A Handy Hebrew Sing-Along Guide

“Deliver us; there’s a land you promised us. Deliver us out of bondage. Deliver us to the Promised Land.”

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

Thanks to the Dreamworks Wikia for the image. Such a dramatically striking poster...

I first encountered Dreamworks’ legendary early project The Prince of Egypt during a wet lunch break at infant school. I finished eating and left the hall at such a time as to cause me to enter the television-hosting classroom just as the Nile was turning to blood.¹ I remember finding the scene vaguely disconcerting. Then, at a later point in my infant school career, we watched the whole film in RE, and I remember finding that downright disturbing. The whole chucking-small-children-into-the-river-to-be-eaten-by-crocodiles thing, for some crazy reason, rather bothered my six-year-old self, and so I employed what was one of my favourite devices as a child, to stop engaging with what was in front of me and retreat into my own brain.

After that, I avoided The Prince of Egypt for years, but, on eventually re-watching it, came to the inevitable conclusion² that it is a wonderful, wonderful film, for many reasons, including a stunning soundtrack which is one of the few able to physically give me chills.³ (I’ll throw the opinion out there that the best track, and the biggest reason I would love to see the film converted into a stage musical with full choir, is ‘The Plagues’. Discuss.) On my church’s student week away at the start of this year, I genuinely remained in the kitchen holding a tea towel and pretending to be useful even though it wasn’t my turn to wash up because someone was playing the soundtrack on his or her phone and I couldn’t bear to leave the room before it finished. Yes. Really.

And, after said week away ended, I decided, because I’m a nerd and this is the kind of thing I do in my spare time, to take up my trusty Davidson’s Lexicon⁴ and work out what the Hebrew sections in the songs consisted of. The fruits of this endeavour I record below, so that, in the event, dear reader, that you find yourself thwarted by the language change while trying to sing along to ‘Deliver Us’ or ‘When You Believe’, you might in future not only be able to get the lyrics right but actually understand what they mean. You’re very welcome.

First, the short section sung by Moses’ mother during ‘Deliver Us’ – this is what it looks like in the Hebrew, including vowels:

יַלְדִי הַטּוֹב וְהָרַךְ

אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תִּפְחַד

A transliteration for pronunciation purposes:

Yaldī hatt͗ōv w’hārakh

Al-tīra w’al-tiphchad
 

A translation:

My good and tender child (literally, ‘my child, the good one and the tender one’),

Don’t be afraid and don’t tremble.

Now the far longer section from ‘When You Believe’. This is all lifted straight out of Exodus 15,⁵ so it was pretty easy to work out:

אָשִׁירָה לַיהוָה כִּי־גָאֹה גָּאָה

Transliteration:

Āshīrah ladōnaī kī gā’oh gā’āh

Translation:

I will sing to the Lord, because he has been greatly exalted (literally, ‘because being exalted he has been exalted’; the basic point is that he has been exalted very much indeed – Hebrew is quite a fan of the policy of repetition for emphasis).

This is found in Exodus 15:1. In the film, the line is sung twice.

מִי־כָמֹכָה בָּאֵלִים יְהוָה

מִי כָּמֹכָה נֶאְדָּר בַּקֹדֶשׁ

Transliteration:

Mī khāmokhāh bā’ēlīm adōnaī

Mī khāmokhāh ne’dar baqodesh

Translation:

Who (is) like you among the gods, Lord?

Who (is) like you, glorious in holiness?

(The verb ‘to be’ is usually left implied in Hebrew, as it is here, hence I have bracketed it in my translation.)

These lines are from Exodus 15:11.

נָחִיתָ בְחַסְדְּךָ עַם־זוּ גָּאָלְתָּ

Transliteration:

Nāchīthā v’chasd’khā am zū gā’āltā 

Translation:

You have led, in your kindness, a people which you have redeemed (literally, ‘a people, this you have redeemed’; use of a demonstrative in place of a relative pronoun is unusual, but I reckon something about it makes sense).

This is from Exodus 15:13. Again, in the film, the line is sung twice. 

אָשִׁרָה

Transliteration:

Āshīrah 

Translation:

I will sing.

This is that first word from the first line again. It’s repeated three times in the film.

Note that where I’ve used ‘ch’ in my transliterations, that’s not a nice English sound as in ‘chips’, but one of those gritty ones you make in the back your throat, as in ‘loch’ and ‘Bach’, although it’s a softer, less percussive sound than the ‘kh’. The lines over the vowels are to show that they’re long ones, although, in practical terms, it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference for pronunciation. Pronounce a ‘w’ as in ‘wonderful’ or as in ‘wunderbar’, and ‘th’ as in ‘three’ or as in ‘Thomas’; the decision is yours. (I take no responsibility for speakers of Modern Hebrew making fun of you because your pronunciation is dreadfully archaic.)

Well, there you go: you’re now all set for a Prince of Egypt karaoke session, and I even managed to restrain myself from talking about Hebrew grammar too much (which, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, is quite an achievement).

Footnotes

¹ Yeah, I’m not going to provide a spoiler warning. The book came out literally thousands of years ago, so if you haven’t got round to reading it yet, that’s your own fault.

² Why an inevitable conclusion, you ask? I subscribe to a theory suggested by a friend of mine: The Prince of Egypt is so irresistible because it’s the story of salvation – of God rescuing his people from slavery and oppression. (Said friend contrasts the shorter Joseph King of Dreams, also by Dreamworks, which, though excellent, lacks the strong salvation narrative.) Those of us who have seen the same story take place in our own lives are obsessed with it. We’ll happily be told it again and again in any format available – and, what do you know, ’90s animated musicals are one of the absolute favourite formats of my generation.

³ Here’s a playlist of which I approve because it misses out all the pop versions that nobody cares about (sorry, Mariah Carey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WKN0XF8-3Q&list=PLrjhOUTfRro7ro9MjrNV_W5gwFCMbSxEu.

⁴ It’s this huge great wodge of a book that contains a grammatical analysis of every single word that exists in the Hebrew Bible. I’m awfully fond of my copy. I have, on occasion, caught myself stroking the cover. You can actually get it free in various electronic formats from the Open Library, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13507257M/The_analytical_Hebrew_and_Chaldee_lexicon, but it’s a nightmare trying to look things up on a screen, and, let’s be honest, we all know real books are better.

⁵ Don’t believe me? Check for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+15&version=ESV. My translation differs slightly, but the gist is the same. And if you’re that fussed about details, you’d probably do better to go with the ESV people; I expect they put a lot more time, effort, and research into their translation than I did into mine.

Thoughts on Love 5: The Great Self-Love Paradox

Nathaniel:                   Sire, do you like yourself?

Prince Edward:          What’s not to like?

Enchanted (2007)

Well, I’ve talked about us loving God. I’ve talked about God loving us. I’ve talked about us loving one another. What am I missing?

Hint: self-love doesn’t literally come in cups. Just in case you weren’t sure.

A little while ago, I was browsing Icon for Hire’s videos on YouTube¹ and, through the power of the suggestions list on the right-hand side, ended up watching an episode of the REL Show (lead singer Ariel’s vlog channel) entitled ‘How to stop hating yourself: An honest conversation with Gala Darling’.² Less than a minute into the video, Ariel says to Gala, whom she is interviewing, “And one of the things that I am so excited about with you is you’re one of the only people I can find actively speaking about self-love.”

In terms of what Ariel meant by ‘actively speaking’, that may be true – but perhaps I just move in different online circles to her, because it seems to me as if people talk about self-love quite a lot. I have encountered quotations related to the theme plastered across vaguely inspirational-looking backgrounds; articles taking its importance for granted; even advertisements for such a thing as a ‘feminist self-love course’.³ The accepted position seems to be that self-love is a Good Thing. Indeed, Ariel and Gala spend the rest of their YouTube interview extolling its virtues and detailing how to attain to it.

Perhaps you’re picking up on a slightly cynical tone on my part. This is deliberate. I have long found the concept of self-love problematic, and, if you’ll give me a moment to explain before quitting this page in disgust, I’ll attempt to do so.

The trouble is that the way self-love seems to be understood is as a high opinion of oneself – liking one’s own characteristics. Prince Edward from Enchanted, as per my opening quote, would seem to be a veritable paragon of this kind of self-love – but surely he tips over into arrogance? He is, admittedly, rather endearing with it, and handles the loss of his hero/male lead role far better than, say, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, as I discussed a few weeks ago – but nevertheless, he is kidding himself to think that every aspect of himself is entirely likeable. For all he is literally a fairy-tale prince, he is frequently elitist (referring to a group of bus passengers as ‘peasants’), violent (on the point of dispatching Robert with a sword until Giselle steps in), and self-obsessed (assuming the message Pip is trying to convey to him through elaborate mime must be some compliment to himself)⁴ – not, I think, qualities which many of us would perceive as likeable.

I simply don’t consider it an option to entertain that kind of self-love, a refusal to acknowledge anything bad about oneself. The Bible is clear beyond doubt that all of us as human beings are deeply flawed: Romans 3:9-20, for instance, contains a damning compendium of Old Testament remarks on how utterly godless and riddled with wrongdoing we all are.⁵ Indeed, to admit that one is a sinner in need of a saviour is very much key to being a follower of Jesus, who, you may well be aware, takes rather a dim view of people exalting themselves.⁶

Still, the way self-love tends to be talked about in the contexts in which I’ve encountered it, it’s not an attitude people are likely to already be abundant in, but rather one which must be determinedly cultivated. This actually raises another problem, because I really tend to feel that the last thing I need to be encouraged to do is spend more time focussing on myself, to the detriment of God and other people.

Focussing on myself, was the idea I was going for with this one. The selfie stick seems to me like a particularly pointless exercise in narcissism.

So what’s the solution? Simply not loving ourselves? I might, not too long ago, have been tempted to defend that position. And then, this summer, I was staying with some people in rural mid Devon while helping with a church holiday club, and happened one evening to pluck a book called The Teenage Survival Kit, clearly hailing from some point in the last couple of decades before the twenty-first century hit, off their shelves. Despite no longer being a teenager, I found a lot of really very helpful stuff in it, including a section where the author, Pete Gilbert, makes it quite clear that he had no time for lack of self-love in the name of piety – after all, God loves us, and who are we to think our judgement is somehow superior to his?⁷

And here we find the key. God loves us, but not, as I hope I have successfully established in previous weeks, based on any appealing attribute of ours. If we love ourselves because we like our own qualities, we’re only applying a peanut-butter-milkshake level of love to ourselves – in which case, it’s really no wonder, in view of the deep imperfection that characterises each of us, that it’s such a difficult thing to do. If, on the other hand, I’m trying to follow the way God does things, the kind of love I should have for myself is unconditional, and selfless, and based not on what I have done but what God has done for me.

This is, I think, a rather odd thing to get one’s head round: how does one love oneself selflessly? How can something as totally to do with myself as self-love find its basis in someone other than myself? But this is itself the trick. God’s love is infinitely better and stronger and more wonderful than ours can ever be, so the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is in fact to allow ourselves to be loved by him. And, since, loving us as he does, God is certain to have our best interests at heart, we can be sure that loving ourselves will also involve doing what he says we should – which, oddly enough, heavily involves loving him, and loving other people.⁸

And hence my cynicism about the kind of self-love that most conversations on the subject seem to advocate, including – sorry, Ariel; I’m still a huge fan of your work – the one between Ariel and Gala that I mentioned above. No kind of love that we generate within ourselves is going to have a fraction of the brilliance of that which God freely offers us. In a completely delightful paradox, the best, most effective form of self-love is to leave aside the self and pour all one’s energy into loving God and loving other people.

It sounds pretty radical. Counter-cultural. Counter-intuitive. And yes, it’s all those things, because sin is so deeply ingrained in us, and all sin is selfishness. But this kind of love is what God ultimately designed us for, and, though none of us will manage it perfectly this side of the end of the world, in the meantime, we are, with his help, to aim to get closer to it, and be more like him as a result.

Footnotes

¹ Icon for Hire is my favourite band. Not only do I find its songs melodically and instrumentally compelling, but the lyrics are incredibly clever and just say things that it doesn’t feel as if anyone else in music is saying. Take, for instance, ‘Iodine’, from the band’s first album, Scripted – “I say I want to be healthy, but I turn up the noise. / The IV drips a steady stream of poison. / I think I’m just in love with the feeling: / Break my bones so I can feel them healing” – or ‘Pop Culture’, from its second and most recent, self-titled, album, whose chorus begins: “Pop culture does nothing for me. / The American Dream, mainstream, just bores me, / ’Cause I’m not like you, I’m immune, I’m immune: / Say it over and over until it comes true.” I just think it’s utterly brilliant stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpR4KGjzlCA&index=6&list=PLMfa-IfzrufpAp8paxZSTqAY30eI9J3Rs. 

² Here’s the link if you’d like to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urF-bMJGhcM. 

³ I’m sorry not to be able to footnote any of the given examples properly, and would definitely scrawl ASSERTION in the margin if I were marking this post as an essay, but hopefully, dear reader, you’re prepared to forgive me for not spending hours tracking down such briefly-encountered items, and take this minor point on trust, or comparison with your own experience.

⁴ Not the best quality video, but it’s such a funny scene, it doesn’t really matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XyNkyHjqSY. 

⁵ Well, I say ‘damning’ – read the rest of the chapter beyond verse 21 and you’ll see that it turns out not to be damning at all: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+3&version=ESV. Still, ‘critical’ or the like seemed rather too flimsy an adjective for such a strongly-worded passage.

⁶ Try Luke 18:9-14: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2018&version=ESV.   

⁷ Again, I do apologise for being unable to cite properly. Still, if you fancied reading the book for yourself and determining whether my paraphrase is a reasonably remembered one, copies are available on Amazon for literally a penny: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0860653641/?tag=ecosia07-21. 

⁸ In fact, Jesus says these are the two most important commandments: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=ESV.

Thoughts on Love 4: Cool Kids

“See, that is the thing with you Plastics: you think that everybody is in love with you, when actually, everybody hates you.”

Mean Girls (2004)

Thanks to *drew on Wikipedia for the image, which remains
© 2004 by Paramount Pictures, all rights reserved.

Do Mean Girls’ Plastics really think everybody is in love with them? I’m not so sure. Recall, if you will, the end credits of Disney Pixar’s most recent masterpiece, Inside Out, when, having spent the vast majority of the film focussing on the mind of protagonist Riley, we are now entertained by a series of glimpses into the thought processes of various minor characters.¹ What struck me most was that, in the brain of the girl who had earlier so intimidated Riley with her eyeshadow-wearing coolness, the dominant emotion, the one heading up operations from the centre of the control panel, is Fear. “We’re a total fraud!” she panics. “Do you think they can see through us?”

Similarly, in Mean Girls, being a Plastic is all about the cultivation of an exterior image. It’s not just about wearing pink on Wednesdays: the main character, Cady, gets to a point where she deliberately lies, deceives, and manipulates in order that others will think about her in a particular way. “I had learned how to control everyone around me,” she monologues in voiceover.² What Cady believes isn’t that she’s so amazing that everybody must be in love with her, but that, if she plans her actions carefully, she can portray herself in such a way as to manoeuvre others into a position where they think well of her.

It isn’t an attitude reserved only for Plastics, mean girls, and other cool-kid types, either. Don’t we all deliberately put ourselves across to others in such a way as to gain their approval? Isn’t that blindingly obvious, in fact? To be admired, I must be admirable; to be valued, I must be valuable; to be loved, I must be lovable. Surely that’s just basic, undeniable logic?

However, those of you with good memories may remember that, last week, I concluded that love has far more to do with the lover being loving than the beloved being lovable – and, in God’s case, this was undeniably proven when Jesus gave his life for the sake of his enemies. God is going to love me whatever state I’m in. I don’t have to lie, deceive, manipulate, or wear pink on Wednesdays to make that happen, and, indeed, he would see right through me if I tried.

But what about other people?

The trouble is, other people aren’t like God. They don’t have his omniscience or his glorious depths of mercy, and I simply can’t rely on them to love me whatever happens. Still, I might just be able to coerce them into offering me something that at least looks like love by portraying myself as some kind of desirable asset. In fact, doing so is the only measure of control I have when it comes to others’ opinions of me – and, as ever, I have a tendency to cling resolutely to any form of control I have, because a lack of control is frightening. Like Cady, I do whatever I can to control the people around me, and like the cool girl from Inside Out, I do it out of fear. I do it every time I allow my actions to be governed by a desire that other people will think well of me. And, in all honesty, that’s very frequently indeed.

But here’s the thing: if love is dependent on the lover, not the beloved, then anything I obtain as a result of portraying myself in as lovable a fashion as possible isn’t really love at all. It’s not even ‘luvvou’, or φιλέω.³ It is, at best, peanut-butter-milkshake love: appreciation of something which brings benefit. It’s the kind of love Cady obtains from the general populus at her high school with her deceit and manipulation. If real love – the ͗αγαπάω kind – is unaffected by its object’s failings, then it wins me no love, it does me no good at all, to make any kind of grand effort to be lovable.

Now, that isn’t to say I shouldn’t have concern for the way my actions affect other people – quite the opposite, in fact. My actions should not be dictated by wanting to be loved by other people, but rather by wanting to love other people. “A new commandment now I give you,” said Jesus, as recorded by John in the thirty-fourth verse of the thirteenth chapter of his biography of him, “that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” Later in the same conversation, he said it again: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”⁴ I think we can be pretty clear on the fact that Jesus definitely wants us to love one another – but more than that, he wants us to love one another as he has loved us. That means deeply, furiously, and entirely unaffected by the flaws and failures and irritating habits of those we love.

In other words, we are to love in such a way that those we love know that they don’t have to put on a front and behave in a certain way and appear as lovable as possible in order to manipulate us into displaying love towards them. We are to do our best to rid them of that fear. And we are to do it as a response and a signpost to the all-surpassing love of our God, who did the same for us.

Footnotes

¹ If you’d like a reminder, or haven’t got round to seeing Inside Out yet (it did only come out this summer, after all), you can watch the scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMQT-Mv92x0.

² Some kindly soul has made a complete transcript of the film available here: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/mean-girls-movie-transcript.html. This one I’m assuming you’ve managed to see at some point in the decade since it was released. If not, do please see it at the next available opportunity, if only so you’ll understand references like, “She doesn’t even go here!” and, “You go, Glen Coco!”

³ See my post from two weeks ago for context here. Or just watch Series 3 of Miranda and stick the Greek into the Perseus Digital Library Word Study Tool, either works.

⁴ All right, so I gave you the full reference for the first time he said it, but I’m sending you on a treasure hunt for the second. Hint: it’s somewhere in the book of John, after 13:34. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2013&version=ESV.

Thoughts on Love 3: Susie Rabinovitch Syndrome

“When he looked at me and said, ‘I kind of view you as a son,’

And, for one second, our eyes met, and I met that with the question:

‘Do you know what you are getting yourself into?’”

Relient K, ‘Getting Into You’, Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right … But Three Do (2003)

Last Tuesday (20th October), coincidentally, marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Eva Ibbotson, a quite brilliant novelist responsible for several stories I remember enjoying immensely as a child: particular highlights for me include The Secret of Platform Thirteen (whose involvement of a doorway to a magical world hidden at King’s Cross station could probably have got J. K. Rowling into serious legal trouble if Ibbotson had felt moved to press charges of plagiarism); Which Witch? (featuring a series of amusingly less-than-spectacular attempts to woo an evil wizard with displays of dark magic);¹ and Monster Mission (which I always remember for its delightful conclusion where all is made well by consulting the dictionary for the definition of the word ‘kidnapping’). Today, however, I mean to talk about one of Ibbotson’s adult books – although the version I read recently was one rebranded under a different title for the young adult market – namely The Secret Countess, formerly A Countess Below Stairs.

Ibbotson, Eva, The Secret Countess, London: Macmillian Children’s Books (2007).

The basic plot is that Russian aristocrat Anna, having fled to England following the 1917 revolution, finds employment as a maid in a grand house taking on extra staff to assist with preparations for the impending return and wedding of the estate’s heir. It perhaps doesn’t sound like the most thrilling storyline when I put it like that, but the real triumph of the book – and it is utterly a triumph – is in the details. Comparatively minor characters are all afforded distinct personalities and motivations, which are tied together beautifully in the ultimate denouement, and even the prose itself is joyously ornamental, without tipping over into floridity. Take, for instance, lines like “Professor Fitzroy nodded. He was a tall man, sepulchrally thin, with a tuft of grey hair which accentuated his resemblance to a demented heron.”

And, in the spirit of the details being the greater brilliance of the book, the principal love story, though pleasing enough, pales and fades next to that of the secondary characters Tom Byrne and Susie Rabinovitch. The following is from pages 278-280:

“Susie,” said Tom, and she saw that he was in an unusually grim and serious mood. “How many times have I asked you to marry me?”

“I think, seventeen,” said Susie in her quiet, pedantic voice, looking up at him and wishing yet again that he wasn’t quite so handsome. “But it may only be sixteen; I’m not completely sure.”

…

“Susie, are you really going to ruin our happiness because of your parents’ wretched religious prejudices? Even though I’ve told you a hundred times that you can bring up our children in any way you like?”

Susie hesitated … “It’s not that. My parents aren’t so orthodox any more. They’d moan a little, but there’s no question of them disowning me or saying a kaddish over me. They’re far too kind and too concerned for my happiness.”

Tom stared at her, amazed. “But why, then, Susie? Why do you keep on saying no?”

Susie studied him carefully. “Tom, have you ever looked at me? At me? Not someone you’ve made up inside your head.”

She stepped forward so that the overhead light shone full on her face. The gypsy dress, as she well knew, was extremely unbecoming to her and she was flushed and mottled from the heat.

“I’m plump now,” she continued in her level, unemotional voice. “In ten years I’ll be fat, however much I diet. I have a hooked nose; most of the time I need glasses. My hair is frizzy and my ears–”

“How dare you!” Tom had seized her shoulders; he was shaking her, hurting her. The famous Byrne temper, scourge of his red-haired ancestors since Doomsday, blazed in his eyes. “How dare you talk to me like that! You are insulting me!”

“What do you mean?”

“How dare you suppose that I don’t know who you are or what you are? That I don’t understand what I see? Do you take me for some kind of besotted schoolboy? It is unspeakable! You could weigh as much as a hippopotamus and shave your head and wear a wig and it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I never said you were beautiful. I never thought it. I said that you were you.”

Susie loosened his hands. Then she smiled, that tender, wise smile that made nonsense of her ugliness and said, “Well, in that case we must just hope that our children don’t inherit your awful temper. Or my nose.”

Hands up who’s ever pulled a Susie Rabinovitch and believed that professed love couldn’t be genuine, because its professed object was simply too unlovable. There must be some mistake; you’re not seeing me as I really am; you couldn’t possibly love me – no one could.

 

That’s it, right in the air. You know who you are, Susie-Rabinovitch-Syndrome-sufferers.

The trouble with this perspective is that it stands all responsibility for love on the beloved – I have to be sufficiently appealing in order to be loved – and wholly dismisses the factor of the lover’s capacity for love. This seems particularly odd when you consider that the object of the sentence, by definition, doesn’t have to do anything to have the verb performed upon it; if the subject is capable of the verb, that’s all the action that’s required for the sentence to be true. Still, it isn’t, perhaps, particularly romantic to talk about this in terms of grammar (fond as I am of grammar, it probably comes under the peanut-butter-milkshake category of love),² so I’ll give another example.

Earlier this year, I stood in an enormous tent in a field in Somerset at an event called Momentum,³ and told God I still somehow couldn’t believe he really loved me. Maybe, my mind conceded, he did once, before year after year of failure and relapse and disappointing complacency; maybe he was prepared to tolerate me in his kingdom for the sake of keeping a promise – but surely, mess of wrongdoing and weakness and hypocrisy as I was, he couldn’t love me.

It was a little while before I heard his ‘how dare you’. Not condemnatory, not another accusation laid at my door, another reason to scuttle into the corner and curl up once again bewailing my own shortcomings – but firm, gentle, and entirely fair. How dare you – you are insulting me; how dare you suppose that I don’t know who or what you are, that I don’t understand what I see?

Did I really believe that God hadn’t read the small print, that he was so short-sighted as to agree to the cross without knowing every corner of my fallen heart better than I do myself? Or did I believe he was so irrationally petty as to change his mind on the matter once presented with my failings first-hand? Or did I believe his love was so flimsy and ineffectual, so easily able to be smothered, that I could do so simply by not being perfect?

The cross pours scorn on any suggestion that God couldn’t possibly love such people as you and me. God the Son trades heavenly power and bliss for a criminal’s death; God the Father directs his entirely fair and justified anger at all that’s wrong in the world against the one human being not responsible for any of it, his Son; the two are wrenched apart for the first time in the history of everything, and all for the sake of sparing the very people who rejected God time and time again, even to the point of arranging his execution – us, humanity.⁴

Words fall short, frankly, but my point is that what happened on the cross had nothing to do with us being lovable, and everything to do with God being loving. His love is without flaw; capable of loving even the least appealing person, it can never be diminished by any failing of its object; it has no weaknesses to be exploited. I insult God – I claim that he is less than he is – when I believe otherwise.

The thing about Susie Rabinovitch Syndrome is that, like so many wrong ways of viewing the world, it ultimately comes down to a focus on the self. I believe it is my characteristics that govern the feelings and behaviour of other people towards me, and leave no space for theirs to have any bearing. And I reckon that, often, the best possible cure for the Syndrome is, actually, a shake round the shoulders and a ‘how dare you’ and being put firmly in one’s place.

The end of the Relient K song I quoted above? “You said, ‘I love you, and that’s what you are getting yourself into.’”⁵

Footnotes

¹ Apparently, an animated film based on Which Witch? is being made by the Jim Henson Company, http://movieweb.com/which-witch-movie-billy-crystal-jim-henson-company/, but I’m wary of getting too excited, based on the number of times I’ve come across books that were apparently being made into films, but don’t appear to have ever actually emerged from the chrysalis.

² I’m referencing a post I made two weeks ago, just to be clear. There is, as ever, a link in the box on the right, if you happened to want to read it.

³ Also known as Soul Survivor’s older sibling: http://momentum.org.uk/. It’s a crazy, challenging, inspiring few days, and I’d probably recommend it if you don’t mind camping.

⁴ In a way, I’m not sure where in the Bible to point you on this matter, because it’s kind of the whole story. Still, try Philippians 2:5-7 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians%202&version=ESV), Colossians 1:15-23 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=colossians+1&version=ESV), Isaiah 53 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+53&version=ESV), Mark 15:25-39 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+15&version=ESV ), and my old favourite Romans 5:6-11 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+5&version=ESV) just to get you started.

⁵ Go on, have a listen – the lyrics are much better sung than written down, and some kind human has even made a lyric video with snazzy transition effects and totally inconsistent font and colour and everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0urB9mnCx-A.