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My Name is Saul: A Novel of the Ancient World

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Lin Wilder

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“In a Vietnamese village, as reported in a recent TV program, gas bombs had been thrown into holes and huts to drive out of hiding any remaining Viet Cong. Only women and children came out of the holes. One child, about two, routed out with his mother, sat on her lap looking up at a large Negro marine. The side of the child's face was dirty with the smoke and soot from the smoke bomb; he had been crying. He looked up with an expression of bewilderment, now beyond crying, not knowing what to make of such a world. But the camera shifted immediately to the black American marine looking down at the child, commanding and somewhat hideous in his battle uniform. He had exactly the same expression: bewilderment, his eyes wide as he stared down at the child, his mouth slightly ajar; but his stare did not move, remaining fixed on that child. What should he make of a world in which he does this? While the announcer of the program rattled on about how the gas is harmful for only ten minutes and then leaves no deleterious effects, the cameraman kept his camera focused on the face of the marine. Was the marine recalling that he too had once been a child in some Southern state, driven from caves and huts where he had been playing, recognizing that he too was of a race held to be 'inferior'? That he too was once a child in a world at which he could only look out and up, a world causing pain for reasons no child can begin to fathom? Does he see himself in this child, see his bewilderment as a black child?”

“Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.”