June 23, 2008. A most unusual thing happened to me this morning, and I would like to share it with you. I was walking in the cemetery praying intensely; it had been about a half hour. I was thinking that love always involves risk. The first love-risks that came to mind were the biggies — marriage, friendship. But then I remembered Jesus striking up a conversation with the woman at the well, first century equivalent to the bus stop.

Deep in the heart of the cemetery, in a clearing in the woods, is a mausoleum. As I approached, I noticed a man with his back to me, standing up against the building, with his hands on it and his body rocking, as if at the Wailing Wall. When I got nearer, I heard him wailing loudly.

I was going to pass by — to respect his privacy in mourning. But I have respected people’s privacy all my life. I asked the Lord if He wanted me to go to the man, and if He did, would He please give me words. I kept walking in his direction, still hearing no words from the Lord. Against every habit of my 56 years, I walked up to the man and touched him. I found myself rubbing his back. He said only this: “My mother.” I said I was sorry, and I cried with him (I am not a crier.). I asked if he knew Jesus. No answer. Then I asked if I could pray with him. He nodded through wails.

I believe that was a breakthrough for me. I do not think I will ever again be quite as afraid to approach a stranger. I am a fast walker, my children complain. But on the way out of the cemetery I saw an old man I always walk briskly past, and I stopped. He is 88 years old, and I learned about World War II, and his stroke in ‘82. And he had tears in his eyes.

Abstinence gets some decent, if a little oddball, publicity in the Times magazine with this article about growing secular abstinence programs in unlikely places.

The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity. The founders of the Princeton club, the first to form in the Ivy League in 2005, wanted to offer an opposing view. Many were Catholic, but seeking credibility within the university at large, they decided not to present themselves as a religious organization and always to “shy away from arguments with religious premises,” says Kevin Joyce, a former president of the club. “Here at a university, we have to provide the intellectual basis” for abstinence, he told me. “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought.”

Much of the piece focuses on Janie Fredell at Harvard, who belongs to the True Love Revolution, a name about as awesome as True Love Waits. 

“People just don’t get it,” Fredell said. “Everyone thinks we’re trying to promote this idea of the meek little virgin female.” She said she was doing no such thing. “I care deeply for women’s rights,” she said. Fredell was studying not just religion but also gender politics - and was reading Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” alongside John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” She had awakened to the wage gap, to forced sterilization and female genital mutilation - to the different ways that men have, she said, of controlling women. One of these was sexual. Fredell had seen it often in her own life - men pushing for sex, she said, just to “have something to say in the locker room,” women feeling pressured to have sex in order to maintain a relationship. The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women suffer from having premarital sex, “due to a cultural double standard,” she said, “which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men for theirs.”

Her group’s arguments are powerful with the university audience, but if her propositions are founded on secular ideologies, they will ultimately fail.  Here’s to hoping there’s more to these groups than the cracked and weary discourse of the body, of oppression, of feminism.  If so, kudos.

WARNING: Frank discussions of sex.

When the Church has a problem it really has two problems. The first problem is the problem. The second problem is how to handle the first problem.

I have become aware of a controversy in the small circles I move in. It has to do with matters of doctrine — and doctrine is important to Christ: “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). “[The overseer] must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9).

So doctrine is nothing to go soft on.

Interestingly, however, one of the chief doctrines is love. The whole Old Testament is summed up in the doctrine to love God and love neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40). Moreover, love is the “aim” of all doctrine. While telling Timothy to stay put in Ephesus and “charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3), Paul says, “The aim of our charge is love….” (v.5).

So how to you do that — hold firm to doctrine and hold firm to love?

There are some Christian controversies that are as old as the hills (millennium, baptism, Sabbath). Is it not possible that these have been around so long because the issues are genuinely “hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16), and because each of the disagreeing parties has some genuine kernel of insight in his position?

Maybe controversies are God’s gift to the church to force us to listen to and love one another?

I received a “special greeting,” only to open it and find about fifty other addressees besides me. Not feeling so “special” anymore, I moved on to the next email.

My assumption, as I reflected on it later, was that love’s intensity is diluted when it’s stretched fifty ways. For the same reason, I would not like to be a Mormon of the old school, and competitor for my husband’s affections.

But then I started thinking of people I know who have loved me well. They have generally been people who loved others well too. There was Marge, who opened her house to many a stray hippie in Hyannis. There was Lyn, who had scores of friends, but took me to Quebec the summer my husband died.

The quality of the love, and not the number of people it alights on, is the thing. I have noticed that if a person has this kind of love, she is able to hold more people in her embrace than another person who is capable of letting in only one or two. My arithmetic was too earthly.

I need to disabuse myself of this prejudice regarding God. I have been thinking He can’t possibly love me well if he is so promiscuous with his affections. But that’s like an ant trying to fathom the sea. “The weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

The Kite Runner is Afghan American author Khaled Hasseini’s story of two boys growing up in Kabul on the eve of Communist occupation. They are fast friends though Amir is of the more prestigious Pashtun tribe, and Hassan is a Hazara servant in his father’s posh household.

Amir is a writer of stories, introspective, and not brave. Hassan is illiterate, handy with a slingshot, fiercely loyal, and courageous. Amir watches, frozen, from a hiding place while three future Taliban teenage bullies have their way with Hassan in a cave. Unable to live with his guilt, Amir later connives to have Hassan banished from his father’s estate. Though Hassan knows all this, he continues to show undying love to his friend — even reaffirming his commitment in a letter written to the now California-based Afghan writer.

1 Corinthians 13 says that “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; love never ends.” And I will tell you that I can hear that preached from the pulpit a hundred times, with fortissimo, and it will not have nearly the impact on me that one human incarnation of the teaching has. Oh, what power would be unleashed on the world if we only lived God’s Word!

“A Simile for Her Smile” by Richard Wilbur

Your smiling, or the hope, the thought of it,
Makes in my mind such pause and abrupt ease
As when the highway bridgegates fall,
Balking the hasty traffic, which must sit
On each side massed and staring, while
Deliberately the drawbridge starts to rise:

Then horns are hushed, the oilsmoke rarefies,
Above the idling motors one can tell
The packet’s smooth approach, the slip,
Slip of the silken river past the sides,
The ringing of clear bells, the dip
And slow cascading of the paddle wheel.

Here’s a symposium on dating, courtship and marriage from Touchstone magazine, with four short articles:

“That Could Be Arranged“ by S. M. Hutchens, where he considers courtship for his children.

“Not-So-Blind Date“ by Jocelyn Mathewes, where she sympathizes with Hutchens, but thinks it’s wrong to throw out more convetional “dating” altogether. 

“Three’s No Crowd“ by Kevin Offner, a college minister, who says it’s the local church’s responsibility to facilitate the crossing of the dating/courting/marriage chasm.

“Father Knows Maybe Not“ by James Hitchcock, who closes the symposium by saying that the Christian parent’s only real option is to raise up children of character who will then make up their own minds, because ”for parents to attempt actually to choose their children’s spouses is ultimately not defensible in Christian terms.”

Televangelist Juanita Bynum said her husband, minister Thomas W. Weeks III, choked, kicked and stomped her in a hotel parking lot on August 21. Bynum is accusing Weeks of aggravated assault, filing for divorce, and pushing for federal legislation that gives tougher punishments to abusers. The incident prompts questions of how the church helps - or fails to help - battered women.

Pastor Michael Pearl, for instance, tells abused wives to prosecute their husbands without divorcing them: “Guys who get out of prison run straight home to their ladies and treat them wonderfully-for a while anyway” (see page 6 of “Abusive Husband”). Pearl tells a wife whose husband sexually molests his children, “Stick by him, but testify against him in court. Have him do about 10 to 20 years, and by the time he gets out, you will have raised the kids, and you can be waiting for him with open arms of forgiveness and restitution. Will this glorify God? Forever.”

But Edward Welch, director of Westminster Theological Seminary’s School of Biblical Counseling, said sometimes counselors should persuade a battered woman to divorce her husband: “Violence can be an even more direct breach of the marriage than adultery itself. … It is certainly a violation of a covenant of trust and care.” Welch said Scriptures that counsel wifely submission cannot be used to excuse husbands’ violence. The church may debate the definition of submission, Welch said, but a husband’s call is clear: “You love your wives in the way Christ loved the church.”

Welch said the church can improve its approach to domestic abuse. Churches can “give women the privilege of being able to speak more openly” by teaching that God hates injustice. Welch said pastors should give wives the words they need to speak up, and other church members should be ready to lovingly respond if she does.