Magical Thinking

Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. If those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker. A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God. (Romans 2:25-29) 

          There’s an old question: if you walk into a garage, do you turn into a car? If you put on makeup that makes you look like an alien, or someone of a different ethnic heritage, does that make you an alien or a person of a different ethnic heritage? If you have surgery, whether circumcision or something more drastic, that does make you a Jew or something other than you were before the surgery? A book I recently finished reading touches on this idea. In Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, several characters are seeking happiness. Two of them see it in others and are determined to get it from them even if it requires vivisection.

          I’m no different. I want there to be an herbal supplement, or something, that will make me what I want to be, instantaneously and without effort. Where is that radioactive (non-arachnid) critter? It’d be so nice to not have to struggle with moral purity, health and fitness, even skills and talents. I know better, but I still struggle. I find myself thinking that when I go to Florida (or return to Pennsylvania) that somehow, that change of location will cause me get my life together. 

          What today’s passage tells us is that those outward things don’t change what we are inside. Getting circumcised doesn’t make one a Jew. Failure to keep even one of the more than six hundred laws negates circumcision. Taking a pill doesn’t make one smart, pretty, healthy, fit, talented, disciplined, or moral. When you run to some other place, you take yourself with you. Happiness is not excreted from any organ in the body. Surgery and hormone treatments don’t make you a man or a woman. Neither does church attendance, church membership, baptism, confirmation, going to confession, praying the rosary a thousand times, or taking the sacrament of communion make one a Christian. 

          Don’t get me wrong, in order to be a Jew, one has to obey the Law, and the Law included circumcision. Similarly, one doesn’t become a Christian by attending church, or being baptized, or all the rest, but there is value in doing those things, particularly attending church. It’s hard to learn to love people if you isolate yourself from the very people you need to learn to love. It’s also impossible to receive love from them if you don’t give them a chance to learn to give it. The things don’t magically make us what we want to be, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t needed in order for us to be what we want to be.