Carolyn Custis James

It has been a long time since I was in a math class. But the other day, while listening to Garrison Keiller’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR, I was suddenly back in the classroom.

He was reading Jessica Goodfellow’s poem entitled “The Invention of Fractions.” I stopped what I was doing to listen.

In his smooth baritone voice, Keillor began,

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal

I was about to get a thought-provoking lesson in Higher Math.

The reading continued . . .

Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel —
Ten we’ve already lost —
forty days and forty nights,
Saul’s thousand and David’s ten thousand.
‘Be of one heart and one mind’ —
the whole numbers, the counting numbers

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could
find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.

It’s been almost three months to the day since Search and Rescue volunteers found my husband’s brother Kelly’s body in the snow cave on Mt. Hood. I know a lot of you were praying, and both Frank and I are grateful for your prayers and notes of support

As you can imagine, the grief and disappointment for my family are still raw. And I’m still processing everything that happened—from the upsetting midnight phone call telling us Kelly, Brian and Nikko were in trouble to the awful day the search effort was downshifted from “rescue” to “recovery.”

I’m still intrigued by how the story captivated and inspired the nation. We thought this was a private family crisis. Yet countless people watched and wept and prayed and cared deeply about the fate of our three guys right along with us. It’s difficult to explain such a phenomenon.

I can’t help thinking that at least one reason people were drawn to the story may have been because (if for only a brief moment in time) we were witnessing the kind of whole-number living Goodfellow writes about. The kind of unity God intended for the human race from the beginning.

With three men in trouble, scores of people voluntarily banded together as one, solidly united behind the mission of bringing the climbers back alive. It didn’t seem to matter that they didn’t know Kelly, Brian, or Nikko. It didn’t matter that many were strangers to each other or that there were countless differences among them. Somehow none of that got in their way. They dropped what they were doing, strapped on their gear, and headed for the mountain, ready to do whatever they could to find and rescue the three lost men.

The first mathematical equation in the Bible gives us a hint of the kind of whole-number world God envisioned from the beginning. When he created the first man and woman and gave them a monumental mission, he said—the two “will become one flesh.” It’s a higher form of math that doesn’t easily compute in our world. Not only do we have trouble pulling it off in our relationships, even modern technology resists it. No calculator or computer—no matter how sophisticated or how many times you try—will ever tell you one plus one equals one.

Jesus takes the equation even further. According to His calculations, it doesn’t matter how many “ones” you add together, the final sum will always be one. This is His heart for us. And no matter how solidly united SAR volunteers were on Mt. Hood, Jesus means for His followers to surpass them in whole-number living.

Jesus final prayer for us—His dying wish—was “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. . . . May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:21, 23).

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I still have a lot to learn about math.

After the death of a loved one—or any other sorrow or loss—there is the expectation in the minds of many Christians that the sorrower should put their grief aside and move on with their life. Our troubles are like hurdles placed in our path to test our spiritual fortitude. It’s a sign of spiritual maturity (so we tell ourselves) to rise above the pain or at least to conquer it at some point. The goal is to surmount successfully these miserable hurdles and get on to the smooth stretch on the other side. Someone who months or years later still feels depressed, still talks a lot about their loss, or whose eyes still well up with tears at the mention of their loved one, just doesn’t know how to let go.

As much as others expect it of us, no one wishes to walk away from grief more than the person who is grieving. And we are hard on ourselves when our broken hearts don’t heal. After the death of his beloved wife, Joy, to cancer, a broken C. S. Lewis admitted it was hard to get beyond his grief. In his poignantly personal book, A Grief Observed, he exposes the fallacy of this kind of thinking.

“To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce,continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. . . . At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

http://mthoodclimbers.blogspot.com

New Year’s Day has always been a favorite holiday for me. Having grown up with three brothers, I naturally associate it with good food and lots of football, minus the pressures Christmas creates. At a personal level, I like the pause for reflection and resolve that January brings and the sense that this is a new beginning, a fresh start, a chance to do a lot of things better than I did in the year that has just closed.

When Frank and I hiked Hadrian’s Wall in England, back in 2006, we covered long stretches where no trace of the ancient Roman wall remains. Lots of sheep and cows and picturesque English countryside, but no wall.

Built to last, the original wall ran 84 miles in length, east to west across Northern England near the Scottish border. Fifteen feet high and eight to ten feet wide, the wall was dotted with mile castles and turrets along the way. Hadrian’s Wall established a formidable barrier between the Roman civilized world to the south and (my apologies to readers who may be Scottish) the barbarians in the north. Yet, over the centuries, farmers (so we were told) pilfered stones from Hadrian’s Wall to build houses and churches until in many places the massive wall simply disappeared.

Apart from archaeologists (and a few hikers), no one is lamenting the current state of Hadrian’s Wall. In fact, one could argue that the crumbling of Hadrian’s Wall is a good thing—a hopeful symbol on the world’s landscape that tells us deep-seated hostilities can subside. I found that harder to believe, as we hiked during the day and caught BBC World News in the evenings. Fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, civil war looming in Iraq, and casualties in Afghanistan—just a few of today’s dividing walls, erected from the stones of hatred and hostility.

In a world of walls—those in the news and those we routinely bump into in our personal relationships—hope can take a beating. We could use a word of encouragement.

ABC news anchor Charles Gibson once reported that “we don’t usually look to the Middle East for uplifting stories.” But one of ABC’s reporters had found one. In the aftermath of a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli border town, two Jewish brothers—both husbands and fathers—lay dead. A third surviving brother, devastated by grief, was nevertheless determined to do more than bury his brothers. He took action to donate his brothers’ organs. Among the waiting candidates was an Arab man who was losing his sight and who was completely dumbfounded and humbled to receive the gift of sight from a Jewish victim of an Arab missile. A successful cornea implant restored sight to the man and broke through a barrier most people would have thought was impenetrable. Who would believe that a grieving Jewish man and an Arab could weep together, embrace and call each other “brother”, while in the distance the battle continued to rage?

Gibson was right. We don’t expect to find hope in the heat of the battle. But then, those who are living with the horrors of war know how precious peace is and are willing to take extraordinary measures to achieve it.

Even more encouraging (and also sobering), I think, is the fact that Jesus is so fiercely committed to tearing down the walls that divide. He took costly measures to bring true peace to a broken, embattled world. You’d think that, given his commitment, he would handpick followers who had been matched by the most rigorous personality screening. Instead, he has an unsettling way of bringing people together who have nothing in common and are sometimes a lot like combining nitro and glycerine. But this is where the power of his gospel shines through. And he has more in mind for us than a cease-fire or teaching us how to “get along.” He wants us to become so united to him and to one another that we function as the members of a healthy physical body—his Body.

That’s something to ponder.

Big things are at stake in how Christians relate to one another too. Jesus casts a vision for us that demands the radical kind of bridge-building displayed by those two former enemies in Israel. “Father,” He prayed for us, “may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23). According to Jesus, there’s an awful lot riding on the state of relationships among those who follow him and the kinds of peace-makers we become in the world. The quality of our relationships sends a message to the world that Jesus has come and that we are beloved of the Father.

Proof showed up in Africa when the paths of two African women crossed. The two arrived as grief-stricken refugees at the same Christian shelter in Kenya, only to discover they were from warring tribes. The men in their family—husbands, brothers and sons—had been brutally murdered by men from the other woman’s tribe. One can only imagine the intensity of animosity and pain as the two women came in contact. The potential for vicious conflict between them was frightening. But the gospel of Jesus Christ took root. As the two women began to grasp what Jesus had done for them, the wall between them simply collapsed under the sheer weight of his grace and forgiveness. I don’t want to minimize the struggle it took, but in the end, the two women embraced each other as sisters in Christ.

As a hiker, I admit I was disappointed that more of Hadrian’s Wall hasn’t survived and I enjoyed most those segments of the hike where ruins of the ancient Roman wall still stand. As a Christian, however, I am compelled to side with the farmers. Jesus calls me to join him in dismantling the walls.