Sunday Morning Meds--Order and chaos

 “. . .but whose delight is in the law of the Lord.” Psalm 1:2

Those who remember, often call it “the hunger winter” because, in Dutch cities at least, there simply was no food. Only farmers had something to eat—their own produce, of course—and everyday, people have told me, the roads out into the Dutch countryside swarmed with city-dwellers in stumbling need of food. With no provisions, some ate their cats and called them “roof rabbits.” People did everything they could to secure what they had to, to keep themselves and their families alive. It was a winter like nothing anyone could remember.

By late April, few institutions were functioning. Schools weren’t open, businesses had little to trade, the government was non-existent. Liberation was coming and people knew it, but the Allies weren’t yet there. Life had a Twilight Zone quality.

That’s the setting for a story a woman once told me about herself, her mother, and a block of cheese. Somewhere the province of Friesland, the Netherlands, where the Nazis were still fleeing the advance of the Allies, a train was left abandoned, and along with it an entire boxcar full of cheese. Once it was clear that Germans were gone, the townspeople commandeered that train and everything in it, and dispensed liberated cheese to people who hadn’t eaten that sumptuously for more than a year.

The woman who told me the story was a girl back then, one of those who’d spent most of her days looking for food during “the hunger winter.” She got herself a block of cheese, she said, and, convinced what she’d been given was itself a miracle, she lugged it home to her widowed mother, who took one look at that free food and sent her back to the train. “It's not ours," she said. "To take that cheese is to give in to chaos." 

And so she'd walked back, placed that cheese like a sacrifice in the empty boxcar, and left, very much alone.

That’s what she remembered. That’s what she couldn’t forget.

Her mother’s behavior has cold, understandable logic. What she feared more even than hunger was the madness of lawlessness, of chaos, of a life where disorder rules, as it can only do, insanely.

Here, recently, immigration officials tightened up national borders that, they claimed, had become too porous: thousands of people wanted in, thousands too many. Things were out of control. Someone had to bring order to the chaos, they claimed, so they tightened the law.

Yesterday, thousands took to the streets to protest laws they claimed had separated moms from their own little children. In cities across the nation, people raised signs and marched in opposition to the newly tightened laws.

It’s difficult for an old late-60s guy like myself to believe the Psalmist took real delight, as he says, in a series of “thou-shalt-nots," that he found great joy in the book of Deuteronomy. 

But without law, David knew, Israel was lost. The law spelled out God's own way of life.

One of the human dilemmas we all face--young and old, rich and poor, citizen and alien--is determining the balance between justice and mercy. Life requires both, even though so often they seem to play at odds. Was that Dutch mother right in sending her daughter back, or was she crazy?

What the law gave the people of Israel was order. What it kept at bay was chaos—both collectively and individually. What the law gave the Jewish people, or so says David, the poet/shepherd, was Jehovah's way of life. The law made life manageable and livable, and made God's identity vivid and blessed.

Without taking sides in yesterday's protests, it's clear that it still does. Lawlessness bears no fruit.