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The Other Name

Homily for Proper 25, Year A — Leviticus 19:1–2, 15–18 by the Rev Dr George Lewis Boar-Hays, Vicar of Macomb   There is an ancient and perhaps incurable tendency of the human mind to mistake the general for the profound. We admire those propositions which, by including everything, seem to require nothing of us. Love your neighbor. Be just. Speak the truth. The sentences possess the serenity of geometrical axioms; we repeat them with the confidence of those who have never been required to demonstrate them. I have sometimes suspected that their apparent simplicity is a form of concealment. The nineteenth chapter of Leviticus contains one of these sentences, although it surrounds it with circumstances so particular, so uncomfortably familiar, that we may wonder whether its author intended to deprive us of the consolations of abstraction. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The command is preceded by instructions concerning judges, witnesses, accusations, grudges, and the ...
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The Book of Cyrus

In the winter of 1938, among the uncatalogued Persian manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nacional, I found a history of Cyrus the Great which differed from every history I knew. The book had no title. This is not entirely accurate. There had once been a title, but someone—perhaps the author, perhaps a later reader—had scraped it from the leather binding with such determination that only three letters remained. They might have belonged to the Persian word for king . They might equally have meant servant . This ambiguity, which at first seemed accidental, proved to contain the book. The manuscript consisted of two histories. One was written in black ink. The other, much later, in red. The black history was conventional. It described Cyrus, son of Cambyses, king of Anshan, conqueror of Media, Lydia, and Babylon. It named generals, battles, roads, cities. It recorded alliances and betrayals with the confidence peculiar to historians who know that the dead cannot contradict them. The ...
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