Conversations

One of the most memorable plays on Broadway is Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,”  first produced in 1938.  The scenes from a New Hampshire town finalize with a cemetery scene in which towns' people buried in the cemetery sit in chairs and carry on conversations about their past lives.  One young girl named Emily is undecided about returning to life, but she gives the famous answer about the living, “they don’t understand.” 

In all study of human behavior the greatest mystery is man's inhumanity to man and our total inability to comprehend the strength and weaknesses of others.  Aristotle described the human brain as a vast cosmos.  Frederick Niche, one of the early founders of the “god is dead” doctrine, a famed atheist philosopher, was also a pianist. His realization that life is not an even “playing field” helped him understand why he could not play the piano as well as some. 

William Golding wrote the famous book which become a movie “Lord of the Flies.”  In this epic, a shipload of English school boys sinks and they find themselves on a deserted island.  It was amazing how quick these well educated, sophisticated English school boys became savages.  An officer on the English ship who finally rescued them said he “would have expected better from British boys.” 

Real Christians understand savagery and undisciplined lives because we know that only God can change the heart.  And this comes by grace and faith through Jesus Christ and nothing else.  In conversations with the atheist in the academic community “and I firmly believe the last bulwark of true communism is the academic communities of the US,” (in my visits in communist university in Russia and China I did not find as much communist, Godless Marxism indoctrination as I find in American colleges).

The Godless, Marxist, communist countries such as Russia, North Korea and China, are poverty stricken in other ways.  The people there, in conversations with them, have a pathological poverty of ideas with a sick loyalty to nationality.  They have resigned themselves to a life of obedience for the sake of surviving.  As was the desire of Marx, Mao or even ACLU founder in this country Rodger Baldwin, the only value of a human being is his value to the state. 

When crossing Russia on the Tran Siberian Railroad, I don’t remember the name of the town, but I did get off the train briefly, I remember there was a large iron bear in front of the station. Departing from the train was long lines of prisoners chained together heading for the prison camps of Siberia, where they would work as slave labor.  I saw the same thing happening around the railroad tracks at Irkutsk and near Lake Baikal (It contains more water than all of the North American Great Lakes combined).  Conversations about religions and slavery are always useless to those who do not know the truth “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.”  (JOHN 17:17)

C.S. Lewis, known for writing the “Screwtape Letters” and “The Chronicles of Narnia,“  when he was converted to Christianity was known as  “the most dejected, reluctant convert in all England.”  But later wrote the book “Mere Christianity” and became one of the most prolific Christian writers.  His conversations, before he died, shared that the only hope of the world and those in the world who are the slaves of political and religious ideology such as communism and Islam, are not to be compared to those who are the slaves of unbelief in the Christian God of holiness.  “ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.” ( Leviticus 11:45). 

Like the man who, lame from birth, lay by the gate beautiful of the second temple for 40 years begging and was healed by Peter, only the disabled, slavery to physical ailments suffering from the poverty of pain as well as the conversations of people who pride themselves into an act of charity, can know the loneliness and defenselessness from humanity.  The Jews who had conversations about the man's poverty before he was healed, then had conversations about his jubilation, after his healing and after he held on to his deliverers, cannot possibly know the mental anguish of the mental behaviors of others.  Our conversations like our actions should always demonstrate a generosity of human spirit because the only difference in the human spirit and that of the lower animals is that of our nervous system, our ability to think.