The Color of Water by the black journalist James McBride. His mother, Ruth McBride Jordan was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska). Her father was a Rabbi that brought his family to America and made his living peddling religion and cheating the impoverished blacks in a backwater Southern town. Fleeing her abusive father, she escaped to New York and would have been vanished into the cesspool of drugs and prostitution had not she been rescued by a black man that eventually became her husband and a pastor of a church in Harlem.I think one day I would like to write a blog about The Color of Water and about how unexpected was the choice of a Jewish woman's faith in Jesus as a message to Jewish students in an Israeli high school. But Ruth McBride came to my mind today for another reason.
A friend told me about how she came to know God only after meeting His people. At first she was drawn by their love, and then slowly and in the little things in life she began to feel God's love as well. If you hear her today, God is a real person in her life; her father. She talks to Him, pours her heart out to Him and sometimes gets mad at Him. There's real love there, and it started with the love of the people that are today her brothers and sisters.
I read not long ago this:
"I've also learned that nobody - ever - not ever one time - was argued into faith. Faith isn't ever a matter of argument. It's a matter of choice and obedience and will - stuff much sturdier in the end than mere "reasons" or just being "right" about things. Humans can't live on reasons alone.It's charity first. Take your limited understanding, feeble strength, and puny needs for validation off of it, and just be nice. That's really what it more often boils down to." (Stephanie)
It's charity, love. We can't know God through religion, we know Him through love. And we we'll never be able to explain the God we know to others with words, only with love. I think that was what I was trying to say to my daughter Maayan in "Sons or Servants"; that it's not the things we do, the religion, but the relationship itself, love, that God wants with us.
Ruth McBride grew up in a house full of religion. It was rules and laws, but also a house of abuse and selfishness. She ran away to people dissimilar in every way to herself and those she left behind, and found a home, a place where God dwells. And she found that place through love.
1 comment:
Gorgeous photo under the title! Is it the Sea of Galilee?
And I do think we can know God through religion - I think that's the only way TO know God, in fact. I just don't think anyone was ever argued into it, that's all. We are introduced to Love through love, not argument.
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