Consuming Zeal

Zeal for thine house hath eaten me up.

But Bertrand Russell says, "Zeal is a bad mark for a cause. Nobody has any zeal about arithmetic. It is not the vaccinationists but the antivaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true."

It is hard for us to believe now that there were antivaccnationists, when vaccinations have succeeded in wiping smallpox from the planet. It is hard for us to believe that Dr Semmelweis was almost torn to pieces when he suggested that physicians should wash their hands before delivering babies in order to help prevent the septicemia or puerperal fever which killed so many women after childbirth. It is hard for us to believe that Bach was considered heretical when he put the thumb under instead of over the fingers on the keyboard. It is hard for us to believe that Shakespeare was considered a trivial playwright because he was too popular. But great negative zeal was expended in all of these cases.

We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our eyes and ears open to that which may expand or even chang that which we so zealously think we know.

My non-Christian friends and acquaintances are zealous in what they "know" about Christianity, which bears little or no relationship to anything I believe.

A friend of mine, Betty Beckwith, in her book, If I Had the Wings of the Morning, writes about taking her brain-damaged child to a Jewish doctor. He said, "You people think of us as the people who killed your Christ." Spontaneously she replied, "Oh, no. We think of you as the people who gave him to us."

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water