Religion

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Who· s Afraid of the Fear of God?

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I CAN picture Ecclesiastes as a man growing older, des- perately sensing that he is beginning to run out of time, too honest to repress or deny his fears and gripped by the sense that he will soon come to the end without ever having done something meaningful with his life. To be sure, he has been rich and his life has been a pleasant one, but those are such transient things. Riches can disappear in one's own lifetime or slip from one's grasp at death. Rich people can be obnoxious, lonely, sick. And all those moments of pleasure disappear as soon as they are over. In the end, he knows that he will have to face the darkness alone, without either his wealth or his pastimes to protect him. And if he will be asked, by himself or by someone else, "What did you do with your life, with all the oppor- tunities and advantages that you had?" what will he an- swer? That he made a Jot of money, read a Jot of books, and went to a lot of parties? A person's life should add up to more than that.

Ecclesiastes at this point in his life is wise and well read, learned enough to know that there is no answer in all of his learn ing to the question that haunts him. One day, he

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will write a book to try and answer it. But before he can do that, he has one more p~th to. pursue. Desperate to do something with his life which will ~e not only successful and pleasant but righ t in an endunng sense,. he leaps be. yond the limits of knowledge and understandin~, trying to

h the far shore where reason cannot lead him. Grow. ~~colder and more frustrated daily, Ecclesiastes, like :any people as they grow older, turn~ to religion. Frorn now on, there will be no more doubting or questioning, Ecclesiastes will devote himself "".hol:hea_rtedly to the scr. vice of God and the doing of His will.

Human beings do not live forever. That, of course, has been the starting point of Ecclesiastes' entire search and the rock on which all of his hopes were shattered, What was the point of being rich or wise when rich people and pocr people, wise men a?d fools are all _ fated to die and be forgotten ? But God 1s eternal; He 1s forever. If we attach ourselves to the Eternal God and devote our lives to His service, might that not do the trick? Might that not be a way of cheating death and avoiding that sense of futility and finality which makes all of our strivings mean- ingless? Ecclesiastes sets out to do things which arc eter- nally right and true, hoping in that way to gain eternity,

He never tells us why it did not work. Maybe he was too much of an individualist to be satisfied by the prospect of dying and disappearing himself but having served eter- nal values. Maybe he found hypocrisy and meanness in the halls of religion, learning that the most outwardly pious can be inwardly rotten, and came to doubt the worth· whileness of piety. He writes at one point (8 : 10) of seeing scoundrels being given honored burials in the shadow of the Temple, while virtuous but humble people lay forgot· ten and unattended. Maybe he was just too old to change

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Wh o's Afraid of the Fear of Godl

ritical, skeptical habits of a lifetime. But whatever th tbeC fl d h' . .. e on we soon n tm saying, Be not overeager 10 reas ' fG d " (4·17) "D go the }louse o o • · o not overdo goodness or 10

1 the wise man to excess, or you may be dumfounded ac . k d , Do not over~o w1c _c ness or be a fool, for you may die t,efore your ume. It 1s best that you grasp the one without letting go of.the other," _(7 :16-18) ~n other words, Jet your li fe be a m1xt_urc of piety and sinfulness; all things in moderation! Piety alone apparently was not the answer,

It is a devastating thing to have God fail you, However you conceive of God and whatever names you give Him, 10 base your life on certain assumptions and then to have them collapse under you is a shattering experience. It leaves you feeling not only that your theology is not right but that nothing in the world is right. Take God out of the picture, let events force a person to admit that the funda - mental assumptions of his life are false, and the whole world seems meaningless. I think of the idealistic intellec- tuals of the 1920s and 1930s who gave themselves heart and soul to the Communist party, and who tried for years not to notice its cruelty and hypocrisy. When they finall y had to confront the truth about the cause they had worked so hard to serve, it was more than an education or a disappointment. It was the destruction of the moral basis of their lives. (In fact, a book about disillusioned ex-com- munists is entitled The God That Failed. ) In Camus' novel The Plague, the priest Paneloux tells his congregation repeatedly that the outbreak of bubonic plague in their city is God's judgment on them for their sins and that ultimately God works all things for the best. When an innocent child dies in agon y shortly thereafter, Father Paneloux himself falls ill and dies almost immediately afterward, not so much fr om the plague, one suspects, as

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from the experience of having the principles to which h had devoted his whole hfc proven false, Without th e support, how could he live7 Hi~ God had failed hirn. at

Ecclesiastes' God ha_s failed him ~oo. He had turned to God looking for sccunty, fo~ scrcn_1ty, for freedom from fear and doubt by placmg himself m the service of GOd It was probably not his fa~lt that he did not find what h~ sought and needed m _rehg1on, and it w_as certainly not God's fault that Ecclesiastes t~rncd to rchg1on looking for the wrong things. The fault, 1f there was any, may hav been in the nature of religion as it was understood bac~ then.

In the Bible, there is no word for "religion." The con. cept is too abstract. The phrase closest in meaning to it is "the fear of God." What do those words "the fear of God" mean to you7 Do they conjure up the picture of an au. powerful authority living in heaven and thundering His will down to us, ready to smite us if we disobey? Do they make you think of a God who knows your every secret thought and deed, and will punish you if you do wrong ("putting the fear of God in you")1 lf so, then you are like a lot of people today and throughout the ages, whose understanding of religion has been based on fear of pun- ishment. Religion becomes a matter of God's command• ing and our obeying and being rewarded, or else disobey- ing and being punished. This was the way most people in Ecclesiastes' day understood religion. ("If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant you rains in their season ... you shall cat your fill of bread and dwell securely in your land .. . But if you do not obey Mc and do not observe all these command- ments, .. . I will wreak misery upon you, consumption and fev er. You shall sow your seed to no purpose for your

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emics shall cat it." Leviticus: 26) And this w h ~clcsiastcs could find no satisfaction when he ta~ dw Y .. . m w make rcbg~on the corncrst~ne. of his life. He rnay have t,cen sufficiently ahead of his time to sense that a life of obedience based on fear was not what he was searching for.

I have to int~oducc the important philosophical point of ibis chapter with a personal story. In 1961, I was a chap- lain m the Umtcd States Army, stationed at Fort Sill Oklahoma. I had been east for a conference and was ftyin~ back to Oklahoma from New York, changing planes in Chicago. The flight out of New York was delayed· I missed my connection in Chicago and would have to w'ait several hours for the next plane. At that point, I realized that I had just about finished reading the book I had brought along and had a two-hour wait and a two-hour plane ride ahead of me. Robert Louis Stevenson once defined an intellectual as someone who could spend an hour waiting for a train with nothing to read and not be bored. I guess I don't qualify; I needed a book to fill those hours. I tried the paperback bookstand at O'Hare Airport. Virtually the only book that didn't feature a half-naked woman on the cover was something entitled The Moral Judgment of the Child by Jean Piaget. I had never heard of Piaget or his book before, but rather than board the plane with my chaplain's insignia and a lurid novel, I decided to buy it. The book and its ideas went on to become one of the forces reshaping my life and thought, and I sometimes wonder to what extent my life would have been different had my plane left LaGuardia on time instead of forty minutes late that day.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was fas -

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cinated by the question of how children grow mentally. At what age do they start to understand concepts of "mine" and "yours"? What do they understand about time and space, about truth and make-believe at various ages? His research had led to a shelfful of books on the process of thinking in children .

The Moral Judgment of the Child deals with a child's concept of right and wrong, permitted and forbidden. Pia- get had a disarmingly simple way of gathering data. He would go out onto the streets of Geneva, approach chil- dren playing marbles, and ask them three questions:

How old are you? How do you play marbles? How do you know that is the way to play?

What he came away with was the attitude of children at various ages to rules of any kind, to religious and secu- lar authority, to the seriousness of breaking rules and the procedures for changing them. Piaget discovered three stages in the evolution of a child's sense of authority.

Young children see the rules of a game, and by exten- sion all the rules they are given, as having been handed down by an unquestionable higher authority. This is how you are supposed to play/behave, and it never occurs to them to do things differently. Piaget would ask these young children, "Why do you have to do it that way? Suppose you played the game some other way?" They would stare at him uncomprehendingly and say, "But that's not right. If you did that, you wouldn't be playing marbles." Rules are rules, and one becomes part of the system by accepting and obeying them.

As children grow older and approach adolescence, Pia·

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et found, they be~in to questi~n those rules, as indeed gh y begin to question all authonty. Now they don 't have 1 ebe prompted by an adult's question. They themselves 10 "Who says we have to do it that way? It's our game· say, ' whY can't we make any r_ules we ".'ant?" Typically, chil- dren then go through a~ 1rrespon~1ble phase, inventing a lot of silly rules, sometimes makmg the game too easy until it is not fun anymore, sometimes making it impossi- bly hard, before coming to the conclusion that they do have the power to make and change rules, but the rules they invent have to be fair and reasonable, or else playing the game won't be any fun.

At this point, says Piaget, they are at the threshold of maturity. They understand that the rules don 't come from "on high. " Rules are made by people like themselves, tested and perfected over the course of time, and can be changed by people like themselves, Being "good" no longer means simply obeying rules, It now comes to mean sharing in the responsibility of evaluating and making rules which will be fair to all, so that we can all enjoy living in a fair and just society.

Piaget suggests that these attitudes toward a game of marbles are a paradigm of our attitudes toward all rules, all authority. When we are young and weak, we picture the source of rules as being all-powerful and all-knowing. We show our appreciation for guidance by accepting and obeying the rules. A "good" child is not necessarily a generous or morally sensitive child but a docile and obedi- ent one. At this stage, we have difficulty accepting the idea :hat other people, other cultures, other religions have dif- tnt rules than we do. If we are right and they are "ilferent, they must be wrong. We are the norm; they are funny" or exotic if they eat differently, dress differently,

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or pray differently than we do. Wearin_g ri?gs in our call is what normal people do; weanng a nng m your nose is bizarre.

Children enter into adolescence, and they arc sudde 1 no longer interested in being "good." Obedience, winnn Y . . I tng the approval of their parents, ts no anger their high value . Like Piaget's second-stage subjects who did so est silly things with their marbles until they realized 1:: really wasn't all that much fun, adolescents do a lot f foolish things, sometimes hurting themselves or others, ~n the process of showing off how free of rules they can be As anyone who has raised teenagers knows, they Wili reject good advice rather than be in the position of listen. ing to parents and other authority figures. That is their notion of being "free."

Then, if they are lucky, they grow to become responsi- ble adults, men and women whose definition of "good" has come to mean more than obedience. It now means evaluating and adjusting the rules, using their power in the interest of fairness.

I read Piaget's book on the plane to Oklahoma that night and read it again when I arrived home. I realized that he was not only describing how the individual human soul grows morally. He was giving us, perhaps without even realizing it , a guide to the history, and perhaps the future development, of the two great centers of authority in our societies, politics and religion.

Doesn't the history of human government resemble Pia• gel's scheme of the history of a single child playing mar• bles? In the beginning there were absolute rulers and obt- dient subjects. Monarchs held absolute sway, with the power to make and enforce laws, to decree and collect taxes as they saw fit. Loyalty to the ruler, being a law·

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abiding citizen, ~erving in the army and paying your taxes without co?'pl~mt were the only real civic virtues. People obeyed thetr kmg, usually not because they loved him- HoW could they? They hardly knew him--<>r because they 1,elieved he w,antcd what was best for them, but because th•Y feared hts power, .

Then there were _revolutto?s against the absolute power of rulers, often lea_d1?g to pen~ds of chaos and excess, with many innocent v1cl1?1s ~uffenng from the arbitrary and unfair application of JUsltcc, corresponding to Piaget's sec- ond, adolescent stage, That revolutionary chaos gave birth 10 democracy, the idea that all the people should be in- l'Olved in making the laws, so that the laws would reflect 1heir collective will and wisdom. Rulers ruled only by the ehoice and consent of the people as a whole.

And what has been the history of religion, the ways in which we understood God, over the course of generations? One< God was pictured as an absolute monarch, a King of Kings, He would tell us how to live, and we would show ourselves as good people by obeying Him, living by His word. He would reward us for unquestioning devotion and punish us for being unfaithful servants. Every community would have its religious leaders and specialists, people who spoke for God and knew His will, and the faithful would feel obliged to obey them. God and His human representatives never had to explain themselves. They had only to decree, and people would follow .

Then at about the same time that people were beginning lo question the divine right of kings and to insist on bting s.iven a voice in running government, they began to ques- llon the divine right of God, as it were, They began to see the Bible as an inspired document written by human hands, rather than dictated by God. They saw certain laws

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a~d customs as resulting from the cult_ural and economic ci rcumstances of the people who fashioned them, rath than having come direc_tly from the mind of God. Pcop~: no longer wanted to think of t~emsclvcs as "faithful ser- vants." They wanted to be God s chtld_r~n grown to matu. rity . Parallel to the emergence of polttlcal democracy in Europe and Amenca, people began to assert their right t "vote" on matters of faith and morals as well.

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I have been fascinated by the impact that the American environment has had on Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious traditions brought to these shores by immigrants from Europe. Authoritarian religious strictures were forced to yield to the American creed of "This is a free country and nobody is going to tell me what to do." Churches which emphasized local, "democratic" control -the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Unitarians- flourished more than the centralized, hierarchically con- trolled churches that had been powerful in Europe. American Catholics felt free to transgress the teachings of their church leaders and still think of themselves as good and loyal Catholics. Jews abandoned Orthodoxy for the less demanding voice of Reform, or responded to the Con- servative teaching that religion was shaped by the people, not imposed by the leaders. Like Piaget's marble shooters on the sidewalks of Geneva, religious communities evolved from the stage of being docile, obedient children through an adolescent period of rejection and rebellion into a community of free adults demanding a voice in setting the rules by which they would live.

Piaget would insist that he is not simply showing us a range of options, alternative patterns of moral behavior. The later stages are better, more fully moral behavior than the ea rlier stages, even as an adult is more fully developed

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d rnore mature than a child, No matter how an . . h cute and

h ,rrning a child m1g t be, there is something 1·0 1 c • compete

••ut him, In that sense, democracy and pow h . . ~sm~ ire not JUSI matters of Western taste like baseball and cheeseburgers. They represent a higher, more complete more moral form of ~oc1al organization than dictalorship: Living patterns behmd the Iron Curtain, for example where the government controls ~~crything and people ar~ in constant fear of the authont1cs, arc objectively less moral because they represent a less mature, more childish

5uge of dcvclopm~nt. Those e~rly stages may be appropri- aie for a young child, eve~ as ti 1s appropriate for a young child 10 want to _ hve with his parents and have other peo ple make dec1s1ons for him . But there is something flawed about a person who never outgrows those childish nolions and patterns as he grows older.

And ii is here that Piaget has something to teach us 001 on ly about the mind of a child but about the fulure of religion and the quest for the good life. We learn from him 1ha1 obedience is nor necessarily the highest religious virtue. A religion !hat defines morality as obedience 10 its com- mands is appropriate to children and immature people, and may have been appropriate to humankind as a whole when civilizalion was immature. The Bible may speak in te rms of "Thus says the Lord"; it may promise rewards 10 the nghteous and punishment to the wicked, because it was addressed to people in the earliest slages of their moral development. The Bible may well be the Word of God, bu1 ii may not be His final word not because God's •bi licy lo express Himself was limited but because people's capacily lo understand Him was. A religion which pcrsisls munderstanding "good" to mean "unquestioningly obedi-

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ent" is a religion which would make perpetual children of us all .

I have known people who :,vcre deeply. serious about their religion, people whose rehgtous commitment was th single most powerful force in shaping their lives, and wh~ nonetheless left me wondenng whether all that religion was good for them . In some cases, there was a frantic obsession with sin, a perpetual fear that they had inadver- tently broken some rule, done something wrong and offended God , losing their Heavenly Father's love. In oth- ers, there was an attitude of"Now God will sec how good and devoted I am and maybe He will finally love me." I have known Jews who would spend the Sabbath not in serenity and spiritual refreshment, but in constant concern that they might be doing something forbidden, until the day became a weekly ordeal to be survived. I have known Christians who could not watch a television commercial without worrying that they were having lustful thoughts about one of the models, or who feared that they were guilty of the sin of pride anytime someone complimented them on what good examples they were to the community. Every action was undertaken in a spirit of "Now God will sec what a good person I am and He will love me." I could not help feeling that there was something incomplete about their attitudes, that their interpretation of religion was somehow keeping them from growing up.

There is a part ofus that wants to remain a child. When Peter Pan sings about not wanting to grow up and assume adult responsibilities, the children in the audience, all of whom can hardly wait to be a year older, think he is strange but the adults understand perfectly (and of course, it was an adult who wrote the original play and another adult who added that song). There is a part of us, espe·

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Who'.!' Afra id of th t Fear of God!

ciaIIY in times of str~s, tha~ wants _10 be cuddled and taken ca re of, 10 be told, . There s nothing to worry about· I'll take care ?f everythmg for you." How. often have I ;een

1 patient in a hospital, a man who might be a business

xcc utive, a woman whose days are ordinarily one 1 e . . b d ong string of dec1s1ons to e ma e and responsibilities 10 be bOrne, revert to an almost childlike "Take care of me" ,uitude. There 1s a part of us that wants somebody else 10 step in and do all the hard things we are supposed 10 d relieving us of responsibility . A medieval Spanish wrote in his journal, "! am confident that, after my :;h 1 will go to heaven because I have never made a decisio~ on m_Y own. I have alwaysfoHowed the orders of superiors, and ,fever I erred, the sm ts theirs, not mine."

In the same ve_in, the psychologist Erich Fromm, after fleeing from Nazt Germany to the United States, tried to understand how a cultured, educated people like the Ger- mans could have let a man like Hitler come to power. In his book Escape from Freedom, he suggests an answer. Sometimes, he says, the problems of life become so over- whelming that we despair of ever solving them. Should so meone come along and say in a loud, confident voice "Follow me without question, do everything I tell you to: and I will lead you out of this," many ofus would find 1hat a very tempting offer. When life becomes difficult , we want someone to say to us, "Don't worry your little head about 11. Let me do it for you, and all I want in return is your gratitude and total obedience." . That wish for someone to step in and take over when life starts to get complicated is the child in us speaking from our adult bodies. When religion panders to that wish, •hen religious leaders keep us in childlike submission and dependence, telling us what to do and asking our obedi-

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ence and gratitude in return, it does us a disservice. Th' is where the religion of Ec~lesiastes' day failed him. A.~~ thentic religion should not hsten to us when we say , "This is too hard. Tell me what to do so that I don't hav figure it out for myself." It should urge us to grow, to 1: to childish patterns behind even if we would rather rem:~e spiritual children. Religion should even encourage us :n challenge its own positions critically not out of adolescen~ impatience with limits but on the basis of an informed adult conscience. ("Encourage" is such a good word. Reli. gion should not be in the position of giving us answers. It should give us courage to find our own way.)

My job as a rabbi would be a lot easier if I could expect people to obey me in whatever I told them to do, as my job as a teacher would be easier if students would write down and memorize everything I said without question- ing. But in both cases, I would be shortchanging the peo- ple who looked to me for enlightenment. People are more like plants to be nurtured rather than empty vessels to be filled with my surplus wisdom. We can ask children to be obedient. "Don' t play with that!" is more appropriate than a lecture on the dangers of starting a fire or the conse- quences of breaking an antique heirloom. But we should stop treating adults as if they were still children in the name of religion. Ultimately, morality has to mean more than obedience.

The fear of God may indeed be the beginning of wisdom and the cornerstone of proper living, as the Bible rep~t- edly states. But "the fear of God" does not mean bemg afraid of God. "The fear of God" is not fear as we use :he word today, but awe and reverence. Fear is a negative emotion. It is constricting. It makes us either want to run

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from whatever we are afraid of or else awaY k 1 • want to destroy it. It m~ es us angry and resentful, angry at the person or_ thmg that fnghtens us and angry at our own weakness which !~aves us vulnerable: To obey God out of rear is to serve Him sullenly and with only part of our- selves. . . .

But awe 1s different. The feeling of awe is similar to fear . some ways. We feel a sense of being overwhelmed of rn h' • confronting someone or somet mg much more powerful than ourselves. But awe is a positive feeling, an expansive feeling. Where fear makes us want to run away, awe makes us want to draw closer even as we hesitate to get too close. Instead of resenting our own smallness or weakness, we stand openmouthed in appreciation of something greater than ourselves. To stand at the edge of a steep cliff and look down is to experience fear. We want to get out of that situation as quickly and safely as we can. To stand se- curely on a mountaintop and look around us is to feel awe. We could linger there forever.

Ecclesiastes, at the end of his religious phase, may well have said to God, "What more do You want of me? I have groveled, I have offered You unquestioning obedience, I have done everything You asked me to. Why then have You withheld from me that sense of completeness, that promise of eternity that I was looking for?" And God may have answered, "What pleasure do you think I take in your groveling? Do you really think I am so insecure that I need you to diminish yourself to make Me feel great? I wish people would stop quoting what I said to the human race in its infancy, and listen to what I am trying to tell them today. From children, and from spiritual childre~, 1 expect obedience. But from you 'unquestioning obedi- ence' is just another name for the failure to act like an

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adult and take responsibility for your own life Do • You want to feel complete? ~o you want to fee~ as if you have finally learned how to hve7 Then stop saying, 'I only d'd

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what You told me to, an start saymg, ou may or ma not like it, but I have given it a lot of thought and this _Y what I feel is right. ' " IS

True religion should not say to us, "Obey! Conform! Reproduce the past!" It should call upon us to grow to dare, even to choose wrongly at times and learn from ~ur mistakes rather than being repeatedly pulled back from the brink of using our own minds. For responsible reli- gious adults, God is not the authority telling them what to do. God is the divine power urging them to grow, to reach, to dare. When God speaks to such people, He does not say, as one might to a child, "I will be watching you to make sure you don't do anything wrong." He says rather, "Go forth into an uncharted world where you have never been before, struggle to find your path, but no mat- ter what happens, know that I will be with you." Like a father who is genuinely proud when his children achieve success entirely on their own, God is mature enough to derive pleasure from our growing up, not from our depen- dence on Him.

Authentic religion docs not want obedient people. It wants authentic people, people of integrity. What is integ- rity? The word "integral" means whole, undivided, all of one piece. Living with integrity means finding out who you are and being that person all the time. Religion does not expect us to be perfect. That not only would be impos• sible, setting us up for inevitable failure. It would almost be antireligious. If we were perfect, we could never 1~m (that would imply there was something we were lacktng

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, re). We could never grow or change. We would h t,e,o 1· . d . ave need for re 1gton, an m our perfection, we would b no od B 1· . e

a.s g~t as G . ut re 1g1on can expect us to be whole in another sense, not flawless but constant. The young have

1 word for it. Thc_y speak of a ~erson being "together" in

,he sense of knowmg who one 1s and what one stands for. (J.. thought: When we s~ak of one God, arc we doing something more than takmg a census of how many divine t,eings there arc? Are we perhaps saying that God "has it iogether," that He is a symbol of constancy and unvarying integrity? Maybe we can't be as wise, as powerful, or as good as God, but we can strive to be as whole as He is.) The challenge of authentic religion is not for us to be perfect, but for us to get ourselves together and be at all times who we are at our best.

J,.s the parent of a teenager and frequently the teacher of adolescents, I know how quick teenagers are to de- nounce hypocrisy in their parents and their religious and political leaders. One of the most dismissive names they can call someone is a "phony," a person who says things he or she docs not mean or who claims to believe certain 1hi ngs but acts differently. I am not about to come out in favor of hypocrisy, but I do find myself wondering why young people get so much more indigna nl about such discrepancies than they do about other equally serious issues (being cruel to the weak, for example, or taking things that don't belong to them). I suspect that it is because hypocrisy and integrity are big issues for them during their formative years. Adolescence is such a vola• tile time. Young people can be studious and respectful at one moment, impatient and boisterous an hour later. They can be terribly idealistic in the afternoon as they visit a nursing home or raise money to combat world hunger,

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and appallingly selfish and self-c~~tered on a date a few hours la ter. Adolescents by defini tion are going thro h the process of find ing out who t hey are, and it is a vug uncomfortable thing fo r them to be so changeable. 1 cry ·• h ' dt ' hh can 1magme t at, m or er o su rvive, t ey ave to believe th in a few more years they will have resolved these issu: and taken permanent shape. A t fi fteen , they say to the . selves, I may be confused and inconsist ent, but by the ti:e I am twenty, I shou ld be the same person a ll day ever day. That is why it is so upsetting for them to fi nd 0:i th at even older people, well-respected people h ave not achieved that sense of integrity. That is wh y one of the goals of the full y realized person is to develop this sense of integrity.

Religion is not a n agging parent, nor is it a report card keeping track of our achievements and failures and grad- ing us for our performance. Religion is a refi ning fire, helping us get rid of everything that is not us, everything that distorts, dilutes, or comp romises the persons we re- ally want to be, until only our authentic selves remain. G od' s firs t words to Abraham, " G o forth out of your land, your birthplace, your father' s house, t o the land which I will show you," can be understood to mean, " F ollow Mc and obey Me without question." But they can also mean, " Leave behind all the influ ences t hat keep you from being t he person you are capable of being, so t ha t t he real Abra- ham can emerge."

What is a person of integrity li ke? There is a Yiddish word which is un translatable but describes him or her perfectly, a m ensch. To be a mensch is to be t he kind of person God had in mind when H e arranged fo r human bein gs to evolve, som eone who is h onest, reliable, wise enough to be no longer naive but not yet cynical, a person

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Who's Af raid of the Fe ar of God?

•ou can trust to give you advice for your benefit rather >hall bis or her own . A mensch acts not out of fear or t k ood . . out of the desir~ t? ma e a g 1mpress_1on but out of a strong inner conv1ct1on of w~o he or she 1s and what he or she stands for. A mensch ts not a sa int or a perfect person but 8

person from whom all fals ehood, all selfishness, all vi n- dictiveness have been_ burned a way ~o that only a pure self remains . A mensch 1s whole and 1s one with his or her God-

I have known people of integrity, and the impression they leave is memorable. There is a quiet confidence to them, a sense of tranquility that comes at the end of the process of figuring out who you are and what you stand for. Unlike anxious religious people who are consumed by the fear that they may have broken some ru le and offended God, men and women of integri ty are concerned with living up to their own high standards, not with offending or pleasing God. Yet in their presence, one feels that God has reason to be pleased.

Father Robert F . Drinan was my representative in Con- gress for several years. He was a n articulate spokesman fo r compassion and liberalism. Because he had been a Roman Catholic priest and dean of a law school before being elected to Congress, his voice was listened to when he spoke out on moral and ethical issues, and he seemed to relish the opportunity to shape American law and life. But when word came down fro m R ome forbidding priests from holding political office, R obert D ri nan stepped aside when his term was over and did not seek reelection. A reporter asked him if he had considered defying the order 10 get out of politics and he ans wered, " Oh no, I could ~•~er do that." Some people t hought that he was simply hvmg up to his vows to obey his superiors, that he was

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WHEN ALL YOU 'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

saying he could not think for himself once the order h d been given . But I think I understood what he was sayina He was saying that he knew who he was. Being a Jesu1; priest was the core of his identity; everything else, however enjoyable or gratifying it was, was secondary. He could not do any thing to betray or conflict with that core. Had he tried to be a Jesuit sometimes and a Congressman sometimes, he would have lost the sense of integrity which comes with being the same person at all times and which was the secret of his strength. Like a photograph which is slightly out of focus, t here would now be two images of him, just far enough apart from each other that we would no longer be able to see the person clearly.

With this insight, we are beginning to move from Eccle- siastes' last questions to the beginnings of his answer. Ecclesiastes turned to religion to make him whole, to help him lead a life of enduring meaning. But the religion of his time, because it demanded obedience rather than authen- ticity, because it offered more fear and less awe, could not make him whole. It could make him "good" in the sense of obedient, but that was not what he was looking for. He needed more fro m God than that, and because he would not give up the search for it, he finally found it.

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