If the good Lord saw fit ...

If you are among those the Rev. Jerry Falwell consigned to hell during a long and very public career as a self-proclaimed spokesman for God, it's challenging to say something both charitable and just.

If the good Lord saw fit to take Brother Jerry home, I'm grateful that he did it on a slow news day.

But many of those the Rev. Mr. Falwell demonized over the years have returned the favor: Flames licking around his turned-up toes or more positively, a heavenly mansion along a street paved with gold in heaven's gay ghetto attended by winged feminists, Teletubbies endlessly cycling on the big-screen TV.

And there was the predictable performance of Mitt Romney --- among the Mormons Brother Jerry repeatedly excluded from grace over the years --- coming forth as the first GOP politician to kiss his cold dead ass.

I got to thinking about this guy I know who is a fundamentalist atheist, avid debater of clerics, firm in his lack of faith, religiously irreligious --- and about how much I had learned about my own faith because of him. So I told him one time that maybe God was using him, that he was merely an instrument and a work in progress. He didn't think that was funny.

But it's one way of looking at Brother Jerry. How do we learn to behave if we do not see misbehavior; to love the seemingly unlovable until we witness hate at work?

Best of all, we don't have a say about the form eternity will take for Brother Jerry. That is in better hands.

Eternal rest grant him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.