Volume 7, Issue 9, page 7

which probably consisted of all the small
crosses he either carried or rejected in his
lifetime; the crosses of an average working
day, for instance.

You puckered your lips to whistle, but you
couldn't whistle because by this time you were
shaving and your face was puckered, but not
for whistling. You could either whistle or
shave, but not both together. If you were a
woman, you didn't whistle anyway. You could,
but women didn't. You hummed, or sang softly,
or merely glowed all over if you felt as a man
felt when he whistled in the bathroom.

Then you noticed something, and it was so
olain that you wondered why you hadn't noticed
it at once. Your face was ever so little different. So were your eyes. Was it true that
the eyes were windows of the soul? You leaned
forward and whisnered behind the lather on
your lips:
Does just thinking about Him, and pretending
He's here, actually do something to my eyes?
Does it make them look brighter, or what?
You can't answer that question, not yet,
but it gives you plenty to think about, so you
briefly conduct a sort of side experiment of
The Experiment. You study your face as you
think of Jesus doing something, or saying something. You pin it down a bit more closely. You
see Him sitting on the Mount, hand upraised.
You don't see the halo, and you doubt if people
with Him saw it, either. That would have made
Him stand out too much apart from man for man
to hope to emulate Him. You heard Him saying:
"Blessed are the meek.... Blessed are the
peacemakers....Blessed are the pure in heart....
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after
righteousness."
You didn't know exactly what meekness was,
not when you came right down to analyzing it,
nor how a peacemaker operated, nor what it was
like to be pure in heart; nor did you hunger
and thirst, in any sort of agony, for righteousness. In fact, the word righteousness made
you think of men who prayed loudly in public
places, or cried amen if others prayed -- men
more interested, you'd be bound, in being heard
tial capitals even before you got to the bath- of men than of God. Here you took yourself
room -- you refused to feel sorry for yourself, sharply to task. You were "sitting in judgYou refused to compute the length of a year's ment" on loud pray-ers, simply because you
beard, to think how much water had gone down were not one of them. You'd cease sitting in
the drain after bathing you, so that you had judgment, here and now.
but to do it all over the next morning. You "You see, you're learning," Jesus said from
refused to be bothered because it came to you Your elbow, or else you said it inside for Him,
forcefully that He wouldn't have minded in wondering if you really sat in judgment when
your place. What was to be done, He did it, You didn't approve of some trivial thing some
even to Golgotha. other man or woman did. It wasn't a trivial
Ah, there was another thing! You'd always thing, you decided, to sit in judgment on anythought Him too much a man to be unable to body for anything, trivial in itself, or trecarry His cross. You didn't understand how mendous.

Simon the Cyrene had gotten into the legend. You were still watching your lathered face,
Of course there may have been a lesson there studying the eyes above it. Or if you were a
somewhere for the world. If it happened, there woman you were studying the expression in your
must have been a reason. Jesus hadn't required eyes and ignoring your gray face. But, if you
help with the cross just to immortalize Simon. were a woman, you made an interesting, surYou felt that He carried His own cross, and prising discovery: When your eyes brightened,
did it as a symbol. The symbol meant that every the inner glow extended slowly -- it wasn't easy
human being was expected to carry his cross, to break a habit, even with Jesus present -- to
PART II
IOU WENT into the bathroom, leaving
the door ajar so that He could
come in or not, as He elected. You
felt a Warmth which may have been
a Presence, but that could be imagination. Maybe He was the somewhat unaccustomed glow around the
heart. Maybe He was the lack of
gloom with which you and so many
of your fellow workers began the
day. It was easy to be a martyr to "conditions''. Jesus had been a martyr. He
hadn't been compelled. As He told Pilate,
or Herod, or somebody in authority, He
could have mustered legions of angels to
rescue Him had He so elected. He'd gone
on thru with the martyrdom for a purpose.

You weren't too sure that the purpose was
what you had always been led to believe,
but you didn't feel that He would be very
disapproving of you if you happened to
doubt some of the things you had read
about Him. If Jesus was anything, He was
tolerant. Being a man, He knew what went
on inside men. Being Mary's Son, He knew
fairly well what went on in women's
hearts. too.

After so many years the bathroom ritual had
become a bore, almost every part of it. You
found yourself shirking some of it, if you
could. Or you did it all grimly, as an inescapable small martyrdom. If you were a man you
asked yourself how many yards of gross hair
beard you must have shaved off in a decade or
two. If you were a woman, you wondered if your
hair had ever looked neater than a rats' nest
immediately after rising, if you always looked
so cadaverous without rouge, if your nails
always looked so, well, raddled, after sleeping for eight hours without giving them some
attention.

This morning, the