanity. Many save their hopes for an afterdeath perfection, which no one remembers having gone through, but faith provides the leaps into beliefs of what we have never seen or heard.
"Intellect is the dividing line between man and beast; it masters natural impulses and subdues passions." ("Choice of Pearls")
O Lord, have you ever made an in-person appearance except in bibles and myth, when we must have something in which we believe when hopelessness gains power for moments or cycles seemingly forever? Yet whenever I drop into a church in which gospel rhythms penetrate my very soul, and I think of what these people have lived through: slavery, separated families, beatings by whips, never permitting ownership of anything, except through faith, hope and unreasonable expectation, yet their voices and hands form the infrastructure of their hopes and prayers as they sway to the Lord. No one doubts that the Lord is listening, though the expectation differs from the reality, that God answers slowly, for He has much ground to cover with our hopes.
- But we must believe that God is listening, for He cannot be deaf or blind, perhaps just numb with what we earth-bound creatures do to each other.
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- Contact Sanford "Sandy" Goodkin at sgoodkin@san.rr.com
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