The Pursuit of Happiness: Some Entertainment at the Outset
1.	Movie
	a.	Capon begins with his book with a "screenplay" about a King and a Parlormaid.
2.	Dialogue
	a.	The universe is notably indifferent to either good or evil.  It leaves ample room for both and does not, despite the prejudices of the more antiquated sort of fiction writers, necessarily punish the lucky, however distasteful you may find their luck.
	b.	Accordingly, if you encounter - either in the wide world of experience or in the narrower realm of fiction - two people who profess to be quite happy in a questionable arrangement, you may not say to them (or to their creator, in the case of a fiction) that they cannot possibly be happy because there are laws against that sort of thing.  You may call them monsters, or fools, or sinners, or anything else that philosophy or theology wants you to call them; but you may not call them liars about their own contentment.
	c.	The English language seems to me to be on to something here.  Specifically, it is on to the home truth that we cannot, in any ordinary sense, arrange for happiness; rather, happiness must somehow befall us.
	d.	We are - all things are - free to do whatever we or they choose to have happen.  And happiness is simply our word for a felicitous tissue of such happenings - just as unhappiness is our name for a dire one.  Or to put the matter more carefully, happiness lies in our ability to accept everything that happens and then either enjoy it gratefully or reconcile it patiently.  We may not be able to control all of the things that happen outside us, or even very many of the things that happen inside us; but since we are in control of both our gratitude and our patience, there is always and in every circumstance a path open to the happiness that God already has over everything.
3.	Interlude
	a.	Religion is the attempt on the part of human beings to establish a right relationship between themselves and something outside themselves - something they think to be of life-shaping importance.
	b.	But whatever its incidental of goal or style, it will always have three essential characteristics: it will involve a creed; it will demand specific cultic practices; and it will insist on certain patterns of conduct in its adherents.
	c.	Creed encompasses everything we think (or believe, to use the word loosely) when we undertake the program of a particular religion.
	d.	Cult stands for all the liturgical practices...
	e.	Conduct, finally, covers the rest of the territory of religion: it stands generally for the behavioral requirements that the program of our religion lays upon us, but specifically for the moral aspects of those requirements.
	f.	But once again, and for the last time: every one of these things - when done as part of the program of a religion - would be done on the assumption that if we got it right, it would land us in the New Jerusalem, or the Old Eden, or the God Life...
	g.	The first is that it always insists on our getting the entire business right.
	h.	Religion commonly professes to love the something it's trying to establish a relationship with; but in fact its program is aimed less at love than at such things as appeasement, propitiation, self-protection, conjuring, and control.
	i.	You can conform intellectually to every scrap of your creed and still be hit on the head by a loose gargoyle off a buttress of the cathedral.
	j.	...religion is not fun.
	k.	[Jesus came to announce] the end of religion.
	l.	The main item in Paul's job description was precisely that he knock religion in the head.
	m.	Religion, as a device for insuring anything, just doesn't work.
	n.	And so instead of facing the rigors of the subjects themselves, we regularly substitute a minor we think we can pass - and that minor is invariably religion.
	o.	For instance, Instead of dealing with death, we conjure with assorted religions that we think will enable us to avoid it.
	p.	Yet instead of looking at the satisfaction of work well done, both you and I persist in giving our chief attention to the religion of money - a religion which, as you well know, holds that we are no good at all unless we are paid in exact proportion to our efforts - or beyond all proportion, whichever shall first occur.
	q.	But perhaps you see the point: whether the major subject is Health, Money, Love, or anything else, our religions become substitutes that do nothing but cut us off from whatever happiness we might, by gratitude or forgiveness, have gotten while taking the courses.
	r.	Religion may enjoin upon you weighty and important things like not lying or having only one husband; superstition, by contrast, may give you silly things like not getting on a plane unless you have hung up the bath towel with the label out of sight.  But in no case is there any difference between them when it comes to their respective abilities to deliver the improvements they promise.
	s.	Besides, if you put all the miracles ever wrought into one pile, they would look like a grain of sand compared to the galaxies - full of noninterventionist, luck-of-the-draw operations by which God normally lets the world run itself.
	t.	...as Charles Williams was fond of saying, "All luck is holy" - for the simple reason that all luck, good or bad, is God's chosen metier.
	u.	That, then, is what's really wrong with religion even after you've given it all the good marks you can: it rejects God's holy luck and tries to substitute for it our own sticky-fingered control.
4.	Story
	a.	...either our homesickness is bunk, or it is the greatest thing about us.  Either the Beloved has always been calling us home, or home is the final delusion, a creature of air and foxfire that dies in the darkness of our last breath.
	b.	...it is precisely a party that draws us to the home at the core of our being.
	c.	The Beloved, you see, not only makes the world by her speaking but she also restores it.  She brings all things out of nothing by calling their names; and the brings them back from their naughtiness - from their foolish attempts to make themselves nothing again - by re-calling their names.
The Course of the Pursuit: Some Observations along the Way
5.	Childhood
	a.	As a pastor rather than a therapist - as one who sees not just the select few who opt for treatment but a cross section of the great, gray-green, greasy mass of untreated humanity - I find them generally in one of two postures.  If they are not blindly raging against their debilities or lashing out in unfocused resentment at anyone near them, they are slouching along in uncomprehending silence.
	b.	You may mend psyches as deftly as you mend broken legs, but unless your patients supply themselves with robust attitudes and actions in their lives, they will soon become sad and sick all over again.  Happiness (to say it again) is the ability to take everything that happens and either accept it with delight or reconcile ourselves to it by grace and forgiveness.
	c.	...but as the great, first sacrament of the whole mystery of being - of life itself.
	d.	In any case, children are philosophers before they are scientists: their first thoughtful response to the universe is to assume that it is magic.
	e.	They are smart enough, in other words, to realize that the proper first response to creation is astonishment, not explanation.
	f.	...if you opt for materialism instead of magic as the correct explanation of your being - you will lose the love of risk-for-the-sake-of-wonder you first learned in childhood.  And your relationships themselves will be reduced to little more than exercises in cost accounting.
	g.	Like Adam and Eve, children find themselves in a world where everything is a matter of luck.  They didn't arrange for their presence in it: they simply woke up one day and found themselves inexplicably there.
	h.	The fall occurred early enough in the story of the race to corrupt the rest of history, and it occurs early enough in everyone's childhood to corrupt the rest of our lives.
	i.	...to avoid being losers, we have lost the game itself.
	j.	Childhood remains the time in which we learn not only the game but also the way to destroy the game - in which we both discover and forget how to play.
	k.	I have very little patience with people who rattle on about the Divine Plan - who talk as if God had the script of history already written and all we had to do was find a copy and stick to it, or else....
	l.	When a baby is born, there are only a handful of activities it comes factory-set to run: it can breath, suck, swallow, and respond to loud noises and sudden withdrawal of support.  All the rest of the programs it needs - nursing, crawling, walking, talking, whistling, reading, whittling, romancing - it acquires through play.
	m.	The highest form of play is precisely turning ourselves on in order to turn others on; it is the offering up of the good in delight, for delight.
	n.	We are playful offerers of creation almost from square one because we are meant to be playful offerers of it all the way up to square forever.
6.	Childhood: More
	a.	On the one hand, original sin did indeed say that right from the start of our lives there was something incurably wrong with us. To wit, that we were somehow profoundly unable (not just occasionally unwilling) to make the playful offerings of reality we were designed to make.  But on the other hand, when the doctrine was correctly expounded, it still insisted not only that we were designed as offers but that we remain under an inescapable compulsion to fulfill that design.
	b.	Our problem is not that we are unadulteratedly bad, but that we can never quite manage to be unadulteratedly good.  In short, we are prone to both goodness and badness at the same time.
	c.	The world of evil, therefore, is actually a perverse creation, a parallel universe of air and darkness that has no God-given reality at all. But (and this is the biggest but in the world) because that weird, unnatural universe so preoccupies the human race - because we spend so much of our real, God-given energy making offerings to that fake world - evil does indeed acquire power over reality.  We become its agents.  Through us, it warps the world itself.
	d.	The business of lifting up things (and people)into higher unities - into further, more elaborate moves in the Dance of Creation - is something we do by nature, constantly.  Beginning with our primitive ancestors, for example, generations of gardeners have lifted vegetables into ever higher forms.
	e.	That, you see, is the fundamental trouble with religion: as far as real life is concerned it is always on the sidelines.  It is over there, trying to stave off disaster by making irrelevant offerings in some arbitrary world, while the disastrous offerings in the real world go on just as before.  It is a parallel dance that has no necessary, beneficial effect on the actual Dance of Creation.  Worse yet, it can also become a tyrannical dance that in fact adds to the disasters of the real Dance
		i.	First of all: religion operates in a self-originated, parallel world rather than in the world as originated by God.
		ii.	Second: because the world it thus confects exists only inside us, it operated by directing our attention and our efforts to our own insides rather than to the world we actually inhabit.
		iii.	Third: it makes the false assumption that these pseudopriestly, internal transactions we busy ourselves with have some controlling effect on the outside world.
		iv.	And fourth: because it thus neglects to concern itself with the transactions of actual history, it encourages and compounds the disasters that already flow from our failure to make true priestly offerings of the real world.
	f.	What I am really saying is that he(and any other member of the human race, young or old) is somehow disposed to credit the parallel universe more readily than the real one.
	g.	Children are first taught that money is valuable in itself.  Next, they are taught that it is power: if they have money, they can do things that children without it cannot do.  After that, they are taught to value themselves simply because they have it, not because of who they are.  And finally, they are taught to value others - and their relationships with others - in terms of the monetary value that can be put on them.
	h.	In a word, we teach them that everything must be earned.
	i.	The church acts far more often like an institution selling a product to canny buyers than like one offering liberty to slaves of the system.
	j.	Giving, therefore - dumb, no-reason-for-it unloading of money - remains the only hope of a cure for the disease of money.
	k.	Even when parents provide good examples of giving, the system of money is still so pervasive that it is entirely possible for their offspring to grow up devoutly greedy anyway.
	l.	In short, it learns that it must be successfully religious if it is to be of value to its parents.
	m.	From "Mommy is disappointed in you," to " Daddy is angry with you," all the way up to the child-abuser's unappeasable rage, our primary caretakers' primary care seems to be to convince us that it's our fault that they are not happy or that we are not loved.  Obviously, most parents don't deliberately set out to produce that impression.  But their habit of harping on what goes wrong, plus their strange conviction that blaming children is the best way to teach them responsibility, guarantees that the impression is almost universally given.
		But blame doesn't lead to responsibility.  Responsibility is a positive trait, developed more by acceptance and encouragement than by criticism.
	n.	By the time she is an adult, therefore, she reaches the standard condition of the human race, namely, an utter inability to believe in or even conceive of acceptance as a free gift.
	o.	Any Christian preacher who has seriously tried to convince a congregation that God in Christ no longer has any problems with their sins - that he simply accepts them freely as they are, sins and all, and forgives them out of love - knows that that's the last thing they will ever buy.
	p.	That Jews and Christians have become obsessed with guilt is not something you can pin on God.  We did it to ourselves.
	q.	Getting rid of religion is always the first step back to love.  Given that, the Love that draws everything home does all the rest.
7.	Romance
	a.	Those monkeys, in fact, are not just a single barrel of discrete inconveniences that have kept you so far from anything seriously resembling fun; they are - to say it quite plainly - one and only one monkey, namely, the great baboon of ‘the endless struggle to think well of yourself.'
	b.	It's almost as if Jesus is deliberately making the point that he can't deal with someone who's any kind of winner at all.
	c.	His paramount purpose is to drag the whole world into the party; if you make good behavior any condition at all, you blow the Good News of his purpose out of the water.
	d.	Their sin, even unrepented of, is still no obstacle to his sovereign acceptance of them.  Even if they decide to be eternal party poopers, he still wants them: "the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance" (Rom. 11:29).  God never changes his gracious mind.
	e.	The plain, historical fact of the matter is that romance as we now subscribe to it - romance, that is, as an earth-shaking, heaven-rending, metaphysically ennobling experience - was introduced to the Western world precisely in connections with adultery.
	f.	Marriage, as it then was and for a very long time continued to be, was at its best a contract to achieve something called love: love was not what brought people to it; it was what they were expected to work at all during the course of it.
	g.	With the invention of the modern novel, we set about the paradoxical task of making romance not the astonishing midnight sun that shone outside marriage but the ordinary, expected dawn of it.
	h.	The point I am about to make is that romance is always on the fringes of respectability, always iconoclastic.  It didn't just begin that way; it remains that way by its very nature.  It no more blends smoothly into the routine of marriage now that we have make it matrimony's familiar front door than it did back then when it was a glorious if surreptitious walk around the back yard.
	i.	From that momentous lat-eighteenth-century day when the first moonstruck couple decided to defy all parental desires and make their own marriage on the basis or romance, romance (which hardly ever needs help at all) has had the whip hand over marriage (which always needs all the help it can get).  Do you see?  In its earliest days, romance was a threat to marriage simply because it was present: whether it proceeded to literal adultery or not, it was always a blatant infringement upon marital rights.  And in our days, romance is still a threat to marriage, but for a new and opposite reason: now, when we find it absent from marriage (as one way or another we inevitably must), we make it the sovereign reason for getting out of marriage - because, Lord help us, we claim that its absence is an infringement upon our personal rights.
	j.	We can no more go back to the romanceless days before Chretien de Troyes or to the quiet, dutiful marriages before Jane Austen, than we can to thinking the earth flat or a man's stride the measure of its distances.  All such fantasies are now on the other side of a great gulf.  Any future we have, delightful or dire, will be as romantic as al get-out.
	k.	Jesus is nowhere near as tough on the subject of adultery as he is on marriage.
	l.	I do however, have two consolations that keep me very far from despair.  The firs is that in all likelihood nobody else's track record (yours included, gentle Lector, if you are honest) is noticeably better.  But the second is that despite the shortfalls of both of us in any or all of these departments, we have never once seriously considered shutting down even a single one of them.  Unthinking clergy may bewail the decline of marriage, but with four out of five of the one out of two who divorce heading bravely back for another go at the marital strength test, the statistics are against them.  Romance fares just as well: it is still the Great White Queen of our fantasies, even for those of us who may feel we have been banished to the outer marches of the kingdom.  Sexuality fares better yet: even though (like Arthur from East Waffle) everyone treats it as if it were some kind of religious observance that no one can possibly get right, nobody doesn't have a sex life, one way or another.  Period.  And love fares best of all (though it is hands down the worst performed of the lot) for one simple reason: we need it more than air or light: we die without it.
	m.	Rather she was, even when I was only five, a remembrance - or if I may lay upon you another technical theological term - an anamnesis of a love that had already called to me and of a home that had already borne me.  (Anamnesis, by the way is the Greek word used by the New Testament in recording Jesus' command at the institution of the Eucharist, "Do this for my remembrance."  "Remembrance," however, is too weak a translation to convey its force: since orthodox Christians have always held that Jesus is not just mentally remembered in the eucharistic rite but really present in the power of his death and resurrection, the word anamnesis conveys the idea of something in the past that is also an ongoing fact in the present.
	n.	Even our first romantic event, therefore, is precisely an anamnesis.  And I have already said what i think it is an anamnesis of: first, it is a making present again of our deep Home in the Bed of the Trinity; second, and more immediately, it is also a representation, a sacramental manifestation, of our earliest home here - of the home into which we were literally and historically born.  And all our subsequent romances follow the same rule: they are not the conscious search for someone who matches precisely the paradigm of our earliest romantic experience,; rather, they are the constant rediscovery in later loves of yet another anamnesis of those same two homes.
	o.	We fall in love not with people whose specifications we have logged into a dating computer, but simply with people we have been lucky enough to run into, given the stringent limitations of time, space, physical energy, and ready cash.
	p.	Thinking has almost nothing determinative to do with them, and neither does willing.
	q.	We are always sitting ducks for the anamnesis.
	r.	Sensibly enough, we have made rather a lot of rules for ourselves in an effort to put some restraining body English on all this fabulous luck; so much so, that you probably expect me, as a gentleman of the cloth, to say something about the rules.  To please you, here it is: The rules are fine.  But at the risk of displeasing you, I have to say that expounding them is not my cup of tea - nor if it was, would i do it anyway.  Because the human race, wisely, has always preferred the fabulous to the sensible, no matter what the cost - not even if the fabulous always made messes and the sensible always made sense.
	s.	Even at four, he remembered something - and that remembrance re-membered hem: it put him back together as the self he had never recognized but now knew.  You may doubt that if you like, but I was there and you weren't.  Trust me; whatever I've said about it is less than a hundredth of what happened.  It was another first for the fabulous, remembering love.
8.	Romance: Further
	a.	For even in their worst breaks, our loves do not just break down; they break upwards as well. And what they break upwards to is Love itself: the Home that invented them in the first place.
	b.	...a sacrament - an outward sign of the presence of a reality beneath and beyond itself - it is not designed to be the final object of anyone's attention.
	c.	Human cussedness can't hold a candle to the fake, parallel universe of religion when it comes to gumming up any major project.
	d.	How many love affairs have shattered, supposedly, on the rocks of betrayal, or jealousy, or putting on weight, or becoming like her mother or his father, when what really did them in was the conviction that the god of romance called for the extermination of the partner rather than patience and forbearance in the relationship?
	e.	All the breaks (exalting or devastating) of all our relationships (sexual, romantic, or marital) are meant to be breaks upward into love.
	f.	True enough, joy is what all passion is about.  But in this world it can never come without the Passion - the suffering - into which all passion (innocently or guiltily) leads.  Joy is not something we can pursue directly, it is an efflorescence, a by-product of the passion/Passion that is the only thing that can be its occasion.
	g.	In fact, you can't go back to the previous conditions of a relationship at all.  You have to move forward in the ongoing breaks of the relationship - through the deserts, and the flaming arrows, and the bandidos - to the Home that calls you in every event.  You have to stop kidding yourself that the parallel universe you've constructed is going to help you find yourself.  You have to stop believing it even exists.
	h.	That they changed in the later stages of the trip is false; the truth is that, with longer acquaintance, you finally learned who they were all along.  And at that point, only commitment to each other - commitment to this him or that her, no matter what overlooked monstrosities we have discovered - can keep the journey Home going.
		To put in a kind word for it once again, therapy does help.  But when it works, it works chiefly by bringing to light all the unaccepted things in ourselves that have for years been crying out for acceptance - and by placing the forgiveness of our partners' unacceptabilities at the top of our personal list of things to do.
	i.	How, in short, do good encounters manage to avoid the trap of religion and end up flourishing in the real world?
		i.	The first is the most austere: the sexual, or the romantic, or the marital vision of home, life, and self in another person is gratefully received but then renounced as far as any pursuit of it here in this world is concerned: each partner's quest for it is directed straight upstairs to God as the ultimate Home.
		ii.	The second seems easier but is hardly less difficult: the romantic vision is gratefully received but then pursued here in terms of a long love affair (which may even flourish in the thick of the lovers' ongoing marriages to others).
		iii.	The third seems the easiest of all (or at least, the most conventional), but given the witness of the divorce rate, it is no cinch either: the romantic vision is gratefully received, and then pursued here in a marriage until death.
	j.	And more than anything else, they must accept gracefully and forgivingly the home truth that no home here can be Home - that every vision we catch of Home is a sacrament ourselves Home for good and whole for the first time.
	k.	We have always been called forward; it is only religion that pretends there is a way of going back.
	l.	But there is this to be said for marriage: even though married couples try just as often as any to lay upon themselves and each other the useless exercises of religion, there is no place more than in marriage where they so emphatically do not work.  Nowhere does familiarity breed all its nasty children more than there.  Nowhere does the need for grace and forgiveness more regularly arise.  Nowhere are we so uninterruptedly presented with the bitterness of the real rather than the nutrasweetness of pretense.  And nowhere is who we are so painfully evident and what we say so manifestly irrelevant.  If there is a single lucky break that matrimony bestows on us, it is the breakdown of all our attempts to conjure with it - its insistence on dragging us forward (kicking and screaming, or smiling and pardoning) into the new realities that alone can be new sacraments of Home.
9.	Vocation
	a.	I am not fond of the usual distinction between vocation and avocation, between work and play, to me, work that does not rise to the level of play is flawed work and play that is simply an escape from the expenditure of effort is flawed play.
	b.	If we have any final vocation, any ultimate calling, it is into that play.
	c.	God seems to prefer the ordinary leading of luck to the miraculous intervention of loud noises.  God does issue the occasional dramatic call; but the still, small voice - and his patient wait for our answer to it - remains his way with most of us.
	d.	...the ordained priesthood is a sacrament, a real presence of Jesus' priesthood, held up before the church as a mirror in which others can see themselves as the priests they already are.  And the vocation to the priesthood, despite the high-flown language in which it is sometimes couched, is not a call more noble that God's other calls to plumbers, computer operators, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs; rather, it too is a sacrament, a mirror held up to the world to remind others that they, every last on of them, are likewise called by God.
	e.	Every call from God, whether into some dull line of paid work or into an excursion from such work, is a call into play - into fun, if you will.
	f.	In my mind, the whole clerical "profession" is a splendidly corrupt business that pays me simply for being what i want to be: a priest doing the priestly things he loves.
	g.	But whether we are talking about vocation or avocation, fun must always remain the sovereign consideration.  For while it is a truism that nothing that is fun can be done without some measure of discipline, it is practically an eternal truth that nothing that calls for discipline will be kept at very long (or very well) if it is not fun.
	h.	But the very nature of that call - whether vocational or avocational - is that it is inevitably an invitation from something to something - from where we are to the step away from where we are.
	i.	Specifically (to put it in the terms of this book), vocation-avocation is always a sacrament of the call from the home we are presently in to that happiest Home that is our beginning and our end.  Accordingly, it is precisely the people who see that clearly and act on it resolutely who are happier in their several callings than most.  They even seem to live longer.
	j.	The ones whose primary view of their calling is something other than the fun of the priesthood - who se it as a road to success, or position, or power, or reputation (the definitions of which are entirely in the hands of other people) - either burn out early or shrivel gloomily in harness.  But the ones who refuse such alien definitions and do only the priestly things they love doing remain remarkably green and pleasant, both in themselves and to others.
	k.	Pursuing a vocation without at the same time accepting it as an avocation - pursuing it, that is, as a call into some other thing outside the vocation rather than as a call forward into the next thing that the vocation itself presents - is a fatal fall into the parallel universe of religion
	l.	if you are willing to go with the luck of that anarchy and either accept it with thanks or reconcile yourself to it by forgiveness, then your vocation can stand.  But if you insist on waiting for your nonexistent gods to intervene and make your vocation all niceness and no nastiness, then the wait will wear you out.
	m.	The real world, more than not, punishes sequels.
	n.	The only vocational reward guaranteed by reality is the reward of the work itself - the fun of either doing the job gratefully or laughing at its disappointments forgivingly.
	o.	But if you insist nonetheless on pursuing vocational justice - if you cannot let go of the idea that the parallel universe should be able to intercede for you - you will drown in one or the other of the two inevitable results of such religiosity: worry or bitterness.
	p.	Worry is the reverse of a coin whose other side is control.  Commonly, of course, you think it's the front side and spend all your time preoccupied by it.  But if you turn it over and recognize its true nature as a by-product of the effort to control your life rather than accept it as it happens - and then ask yourself where you ever got the notion that you were actually in control of all these terrors that are in fact beyond your control - you will quickly learn the answer.  You got that illusion from the parallel universe.
	q.	You got it, in other words, from thinking that happiness could be secured by religion.
	r.	You alone, therefore, are in charge of your happiness: if you decide to accept the world's luck by grace and/or forgiveness, you will be happy; if you try to conjure with that luck, you won't be happy; if you try to conjure with that luck, you won't be - because the religion of conjuring never works, it just gives you all the worries that can be produced by the false expectation of control.
	s.	On the cross, Jesus comes into the world's toughest luck.  And he comes into it to raise the dead, not to reward the deserving or promote the successful - or to do anything even remotely like the scorekeeping that the myth of the parallel universe insists on.
10.	Well-Being
	a.	I'm going to maintain that precisely because religion doesn't work, one of its hall marks, when it tries to operate in the real world, must inevitably be secrecy: it demands that everybody (its adherents as well as the general public) be kept in the dark about the ineffectuality of its methods and results.
		The religions of health, money, and love - and of sex, romance, marriage, work, dieting, eating, jogging, or working out - all function as mystery cults.  They are presented to us as possessing a secret gnosis, a private knowledge to be carefully guarded by the elect and to be extended to the general run of humanity only after the most exacting initiation rites.
	b.	Earlier in this book, I made the point that Christianity is not a religion but rather the proclamation that God has hone ahead on his own and ended religion by accomplishing in Jesus, free of charge, whatever it was that religion was trying to do.  He has closed the religion shop for good and simply handed over - not to select cultists but to absolutely everybody - all the foods that the shop advertised but never carried.
	c.	Christianity, properly understood, has no need whatsoever to guard itself against the profaneness of reality.
	d.	Furthermore, in proclaiming that his death is in fact present in all deaths (whether those who die know it or not), Christianity offers the world the ultimate profanity: it announces the absurd Good News that the only ticket anyone needs to the new creation is the one ticket everyone had, namely, death.  And finally, to cap the vulgarity, it says that no one needs to do anything - not rack up any scores, not achieve any level of acceptability, not do any job, secret or public - to cash in on that ticket.  We need only to believe Jesus when he says the job has been done in his death.
	e.	But enough, perhaps, of that : we are so enamored of religion that almost no one can hear the Good News anyway.
	f.	The secrecy of the religion makes us secretive as well.  Not only do we keep the truth of our performances from others; we keep it from ourselves.  But then, with the shame of our true condition thus hidden, we feel free to heap the blame for it on whomever or whatever is handy at the time...
11.	Postscript
	a.	My insistence that God has chosen to make luck and not intervention his normal device for running the world and establishing his relationship with us has raised three large questions - or better said, perhaps, one major question and two corollaries to it.
		i.	Your first question is: Isn't luck, or chance, rather a casual or even an uncaring way for a supposedly respectable God to pursue his relationship with creation?
		ii.	Your second question follows logically from that.  If God (as i have maintained) is not better than we are - if in fact he seems worse and only rarely intervenes with the help we so frequently need - doesn't that lead straight to indifference, inaction, or even despair on our part?
		iii.	And your last question is yet another corollary to all of the above: if it's true that any luck that befalls us is his idea of a proper rendezvous for a divine Lover, why should we pray - why should we ask for more comfortable or more mannerly assignations from him?
	b.	Both Scripture and history make it quite plain that despite all the human race's efforts to write up the requirements for membership in the Good God Club, God himself has simply declined to join.  Contrary to what we think he ought to be doing, he makes his sun to shine on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.
	c.	Theologians, of course, have felt free to tell God that he ought to be running a tighter ship; but God steers almost entirely by luck and that is that.
	d.	God is unfair by our standards.
	e.	The ultimate answer to all of your first question is that there is no answer except the promised presence of God in all luck.
	f.	For the permanently crippled, the hopelessly bereaved, or the terminally ill, the only gift we have to give is our presence in love; and while that's not what they might have asked for, it certainly is ourselves at our best.
	g.	Since you are one of the factors - one of the varying causes - in any chance event you choose to involve yourself with, there is no reason for you to come to the conclusion that chance or luck implies fatalistic determination.
	h.	In a world run by luck, the call of God is not a call into the following of some plan that will guarantee a life drawn up to either our or God's specifications.  It is simply a call into the next thing we choose to do or not to do, as the case may be.  It is a call to the next step in the dance of a free creation; and whatever we do about that next step - whether we take it brilliantly, or disastrously, or not at all - the dance will always be different as a result of what we did.
	i.	But if he, as God incarnate, can make such a request - if he can poke into the dance even such a refusal of the dance as that - then the dance is a lot more accommodating that the strictures of anybody's theology (even Jesus') might have led us to believe.  If he can pray not to die, then there is no such thing as unworthy prayer or inappropriate prayer; there is only prayer - only whatever comes out of our minds and hearts, no questions asked.
12.	Epilogue
	a.	It seems to me, therefore, that the interpretation it invites is that Jesus is upset precisely by the doing of miracles at all - by the act of offering miraculous band-aids to a world that can only be saved by much more mysterious and radical action.  Accordingly, I think that Jesus' disturbed state when he did these patchwork miracles as signs of his program sprang from his awareness that his radical, ultimate program would not involve patchwork miracles at all but rather an acceptance on the cross of the luck of the world's draw as his chosen way of relating himself to us.
	b.	Jesus wept, in other words, at the divine incompetence, at the divine complicity in the nightmare that is history.
	c.	So he opts instead for the mystery of suffering: he joins his tears with ours at our dilapidation and just moves in and lives with us as we are.  He is not the slick, professional god of the theological hucksters; he is the Amateur God who loves every board in the old place, and whose answer to all requests to repair the hell out of it is, "Now, now; we'll see."  He is the Lover who is with us in all luck - and who, at the roots of the being he will not tamper with, calls us back to the Love from which we sprang.