When I began taking flute lessons again at 50, my teacher kept on insisting that I needed to record my practice sessions. I understood why: I was substituting speed for clarity and precision. The notes came out in a blur that began and ended on the right notes, but that didn’t communicate anything in the middle.

But the thing is that I conditioned myself to that expectation of velocity, and I’ve stuck with it, slowly eliminating the extraneous motion and learning to focus the air flow. I’m beginning to sound like a flautist.

This was particularly apparent today after I came back from Dance Tribe in Santa Barbara. I felt like playing dirges, and since I don’t have any in sheet music, I just played slowly. I was pleasantly surprised by the clarity of tone.

I’ve been calling patiently to Hillary all week, and resolved to dance this morning for healing. While waiting for the doors to open, I offered Out of Eden’s Every Move I Make and the Katina’s Draw Me Close. I got part way through Sheena Wellington’s The Christ Child’s Lullaby before cutting inadvertently over to Lauren Daigle’s I Am Yours. Fifteen minutes of tears later, I realized that I could have taken another path: Shiva’s Dance of Destruction. But I held my resolve, and spent most of the first hour of the dance working my way in to the root of the pain. When it was over, I thought “You know, Hillary, your pain is a link to the things that beset us.” I walked out into the sunlight, and made them present to the Ancient of Days.

Yes, that is an intentional reference to Daniel 10.

I am hardly proud of all this trauma. Particularly because much of it originates in Christian confusion – this idea that we are “one nation under God,” which means that the Bible should be the moral law of the land.

I finally heard an interviewee on NPR explain the Evangelical premise: Christian faith requires conversion of the heart, and a belief in the inerrancy of God’s word. Politically, that departs from the ten commandments, headlined by “thou shalt not kill,” and continues through pro-life logic to a determination to see the Supreme Court recomposed to overturn Roe v. Wade. It was that determination that caused almost all white evangelicals to vote for Donald Trump.

I could tell them that they are wrong – wrong all down the line. Jesus reminds us that God “desire[s] mercy, not sacrifice.” He commands us to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” As promised in Jeremiah, Jesus dethrones the law, eliding it to “Love God and your neighbor.”

Why does he do this? Because the Law is not God’s word. Read the covenant with Noah: “By man shall man be judged.” The whole of the Pentateuch is a lesson in natural consequences – that threatening people doesn’t lead them to do good, it just corrupts those that mete out punishment. It’s not God’s Law, it’s man’s law propagated under the authority granted by God. This is why Jesus casts the law aside.

Look even at “Thou shalt not kill.” What does that mean? Only people, or does it also include other forms of life? And what about the capital punishments of Leviticus, or the genocide of Deuteronomy? The only conclusion to be drawn from the progression is that human priorities were present in the Law from the beginning.

So why was the Law allowed to persist? Because it served the purpose of building the capacity to reason in God’s chosen people. That fragile tool allows us to overcome our animal instincts, discerning and strengthening creative behaviors.

Jesus came when enough people were prepared to recognize the lesson delivered by the law of natural consequences – the religious and political practices of his era were a terrible abuse of faith. The people’s hunger for truth and justice caused many to accept the invitation to “follow.”

So what about our world today? There are still those that need the discipline of reason, and should they chose to follow some version of the Bible’s ethical code, that’s good for them. But there are also those that envision bringing a child into this world, and dread the prospect that that child will live a life twisted by fear and want, or casually crushed by violence. They know what it’s done to their lives, and they can’t imagine that anyone would want to repeat that experience. And then we have those that wish to have a child, but want to do it under the right circumstances, when all the benefits of family and community can be at their disposal as they grow.

None of us are inerrant. Even Jesus protested “Why do you call me ‘Master’? There is only one that is good.” We all make mistakes, and those mistakes cause us pain. Love is the tool that heals us of the consequences of our mistakes. Jesus tells us to love God because it calls that healing power closer to us. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors because that allows God to see them clearly, and so to heal them most effectively.

The soul of the aborted child will find a loving family capable of providing for its security and growth. Is that not what it would desire?

Maybe, then, we should think of the “Word of God” in the way the John invoked it: the logos that was and is with God. The source of all creative power, the force that amplifies all that is good. Simply and wholly: Love. In its infinite possibilities, love overwhelms any law of human reason. It leads people through error into repentance, and thus to wisdom. It prepares them to do better next time, rather than denying them the right to try at all.

From this perspective, all the dross of human vanity and folly falls away from Scripture. It reads as Jesus characterized it: the effort of a loving “daddy” to guide his children into maturity.

We shouldn’t be in such a hurry to write perfect laws, for love undoes the strictures of government. It is an error to chain it to law, for when the Kingdom arrives, government will fall away. We will all have the benefit of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and so no law except the song of compassion in our hearts.