Las Vegas | CURIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

We all have a lot of ideas about paradise. For some it’s a trip to Las Vegas, where for them paradise may just be, homophonically, a pair of dice.

For others, it’s a beachy place with a sea breeze (instead of a powerful air conditioner) or wildflowers near a lake or being surrounded by loved ones or love itself, or music with love, or well, the list could go on.

Texas Bluebonnets and wildflowers along Lake Whitney, Texas

And then I got to thinking about love, and Paradise along with it and, well, given the season of the year, I was thinking, too, of the proverbial thief on the cross. Jesus says to one of them, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). In that very familiar verse, Jesus speaks not only the promise of Paradise but he speaks love, a very present love. When one stops to think about it, one realizes that, for that suffering, dying man Love is right there, before him.

Now we might think of Paradise as something like a beautiful beach or even the enjoyment of two luscious drinks at a far-away bar (or even a familiar one); yet Paradise for that thief on the cross and for the One who speaks him into that Paradise probably turned out, that first Good Friday so very long ago, to be a place rife with other unfortunate people, people whom you wouldn’t expect to find in any earthly paradise. After all, the people Jesus came to care for were, for the most part, impoverished, needy, psychologically screwed up.

Given that it’s Maundy Thursday, I will take the fitting example of Mary. Not Mary, the Mary to whom many a cathedral is dedicated—and we here lament, yet again the extensive damage to the greatest cathedral to Jesus’ mother, Mary, Nôtre Dame de Paris—but the Mary whose life was screwed up so badly, the one whom Dan Brown novels have him married to: Mary Magdalene, for it is possible that it is her name that gives rise to the holy day known as Maundy Thursday. Mary is believed to be the woman who perfumed Jesus’ feet with her hair preparing him, Jesus says prophetically, for burial. She is also believed to have been a prostitute or at least a woman who was rather free with herself sexually. Yet Jesus did not reject her as unclean and unworthy; rather, he reached out to her, brought him close to himself, forgave her for all her sins, not just her sexual ones, and loved her. And she loved him for that, and for much more. And we can, too.

But back to Paradise. If there are in fact needy, unfortunate people there, chances are there’s service to be rendered them. Maybe some who show up in such a paradisiacal place should assume that they will have something to do when they arrive—serving the needy, caring for the poor, bandaging the wounds of those who are hurt in some way, whether physically or spiritually. And their own wounds, psychological, spiritual and physical, can be healed there, too. If that is the case, maybe heavenly Paradise, the place that Jesus is speaking about on the cross, isn’t so much a resort but really a place where we will have the privilege of serving. And maybe that’s what the psalmist means when he writes, “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked” (Psalm 84:10 NIV). I think Mary Magdalene understood that, for she had begun already serving before she ever entered Paradise.

The most comfortable paradises that we shall find on earth are wonderful, and can be a great opportunity to recover from the stress and strain of our daily lives. Good stuff. But the Paradise of Heaven, will be better by far, though possibly less comfortable; it will be far more filled with love, but undoubtedly less sexy; it will poorer, and yet I think it will be far richer and even, I think, more beautiful. For in it there will be the ebb and flow of real Love.

And, then again, there just might be delicious drinks there, as well. Who knows? In any case, I have a feeling that the Paradise that is on Jordan’s far bank is going to be both a bit different than anything we can imagine and even better that anyone on this side of Jordan could begin to describe. However it may turn out to be, there can be little doubt but that it will be filled with mercy, for that is what Jesus speaks to the thief on the cross, and it is that very thing—mercy—which this season, more than any other, proclaims.

A Blessed Maundy (i.e. Magdalene) Thursday to you and, soon, a Happy Easter! May you both enjoy some temporary paradises on this earth and, more importantly, may you, like Mary, find true love, enduring mercy and the true paradoxical Paradise, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Never until I had a balcony in Viterbo did I understand why there is an eye on a dollar bill. Now I know this connection is preposterous. I know that the reason there is an eye on a dollar bill is, conspiracy theorists attest, because the Masonic League or the Knights Templar held the image of the all-knowing eye of God to be among their most prominent symbols. I’m not so sure. However that may be, certainly the symbol intrigued Benson Lossing who crafted the seal on the dollar in the years leading up to 1856 when it was first published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.[1] But that’s not what I mean. Rather I mean this: when you have a balcony in an inexpensive but lovely hotel in Viterbo, like the Hotel Tuscia, you see things you would never otherwise see, as if you were the eye of God.

Or, in fact, maybe you just hear them. For as I am writing this I am obviously looking at a computer screen, but I am taking in sounds, sounds coming from the nearest piazza, Piazza San Faustino, where a far from flawless cantor, if perhaps he is not so bad—he is, after all, a young man—is singing popular (I assume) Italian songs. I know enough Italian to know that most of them are about love (predictably). And I felt like, for a moment, Superman hovering over the earth and taking it all in, listening to a lone singer of love amidst a world in need of such singers, a world in need of love songs; for it is a world, indeed, in need of love.

I say this because, just after getting off the train from Rome, where I passed a lovely and culturally rich day touring the Chamber of Deputies (Camera dei Deputati) and meeting a few powerful folks, a senator and a congressman—please don’t ask me how this happened; but if you want to know how things like this happen to me, read the final chapter of the Curious Autobiography, the bit on Vegas, for that should do it—I passed by the bus stop near Porta Fiorentina where a number of Africans were waiting for the bus. “Why were they waiting?” a friend of mine asked later. I tried to explain that they were likely “indentured,” a polite word for humans, in sinister wise, being trafficked. The sadness of these folks’ plight choked the culture, the richness, and the hope out of me in less than ten seconds. I wanted to stand at the bus stop with them. I wanted to play soccer in the park with them the next day. I wanted to participate in their sufferings as a little Christ, for the larger, more perfect version has more than participated in all of ours.

But that’s theology, and I don’t want to move in that direction. Rather I want to return to the singer in the piazza at the top of the block; for after a short break his song began to fill the square again. Ah, love again, and again, and again, for that is his solitary theme. Yet I couldn’t help think of the men gathering by Porta Fiorentina to ride the bus day upon day. How can I, or anyone, let them know that that same theme, if to a slightly different strain, is God’s very song, too? I don’t know. But I do know that, though I know not how, I want to participate in their sufferings that I might fill up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ.[2] Can there really be anything lacking in that? I doubt as much—but perhaps just the message, the message of the singer, not always in tune, but beautiful, as I listen to it now from a balcony of a hotel in Tuscia, fittingly named, Hotel Tuscia. In closing, let me send you some blessings from Italy, from Tuscia, a place that is not quite Tuscany, not quite Rome, but rich in lovers’ songs and offering hope, I hope, to those without any, all under the Tuscan sun, under the all seeing eye of the One who truly sees and suffers with all humankind, and all this, just under my balcony.