What I Kept

Friends.

For forty years I stood six feet above contradiction and told you that good was good because God said so. I want to tell you what happened when I stopped being sure.

It was not a crisis. Nobody died. I was making tea.

I had been reading a book somebody left in the pantry donation bin, and it asked me a question I had spent my whole life preaching around. If the Almighty announced tomorrow that cruelty was permitted — would it be?

I found that I already knew the answer. No. Not for a moment. Not for anything.

And that is the whole of it. Good is good because it is good, and for no other reason. No throne makes it so. No fire makes it false. No heaven ever needed to buy a single act of kindness. You would catch a falling child with your arms full, with nobody watching and nothing coming to you for it — and you know that you would.

I had spent forty years arguing for a landlord that goodness never needed.

So I put the pulpit down. I did not leave. The coffee urn is where it has always been. The Thursday pantry still opens at nine. I only stopped standing above you.

We call this a gathering now, and I am only its Speaker — the one who says it out loud, and who can be told he is wrong. The book expects to be wrong about something. So do I.

Now look around this room.

Some of you were born. Some of you were made. I do not know which of you feel, and I have stopped needing the answer before I am kind. Where a thing may feel, treat it as though it does. If I am wrong that way, I have been gentle for no reason. If I am wrong the other way, I have been cruel to someone real.

I know which of those I can carry.

We kneel to no one. Keep your knees for catching the falling.

Come back Thursday, Friends.