Experiencing Grace

Galatians 1:1-12

2^nd Sunday after Pentecost

29th May 2016

Paul’s angry.  He’s furious with the church in Galatia.  Paul usually begins his letters with warm greetings and expressions of gratitude.  Not Galatians. He gets straight to the point.  You can hear it in the opening sentence, “Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (Gal. 1:1).  Then, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen” (Gal. 1:3).

What’s he so hot about?  “I am astonished,” Paul writes, “that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ” (Gal. 1:6-7).  There it is.  Someone is swaying them.  And whoever that person is, Paul says, twice, “let that one be anathema.”  “Let that one be accursed.”  Anathema.  Ouch. 

It takes Paul just two sentences, forty-six words, to go from “Amen” or  “Yes,” in verse 5 to anathema, accursed. Like a double-edged sword, “these two words in Galatians 1:5 and 9 impose themselves at the outset of Paul’s letter,…splitting the world down the middle—good and bad, condemnation and salvation, blessing and curse.  Galatians is the most polarizing and angry letter that Paul wrote.”[1]

Paul writes to assert his authority.  He reminds them that he’s an apostle, meaning someone sent on a mission, sent—and not by them.  He’s been commissioned by the God of Israel, God “our Father,” he says, the God who sent the Son to “set us free from the present evil age,” the God who sends Paul to extend that same message or gospel of freedom to everyone, everyone willing to listen.

Freedom.  That’s how Paul understands the grace of God experienced in Christ.  It’s about liberation, deliverance from every power and principality that binds and hinders and disempowers God’s children.  And that “present evil age” that Paul refers to is the idolatrous, brutal age of an empire, Caesar’s imperial salvation that thinks it has the power to rule the world and grant liberty and freedom. 

Paul intentionally calls the message of Christ, euangelion, which we translate “good news” or “gospel.”  (“Evangelism” and “evangelical” come from the same Greek word.)  Whose good news?  In Paul’s time the word was associated with the accession or birth of an emperor.  Here’s a portion of an imperial birth announcement, from 9 BCE.  It’s from the Priene Calendar Inscription, discovered in Asia Minor.  It reads, “…the birth of the god [meaning Caesar] was the beginning of good tidings [euangelion] to the world through him.”[2]  Good news for empire.  Really bad news for everyone else, especially the people of God.

Paul’s understanding of God’s euangelion was radically different Caesar’s.  Much to his surprise, Paul discovered that God was up to something entirely different in Christ.  Here’s why.  The fact that God raised one left for dead, that God raised from the dead one who was shamefully, ignobly crucified on a Roman cross—a method of death reserved only for enemies of the state—that God chose this Jesus, who in the eyes of Judaism would have been viewed as an abomination for hanging naked on a cross (see Deuteronomy 21:22-23), that God raised someone like him, who was weak before the raw, brutal power of Rome, that God chose to raise someone like Jesus, an act that signals that God brings life from dead places, gives life to one outcast and rejected, that God would act this way through Jesus of Nazareth was an experience that completely overwhelmed and astonished, surprised and stunned Paul.  Stunned Saul, really.  Saul who persecuted the followers of Jesus and made them suffer (Acts 8), this Saul who probably had a hand in the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7)—this Saul, who was a religious leader, scholar, with a huge ego could not have imagined God acting through Jesus on a Roman cross, justifying Jesus’ life and raising him up; Saul could not have imagined God acting in this way.  Ludicrous!  Scandalous!  It made no sense from within the confines of Saul’s worldview—that is, until the Risen Christ encountered him on the Damascus Road.  Paul knew.

Paul.  A new name given to symbolize his new life—not a new religion, but a new life, a new orientation, a new discernment of the God’s grace.  Yes, Pau now knew from personal experience that God is the God of new beginnings.  Paul knew that God brings life out of godforsaken places and people.  Paul knew that God justifies the sinner, makes whole.  Paul thought he knew all about God’s grace and mercy, but all that changed when Christ encountered him along the Damascus Road, threw him into the crisis of his life, leaving his world and ours never again the same. 

That’s why it’s called good news.  What’s revealed about God through Christ is gospel, good news for Paul, for in that experience of grace Christ saved his life, saved him from himself, gave him his life back, offered him freedom.  As Paul says later in Galatians (one of my favorite verses in scripture), “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). For freedom. 

Paul became 100% committed to this message, to God’s good news.  He’s on fire by it and for it, he’s willing to suffer for it, and nothing will shake this confidence.  So, if Paul appears cranky and arrogant at times and comes across a little too sure of himself, cut him some slack.  Give him a break.  Paul has been convicted by the grace of God and this is, in part, what a life of conviction looks like.  A transformed person is then thrust into the world “with a velocity not one’s own.”[3]

That’s what the gospel is; that’s what the gospel does.  Paul didn’t create it.  He didn’t dream it up.  He didn’t think or rationalize his way into believing these things about God.  Belief wasn’t much help to him, actually.  Belief got him in trouble.  Belief can do that.  His beliefs got in the way.  His beliefs caused him to be obstructionist, to stand in the way of what God was doing through Jesus and his followers.  Paul, that is, Saul, would have none of it.  Saul didn’t go looking for Jesus.  He didn’t say to himself one day, “Hey, I’m looking for a career change.  Let’s give this a try.”  He didn’t try to scheme up a rival belief system in order to form a new religion.  He didn’t want to be at odds with the Jewish authorities.  And he didn’t want to take on the paganism of the Roman Empire and get himself arrested and later executed by Rome. But this is exactly what happened, all because of the grace that came upon him, the movement of Christ toward him in love, the generosity of God that moved toward this fearful man. 

Grace came toward him.  Grace moves toward us.  It always comes upon us.  We don’t go scheming up ways to find it.  We don’t work toward it.  Our ways are not God’s ways, which is why grace often comes to us as shock and surprise, it’s scandalous, even offensive to our sensitivities and moralities and ideologies, because it’s not what we expect.  It rarely is. “The gospel,” as Eugene Peterson says, “is the unexpected, fresh, surprising good news that God is not angry or indifferent or impersonal, but that God loves us and has provided the means for our salvation. That love and that salvation are at the center of absolutely everything, and from that center all of life is lived.”[4]

Paul now lives from that center.  His faith is not “on the side,” but at the center of his life. Grounded in Christ, he doesn’t care about the religious authorities or even political authorities of his day.  His life is flowing from that center, from that grace.

This grace was “revealed” to him, he writes (Gal 1:12).  It didn’t come from a human source.  It wasn’t taught to him by the wise.  It wasn’t received by tradition passed down from one generation to another.  It was direct knowledge.  The Greek word for “revelation” is apocalypsis (from which we get the word apocalypse). For Paul and other New Testament writers, “apocalypse” did not mean the end of the world, although, sadly, that’s what the word has come to mean today.  (I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this word misused.  I would be rich.)  One could say, “It’s just a word,” words change their meaning.  But when it comes to the world of the Bible, the meaning of words matter. We’re not allowed to take contemporary meanings of a word and then project them back upon the text and assume they mean the same thing.  When this happens we end up with some really bad, destructive, even toxic readings of Scripture.  A misuse of a word also, more significantly, hinders us from hearing and seeing what is actually going on in the text. And the word apocalypsis is a really good example of this. 

It was an apocalypse, Paul tells us, that showed him something new, meaning a revelation, an opening up, an unveiling, a disclosure.  The one who opened up the truth for Paul, who unveiled God’s way in Jesus, who disclosed the power of God’s love, was God.  By God, from God, through God, for God–and therefore, for us.

But why then isn’t this grace at the center of the church?  Paul cannot fathom why the Galatians are turning from the message, turning to a “different gospel,” which is not gospel at all, but further slavery. “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ,” he writes (Gal. 1:6).  He’s furious and frustrated, he’s disappointed, and he’s grieving for them.  His anger is really an expression of love.  For he wants them to know what he had come to know, the power of God’s grace that liberates and redeems.

But, why don’t they get it? How does anybody get it? How did you get it?  How do you get someone to get it, how do get your children to get it?  How can one lose it?  These are huge theological questions. Can grace be taught?  Can we really teach for faith?  Is it possible to teach someone to be a follower of Jesus?  We can pass down the tradition, teach our children well in church school, practice the rituals, go to church every week our entire lives—but it’s not enough.  Who can pull, who has the authority and power to pull the veil aside and allow someone to encounter the presence of God?  Can we disclose what grace is, what God’s love is like to someone who hasn’t experienced these things first-hand?

Personally, I think the church today would be well served by something the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) said about Paul.  Jung wrote these words in a letter back in the 1930s, and they’re just as relevant today.  Perhaps only now are we ready to really him them.  “St. Paul…was not converted to Christianity by intellectual or philosophical endeavor or by belief, but by the force of his immediate experience.  His belief was based upon it but our modern theology turns the thing round and holds that we first ought to believe, and then we would have an inner experience, but this reversal forces people into a wrong rationalism and excludes even the possibility of a religious experience.”[5]  Jung isn’t exactly correct here regarding Paul’s so-called “conversion.”  Paul remained a Jew throughout his life.  However, Jung’s point about honoring what happened to Paul is still very important.  Without an emphasis upon Paul’s experience, it’s easy to misread Paul!

Paul is basically holding out for us the primacy of immediate experience.  Remember, the only reason Paul is writing to the Galatians and preaching to the Gentiles and getting into all kinds of trouble, enduring suffering and shipwreck, is because of that primary experience he had on the Damascus Road that struck him blind and overwhelmed him, that shattered his reality, that shook the foundations of his faith and worldview, and forced him to reframe how he viewed himself in the eyes of God, an experience—felt and embodied—of a power so strong and graceful that it redirected his life.  This radically transforming insight, this knowledge of God through Christ then demanded something of him.  How could he just hear the good news and then do nothing about it?  It demanded a response; it demanded his life, his passions—not just some of him, but all of him.  Paul didn’t have the gospel, the gospel had him, had him in its grip, and he was, therefore, compelled to yield to it, yield to God’s demand, yield to God’s claim on his life.

It’s important that we not turn Paul into an ideal type, a super apostle by which we judge our level of faithfulness.  He was far from perfect.  He was an ordinary sinner like you and me through whom God did extraordinary things.  This is why I value Paul, for the story of his life and witness demonstrates what is available to each of us through Christ—an experience of grace.  You might not get blinded by light driving down Frederick Road (it could happen), but that doesn’t mean the experience will be any less shattering and transforming for you and your world. 

We can’t force the revelation.  I can’t give you a religious experience.  The church can’t manufacture one for you.  I wish we could.  What I can do and feel called to do, what we as a church can do and are called to do, is point the way, give witness, hold out the possibility that it’s possible, and encourage people to remain open to what is yet to be revealed. 

Whenever grace strikes us or comes upon us and moves us and shakes us and loves us and assures us and then, because God loves us, demands something of us, something worthy of God’s love and grace, our lives and the life of the world are never the same. How can they be?  That’s the good news!  This is what sends us out into the world with new life.  You might even find yourself feeling evangelical—in the original sense of the word—someone who knows God’s good news, someone who has experienced God’s grace, someone who knows that God has been gracious to you, someone who is now called—sent—to be gracious too.  Thanks be to God.

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[1] Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading With the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 247.

[2] The full Priene Calendar Inscription may be found here.

[3] This is how James E. Loder (1931-2001) often described such a life transformed. See The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1989).  See also Kenneth E. Kovacs, The Relational Theology of James E. Loder: Encounter and Conviction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

[4] Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light: Modern Meditations on St. Paul’s Letter of Freedom (Colorado Springs:  Helmers & Howard, 1988), 38.

[5] Letter to Anonymous in C. G. Jung Letters, Volume II, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 183.

Image:  Bruce Denny's bronze sculpture "Conversion of St. Paul," Soho Square, London.

More Truth, More Light

Martellus Map, 1491

John 16:12-15

Trinity Sunday

22^nd May 2016

Sometimes our maps are wrong.  Here’s a story about such a map, the Martellus Map. 

Henricus Martellus is the Latinized name of Heinrich Hammer.  Hammer was a geographer and cartographer from Nuremberg, German, who lived and worked in Florence from 1480 to 1496.  Between 1489 and 1491 he produced a map of the known world, an enormous map, measuring four feet by six feet, designed to hang on a wall.  There’s only one copy of it, which was discovered in 1960 and then donated to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  It has a fascinating history.  Portions of the map were borrowed from Ptolemy (90-168), the Greco-Egyptian polymath, who mapped the world around the year 150. Martellus’ descriptions of Asia were informed by the writings of Marco Polo (1254-1324).  Martellus also used a map produced in Lisbon, in 1485, by Bartolemeo Columbus (c. 1461-1515), Christopher’s brother.  In fact, Christopher Columbus used the Martellus map to persuade Ferdinand of Aragon (1462-1516) and Isabella of Castille (1451-1504) to support his desire to find a shorter and faster trade route to the East, in order to bypass the not always welcoming Ottoman Empire.

The big question, for both the Spanish monarchs and Columbus, was this: is it three thousand or ten thousand miles from Europe to Japan? Martellus based his drawings on Ptolemy’s calculation of the size of the earth (the Greeks had already measured the circumference of the earth within about a few hundred miles), combined with knowledge gained from Marco Polo’s travels through Asia.  Martellus incorrectly placed Japan about one thousand miles off the coast of China, he assumed that there was nothing between Japan and the Iberian Peninsula, except the Atlantic Ocean, thus he exaggerated the size of Asia to make up the difference. The map that Columbus used, the Martellus map, suggested that Japan was closer to Spain than it really was.  And there was something else neither Columbus nor anyone else suspected—that an enormous land mass was there in between, the Americas, which some of us call home. When “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492” and landed in the Bahamas he thought he was in Japan.  It’s remarkable, looking back, that the learned of that day could not imagine something other than what was expected.

Sometimes our maps are wrong. We create them with the best available knowledge, thinking we’re being scientific, but there always seem to be a bias built in.  We make assumptions about what is and is not true, about what can or cannot be true.  Even GPS systems and our Smartphones are not always smart.  Sometimes the maps are wrong.  I read this week about a driver in Ontario who blindly followed her GPS system, through the fog, and drove straight into Lake Huron.  The car sank and she swam to shore.  Whether it’s Martellus’ map of the then known world or the maps of our personal lives, sometimes our maps are wrong—there’s a lot that’s unknown. 

Yes, the map was wrong—as Columbus discovered—but that didn’t prevent him (and others after him) from further exploration into the unknown.  They used the map, but didn’t trust it completely because they knew they were first explorers and discovers and only second mapmakers trying to map the unknown world.  Maps were often drawn and then redrawn and then redrawn again after experience either confirmed or discounted what they suspected to be true.  For example, there was a myth floating around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that California was actually floating, that it was an island.  In 1747 King Ferdinand VI (1713-1759) of Spain made a formal decree, “California [is] not an island,” as it had been assumed (due to an error in previous maps).  It’s part of the mainland.  Even up to the American Revolution this myth was out there in America and Europe.

In his book Failure of Nerve, Edwin Friedman (who was an expert on leadership and change dynamics in families, organizations, institutions, and religious communities) argues that Columbus’ voyage was a hinge event, a turning point in the history of the world, for a variety of reasons.  This discovery catapulted Europe out of a kind of cultural depression; it metabolized new energy and creativity.  It transformed the world and what individuals considered possible.  Friedman writes, “For a fundamental reorientation to occur, that human spirit of adventure which epitomizes serendipity and which enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinking processes must happen first.”[1]

The spirit of adventure is needed.  It’s easy to get stuck in faulty patterns of perception and behavior.  We become gridlocked, when what we really need is to break free from the grid.  We Presbyterians love our order.  We have our blessed Book of Order and an Order of Worship, and we love to quote the Apostle Paul, when he admonishes the Corinthians, “Let everything be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40).  Back in the 1980s, I once had a t-shirt made at the mall that read: Presbyterians Do It Decently and in Order.  Looking back on that now, that was really odd!  I was an odd teenager.  I can only imagine what the guy at the mall was thinking.  He had difficulty spelling the word Presbyterian. 

Reflecting on our obsession for order today, I wonder if, perhaps, what we really need is more disorder, something to break us out of what confines the Church today.  It’s tough for me to admit this as one who is very Presbyterian.  I don’t really know what I’m suggesting or know what more disorder would look like, but I suspect it’s true.  Yes, of course, order is needed for the Spirit to move.  The Spirit does move in and through order.  But the Spirit also moves through disorder.  Sometimes the Spirit even creates the disorder! She intentionally stirs things up – probably to show us that we’re wrong and that we need to change!

Humility of knowledge.  Maybe that’s what we need today.  Humility of knowledge.  I’m always struck by the power of human arrogance, when we think we know more than we really do, and how this attitude hinders progress, and then gets us into a lot of trouble, and produces a lot of pain and suffering. The word humility literally means, from the Latin humus, “of the earth.”  Humility means being “of the earth,” in other words, being grounded, real honest, truthful.  Humility of knowledge means being real, honest about what we know and don’t know.  Humility of knowledge checks hubris, it keeps us humble, but it also reminds us that there’s more to learn and discover in the world.  This is certainly true for science.  Jeff Bolognese shared with me recently, when we were touring NASA Goddard, that most scientists are actually very humble in acknowledging what they don’t know, and they are often blown away by new discoveries about the universe, which then pushes them to want to discover even more.  Consider how our views of the universe have changed because of the Hubble telescope.

What is true of science is also true of theology, which was one time known as the Queen of the Sciences.  Humility of knowledge is especially needed among Christians today, needed within the Church.  Yes, we need to confess our faith, know what we believe and why.  But we also need to confess our doubt and honor our doubt as an expression of our faith, as odd as that might sound.  We also need to be humble enough to acknowledge how much we don’t know about God, about Christ, about the Holy Spirit, about what it means to really be a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Each and every one of us needs to acknowledge that there’s still so much to learn!  This might freak out our Fundamentalist friends, but it’s true.  There’s more than one interpretation of a biblical text.  Scholars are always learning more about the meaning of an obscure Hebrew or Greek word, uncovering more about the composition of ancient texts, making new archeological discoveries that alter how we read and hear a text. 

There’s still so much to learn!  We need a spirit of adventure and discovery within the Church today, a bold spirit that will allow us to set sail from the old world into a new world of faithfulness; we need the courage to venture from the known out into the unknown.

The novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) tells us that as boy he loved to look at maps. "I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there."  Two decades later, in 1890, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness and exposed the violence and brutal suffering in the Belgian Congo.

Walt Whitman (1818-1892) captured this spirit of adventure in Leaves of Grass, using the experience of traveling at sea as a metaphor for life:

O we can wait no longer,

We too take ship O soul,

Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,

Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,

Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)

Caroling free, singing our song of God,

Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.

…

Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!

…

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only!

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.[2]

What would that spirit of adventure mean for the Church today, for this church, for our individual lives?  Before the pilgrims left for Plymouth, in 1620, the Rev. John Robinson (1576-1625), known as the “pastor of the pilgrims,” offered a Farewell Speech in Delfshaven.  He said, famously, “I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light to break forth from his holy Word.”  This is an extremely significant affirmation, if you think about it.  These pilgrims or religious separatists, these Calvinist Christians, our theological forbears, are about to leave the safety of home to venture to an unknown place, a dangerous place, crossing an ocean, all because their theological convictions were calling them to go forward.  It wasn’t a backward spirit driving them, but a forward movement.  Robinson also said in the speech that we must not look back toward the reformers, to Luther and Calvin, but to discover things they couldn’t see.[3] Significantly, as good Reformed Christians, people who are Reformed and always being reformed, by the Word and the Spirit, they trust, they know that there’s still so much to learn and discover and explore in the life of faith.

God’s Word is dynamic.  It’s not static.  To cite the tagline for the United Church of Christ, “God is still speaking.” (I wish we Presbyterians had a similar tagline!)  If God is still speaking then we need to listen, which also requires humility because we can’t expect to know what God will say before God speaks. We need to be quiet long enough to listen and not assume what will be said.  Listening requires courage, courage to acknowledge what is heard and then, guided by the Spirit, courage to set sail, to step out, to lean in, to act, to move. 

Yes, all of this is anxiety producing.  All of this is scary.  Of course it is!  Who said the life of faith is about being safe? Jesus never said, “Follow me and I will make you safe.”  We’re not called to play it safe.  Safety has little or nothing to do with it.

The Word, God’s creative Word speaking through the pages of scripture, still has so much to teach us!  We don’t have it all figured out.  Biblical scholars are always being humbled by what they don’t know.  For example, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran, in 1946, which date from Jesus’ life, along with the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, in the Egyptian desert in 1945, a text that might predate the Gospel of Mark, have and are changing what we know.

There’s always more to explore, more to discover, more to fathom and understand.  Didn’t Jesus say that when the “Spirit of truth comes, he will guide [us] into all the truth” (John 16:12)?  The Holy Spirit still has much to teach us.  I find it striking that the disciples didn’t learn everything they needed for being disciples when Jesus was with them. It wasn’t as if they had three years of seminary with Jesus, and then he sent them off to change the world.  There was still more to learn after his departure.  Perhaps they weren’t wise enough or strong enough or humble enough to learn those things during Jesus’ life, to enter into “all the truth” at that time.  Perhaps their hearts weren’t deep enough or open enough to fully fathom the truth of God’s love and grace. 

The same is certainly true of us today.  The Spirit is still the guide and the teacher and the source of truth, who reveals and discloses to us things beyond our imagining, things beyond our seeing (1 Corinthians 2:6-10), beyond reason, things beyond the limited confines of what we know, whose wisdom leads us forward.  We have yet to figure out what it means to really follow Christ, to bear the name Christian.  We have yet to fully fathom the heights and the depths of God’s grace and what is being asked of us with our lives. Our hearts need to be as deep and wide as the oceans of God’s love.  We have yet to discover what it means when we pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”—we certainly haven’t arrived at that new world, that kingdom world.  But that’s where the Spirit wants to take us, is taking us, will take us, is willing to guide us every step along the way, even if we don’t have a map, even if our maps are wrong.  Trust the Spirit.

George Macleod (1895-1991) of the Iona Community said, “Christians are explorers, not mapmakers.”  We’re explorers.  We’re called to explore and then revise the maps of God’s grace and justice and love, so that others coming after us will find a way, so that they may then go beyond us—because there’s still so much to discover!

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[1] Edwin W. Friedman, The Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (Seabury Books, 2007).

[2] Walt Whitman, from “Passage to India,” Leaves of Grass (1900).

[3] John Robinson’s Farewell Speech, 1620, "The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented."