Blog 435 – 10.15.2016

Legend has it that long ago the dogwood tree grew straight and tall. The grain of its wood was so straight and strong that the Romans chose it for one of the cruelest instruments of terror, torture, and execution the world has ever known. Thousands of crosses hung across the Roman world with men, women, and children nailed to them in one of the most agonizing deaths ever devised by man.

The story goes that because such a cross was used to crucify a particular son of God that the tree was forever cursed. No longer would it grow straight and tall but stunted and snarled. In addition, its bloom would be a reminder to all of Jesus death on the cross. Its white petals symbolized the cross. Each petal having on its tip a blood stain to represent the three bloody nails that pierced his body and the bloody crown of thorns that pierced his head. A picture they say is worth a thousand words.

You may be skeptical of the meaning some find in the folds of a flower. For over twenty years of this adventure I tried very hard to be a skeptic, a doubter, but what I think I learned from that experience is that other view points are valid too. In high school we were taught to debate, to take opposing sides of an issue and taking turns to try to convince an audience that your view is the correct view. I have spent the greater part of my life arguing this point or that always wanting to think I was on the right side or had the truth of the matter.

In college I had a literature class with a young teacher we called Sister Weaver. No, it was not a Roman Catholic college, but it was like that somewhat. It was a conservative Christian Bible College. Sister Weaver was from a Christian fellowship that was a bit more relaxed than ours and so she opened up her students minds to different views and interpretations. Her view of things, as my own now is, was slightly skewed from what the college administration and the fellowship it represented put forward.

A good buddy of mine, Michael Ross Rosensweig, and I gave Sister Weaver quite a hard time in class as we were particularly skeptical of her interpretations. She had what we thought was a way of finding spiritual meanings in everything. Her views on Hemingway’s The Old Man In The Sea we found to be sort of strained. I mean some times a fish is not a metaphor it’s just a fish or is it?

We can find meaning in everything and often like the four blind men trying to describe an elephant we just see things differently. But is one particular view the right one or just a different one? My buddy Michael Ross had been raised in the Jewish tradition for his family was Jewish. But after his time in Vietnam (we were brothers in that way too – both Vietnam vets) he was for a while a Jew for Jesus in California and then became associated with the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana who sponsored our college, Gulf Coast Bible College, at that time located in Houston, Texas.

I had not seen Michael, we called him Ross back then, in almost forty years. Through another friend I located him and we emailed and spoke on the phone a few times. When I got a work assignment in Indiana I let him know I would be closer and he drove over to Terre Haute from Bedford, Indiana where he lived and we spent a Saturday afternoon together.

We talked and talked and Michael told me that he had rejected Christianity and returned to his Jewish faith. I shared my spiritual journey as well and my belief that no matter what views either of us held that we were brothers twice over. He asked if I’d like to go to the Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute with him and I said sure. We grieved together for that terrible time in world history when brothers killed brothers in mass. Sadly it still goes on around the globe today and even close to home.

My brother Michael got his discharge papers not long after our visit. He went home to be with the brothers that he lost in the war and his larger family on a far finer shore. Michael died as he lived trying to help his brothers. There was a beautiful song that came out about the time Michael and I served in Vietnam. It was inspired by a real life event.

During the war a soldier saw a young boy carrying another boy bigger than himself who had been wounded. The soldiers asked the boy carrying the other if he needed help and the boy replied, “He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.”

Our brother, Jesus, gave his life to remind us all that we are all brothers of the same Father and that father has no favorites but loves all his children. Jesus said, “No greater love has any man than to lay down his life for his friends.” Michael knew that. He saw his brothers laying down there lives for their brothers. Sometimes living for them is a greater challenge. Let your light so shine that others will see the way home,

Your brother and fellow traveler,
David White