Protestants v Catholics; What Goes Unsaid; A Schoolboy's Essay Reminds Me Why I Am Catholic

Source: Artzone

A Facebook friend posted an essay her son had written for homeschool. The essay provides a brief history of the Reformation. It is well written. My friend was proud and she had reason to be. As a teacher I was impressed by the economy and clarity in the boy's writing.

My friend is, herself, a really good writer, and she has a story to tell. I have urged her to write a memoir. If there were any justice in the world, her memoir would find a publisher right quick and it would inspire and entertain many.

Her son's history of the Reformation is one page long. It is four paragraphs. The first sentence: corruption in the Catholic Church. The second sentence: corruption in the Catholic Church. The bulk of the first paragraph: details supporting the claim of corruption in the Catholic Church.

Second paragraph: Martin Luther. A bare bones bio. Third paragraph: the pope excommunicates Martin Luther. Fourth paragraph: Martin Luther translates the Bible and founds the Lutheran Church abrupt and final full stop. Capital T The Capital E End.

I learn a lot from Facebook. Facebook friend Magdalena Paśnikowska told me once that "what is not said is as important as what is said." She said this in the context of a discussion of censorship, including censorship in the old Soviet Empire.

Schoolboys aren't Soviet-grade censors. But schoolboys know where to put that abrupt and final full stop, and to leave the bottom twenty percent of the assignment page completely blank.

After I read this schoolboy's essay three times, I walked to work. My mind could not help but fill in the rest of the page.

Yes, the Catholic Church was corrupt. It was then and it is now.

But there's a bit more to the story of the Reformation.

My guestimate of a key statistic: most Protestants in the world today are Protestant not because of the genuinely admirable desire to address corruption in the Church, but because one of history's most odious figures.

Henry the VIII was a fat – a fifty-two-inch waist – madman who murdered his own wives. Henry VIII wanted to dump his first wife in order to marry his mistress, and the Catholic Church told him not to.

Divorce wasn't about choices and liberation. It was about older, divorced women being reduced to begging social outcasts. The Church wanted men to respect and provide for the women they married even after they lost their youthful glow. Henry didn't want to respect and provide for Catherine because she was barren – certainly no fault of her own.

Historians depict Henry's mistress, Anne Boleyn, as sexually hot, and either a manipulator or a victim of manipulation. Before his passion for Anne, Henry VIII was one of the great champions and defenders of Catholicism, and he still believed in key Catholic tenets after he worked to destroy Catholicism in England and establish Protestantism there. Henry burned, looted, and murdered. In another context, his actions against the Church might be called a genocide.

I often think about converting to Episcopalianism. I like it that women can become priests. And then I catch myself – do I really want to be a member of a church founded by a lustful, hypocritical, murderous, genocidal fatso? Nah.

Returning to the schoolboy's essay on the Reformation. In these four paragraphs of elegant and spare prose, Martin Luther is a courageous reformer. Full stop.

When I think of Martin Luther, I think about his writings on Jews, and the impact of those writings. Wikipedia lists what Luther recommended regarding Jews:

1. for Jewish synagogues and schools to be burned to the ground, and the remnants buried out of sight;
2. for houses owned by Jews to be likewise razed, and the owners made to live in agricultural outbuildings;
3. for their religious writings to be taken away;
4. for rabbis to be forbidden to preach, and to be executed if they do;
5. for safe conduct on the roads to be abolished for Jews;
6. for usury to be prohibited, and for all silver and gold to be removed and "put aside for safekeeping"; and
7. for the Jewish population to be put to work as agricultural slave laborers (Source) 

The notorious Nazi propaganda film "Jud Suss" quotes Luther, "set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them." "Jud Suss" was routinely screened for Nazis about to go on a raid against Jews.

Not just in relation to Jews, Luther's speech was violent. He insulted people in hateful ways. There is an internet site where one can press an icon in order to be insulted by Martin Luther. (Here)

Luther used much scatological language. That is, he talked about rectums, feces, and outhouses a lot. He said that the Holy Spirit unveiled the Bible to him while he was relieving himself. Luther said he could chase Satan away with his flatulence. When he was near death, Luther said, "I’m like a ripe stool, and the world’s like a gigantic anus, and so we’re about to let go of each other."

The Lutheran Church is not named after God or Christ or Love or Truth. It's named after Martin Luther, an anti-Semitic, hateful man obsessed with feces.

The Reformation, in the schoolboy's essay, is all about reading the Bible in the vernacular and not selling indulgences.

The Reformation was also significantly about war. Kings decided to convert, and their conversions meant that they dragged their people into war. I don't know if anyone has a death toll count, but Wikipedia lists the wars here.

Here's a pretty typical paragraph describing a king's conversion, followed by resistance, followed by imprisonment of Catholics, state confiscation of church property, and the immediate enrichment of the state:

"In 1524, King Christian II converted to Lutheranism and encouraged Lutheran preachers to enter Denmark despite the opposition of the Danish diet … war broke out between Catholic followers of Count Christoph of Oldenburg, and the firmly Lutheran Count Christian of Holstein. After losing his main support in Lübeck, Christoph quickly fell to defeat … Lutheranism was immediately established, the Catholic bishops were imprisoned, and monastic and church lands were soon confiscated to pay for the armies that had brought Christian to power. In Denmark this increased royal revenues by 300%."

Royal arrogance, bloodlust, power, and filthy lucre were as much the appeal of the Reformation as the Bible in the vernacular.

There was another dreadful effect of the Reformation not alluded to in the schoolboy's essay. Historian Lyndal Roper says that the chaos and societal breakdown caused by the Reformation played a big role in the witch craze that took so many lives of innocents, especially older women but men, too.

The Protestant obsession with conquering corruption lead to a different form of madness and sin than that found in the Vatican. While popes certainly had ermines, wine, and mistresses, Protestants went too far in the other direction. Their push for purity created corrupt societies like that critiqued in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." This is why the word "puritanical" is not a compliment.

There's another thing left unsaid in that history of the Reformation. During that century, that the Catholic Church was so very corrupt, Catholicism gave us spiritual giants like Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, Bartolome de las Casas, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila, Paulo Miki, Ignatius Loyola, Rose of Lima, Juan Diego and Margaret Clitherow. No history of Christianity would be complete withouty of those names. These are the fruits of the admittedly corrupt Catholic Church.

Don't get me wrong. I also dislike corruption. I think most sane, mainstream Catholics think that selling indulgences and not translating the Bible into the vernacular were mistakes. Reform is good. It is often a vexed debate whether to get along and go along, or throw the baby out with the bathwater. Had I lived in those times, I would have been as confused as I am now.

I just wish that my Protestant friends would fill out that bottom twenty percent of the page that is left blank. I just wish that as they celebrate Luther and the Reformation, that they acknowledged important and obvious facts about who Luther was and what the full, very heavy cost of the Reformation was.

I wish that Protestants would acknowledge that the urge for perfection is itself a sin that kills and maims. We are human. We will never be perfect. We will never be part of non-corrupt institutions. Every Protestant church is every bit as corrupt as the Catholic Church.

The push for purity is itself a sin. It drives us to obsess on flaws and miss the larger picture. Rose of Lima managed to do the amazing amount of the good that she did in spite of the flaws in the church.

Yes, I admire Luther's reform, and all the reformers. I know the Church was corrupt. I think this is all very complex. If nothing else, I would have liked to have seen that sentence on the bottom, blank, twenty percent of the page: "this is all very complex."

I also wish that Protestants would get over their prejudices against Catholics. I've been Catholic all my life and I've never heard a single Catholic talk about Protestants the way that Protestants routinely slander and obsess on us. This is NOT a comment about my Facebook friend's son's essay. It's a comment about the Catholic-bashing I often encounter among Protestants, in real life and on the web.

In other news: a Facebook friend posted a link to a blog post by Walid Shoebat. Apparently Mr. Shoebat is also tired of Catholic bashing among protestants. That blog post is entitled "Them 'Damned' Catholics" and you can access it here.

Anti Catholic Jack Chick pamphlet 

Many Protestants refer to the Catholic Church as the "Whore of Babylon" 

"The Shroud" Book Review and Verdict: Yep, It's Real

It was the late 1970s. There was a newspaper on the kitchen table. I gave its Shroud article a quick glance. I thought, even in that brief newspaper treatment, that I'd immediately discover the fact that proved the Shroud of Turin to be a moldy, embarrassing relic of a bygone era, the Catholic version of Bigfoot.

The newspaper article let me down. It introduced facts that boggled my mind. The Shroud of Turin can be described as a photographic negative. How did someone in the Middle Ages create a photograph? More importantly, why?

Teams of scientists from disciplines I'd never heard of were subjecting the Shroud to tests I had also never heard of, and they were not triumphant in denouncing an obvious fake; rather, they were in awe.

After much reading, writing, asking questions, and a lengthy conversation with STURP photographer and online archivist Barrie Schwortz, I am now 97% certain that the Shroud is authentic. We may all be missing something, but given the amount of research that's been done on the Shroud, I think there's only a three percent chance that it is a fake.

Ian Wilson's book "The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000 Year Old Mystery" is one of the sources of data that have convinced me. If you are at all interested in the Shroud of Turin, you must have this book. It's a one-volume encyclopedia.

"The Shroud" is a fascinating book by any measure. The Shroud of Turin has been rigorously tested by scholars in a wide array of disciplines; Wilson's book reflects that scholarship, traveling throughout time, space, and multiple ultra-modern laboratories, darkrooms, museums, archives, remote monasteries, obscure archives, hushed but impassioned clerical offices, and politically yeasty university campuses.

Readers learn about radiocarbon dating, identification of marble from Jerusalem, the Crusades, the Knights Templar, and ancient v. medieval textile fashions and manufacture. Readers visit a land that time has forgotten: the ancient, Christian Middle East. Indeed, Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey were once devoutly Christian. Caliph Muawiya, an immensely important figure in early Islam, actually had his hands on the Shroud of Turin, and is responsible for damage to it. The book touches on Islamic - Christian conflict occurring in the present day. One of Wilson's pieces of evidence was an ancient mural in a Macedonian monastery. The mural was destroyed by Albanian Muslims in a series of vicious desecrations extending from 2001-2002.

Wilson has an eye for the gem-like anecdote; you read of a wedding that took place as the bride's brother died in the next room; he received a fatal jousting injury while entertaining the crowds before the ceremony. Another aristocrat died of drinking cold wine after a hot hunt. Reading this book was an addictive pleasure and an intellectual adventure.

A measure of the rigor that Wilson and other Shroud proponents exercise is Wilson's treatment of new claims by Barbara Frale. As Wilson's book was going to press, Frale claimed that she alone had access to a document that could strengthen the link between the Shroud and the Knights Templar. Wilson included her claims in his book, with a proviso that he had not seen her evidence. After he did so, he assessed that evidence as unconvincing, and he said as much in a carefully worded publication on Barrie Schwortz's site.

This scholarly scrupulosity is, alas, not reflected on the side of Shroud detractors, as Wilson makes clear. The denunciation of the Shroud as fake after the 1988 radiocarbon dating was decidedly not scholarly. No other artifact would have been treated in a similar manner. Case in point: radiocarbon dating mistook the date on the linen wrappings of a mummified ibis by 550 years. No one jumped up and claimed that the date on the ibis was wrong; rather, they understood that radiocarbon dating made a mistake. The Shroud was not treated in a similar manner because militant atheists with an agenda masquerading as neutral scientists so desperately wanted to discredit the Shroud. They failed, and their failure is exposed in Wilson's chapter on the fiasco of the radiocarbon dating.

Wilson works through a massive amount of data. This is the kind of book that makes you grateful for the existence of the internet. You will want to read this book with Barrie Schwortz's Shroud website your constant companion. There you can find the full texts of the peer-reviewed articles Wilson cites.

The evidence Wilson works through includes the following: Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, a textile expert, attests that the Shroud is consistent with the size, quality, and stitching technique of the ancient world, not of the Middle Ages. Swiss criminologist Max Frei found Middle Eastern pollen on the Shroud. Physicians and other observers familiar with anatomy, going back centuries, attest to the Shroud's accurate depiction of Roman flagellation and crucifixion. Sampling of the foot area of the shroud image showed the presence of travertine aragonite, a form of marble typical of Jerusalem. There is more.

Wilson then walks the reader through a detailed, proposed history of the Shroud lasting two thousand years. Wilson makes a very strong case that what we today call the Turin Shroud was once known to history as the Image of Edessa. He argues that the notorious and shameful sack of Constantinople in 1204 by wayward Crusaders was the event that transferred the Image of Edessa, in Turkey, to Western Europe.

The Knights Templar, Wilson reports, were known throughout Europe for their banking and their fortresses. They were very good at storing valuables and secrets. The Knights Templar became too powerful and they were interrogated, tortured, and purged. The last Templars were burned at the stake. The victims included Geoffrey de Charny. The first man in recorded history to display what we now call the Shroud of Turin was another man named Geoffrey de Charny. There may be some connection, Wilson argues.

Thomas de Wesselow is a non-believer. His book "The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection" pushed me very close to believing in the authenticity of the Shroud. De Wesselow's treatment of the blood stains on the Shroud is masterful. Wilson's book sealed the deal, for me. Read it. I really cannot imagine any intelligent person not being fascinated by this book, and awed by its implications.

Public Shaming and Saggy Pants

True story.

I was on a bus traveling from the suburban supermarket back to Paterson, the urban ghetto.

I was not really alert, just drifting off into no-mind as I do on buses.

I just turned my head and dead smack dab in front of my nose was the underwear-clad buttocks of a young African American male.

Again, I was not really alert, so I didn't hide my reaction. My jaw dropped and I stared, in a politically incorrect way, as if to say, "Omigod look at that kid's underwear! His ass is sticking right out of his pants!"

Again, because I wasn't really alert, I didn't stop myself from rolling my eyes dramatically and kind of going "Huh."

And, guess what. Because I wasn't alert enough to hide my reaction, the kid actually pulled his pants up!

I was amazed.

Maybe public shaming is not such a bad idea.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Genius, and His Religious Beliefs

I'm a huge fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and listen to him regularly. He was, of course, a Muslim. I understand isolated words of his songs because I spoke Nepali, which is related to Urdu, and it's easy to make out bits of Arabic prayer ("there is no God but Allah" in Arabic, for example), but for the most part I pay no attention to the lyrics. 

In any case I think NFAK's genius transcends his faith. His gift is not about Islam, to me. It's about something much bigger. 

I was just listening to a youtube video and saw that it had subtitles. One of the subtitles moved and surprised me. "Why do Hindus and Muslims fight?" The audience made approving noises. 

I re-watched the video and paid more attention to the subtitles. NFAK is expressing ideas straight out of the psalms: God is omnipresent; all creation is witness to God; creation yearns for God: Psalm 19, Psalm 139, Psalm 42.  

I googled "Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan religious beliefs" and found a page that quotes the lyrics of one of his songs. I find these lyrics immensely moving. They speak of one finding God in a temple, another in a mosque:

"One lover was in the temple and another in the mosque

but to me, immersed in the joy of love, both seemed same

Chanting on rosary, the name of Shyam [Lord Krishna], I become him.

I am worthless except that

I surrender to the name of my beloved, all the time." (source)

Wishing We Learned About Atrocity Besides The Holocaust and The Atlantic Slave Trade

I've spent only about half an hour, this Saturday morning, listening to NPR talk radio, in three disconnected bursts of about ten minutes each.

In that half hour of disconnected and distracted NPR talk radio listening, I've heard three separate news features, each several minutes long – relatively long in talk radio terms – devoted exclusively to the German Nazi Holocaust of European Jews.

By "exclusively" I mean no mention was made of non-German Nazis or other evil states from that era like Stalin's Russia or Tojo's Japan. No mention was made of the Nazis' other victims: no Poles, no handicapped people, no Gypsies, no priests or nuns, no homosexuals, no Jehovah's Witnesses, no western POWs, no Slavs, no Russian POWs, no communists.

A new movie opens this weekend, "The Book Thief." The film is based on the phenomenally bestselling adolescent novel of the same title. It's about a German family that hides a Jewish man during WW II. He befriends the family's adopted daughter, a little German girl. Almost everybody dies in the end. Stephen Holden, The New York Times critic, called "The Book Thief" "A shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch."

NPR also devotes a huge amount of airtime to white supremacy and black victimization. And of course "Twelve Years a Slave" will compete with "The Book Thief" at this year's Academy Awards.

This is hard to say. It's the kind of statement that might enrage people and will be easily distorted and misunderstood.

I want people to know about and understand the Holocaust. My father was a sergeant, one of millions of American combat soldiers who risked their lives to defeat the Axis. I honor him and the millions of others. The boys at Normandy Beach inspire me no end.

I have a huge amount of respect for the Civil Rights Movement.

At the same time, I really wish Western culture did not continue to treat German Nazis, or white supremacists, as if they were the only bad guys who ever existed, and the Holocaust, and the Atlantic Slave Trade and Jim Crow as if they were the only atrocities that ever happened.

We live in a finite world, and time is finite. NPR has only so many broadcast hours per day. Hollywood will produce only so many Oscar-bait feature films per year. High school students will study only so many events.

The Holocaust. The Atlantic Slave Trade – "The Book Thief." "Twelve Years a Slave."

I wish other atrocities received attention as well, and I wish this for a reason.

I read once that probably no one will ever read all the documents devoted to the Cambodian genocide. No one cares enough to do so. Many of the perpetrators of that genocide died in their sleep, or are alive, free, and comfortable today.

We need to understand that Communists commit atrocity as well as fascists and white Southerners. We need to understand that non-Western people commit atrocities as well as white European males in high shiny boots or with Southern accents.

Will Durant, one of the most famous historians who ever lived, said that "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within."

K.S. Lal alleges that the loss of Hindus in the Muslim conquest of India ran to 80 million lives. Others say that this number is inflated. Okay, what's the real number?

Why have so few even heard of this atrocity? Why do so few know of the Arab Slave trade, which dwarfed the Atlantic Slave Trade, and which still exists?

We need to understand what happened in India in order to understand what some have called the most likely site of the breakout of nuclear war: the border between Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu India. We don't. We don't understand that part of the world to our misfortune. Is anyone happy with US - Pakistan relations?

The larger history of Jihad would equip Americans to understand the world they live in now. I am Polish-American. I know of 1683. I know what the date September 11 means. I've never met a non-Polish American who knows what that date means. Their country was attacked on September 11, a date that goes back to 1683, and Americans are clueless.

We say that the Holocaust teaches us "Never again," but, if we learned that lesson, how exactly did we apply it during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, called the world's fastest? And, speaking of Africa, why do we not cover the war in the Congo, the "No Living Thing" campaign in Sierra Leone, Darfur, slavery in Mauritania?

If atrocities concern us, why do we not cover the one hundred million Untouchables in India, Amartya Sen's claim that there are 100 million missing women and girls in Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian Asia, the mistreatment of Native Americans in Central America?

All right, I'm Polish American. Why do so few Americans know anything about what happened to non-Jewish Poles during WW II?

And they should know. The Holocaust is exploited by unscrupulous educators to convince young people that Christianity = Nazism. I know "educated" adults who are convinced that this is true; they "learned" it in school.

Nazism announced itself as the cancellation and death knell of Christianity. If people knew the genocidal force that Nazism exerted against Catholic Poland, if people knew of the Catholic priests rounded up, tortured, and slaughtered, selling Nazism as anti-Christian propaganda would become impossible.

People should know. They don't.

If I ruled the world … If I had a magic wand … education and media would be focused on teaching the next generation about atrocity per se, about what Rwanda and Germany and Cambodia and Katyn and Otranto have in common. Of course students would learn about the German Nazi Holocaust of Europe's Jews and the Atlantic Slave Trade, but they would learn of other events, other victims, other perpetrators, and they would be better equipped to face the modern world.

I greatly admire Jews and African Americans for telling their story. I reject any criticism of Jews or African Americans for telling their story. I say to member of my own ethnic group, Americans of Polish descent, don't criticize Jews and Blacks. Emulate them. If you want people to know your story, tell it to them.

What students learn in school is intensely politicized. Politics is not the best friend of truth.

Quiz: Which of the following killed the most people? If you don't know, you just proved my point. 

"The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000-Year-Old Mystery" by Ian Wilson; An In Media Res Report. Full Review Later

I'm reading Ian Wilson's 476-page, 2010 book "The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000-Year-Old Mystery." I'm about three quarters of the way through the book. Even though I haven't finished it yet, I want to talk about it before I post a review.

This is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. I am getting up early, at four, say, and going to bed late, in order to get in reading time that I can't scrimp from my daily schedule. When I wake up, I reread the pages my foggy brain read before I fell asleep. I use a highlighter pen to be sure to pick up all the arcane information.

I remember the very first moment I was introduced to the Shroud of Turin, decades ago. It was the late 1970s. There was a newspaper on the kitchen table of the house I grew up in. I gave its Shroud article a quick glance. I thought, even in that brief newspaper treatment, that I'd immediately discover the fact that proved the Shroud of Turin to be an embarrassment, a moldy relic of a bygone era, the Catholic version of Bigfoot.

The newspaper article let me down. It introduced facts that boggled my mind. The Shroud of Turin can be described as a photographic negative. How did someone in the Middle Ages create a photograph? More importantly, why?

Teams of scientists from disciplines I'd never heard of were subjecting the Shroud to tests I had also never heard of, and they were not triumphant in denouncing an obvious fake; rather, they were in awe.

Wow.

I didn't think about the Shroud for a long time after that newspaper article. Contrary to atheist stereotypes, Catholics generally don't think much about it. It is, rather, scientists who do. They do because it confounds them, and they want to solve the puzzle.

When the carbon dating came out in 1988, I was living in Poland, participating in the riots that helped bring down the Soviet Empire, and the Shroud was the last thing on my mind.

It wasn't till a televised documentary in the late 1990's that a friend recorded and sent to me (thank you Don Freidkin) that I really got bitten by the Shroud bug. I read two Shroud books, one by Mark Antonacci (review here) and an earlier book by Ian Wilson (review here.)

I loved both of those books but they left me fifty percent convinced that the Shroud was what its adherents say it is, and fifty percent willing to be convinced that we were missing something terribly obvious and it really wasn't all that.

I watched documentaries on youtube. Barrie Schwortz, Shroud expert, Orthodox Jew, and STURP photographer, allowed me to grill him long distance in an interview that lasted over an hour, during which Barrie insisted, "After years of study, I am absolutely certain that the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ."

Thomas de Wesselow's book "The Sign" pushed me ever closer to believing that the Shroud is genuine. Interesting, because de Wesselow is not a believer. (Review of his book here.)

The book that is pushing the needle to 99% certainty is the one I'm reading now, and can't wait to talk about, even though I'm not finished with it yet. Ian Wilson's "The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000-Year-Old-Mystery."

The book is fascinating. Addictive reading. I wish I could push the world away and just hole up until I finish it, reading chapters twice in a row, once for the general idea, then again to highlight and ponder. Then I'd want to go to Goggle and read up more on all the historical, scientific, and art scholarship Wilson references.

The book is richly illustrated with both black and white diagrams and color plates. The images run from science to art history. There are building plans and tenth century frescoes and Christian mosaics rescued from Muslim marauders by being buried under centuries of pigeon dung (really).

There are obscure manuscripts holed up in isolated Syrian monasteries.

This research references a world most of us never think of at all – the Ancient CHRISTIAN Middle East. Yes, that's right. Before the Muslim Conquest, the Middle East was a devoutly Christian place.

Byzantium. Christian Jerusalem. Christian Turkey and Iraq.

Muslims typically destroyed "infidel" images venerated by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. That process is still ongoing. The Bamiyan Buddhas are one famous example, but one of the artworks Wilson references is in Europe and was destroyed in recent years by Muslim Albanians. Muslims Turks are also continuing the destruction of Christian artifacts.

The Shroud was not destroyed. Caliph Muawiyah himself, one of the most important figures in early Islam, is recorded as having tested a Christian image by fire, and found it worthy. Wilson makes the case that that very image is what we know as the Shroud of Turin.

The book references hard science as well. One can differentiate various types of marble through scientific tests of dust-size marble particles. As one Shroud website discusses this evidence:

"Experts at the Hercules Aerospace laboratory in Salt Lake, Utah, carried out a study of a sample of dirt taken from the foot region of the Shroud. They identified crystals of travertine argonite, a relatively rare form of calcite found near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. Would a mediaeval forger have taken the trouble to impregnate the linen with marble dust from the ground near Golgotha? Hardly" (source).

Part of me still stares at the Shroud, pages through the evidence, and says, "This cannot be. It's too perfect. That a photographic image of Jesus would gain worldwide recognition during the era of photography. That that image survived the Sack of Constantinople, the Muslim Conquest, three separate fires, dousing with water … "

Another part of me, and it's moving closer to 99% of me, says, "The evidence is in. Occam's Razor demands that this be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ."

And that just blows one's mind, does it not?

What It Meant To Me Today To Be A Christian

A little story about what it meant to me today to be a Christian.

For the most part my dead left ear is not obvious when I move, but when I change direction in a crowded place it becomes obvious. I shake and it's hard for me to keep my balance.

I got on a bus and the bus driver, rather than letting me take my seat before driving off – which most do – I carry a cane, they see that, they allow the time – the bus driver peeled out.

I was left unstable and fighting for balance. I struggled, obviously.

There IS a seat right near the door that is reserved for handicapped patrons. Anyone sitting there is supposed to surrender it if a handicapped person gets on.

An African American girl, about twenty, with elaborate, expensive braided hair, was yakking away on her cell phone. She could have easily surrendered the handicapped seat; there is a sign behind the seat advising passengers to do just that.

The girl could have easily moved. There were plenty of seats.

I stood for a long time, white knuckles gripping the handrail, struggling not to fall. I was trembling. My cane was hanging useless on the moving bus.

Finally the bus stopped for a red light and I was able to move again, to take a seat further back.

Here's the politically incorrect part: my observation is that African Americans and Hispanic Americans, pretty much the sole passengers on Paterson buses, do not regularly surrender their seats to the elderly or handicapped on Paterson buses.

This is in stark contrast to the Poland I lived in in 1988-89, where there was a race as soon as an even borderline older person got on the tram. Young men would pop up to offer the woman or handicapped person their seat. It was a point of honor and pride.

It shocks me. Big, strong guys, muscular, in sports attire, can be in the seats near the door, and a little old black lady, frail as a bird, dangling a cane can get on, and no one moves. They expect her to stand. Often it's me or some other demographically atypical passenger who seats her.

I don't understand this. I don't like it.

Anyway.

I sat behind the girl with the expensive hair and cell phone and stared daggers at the back of her head. I thought obscene words that I will spare you. I really hated her.

I did that for several seconds.

Then I thought, and I thought this, did not feel it, "You are a Christian and this is not allowed to you."

And so I stopped. Immediately.

Stopping didn't feel natural. My hatred, anger, and condemnation felt totally natural. I had a whole bucket-load of obscenities all primed for this girl and ready to roll down the chute.

I stopped.

Okay, what am I supposed to do?

Think of Jesus. On the cross. "Father, forgive them." If he can say that in that circumstance, you can say it in response to this girl's minor offense.

I said it, in my head. I forgive.

That's not enough, the little voice said. And all those verses about praying for your enemy rolled down the chute, instead of the swear words.

Pray for your enemies.

I did. I prayed for her.

I gotta tell ya – NONE of this changed how I felt. I felt condemnation. I was SURE that this girl was cruel and stupid.

And so I had a talk with myself. "You THINK you know what is going on in her head. You are so certain that she spitefully refused to move. You are wrong. You have NO IDEA what is going on in her head. You know nothing of her life. Stop projecting what you think she is into her. Your savior told you not to judge. This is what he meant. You do not know her. Her mind is not your business. Just forgive her, pray for her, and let go your arrogant thoughts of who she is and why she did what she did."

And I did. Because Jesus modeled this.

***

A few weeks back, I was walking across a parking lot. I turned my head, and saw a man and his wife SCREAMING at me with real hatred and condemnation.

"You knew! You knew! You knew I was trying to park here, you idiot! How could you be so stupid! Bitch!"

Huh? I stood, shocked, scared, staring at this screaming man and wife, my mouth agape.

I am deaf on my left side. This guy came up on my left and expected me to jump out of his way. I didn't and he barely missed running me over.

He judged me. He was certain that I am a really terrible person. He was certain that I had heard his car, and just waltzed into "his" space in order to torment him.

Not so. I am deaf, and that was my birthday, which I spent alone, and I was lost in unhappy thoughts.

Given that that man was so wrong in his judgment of me, how could I give in to my temptation to judge this girl?

***

That's it. I did not save the world today. I did not wash any lepers. Nothing in my observable behavior changed. But my inner thoughts changed, exactly because I am a Christian.

Millions, maybe billions, of people are making similar choices every day. Millions of Christians are saying, "Okay, I could kill this person, but I won't, because God doesn't want me to."

And I know other persons of faith, of other belief systems, are making similar choices. I *know* Muslims who make similar choices. Who decide to behave honorable in order to honor their own belief system.
***
I posted this because my Facebook friend Sandy posted anti-Christian material. This happens a lot. Many of my friends post anti-Christian material on Facebook. I just wanted to say, this is what it meant to me today to be a Christian.