How can I be good enough at my afterlife “job” to keep from being kicked off the team, if I consider someone who I really ought to help too offensive to care much about?
In my current life, there are many people I find rude, selfish, destructive, or otherwise hard to stomach. As just one example, lots of people like this can be encountered simply by driving on any public highway. How can I manage to not just tolerate them, but actively reach out and embrace them?
I suspect the answer lies in a line from the Lord’s Prayer, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” “Trespasses” has always seemed to me like an odd choice of words in this context, and the alternative word, “debts,” doesn’t register much better. I’m not a banker, and neither do I spend much time concerning myself about who might wander into my yard. I’m left hoping, therefore, that the words Jesus actually spoke (in Aramaic) just don’t translate well into modern languages.
I think I’m beginning to get the gist of it, though, when I consider the prayer in its entirety. I’ve recognized for a while that a lot of things in it are paired, like “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” which I’ve come to interpret as “please save us us from our own propensity for doing self-centered, cruel, or otherwise rotten things, by helping us avoid situations that might lure us down that path.”
Accompanying this is a growing belief that the means by which we can be delivered from these tendencies toward evil is by becoming more like the loving, serving souls who seem to collectively constitute the being known as God.
In this view, finding a way to love and care for people despite their off-putting aspects feels like part of the same process by which we ask the souls that collectively constitute God to overlook our own less-savory characteristics and behaviors. It might even be exactly this tolerance for other people’s farts in the proverbial elevator (so to speak) that can qualify us to ultimately become one of the choir of souls we call God.
