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“…it is the incessant human struggle for self-perfection that redeems us.”

2 scenes from East of Eden that explain the nature of Man and Sin

The “founding argument” happens years earlier, when the twins are newborns. Samuel Hamilton, Adam, and Lee are trying to decide what to name them, and the conversation turns to Genesis 4 — the story of Cain and Abel. They're specifically wrestling with God's warning to Cain after his sacrifice is rejected in favor of Abel's — the line about sin "lying at the door" and Cain's relationship to it — because the King James and American Standard translations render the key verb differently: one as a promise ("thou shalt rule"), the other as a command ("do thou rule"). Lee, unsatisfied with either reading, reveals that he'd taken the question to a circle of elderly Chinese scholars, who spent roughly two years digging into the original Hebrew alongside rabbinic sources to settle it. [Their answer: the actual word is timshel — "thou mayest." Not a promise you'll conquer sin, not an order that you must — a choice. You may, or you may not. They'd considered naming the twins Cain and Abel outright, but that felt too dark, so they land on Caleb and Aron instead — names that keep the C/A echo without the full weight of the original story.

The “private echo:” comes much later, when Cal is essentially grown and quietly convinced he inherited his mother Cathy's cruelty — especially with Adam's obvious favoritism toward Aron grinding on him. Lee sits Cal down alone and walks him back through Cain and Abel, and through timshel specifically — not as abstract theology this time, but as a direct answer to Cal's fear that he's simply built wrong and can't help what he'll become. The point Lee's making to him personally: nature and a parent's favor don't write the ending. The choice is still his.

It closes out at Adam's deathbed — Lee pushes the dying Adam to bless Cal and release him from the guilt he's carrying, and Adam's last word is just that one, "Timshel." Free will, as the whole point of the book, landed twice: once as theory, once as a father's last word.

"If you have a story that could brighten someone's day or encourage their faith journey, submit in the contact form or send it to stories@cplu.onine. We’d love to feature it! If you want us to change names or keep you anonymous, just mention it in your submission or email."

The 33

On the afternoon of August 5, 2010, thirty-three men were working nearly half a mile underground at the San José copper and gold mine, deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert, when the mountain above them gave way. Tons of rock sealed off the main shaft in an instant. The men — thirty-two Chileans and one Bolivian — retreated to a reinforced emergency shelter, the one place built to withstand exactly this kind of catastrophe. It held only a few days’ worth of food.

For seventeen days, no one on the surface knew whether any of them were still alive. Above ground, families gathered in a tent camp they came to call Campo Esperanza — Camp Hope — and waited beside the drilling rigs sent down to search, blind, through hundreds of meters of solid rock. Below, the thirty-three men rationed what little food they had, took turns keeping watch, and tried to hold on to routine as the days piled up with no word from the surface.

On August 22nd, one of the search drills finally broke through into the chamber where the miners had gathered. When rescuers pulled the drill bit back up, they found something taped to the end: a note in red ink from shift foreman Luis Urzúa. It read, in full: “We are fine in the refuge, the 33.”

It was the first proof, after more than two weeks of silence, that anyone down there was still breathing.

What followed was one of the largest rescue operations ever assembled. A separate borehole carried down a camera and a phone line, so families could finally see and speak to the men trapped below. NASA sent engineers to advise on how the miners’ bodies and minds would hold up under such prolonged confinement. The Chilean Navy, mining engineers, and drilling crews from several countries converged on the site, running three separate drilling plans at once, each betting on a different route reaching the men first.

In the heat and dark below, the thirty-three miners organized shifts, assigned jobs, rationed the food and medicine that arrived through the borehole, and held prayer sessions together, determined not just to wait out the ordeal but to survive it deliberately. One miner, Víctor Segovia, filled dozens of pages with a journal of it all.

On October 9th, one of the three drilling plans finally broke through into the refuge. Three days later, engineers lowered a narrow rescue capsule named Fénix 2 — painted in the white, blue, and red of the Chilean flag — down the completed shaft.

Through the night of October 12th and into the next day, the miners were winched, one at a time, back up to the surface. Florencio Ávalos came up first. Shift foreman Luis Urzúa — the man who had written the note in red ink — came up last, on October 13th, sixty-nine days after the mountain fell.

All thirty-three men survived: the longest anyone in recorded history has been trapped underground and lived. Television crews from around the world broadcast the rescue live, and for a few hours, people who had never met any of these strangers watched and cheered as, one by one, they climbed out of the dark.

Yes You Can

In the spring of 1977, a teenager named Rick Hoyt asked his father for something unusual: he wanted to run in a five-mile road race, held to benefit a local lacrosse player who’d been paralyzed in an accident.

Rick had been born with cerebral palsy that left him unable to walk or speak on his own; he communicated by spelling out words on an assistive device. His father, Dick Hoyt, was thirty-six years old, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard, and not a runner in any sense of the word. But when Rick asked to enter that race, Dick agreed, and pushed his son the entire five miles in his wheelchair. They finished second-to-last.

That night, Rick typed out a sentence that would end up reshaping both of their lives: “Dad, when I’m running, it feels like I’m not handicapped.”

Dick started training in earnest, pushing a bag of cement in the wheelchair on solo runs since Rick was away at school during the week. Within a few years, he could run a 5K in seventeen minutes — while pushing his son the whole way.

What began as one race became a partnership that lasted decades. Racing as “Team Hoyt,” Dick and Rick went on to complete more than a thousand endurance events together, including 72 marathons — 32 of them the Boston Marathon, back to back — and six Ironman triathlons, in which Dick towed Rick behind a boat on a bungee cord for the swim leg and pedaled him in a custom seat mounted on the front of a bike for the 112-mile ride. In 1992, the two of them ran and biked across the entire United States, covering 3,735 miles from Santa Monica to Boston Harbor in forty-five straight days. In 1996, they carried the Olympic torch.

In their first few Boston Marathons, officials wouldn’t even give them a race number — wheelchair-assisted teams weren’t something the rules accounted for yet, so the Hoyts ran for years as unofficial “bandits” before the marathon caught up with what they were doing. By 2013, Boston had embraced them so completely that a life-sized bronze statue of Dick pushing Rick, titled “Yes You Can,” was unveiled near the marathon’s starting line in Hopkinton.

That same year, the Hoyts were less than a mile from the Boston finish line when two bombs exploded near the route. They were stopped along with thousands of other runners, uninjured, and a stranger with an SUV drove them to a hotel to reunite with family. The following spring, on April 21, 2014, at ages 73 and 52, Dick and Rick crossed the Boston finish line together one last time — their 32nd Boston Marathon, and the final race they ever ran as a team.

Dick Hoyt died in his sleep at home in March 2021, at eighty. Rick followed in May 2023, at sixty-one. The Hoyt Foundation the two of them started together in 1989 still brings runners to Boston every April to raise money for people with disabilities — and volunteers still hand out pickle juice to exhausted runners at an aid station near Heartbreak Hill, keeping some small piece of the Hoyts out on the course every year.

Between the Rails

On the afternoon of January 2, 2007, Wesley Autrey was standing on a subway platform at 137th Street in Manhattan with his two young daughters, waiting for a downtown train, when he saw a stranger a few feet away begin to convulse.

The man, a twenty-year-old film student named Cameron Hollopeter, was having a seizure. He stumbled toward the platform’s edge and fell onto the tracks — just as the headlights of an approaching No. 1 train appeared in the tunnel.

Autrey, a fifty-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran, didn’t have time to think it through. He jumped down onto the tracks and tried to haul Hollopeter back up onto the platform. There wasn’t enough time. So instead, as the train bore down on them, Autrey made a different choice: he rolled with Hollopeter into the drainage trough between the rails — a gap sometimes as shallow as eight inches — and lay on top of him, pinning them both flat.

The train’s operator spotted the two men and threw the emergency brake, but the train was already too close to stop in time. Several cars passed directly over Autrey and Hollopeter before the train finally screeched to a halt. When it was over, the only mark on Autrey was a smudge of grease on his baseball cap.

As stunned bystanders on the platform above began to scream, Autrey called up to them: “We’re okay down here, but I’ve got two daughters up there” — and asked someone to let them know their father was fine.

Hollopeter was treated at a hospital and released, uninjured beyond the seizure itself. Autrey walked away with nothing worse than a stiff back. Asked days later whether he’d do it again, he didn’t hesitate: “If I had to do it again, I probably would.”

The story went around the world within days. New York’s mayor gave Autrey a key to the city. The transit authority gave him a year of free subway rides and gifts for his daughters. He appeared on late-night television and was flown to Washington as a guest of honor at President Bush’s State of the Union address that January, where he received a standing ovation from the entire chamber.

Autrey went back to construction work not long after, uncomfortable with being singled out for something he insists any New Yorker would have done in his place. He still gives talks to students from time to time about that day on the platform — not as a superhero story, but as a reminder that most people are more capable in an emergency than they think they are. Fifteen years later, in a coda almost too neat to be true, a television prize patrol showed up at his door with flowers, balloons, and a new car — a stranger’s way, once again, of saying thank you.

One Hundred Laps

In early April 2020, as Britain sat under its first coronavirus lockdown, a 99-year-old World War II veteran named Tom Moore made a promise that started out, by his own account, as something close to a family joke.

Moore had served with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in India and Burma during the war, then came home, married, raised a family, and spent the following decades as an unremarkable, well-liked man in the village of Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire. In his late nineties, he’d broken his hip and was being treated for cancer. His daughter Hannah, worried about him staying isolated and inactive during lockdown, suggested he try walking laps of the garden.

Someone in the family floated an idea: since Tom was about to turn 100 on April 30th, why not try to walk 100 laps of the garden before then, using his walking frame, and see if a few neighbors would sponsor him? The goal was modest — just £1,000 for NHS Charities Together, as a thank-you to the doctors and nurses who had cared for him.

His garden measured 25 meters end to end. A hundred laps meant well over a mile, in short shuffling loops, for a man who’d broken his hip not that long before.

He started walking. And donations — a few pounds at a time, from strangers who’d heard about him online — started to come in.

Within days, he’d raised more than his family could quite believe. By the time he completed his hundredth lap on the morning of April 16th, two weeks ahead of his own deadline, soldiers from the Yorkshire Regiment had arranged a surprise Guard of Honour to salute him on his final loop, and the total already stood well past £14 million. He kept walking anyway, extra laps past the finish line, because the donations kept coming and he said he might as well.

“It’s absolutely awesome,” he told one interviewer, sounding as surprised as everyone else. By the time his fundraising page closed at midnight on his hundredth birthday, close to 1.5 million people around the world had donated, pushing the total past £32 million — the largest sum ever raised by a single person’s charity walk, breaking a record that had stood for forty years.

The Queen knighted him that July, in an outdoor ceremony at Windsor Castle designed around social-distancing rules. He recorded a single with the singer Michael Ball and an NHS choir that reached number one on the UK charts, making him, at ninety-nine years and 359 days old, the oldest person ever to top the British music charts. He published a memoir. He was named an honorary colonel. His family estimated he received more than 150,000 cards from well-wishers.

Ten months after he finished his hundredth lap, in early February 2021, Captain Sir Tom Moore died in the hospital after contracting COVID-19, following weeks of treatment for pneumonia. He was a hundred years old. His funeral, limited by pandemic rules to eight family members, still included a military honor guard and a flypast by a World War II-era Dakota aircraft, while people who had never met him lined the streets outside anyway, just to be there.

He had chosen his own epitaph months earlier, a callback to a joke he liked to make about his age: “I told you I was old.”

By the time it was all totaled, strangers on every continent had turned one man’s hundredth-birthday walk into something far bigger than a walk: a life mostly lived quietly, and one extraordinary spring at the very end of it, that reminded a locked-down world what looking out for each other could still look like.

Four Minutes

Jason McElwain was diagnosed with autism at age two and didn’t speak his first words until he was eight years old. By the time he reached Greece Athena High School, outside Rochester, New York, he stood shorter than most of his classmates, loved basketball more than almost anything, and had exactly one way to be close to the team he wasn’t able to compete on: as its manager.

For three years, “J-Mac,” as everyone called him, kept stats, handed out water bottles, and ran the clock for the Greece Athena Trojans, coached by a man named Jim Johnson. He had never played in a single official game.

On February 15, 2006 — senior night, the last home game of McElwain’s high school career, with a division title on the line against rival Spencerport — Greece Athena built a big, comfortable lead. With four minutes and nineteen seconds left on the clock, Coach Johnson made a call: he sent J-Mac to the scorer’s table to check into the game.

The gym, packed with roughly 900 people, erupted. McElwain, in his first and only varsity minutes, air-balled his first shot badly, then missed his second attempt too.

Then something changed. His third shot — a three-pointer — dropped clean through the net. So did his fourth. And his fifth. He kept shooting, and the ball kept going in: six three-pointers and a two-point basket in the final four minutes of his entire competitive basketball career, twenty points in all.

“I just caught fire,” he said afterward. “I was hot as a pistol.”

When the final buzzer sounded on Greece Athena’s 79-43 win, the gym emptied onto the court, and McElwain’s own teammates hoisted him onto their shoulders. Someone in the stands had been filming with a home video camera. That footage reached the local news within days, then the internet, then ESPN, and within weeks Jason McElwain — a team manager who had never played a competitive minute of basketball before that night — was a household name across the country. He was flown out to meet President George W. Bush. He won the ESPY Award for Best Sports Moment of the year, ahead of plenty of actual professional athletes. A book was written about him, and later a short film.

What the highlight reel alone doesn’t show is the part that came before it: three years of a teenager showing up to every practice and every game for a team he wasn’t allowed to play on, doing the unglamorous work of towels and stat sheets and water bottles, because it was as close as he could get to the thing he loved — and a coach who noticed, and quietly decided that on the one night it would matter most, that shouldn’t have to be the whole story anymore.

McElwain, now in his thirties, has spent the years since as a motivational speaker, a marathon runner, and — fittingly — a coach of his own, still showing up the same way he always did: to be part of a team.

Your Faith Journeys

A young man once told me about a lesson from his teenage years in Hebrew school. The rabbi stood before the class and asked a simple question: how many of you believe in God? Out of ten students, only one hand went up.

Most teachers would have flinched. Many would have launched into a lecture, alarmed at the spiritual state of the next generation. This rabbi did neither. He looked at his class and said, simply: this is okay. Not everyone in a family believes in God to the same degree, or in the same way. You are all still Jewish. One of you — or one of your children, or one of their children — may yet become a stronger believer. Religious feeling rises and falls within a single lifetime, and it rises and falls across generations within the same family. So don't panic. It will work out in the end.

I have never forgotten that story, because it captures something the Church of Peace, Love, and Understanding holds as a central truth: faith is not a contract that requires unanimous, unwavering belief from every member of a household in order to remain valid. Faith is a home. And a home does not stop being a home just because the people living in it see things differently.

Think about your own family for a moment. Perhaps you have a grandmother who prays every single day without fail, and a grandson who hasn't set foot in a church since his confirmation. Perhaps you have a spouse who finds God in scripture and another who finds God in a sunrise over the mountains, or doesn't use the word "God" at all but feels something sacred when holding a newborn child. Are these people no longer a family? Of course not. They are exactly what every family has always been: a collection of individuals on different points along the same long road, bound together not by identical belief but by love.

CPLU wants to unite families on precisely these terms. Not everyone believes in Jesus with the same intensity, or in the same way, and that is alright. You are still Christian. You are still part of this community. Your children, and their children, may yet come to a deeper faith than you currently hold — or you may come to a deeper faith than you currently hold. Religious conviction is not static. It moves. It breathes. It responds to the seasons of a human life — to grief, to joy, to the birth of a child, to the death of a parent, to the long quiet stretches when nothing dramatic happens at all.

This matters because too many families have been torn apart, not by lack of love, but by the insistence that everyone under one roof must believe identically or the household has somehow failed. A father stops speaking to his daughter because she questions doctrine. A mother feels like a failure because her son calls himself an atheist. Holidays become minefields. Dinner tables become battlegrounds. And all of this happens in the name of a faith whose central commandment is love.

We say: stop. Put down the weapon of certainty. Pick up, instead, the practice of patience.

CPLU exists to serve as a basis for uniting families under a common banner — not the banner of identical belief, but the banner of shared love and mutual respect. We want to be the religion for the entire family, in all its complicated, beautiful variety. As long as you believe in love, you are in. That is the whole of our membership requirement.

This is not a lowering of standards. It is, in fact, a much higher standard than mere doctrinal agreement. It is far easier to demand that everyone think alike than it is to hold a family together across genuine differences in belief. It takes wisdom. It takes humility. It takes the rabbi's patience — the willingness to say, "this is okay," and mean it.

So if you are sitting here today uncertain about what you believe, you are welcome. If you are sitting here today as the only believer in a family of skeptics, or the only skeptic in a family of believers, you are welcome. If your faith has changed three times in your lifetime and might change again, you are welcome.

Don't panic. Everything will work out in the end. And in the meantime, we will hold the family together — not with rigid uniformity, but with the patient, abiding love that has held families together since the beginning of time.

"If you have a story that could brighten someone's day or encourage their faith journey, submit in the contact form or send it to stories@cplu.onine. We’d love to feature it! If you want us to change names or keep you anonymous, just mention it in your submission or email."

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