Fence Evil Out, part two

In the 1960s, some of Channa’s and my generation disdained the setting up of fences.  All things should be free and easy, that group opined, and they practiced what they preached. 

 

It was their idea that their example of openness was sufficient, in itself, to make calm the heart of evil…not that they believed very stringently in the existence of evil in the first place.  Evil was, to them, misguided love, and it longed for an apotheosis by which it should come, shining, out of its ugly humor. 

 

Our co-generationists were to bring that happy moment into being, by dint of their goodwill.  All of us were, at the time—this is a theme—still young and unhurt. 

 

            Theirs was an intellectual and idealist snobbery, and they set fences around themselves without recognizing their existence.  They believed no one over thirty.  They dressed in flowered uniform to make a fence between themselves and the straights. 

 

             But they disliked other fences. 

 

At the time, of course, there was a war on.  Some of us laughed mightily at the silliness of the idea that Communism ought to be contained.  Why, Communism was nothing more than the idealist yearning of downtrodden men for a fairer sharing-out of the productivity of society and for a more social-justice orientation of the governing system.  What could be wrong with that?  That its principal exemplar, the Soviet Union, was a hideous affront to human dignity—to say nothing of its being an acute danger to human life—was a fact which didn’t penetrate the cotton batting some of us pulled around ourselves.  Beyond that, though many of us read The Baghavad Gita and Siddhartha and Black Elk Speaks, and considered ourselves quite spiritual indeed, the fact that Communism was antithetical to God troubled us little.  Indeed, in Vietnam, it was plain to many that our Christian nation was the aggressor and that the Viet Cong, whatever their Chinese Communist backing, were innocent and pacifist Buddhist victims of our megalomania.  

 

It would have astonished some of them at that time—even horrified them—had they been able to see a mere thirty years into the future.  It was to be the great monolith of Communism itself that died, buried in a rubble of concrete between the Germanys, and the evangelical Christian churches of America would be ascendant. 

 

            Picture if you will the young Dikkon, as yet unhurt. Surrounded by a few friends, cavorting freely on the beach at the southern tip of California’s Point Reyes, some fifty miles north of San Francisco, it was—as always—a stunning day in paradise.  That beach is backed by a tall cliff, perhaps sixty feet high.  It is pleasant to loll in the shade of that cliff and to drink wine and to talk earnestly of love and of God and of other beneficences. 

 

            On that day, our idyll was interrupted by a sudden…fence.  In the middle of a sentence, we were stunned by a sound from above of such hugeness as to blank all other sensation.  Our eyes jerked upwards.  No more than fifty feet above the top of the cliff, there appeared for an instant a flight of three Navy fighter jets streaking out to sea.  We had heard nothing until they appeared.  The noise when they passed was colossal.  They were so close above us that my eye photographed—and I still have in my mind—an image of their underbellies, one with a streak of oil near its wheel well.  In seconds, they had dwindled to specks above the far horizon.  

 

            Outrage! 

 

            I was for an instant a Vietnamese peasant and they the arrogant invaders.  What possible power could I muster against such might?  My friends stayed with that outrage through the next hour, and they whipped it into a froth of victimization.  But I grew quiet. 

 

            Suppose I were ever hurt.  Suppose I needed assistance.  Suppose someone dear to me were hurt.  Suppose…even suppose my country were hurt.  Suppose I needed to throw up a fence. 

 

            Those Navy jets were a strong, and a very high fence. 

 

                                                                        *****

                                                          

            I’m older now.  I’ve been hurt. 

 

Too, I’ve steeped myself in history and theology through many volumes and many years.  I’ve learned that others can be hurt as well as I.  I’ve recognized that bad neighbors do exist on earth.   I’ve understood that darkness does encroach across the green fields of our so green and pleasant land.  I’ve dreamed of a tower of my own.  I’ve grown angry and wanted to bang up a fence between myself and the Other, the Bad One.  I’ve watched the Blue Angels scream past me at air shows and marveled at their precision.  Mostly, though, I’ve breathed a prayer of gratitude that these magnificent men in their flying machines are on our side. 

 

I’ve challenged God on theodicy.  How can you allow evil, you who are all-powerful?  How dare you? And then I’ve cowered at my blasphemy. 

 

Like the flooded man disdainfully waiting on his roof for the Lord to provide—while first the Lord makes a floating door passes by, and then an empty canoe, and finally a Coast Guard helicopter with a dangling rope—none of which he uses because, as he explains later to St. Peter, he was waiting for God to provide—I didn’t notice at the time that the Lord was providing just as fully as He needed to, and that it was by my own arrogance that I failed to see it..  

 

            A stone wall along a property line in southern New Hampshire is a barrier to assure the goodness of neighbors of good will, but it is a figurative one withal.   Three feet high at the most, that fence will stop a cow from crossing but not a man with evil in his heart.  That’s when we are glad for the more powerful fences, the bigger and the higher ones, from the Spite Fence in Penobscot village to the instant platoon of taxi drivers who had my back in Roxbury, from the towers and stone cottages which saved our Irish ancestors—and with them Christian faith—to the fliers of supersonic fighter jets who have our national back today. 

 

            To be hurt is inherent in being the animals we are, albeit animals with a divine spark.  But, in the end, there is one even greater Fence that we can use. 

 

When it all comes down to the end, and we truly need a fence, and we have tried everything we can think of, and absolutely nothing else will do, we have Jesus to watch our backs. 

 

Jesus did stand up for us once upon a time, and He stands up right now, too.  Greater than the greatest soldier, who dies to save his foxhole buddy, Jesus (who is God) allowed Himself to die so that He might save all of us, through all time, until the end.  

 

            Here’s what Channa and I learned: against bad neighbors God has given us a Very Big Fence.   

 

  Copyright -- Dikkon Eberhart, 2013         

 

Fence Evil Out, part one

As a Christian, you admit that evil is.  As a Christian, you throw a barrier before that ring-tailed, horn-swogglin’, sidewinder of a devil before he gets the upper hand.   

 

Fences are necessary; always have been, always will be.   

 

                                                            *****

                                               

When I was a boy, my sister and I drove with our parents each summer through coastal Maine to our summer cottage.  Penobscot was one of the small hamlets through which we drove.  Penobscot was, and is, modest enough—small houses strung along the street, a store, and, for many years, a blueberry cannery, now turned into a craft shop. 

 

The houses are set close together.  As we observed Penobscot during our yearly drives, nothing much changed, until one particular year.  That year, we were stunned to see between two houses a tall wooden slat fence, as high as the second levels of the houses, stretching from the street back to what must have been the rear property line. 

 

What had happened? 

 

That raw wooden barrier was like a scream between the two houses…what could possibly have caused this palisade to be flung up?  The remainder of our ride was enlivened by speculative answers, each answer more excitingly lurid than the last. 

 

Many readers will recall that Robert Frost wrote a poem about re-building stone walls each spring with his neighbor, in which is found that famous line—“good fences make good neighbors.”  The poem tells of the two neighbors meeting to restore the wall between their properties, the neighbor being pine, and Frost apple orchard.  Time—and an imp—knocks down the wall each year, Frost says, and each spring it must be restored.   

 

In Penobscot, though, the installation of that wooden rampart seemed not to have been the result of a neighborly afternoon work.  It seemed as though it must have been thrown up in a sudden rage, and savagely nailed into place, by one side or the other. 

 

Thud, thud, thud: the hammer!   

 

My father took the opportunity of this shrill wall to write a poem he called “Spite Fence.” It’s not one of his best, but it concludes with a pun on the Frost line, and one which his pal Robert enjoyed.  Dad’s line always got a big laugh when he included the poem in public readings.  The last line of Dad’s poem is, “Bad neighbors make good fencers.”

 

Someone in Penobscot was safer, when fenced. 

 

                                                            *****

                                               

            Whenever I was young and broke, in Boston I would drive a cab. 

 

            One summer, in answer to a rash of cab driver muggings, and a murder, the company for which I drove agreed to install thick Plexiglas barriers, like fences, between the passenger area and the driver.  Despite that new fence, among my fellow cabbies, there were those who drove armed, though it was against the policy of the company to do so.  However, there were times—late on a Saturday night, for example, with a certain sort of fare in the car—when I longed to have a gun on the seat beside me. 

 

            But we unarmed drivers did have another sort of fence upon which we could depend.  There was radio communication between us and dispatch, and dispatch had access to all the Town Taxis in the city.  And Town Taxis were everywhere. 

 

One night I slapped up a quick fence. 

 

I had responded to a radio call in the Tenderloin—lower Washington Street—at 2 am on a Sunday.  Two young men got into the cab and directed me to a location in Roxbury.  They struck me as menacing.  Their manner was pumped, loud, aggressive.  As we approached what they said was their destination, they changed their minds and, without giving me an actual address, they directed me into a smaller street, and then, after that, into an even smaller and a more narrow and more badly lit street. 

 

I did not like this. They radiated nervous energy and were alternately silent and then loudly jiving. 

 

            Well, there was the radio code. 

 

I thumbed the button on my microphone, spoke a certain number, and recited my location.  That’s all I needed to do.  Instantly, all other radio traffic was cleared from the air, and I was live in realtime through the network.  Dispatch repeated the code number and my location.  That’s all it took.  Within two minutes, other Town Taxis cruised beside me.  I had five cabs inside of 120 seconds.

 

            I pulled to the curb and told my fare this was as far as I went.  All five cabs surrounded me.  A platoon of headlights bathed my fare.  Large men stepped from their cabs.  Baseball bats and tire irons were in evidence. 

 

Very quietly, my fare paid up, and, very, very quietly tiptoed away.

 

            That was some code, that was. 

 

            It was a battlement against which I could lean.  That’s what fences are for.  They let us know where we stop and where the Bad One starts.  And they keep it that way, with him on the other side.  

 

                                                                        ******

 

            As a young college man, I visited Ireland, and I made it my business to sojourn to Yeats’ Tower, to climb up into and to inspect its interior, and to observe the view from its windows.  I was at the time much enamored of William Butler Yeats, a poet who built no fences between the commonplace world and his inspirational world of spirits and the imagination.  Like him, I too longed for the lost woods of Arcady.  I was open to comers from all sides—spiritual comers—because I was still young and unhurt. 

 

Yeats built the tower for the wife he married late in life.  My father’s telling of Yeats’ Tower had given the place a prominence in my mind—Dad had been a diner with Yeats and his circle in the 1920s, and he had looked on the older Nobel laureate as a god-like being.  When I arrived at the tower, from Dad’s tales, I had expected it to be more imposing than it is.  Truly, it’s a modest construction.  But you may sit in its upper story and gaze out at the green hills and dream of your own escape from the pavements grey…to the shores of some Innisfree of your own devising. 

 

            A tower.  Yeats may have built the place just to afford his wife a high view, and himself a high one, too.  He may have been pummeled politically and wounded in love, but he was not a man who feared, I think, the stranger.  Nevertheless, the ancestors of Yeats’ Tower were designed to keep fearsome strangers away.  Towers are fences that one pulls up around oneself against the danger of those men from that mountain over there. 

 

Indeed, elsewhere along Ireland’s western coast are the ruins of towers more ancient than Yeats’, which have succumbed over the years either to Frostian imps or to war.  They nobble the sheep-grazed hills, and they fascinated me.  I explored those that I could reach in a few days’ walking. 

 

Who had stood within these walls, now cast down, and what had he feared from away?

 

            Still farther out than they are the stone huts of early medieval Christians, set on the rock islets strung along Ireland’s Atlantic shore. In those years, those hutments were home to monks who fell back as far as possible from the encroaching re-assertion of paganism, and then they set themselves a final bulwark, a fence.  Saint Patrick may have cleared the Ireland’s green of snakes in the fourth century, but, at least figuratively, the serpent was making a vigorous return by the sixth. 

 

The Irish monks were justly afraid of the spiritual danger they faced; it would be more than three centuries before the Auld Sod once again was free of the hissing of snakes.    

 

 

Copyright, 2013 – Dikkon Eberhart

 

 

Me and Peter

It’s evening.  I fished alone today on the Sea of Galilee, and the currents drifted me farther south than I usually go.  There is little wind. 

 

Instead of trying to row home, I decide to pull my boat onto the shingle in a new harbor; I’m a stranger here. 

 

I manage to sell today’s catch—not much—but now I have money for a drink.  Later, I’ll curl up in my stern-sheets and wait for dawn. 

 

From a dockside tavern issue companionable sounds.  The place smells of caulking tar and of salt bait.  I may be unfamiliar with this harbor, but I know taverns as well as I know my own hands.  I press inside the doorway.  The talk around me is of the catch that day and of the prices.  Prices have not been good.  The weather: always the weather…and the weather has not been good.  Some of the men are talking about the Almighty, and of what He said at some time or other. 

 

There are lamps lit on the bar.  A few men sit there.  I move forward to the bar and take an empty seat.  I order a cup of wine.  I look around.  Over in the corner there’s a big, loose-limbed, shambling kind of man, weathered as all of us are, with grizzled grey hair and a beard.  Several of the fishermen sit with him, listening to him talk.  He speaks slowly, every word carefully placed before his listeners as though he were displaying the Law and the Prophets. 

 

            “Who’s that?” I ask the man sitting next to me.

 

            “Oh, that’s Peter.  He’s back today from one of his journeys.  He’s talking about that new rabbi—dead now, they say.”

 

“What new rabbi?”

 

“Or maybe not dead…which is queer, you have to admit. You don’t know who I’m talking about?  Jesus of Nazareth?”

 

“Yes, I’ve heard a thing or two.”

 

“Jesus ought to be dead.  People saw him crucified.  No one lives through a humiliation like that!  But Peter says he came back to life, that he’s…well, the Messiah.”

 

There’s a pause.  I ask, “How well did Peter know the man?” 

 

“Very well.  He saw it all, Peter did.  He was with the rabbi the whole time.  He left off fishing to follow him.  Hard on his wife, but there it is.  However, she’s now become a missionary like him.”

 

We are silent, the way men are who are shy and wonder if the conversation has enough steam…and especially when the women have been broached.   

 

            “So what do you think?” finally I ask.

 

“That’s the devil of it.  I don’t know what to think.  But Jesus is the one, you know, who healed lame people and a blind man and cast out demons.  He fed whole crowds with only very few fishes and a piece of bread.  That, I know about.  I was there for that.”

 

“I wonder what it was like to be with him.”

 

“Peter says he was—is—mighty.  He knew him well, Peter did.  Have another?”

 

I would have another, yes.

 

“Peter says Jesus gave life a purpose.  The purpose is that God’s kingdom is right here on earth…right now.”  He barks a short laugh.  “Of course, you wouldn’t think so, when you look around and see what goes on.  But Jesus said that we should love one another, as we love ourselves…which we do, really we do.  And he forgave sins, Jesus.  That’s what got him into trouble.  He would just come right out and forgive a sin.  Just like that.  I mean, only God can do that.  That’s what the Pharisees say anyway.”

 

“And that’s why they hated him.”

 

My companion nods.  Again, we are silent, but then he continues, and his tone is softer.  “I was there one day when Jesus came across a woman who was, you know, an adulteress.  We all knew about her being that way.  So this one day, she got caught doing it, and we were going to stone her, and Jesus came up and—it was the most amazing thing—he stopped us.  He bent down, and he wrote something in the dirt.”

 

“What did he write?”

 

“I’d give worlds to know.  It was all scuffed when I tried afterwards to see what it was.” 

 

“Maybe Peter knows,” I suggest.

 

He shakes his head.  “Peter knows a lot, but not that.  I asked him once.” 

 

My new friend is still for a moment, remembering.   Then he takes a slug of his wine.  “It was like the others who wanted to stone the woman were testing Jesus, to see what He might say.  They challenged Him.  They called out to Him that the Law says to stone her.  ‘What shall we do?’  Then Jesus rose up from where He had been writing in the dirt—I’ll never forget this—and He said, ‘You who are without sin, you cast the first stone.’”

 

“What happened?”  

 

“I’d found a good stone, you know, heavy enough but not too heavy for a good throw, sharp edges.  It would hurt.  I was ready to go, but, when He said that, we, all of us, we just…stopped.  It was as though all the blood drained out of us.”  He strokes his beard, looks at me to see if I might understand.  “Not that I would have anything to do with a woman like that—of course not—but… well, what if she were my daughter?  She had to be someone’s daughter.  It’s hard to stone your own daughter.  Family honor, of course, and you restore it by the stoning.  But still it’s hard.” 

 

I nod. 

 

“But there was more to it than just that.  I’ve felt bad when I’ve stoned someone, sometimes, needful as it is.  But this was a different feeling.  All of us, we suddenly felt that this woman was—I know this sounds odd—we felt that she was God’s daughter…an adulteress!”  He belts another short, embarrassed laugh.  “And I felt—and I think the others did, too—that we were God’s sons.  We were all in the same family, in God’s family.  And the dishonor to our family did not come from our sister’s adultery….”

 

“Very strange.”

 

There is quiet for a moment. 

 

I prompt him, “Where did it come from then?”

 

“It changed me, the way I thought about that woman.  Yet it wasn’t the woman, really, in the end.  Jesus changed how I thought about myself.  I thought, if the kingdom of God truly is here, right here, what business do I have stoning another of God’s children, when it is I who have sinned?”

 

“You?”

 

“Yes, I.”

 

“The dishonor came from you?  How were you the sinner?”

 

There is a pause.  “Oh, I’ve sinned.”

 

“Well….”  I prompt.

 

“That’s where the dishonor came from.”  Another pause, and then, with finality: “I’ve sinned.”

 

We sit quiet for a time.  He stares into his cup; I drain mine.  “My turn.”  I wave to the man behind the bar.  When our cups are refilled, I glance at him.  “What’s your name?”

 

He tells me his.  I tell him mine.

 

I break the ensuing silence by asking, “So you didn’t stone her?”

 

“We dropped our stones and walked away.”

 

My friend takes a deep breath and lets it out.  He sits back a little and turns to me.  “What I think now is that we are all sinners.  We all deserved that stoning we were going to give to her.  But He forgave us, Jesus, not just her.  So we didn’t stone her.  We’re all sinners, equally, is what I think now.  Very odd.”

 

“I need to talk to Peter about this.”

 

“I heard what Jesus said to the woman afterwards.  What he said was, ‘Go, and sin no more.’  Just like that.” 

 

I stand up.  “That must have been a powerful experience.  Did she?”

 

He grasps my arm as I turn away, pulls me back.  “I’m a new man,” he says. 

 

I look at him and say, “Thank you for telling me this.”

 

He shrugs that off.  “I’m a new man,” he repeats, “That’s what you need to know.  You ask Peter if it’s not so: I’m new.”

 

I turn away and make my direction toward Peter.  I stand beside him, and he looks up at me.  There is great caring exhibited on his face, as though he can see right inside me.  For some reason—though I’m a private man—I am not alarmed when he looks inside me.  Instead, I feel relief. 

 

“Excuse me.  Are you Peter?”

 

“I am.”  His voice is a rumble, deep, content. 

 

The others make room for me.  I sit.  I sense that he is as full of holiness as a shell is full of egg.  His attention is on me.  I am dumb. 

 

Then: “May I, ah, offer you wine?”

 

He looks at me without reply. 

 

The holiness that is in him is because of his fear of God.  That fear leaves him joyful.  His joy makes him—and also me, there beside him—calm. 

 

“You do not come here to give me a drink.”

 

“No.”

 

No sound comes from Peter or from the men around me. 

 

“Excuse me,” finally I say, “I don’t know what to ask you.”

 

Peter watches me and then, taking a breath, he declares, “I stood on a mountain beside Jesus of Nazareth and knew him to be the anointed one.  He became light.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“That is my witness.”

 

My heart pounds, and my breath is short.   

 

Peter declares again:  “I spoke to him after he died, and I saw him rise into heaven.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“He called me, and I went with him, and I have been with him since.”

 

We are quiet.  My breathlessness makes me cough.  There is a murmur from some of the men, a shuffle.

 

“Please bless me.” I request, my voice sounding hoarse.  I had not expected to say that. 

 

“Do you know Jesus?” Peter asks. 

 

“I know of him.”

 

“You may love him.”

 

“He doesn’t know me.”

 

“Oh, but he does.”

 

“How can that be?”

 

“He knows all of us because we are sinners, and he is the Messiah.”  There is a pause, and then Peter continues, “He loves you.”

 

I take a deep breath.  “But you actually knew him?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“What was he like?”

 

“He was not like anything.  He was everything.”

 

“He was one of us?  A man?”

 

“He was a man, yes.  But he was the anointed one, who was foretold in ages past.  With my eyes, I saw that he was the Son of God.”

 

“But he’s gone now?  Dead?”

 

Peter nods.  “Risen, yes, but with us still.”

 

“Will he come back?”

 

Peter watches me. “When it is time.”

 

“And you preach of him?”

 

“Whenever I can.”

 

“Tell me something of him.”

 

“You long after him?”

 

“I do.”  I didn’t know that I did, until then, but I did.  “Please.”

 

“He will change you.”

 

“I am burdened, as I am.”

 

“He will change you.”

 

“I…I suppose I have sinned.”

 

“You suppose?”

 

I bow my head.  Quietly, I nod and say, “I have sinned.”

 

“And you ask for my blessing?”

 

“I do.”

 

“So I will tell you a story.  I am blessed by this story.  In it, there is a blessing for you, too.”

 

“Please.”  Still, I am out of breath. 

 

Peter shifts in his seat.  He glances around at the other men.  Then he focuses on me.  “When Jesus was tried and condemned, I denied that I knew him.  I was asked three times, and I denied him three times.  He had told me the night before that I should deny him, and I had scoffed.” 

 

“That is sad.”

 

“I am a humble man, of no great merit.  Why all this should have happened to me is a mystery.  One day, Jesus came to me and said, ‘Follow me.’  So I put down my nets and followed him.  That is all it took.  I witnessed miracles.  I experienced miracles.  I walked on water in the middle of a storm.  But the greatest miracle I experienced is this.  The greatest miracle came when I denied Jesus—just as he had foretold.  When I realized what I had done, I was wretched.  I had denied the Messiah who had come into my life and saved me.  I had denied him who had lifted me up out of the sea and rescued me in the storm.” 

 

“Terrible.”  

 

“But here is the miracle.” Peter looks me straight in the eye as he says this.  “When Mary Magdalene, and James’ mother, and Salome brought spices to anoint Jesus’ dead body in the tomb, and they found the stone rolled back, they were amazed.  There was no body.  But they saw a young man inside the tomb wearing a white robe —who was an angel.  And here is what the angel said to them.” 

 

Peter’s voice thickens. 

 

“Here’s the miracle,” he repeats.  “The angel said to the women, ‘Go, and tell the disciples’—he meant that Jesus’ body was gone.  And then the angel paused.”

 

There is a long silence as Peter holds my eye with his.  “And then the angel added, ‘And tell Peter, too.’” 

 

The others sitting around us have heard this tale before, but there is silence from them as well as from me.  The light is dim.  Even so, Peter’s face shines.  Peter stares at me.  “Do you understand?” 

 

“I understand.”

 

“Jesus gave me a second chance.  And I have never, and I shall never, deny him again.”

 

There is silence in the tavern.  Many of the men around the bar have left.  But no one has left the master. 

 

“Though I denied him, he loved me still.  Once again, he caught me and lifted me as I was about to drown, this time in my sin.” 

 

“It was a blessing.”

 

“I did not deserve it, but I needed it, as both Esau and Jacob needed Isaac’s.”

 

“Though they sinned.”

 

“Though I sinned.”

 

We are quiet for a time. 

 

“Thank you for your tale.”

 

“Jesus changed me.  I do not deny him anymore.  I speak of him.  I am redeemed by him.  Though he is gone, I am still with him, and he is with me.  He is here with me, right now.”

 

Peter reaches with a gnarled hand and touches my arm.  “He is here with you, too.”

 

And, for that moment, I perceive, He is. 

 

“That’s my blessing for you.”  Peter continues, “Jesus is bigger than the Law.  He is bigger than death.  He is bigger than time.  He is eternal.  And he is here with you now.  You may know him now.  For He knows you.”

 

“Will He forgive me?”

 

“God already has forgiven you.  That’s Jesus’ message.  You get a second chance, too.” 

 

I shiver. 

 

Peter rises.  It is not customary for me to do obeisance, but I bow to him and kiss his hand. 

 

“Bless you,” Peter says.  “Go in peace.”

 

“And you, too, sir.”

 

“Remember that you are forgiven, that you are free, and that you may have peace.  Follow Jesus, for He is the Lord.”

 

“I understand what you say.”

 

“I knew Him,” Peter says.  “With these eyes, I saw Him, and I knew Him, and He saved me.  He has saved you, too.”

 

After Peter leaves the bar, I walk outside with my original friend, and we stand at the top of the beach.  The sun has set, but the sky holds a faint light.  The world, right then, is calm. 

 

I continue to experience a shiver of holy dread.  I cough.  “Impressive,” I comment, “Peter.”

 

My friend glances at me.  “He is, yes.  We respect him tremendously.  He’s become an effective rabbi and a healer.  Often he’s away on journeys now; as he says, bringing the word about Jesus to other Jews.  Sometimes they don’t want to hear it.  Often, I should say.”

 

“Does he still fish?”

 

“He says so.  He says he’s a fisher of souls.”

 

“Perhaps I’m hooked.”

 

“Peter is right.  Jesus is the Messiah.”

 

“Peter saw all this.  He saw it!”

 

We are silent. 

 

Before my friend departs, he says, “But Peter’s impulsive.  I heard what he told you about not abusing his second chance.  Probably he will.  Probably we all will.”

 

We laugh. 

 

“However, Peter’s right,” my friend concludes.  “Since Jesus is the Messiah, there’s good news to report.  The good news is that we’ll all get a third chance, too.”





Copyright 2013 - Dikkon Eberhart