Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — February 29, 2004

When someone begins a sentence with the words “I’m
not superstitious, but…” you can be pretty sure he is
about to confess a superstition. So let me phrase this a bit more
straightforwardly and precisely than that: I don’t consider
myself to be superstitious, but I do sometimes interpret events
in a way that may attribute more significance to them than is
strictly warranted. Of this bent are the thoughts that occur to me as I
compose my fifth journal entry for the month of February. We are
in a leap year, and February 29 has fallen on a Sunday. We have
had five Sundays in our shortest month. When I noticed this, it
struck me immediately and irrationally as a good thing. But what
difference does it make which month the Sundays fall in? The
number of Sundays yet to pass before the end of the world, or the
end of one’s own life, is unchanged. And yet it seems
somehow a bit of good fortune, or a blessing.

Whatever their names, the number of our days is fixed, and
they continue to pass. In contemplating what is left behind as each
day ends, I
have often conjectured that one of the secrets of the next life
might be that what is good in this life would somehow be
available to us. Perhaps this is just the sentimentality of one
too attached to this world, but it seems difficult to believe
that what is truly good and beautiful in earthly life should be
gone forever once it has receded in time. My notion of
access to all time poses no logical difficulty if it is true that we will
be in eternity. But since sin cannot enter the Kingdom, any time
spent in sin would truly be gone, irrecoverably: time wasted, in
a perfectly literal and permanent sense.

I have been reading—very slowly, a few pages here and
there—a book I should have, and wish I had,
read years ago, Boswell’s
Life of Johnson. I was intrigued to find in it the
following prayer from a diary entry made by Johnson on his
twenty-eighth birthday; it seems to hint at a similar idea,
though considered only with respect to the day of judgement, and
not beyond :

Mayest thou, O God, enable me for Jesus Christ’s sake,
to spend this in such a manner that I may receive comfort from it
at the hour of death, and in the day of judgement! Amen.

Speculation aside, this is an excellent morning prayer for any
and every day.

******

A Word from the Devil on the First Sunday of Lent

Upon hearing today’s Gospel (Luke 4:1-13) I
found myself considering the
reason why the devil considered himself entitled to offer Jesus
all the power and glory of the kingdoms of the world:
“…for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to
whom I will.”

I don’t think this means that anyone who has worldly
power owes it to Satan—there is testimony in the Bible to
the contrary—but as we try during Lent to wean ourselves at
least a little from the world, we do well to keep in mind that
success therein is not necessarily a sign of God’s favor,
and might even be the work of an altogether different power.