I was beyond any response of either blessing or cursing. But I knew that I couldn’t go home until I had been washed clean of the hate. The very trees around the rock seemed to draw back in horror and apology because they had not been able to stop the intruder.
Feeling sick and cold I called Timothy and walked and walked.
Seeking perspective in a hate-torn world,
Leaving, for respite brief, the choking city,
I turn to trees, new leaves not quite unfurled,
A windswept blue-pure sky for pity.
Across a pasture, over a stone wall,
Past berry brambles and an unused field,
Listening for leaf sound and the brook’s clear call,
Turning down path by bush and tree concealed,
Forgetting human sin and nature’s fall
I seek perfection in the cool green still.
Small trees with new spring growth are tall.
Here is no sign of human hate or ill.
Unexpecting any pain or shock
I turn to climb upon my thinking rock.
The rock stands high above the snow-full brook.
Behind the rock an old tree breaks the sky,
And on the tree where bird and beast may look
An icon and a cross are hanging high.
So strong are they, placed lovingly together,
I need have little fear for their protection
Through wind and snow and bitter wintry weather.
They speak to me of joy and Resurrection
And here my self-will stills, my heart beats slow.
God’s presence in his world is bright and strong.
Upon the rock I climb, and then—No! No!
The sky is dark and here is hate and wrong.
O God! Make it not be! Oh, make it not!
The icon: target for a rifle’s shot.
A wave of dark blasts cold across my face.
My stomach heaves with nausea at the dirt
Of hate in this pure green and loving place.
The trees pull back and cower in their hurt.
Rooted, they could not stop the vicious gun
Fired straight at God’s birth-giver and her child.
There’s only death in this. It’s no one’s fun
To blaspheme love. A shot has made a wild
Distortion of the young and ancient face.
I give the broken fragments to the brook
And let the water lap them with its grace.
And then I sit upon the rock and look
At the great gouge in the tree’s wood.
Evil obscures all peace and love and good.
My dog knew that something had upset me. He kept close as we walked, instead of tearing off in great loops. We kept walking until I had come to the point where I could simply turn over to God whoever had shot the icon and the cross. This person was beyond my puny human ability to understand. I could not add to the curse by cursing. But I did not know how to bless. I went back to the house and told Hugh what had happened. The next day I carried tools and took the remains of the icon off the tree and gave them to the brook. I took away the small nail with the broken loop. Then I sat on the rock and looked at the gouge in the tree’s wood. What I describe in the next sonnet did not happen that day, but it did happen, and redeemed the act of hate, and made the tree far more of an icon for me than it was before.
As I sit looking at the shot-at tree
The rough wound opens and grows strange and deep
Within the wood, till suddenly I see
A galaxy aswirl with flame. I do not sleep
And yet I see a trillion stars speed light
In ever-singing dance within the hole
Surrounded by the tree. Each leaf’s alight
With flame. And then a burning living coal
Drops hissing in the brook, and all the suns
Burst outward in their joy, and the shot child,
Like the great and flaming tree, runs
With fire and water, and alive and wild
Gentle and strong, becomes the wounded tree.
Lord God! The icon’s here, alive and free.
Balak sent Balaam to curse the children of Israel, and the ass saw an angel of God and sat down under Balaam and refused to move, and the curse was turned to a blessing.
I don’t understand and I don’t need to understand.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, I cry with the psalmist whose songs after all these thousands of years still sing so poignantly for us. O bless his Holy Name, and may he bless each one of us and teach us to bless one another.
Throughout these pages there has been an affirmation, explicit as well as implicit, of my faith in the promise of Easter, of the Resurrection, not only of the Lord Jesus Christ but of us all; the Resurrection not as panacea or placebo for those who cannot cope without medication, or as the soporific of the masses (Simone Weil said that revolution, and not religion, is the soporific of the masses), but as the reality which lights the day.
The experience with the icon tree was a symbole of resurrection for me, an affirmation which helps me to respond with a blessing where otherwise I might curse.
There are too many books which affirm resurrection now and can’t quite believe in resurrection after death. Resurrection now is indeed important for resurrection then, but resurrection now means little if after death there is nothing but ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The God who redeemed the icon tree for me will not create creatures able to ask questions only to be snuffed out before they can answer them. There is no pragmatic reason why any of my questions should be answered, why this little life should not be all; but the joyful God of love who shouted the galaxies into existence is not going to abandon any iota of his creation. So the icon tree is for me a symbole of God’s concern, forever and always and unto ages of ages, for all of us, every single one of us, no matter what we think or believe or deny.
So let there be no question: I believe in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus the Christ, and the resurrection of the body of all creatures great and small, not the literal resurrection of this tired body, this broken self, but the body as it was meant to be, the fragmented self made new; so that at the end of time all Creation will be One. Well: maybe I don’t exactly believe it, but I know it, and knowing is what matters.
ALL THAT MATTERS
Nothing.
Out of nothing
out of the void
(what?
where?)
God created.
Out of
nothing
which is
what?
But it is
not a what
or a where
or an opposite
of something
or anything.
Nothing is
nothing
we can know.
Does it matter
that matter’s mind
must not mind
not knowing
nothing
doubly negatively
or in any way
positively
not.
O Mind
that alone knows
nothing
O Word
that speaks
to matter
that
speaks matter
from the unspoken:
that you mind
is all that matters.
And this minding makes my lack of faith no matter, for I know; I know resurrection, and that is all that matters.
The strange turning of what seemed to be a horrendous No to a glorious Yes is always the message of Easter. The destroyed icon and the wounded tree are a poignant symbol of the risen Christ. The gouge in the tree is beginning to heal, but I will always know that it is there, and it is living witness that love is stronger than hate. Already things have happened which have put this knowledge to the test, and sometimes I have been where I could not go to the rock and see the ta
ngible assurance of the tree’s tall strong trunk. But I can turn in my mind’s eye and see it, can image the whole chain of events from the cruel destruction of death to the brilliance of new life.
I need to hold on to that bright promise.
8 … The Blue Balloon
There is a theory that Jesus of Nazareth, like many other extraordinary men who have walked this planet, was in reality a visitor from the stars, a man of a higher race than we terrans, who came to help us out of the muddle we were making of our world and then, his mission accomplished (or failed, depending on your point of view), got into his space ship and ascended into the heavens and returned to his own galaxy.
The idea of extraterrestrials coming to visit their lower brethren does not seem to me particularly farfetched (after all, I both read and write science fiction), but it doesn’t work with my theory of incarnation. It’s simply a modern variation of an old heresy, that Jesus wasn’t really man. He came and lived with us and shared our lives with magnificent compassion and generosity, but he wasn’t really one of us. He went through the motions of death, but being an immortal he didn’t really die, he only seemed to.
Throughout the centuries we have teetered back and forth on this paradox of Jesus as wholly man and wholly God, and too often for comfort have found it too difficult to believe. We emphasize either the divinity or the humanity, to the weakening of the other.
One evening Tallis and I were talking, after teaching a class together. One of the students had been defining God, and everybody agreed that this is impossible. But I said afterwards to Tallis, “We can’t define God, but didn’t God define himself for us, in Jesus Christ?”
He replied, “That’s all very well, as long as you remember Kierkegaard’s saying that Jesus came to us and looked like us and ate like us and talked like us, and the disguise was so perfect that we believed that he was just like one of us.”
I hesitate to disagree with either Kierkegaard or Tallis, but this bothered me so much that I blundered on. “But Jesus was us: isn’t that the whole point? Jesus is us; and it’s we who aren’t us, and haven’t been, not since Adam and Eve.”
And I still think that’s true. The second Adam was what the first Adam was meant to be, what we were all meant to be: spontaneous, free, aware, unafraid to love, without hubris: whole. Not as we are, fragmented, inhibited, sunside and darkside in collision instead of collaboration, so that we are afraid of all that we might find in the sinister world of the subconscious, are suspicious of intuition, and close our doors to the knocking of the Spirit.
Go away. You can’t come in. I’m shutting the door.
I’m afraid of you. I’m not sure who you are anymore.
I’m closing the door. I’m staying safe and alone.
Batter against it all you like. This house is built on stone.
You can’t come in. I’ve shuttered the windows tight.
You never say who you are. If it’s You, then it’s all right,
But you might be the other, the beautiful prince of this world
Who makes my heart leap with his cohorts and banners unfurled.
I could be unfaithful with him without any trouble
If I opened the door. He could easily pass for your double.
I’ve buried my talents. If I put them to use
I could hurt or be hurt, be abused or abuse.
I wish you’d stop blowing. My whole house is shaken.
I’ll hide under the covers. Be gone when I waken.
What’s that light at the windows, that blast at the door?
The shutters are burning, there’s fire on the floor.
Go away. I don’t know you. My clothes are aflame,
My tongue is on fire, you are crying my name;
I hear your wild voice through the holocaust’s din.
My house is burned up.
What?
Oh, welcome! Come in!
It’s not easy to understand the fire of the spirit which burns and does not consume, to keep our door open so that we are helped to understand a God so loving that he can actually be one of us, and still be God.
The idea of a Jesus who really wasn’t one of us after all is easier to believe in than the technical impossibility which I daily struggle to believe, the extraordinary paradox which is all that makes the universe bearable. Jesus of Nazareth was wholly man as well as wholly God. He did die. For our sakes he suffered everything we suffer, even doubt. And then he broke the powers of death and returned briefly to quite a few people—not everybody, but enough so that his presence was noted—though he was never recognized on sight. And then, after a time, he ascended, whatever that means.
What it means in terms of physical, provable fact, I cannot know. Whatever really happened has been lost in the mists of two thousand years. I do know that it has something to do with love, the kind of open, joyful, giving love I fail in daily, and struggle daily to understand.
I know it’s not like that sunny Sunday afternoon
when we went to the zoo; evening came too soon
and we were back on the crowded city street
still full of pleasure from the afternoon’s treat,
and our little girl clutched in her fingers a blue balloon.
It bobbed above our heads. Suddenly there came a cry,
a howl of absolute loss. We looked on high
and there we saw the balloon, ascending,
turning and twirling, higher and higher, blending
into the smoky blue of the city sky.’
We wiped the eyes, blew the little nose, consoled the tears,
did not, of course, offer a new balloon, instead were silly, waggled our ears,
turned sobs to laughter, accepted loss, and hurried
home for dinner. This day is not like that. And yet they must have tarried,
looking up into the sky the day he left them, full of loss and fears.
He had come back to them, was with them, and then was lost
again, or so perhaps it seemed, the table left without the host.
The disciples did not understand all that he had said,
that comfort would be sent, there would be wine and bread.
Lost and abandoned (where is my blue balloon?) they did not comprehend until the day of Pentecost.
Even after he told them, his followers did not hear and see:
“What is this that he saith unto us? A little while and ye
Shall not see me, and again a little while, and ye shall.… when? tomorrow?
We do not understand.” Lord, nor do I, and share thus in their sorrow
at the same time that the Spirit sets my sorrow free
to turn to love, and teaches me through pain to know
that love will dwell in me and I in love only if I let love go.
So the Ascension is freed to move into the realm of myth.
It doesn’t bother me when people talk condescendingly about the Christian myth, because it is in myth that sunside and nightside collaborate and give us our glimpses of truth. But when I use the word myth I bump headlong into semantic problems, because myth, to many people, is a lie. Despite the fact that during the last decade myth has been rediscovered as a vehicle of truth, there are still those who cannot help thinking of it as something which is false. We give children the Greek and Roman myths, the Norse or Celtic myths, and expect them to be outgrown, as though they are only for children and not to be taken seriously by realistic adults. If I speak of the Christian myth it is assumed not only that I am certainly not a fundamentalist, but that I am an intellectual who does not need God and can speak with proper condescension of the rather silly stories which should be outgrown at puberty. But I am far closer to the fundamentalist than the atheist when I speak of myth as truth.
The rediscovery of myth hasn’t helped, because what does his Satanic Majesty do when the sons of Adam stumble upon something which would further the coming of the Kingdom and destroy the Prince of this World? He infiltrates, and
so myth becomes part of the jargon, and jargon has no power.
Nonetheless, myth is the closest approximation to truth available to the finite human being. And the truth of myth is not limited by time or place. A myth tells of that which was true, is true, and will be true. If we will allow it, myth will integrate intellect and intuition, night and day; our warring opposites are reconciled, male and female, spirit and flesh, desire and will, pain and joy, life and death.
God became man, was born of a woman, and we would have liked to keep this man-child with us forever; and that kind of possessiveness leads to disaster; as most parents know.
When I wrote the following lines I thought of them as being in Mary’s voice, but they might just as well be in mine—or any parent’s.
Now we may love the child.
Now he is ours,
this tiny thing,
utterly vulnerable and dependent
on the circle of our love.
Now we may hold him,
feeling with gentle hands
the perfection of his tender skin
from the soft crown of his head
to the sweet soles of his merrily kicking feet.
His fingers softly curl
around one finger of the grownup hand.
Now we may hold.
Now may I feel his hungry sucking at my breast
as I give him my own life.
Now may my husband toss him in the air
and catch him in his sure and steady hands
laughing with laughter as quick and pure
as the baby’s own.
Now may I rock him softly to his sleep,
rock and sing,
sing and hold.
This moment of time is here,
has happened, is:
rejoice!
Child,
give me the courage
for the time
when I must open my arms
and let you go.
I looked at my last baby lying in his cradle, knowing that he was the last child I would bear, for I nearly didn’t survive his birth; looked, touched, listened, with an incredible awareness I might not have had if I had been able to expect to bear more children. As each change came, I had to let the infant-that-was go, go forever. When he was seven months old I weaned him, as part of that essential letting go, letting him move on to child, little boy, young man.… Love, and let go. Love, and let go.
The Irrational Season Page 13