Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

One young and eager girl from a broken Jewish home in Liverpool, wed to one man twelve years her senior from a sternly united if somewhat repressed Baptist family in Portsmouth. Wartime was certainly full of such improvised unions, in which probably both at first counted themselves fortunate, but I know for a fact that while my father never stopped considering himself lucky, my mother soon ceased to do so.

My father was a very good man and a worthy and honest and hard-working one, but he bored her, as did much of the remainder of her life. “The one unforgivable sin,” she used to say, “is to be boring.”

the bogus refulgences of Kahlil Gibran and the sickly tautologies of The Prophet.

A role taken over by Paulo Coelho and his dubious tome "The Alchemist."

Both he and she were now devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: the sinister windbag who had brought enlightenment to the Beatles in the summer of love. I had to boggle a bit at this capitulation to such a palpable fraud—“Have you given The Perfect Master any money? Has he given you a secret mantra to intone?”—but when the answer to the second question turned out to be a sincere and shy “yes,” I forgave her in a burst of laughter in which she (with a slight reserve, I thought) nonetheless joined.

My own text was from that same Paul of Tarsus, and from his Epistle to the Philippians, which I selected for its non-religious yet high moral character: Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

This selection by Hitchens was for his father's funeral. If only more evangelicals attempted to abide by this admonition. But of course they are "saved," that's all that matters and Martin Luther and Calvin made it clear that "works" were not important in the larger scheme of salvation. There is a similar passage in Galatians that is supposed to be evidence of the authenticity of their faith. Hmmm.... "But the Fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."

The only set topic that I can now remember (because there was always a set topic and it was always a worthy and elevated one) was Martin Buber’s homely maxim that “True Living Lies in Meeting.” (How was I to know that this pious old hypocrite, the author of I and Thou, had after 1948 moved into the Jerusalem house from which the family of my one-day-to-be friend Edward Said had been evicted?)

I recall years ago the hullabaloo about Buber's book cited here. But in the end, it's actions that speak the truth about a person, not pious or any other form of verbiage.