His reimagining of the Babel story reminded me of Jewish midrash—a tradition I greatly envy—in which Jews both ancient and modern respond to contemporary problems by creating new stories based on close readings of the Bible. The first midrash I found about Babel was all about bricks. In this old story, the tower of Babel grew and grew until it took a full year for people to pass the bricks from hand to hand all the way to the top. Bricks became so precious to the project that when a brick slipped and fell, the people wept, but when a human being fell and died, no one paid any attention.1
Another old story says that building the tower became more important than anything else including giving birth. When a pregnant woman felt her labor pains begin, she was not allowed to stop making bricks. Instead, she “brought forth while she was making bricks, carried her child in her apron, and continued to make bricks.”2 These legends are not in the Bible, which never says exactly what went wrong in Babel. Was it that people had let bricks become more important to them than each other? Was it that they huddled together in one place instead of being fruitful and filling the earth as God had commanded them? Was it their abandonment of agrarian life for urbanization? The Bible never says.
In my interpretation, it does not really matter what went wrong. Human beings are so capable of all the possibilities—overreaching, underreaching, and everything in between—that it hardly matters which one you decide to blame. The most interesting part of the story is the ending anyway, with the cascade of new tongues that signaled a change in God’s plans. Once God saw how things were working out for the people who spoke the same language, God revised God’s will. God tweaked the humans, so they were as various as all the other creatures God had made. From that point forward, the languages of three people would be as different as the songs of three birds. Wouldn’t that be an improvement over a world in which all birds sounded alike?
For reasons no one may ever understand, God decided it would be helpful for people to be different instead of the same, if only because it would slow them down a little bit. God decided it would be good for them to have to stop on a regular basis and say, “Could you say that a different way, please? I don’t understand what you mean” or “Can you show me with your hands?” God decided it would be good for them to stop taking their communication for granted and work a little harder at trying to understand each other.
One of the first things they understood (in my midrash, at least) was that there was more than one way to say something important. Hashem. Brahman. Sunyata. Holy Trinity. Allah. Sometimes, when they used words like these, they were pointing at the same thing, and sometimes they were not, but just trying to explain the words slowed them down long enough to make them think about what they really meant. What do you mean when you say God? This was not a problem they had when they all understood each other. They had just assumed that they meant the same thing when they used the same word, which was not the case at all—but speaking the same language had allowed them to cling to that illusion for longer than was good for them. Then God came to their rescue and confused their speech.
Translation became a necessary human activity. When there was not an equivalent word for something in another language, people had to settle for second best, which was how they came to understand the importance of charity as well as precision. When they could not say exactly what they meant, they let the frustration of that soften them toward other people who could not say exactly what they meant either.
Eventually those who spoke Finnish had a word for a large herd of reindeer that did not exist in Japanese. Those who spoke Japanese had a word for sunlight that filters through trees that did not exist in Rukwangali. Those who spoke Rukwangali had a word for tiptoeing across warm sand that did not exist in Finnish. Eventually people began to understand that not everything could be said in words. Some things were better expressed with a lifted eyebrow, a tilted head, a hand reaching out to put something in another hand. What do you mean when you say human?
You see where I am going with this. By revising the divine will and creating a world full of people who spoke different languages, God chose variety over uniformity. God created the conditions for multiple interpretations of everything that required speech to describe. There was no longer one right way to say a true thing. There were many ways to say it. Torah. Veda. Dharma. Gospel. Qur’an. Even when those words pointed to different things, you could see how much they meant to the people who said them.
But trying to figure out how they were different proved so frustrating to some people that they decided to settle down with people who spoke the same language they did. Just because God had changed God’s mind did not mean they had to change theirs. They settled in places where they would not have to learn anyone else’s language, and they resented it when people who did not speak their language moved in next door. Others took up the challenge of becoming multilingual, gaining new neighbors every time they learned to say, “Good morning!” in a different language.
“The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation,” says Jonathan Sacks, “speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering a genesis of hope.”3 The vulnerabilities cannot be undersold. Sometimes they are so great that they make my teeth chatter. When I listen to someone describe reality in a foreign language that nonetheless makes enormous sense to me, my own hold on reality is shaken. When I try to describe what I believe to be true to someone who does not believe it, my certainty springs alarming leaks. I am lost in the woods trying to find the life that makes meaning out of mine.
There are plenty of times I want to go back to Babel, where everyone speaks my language and we are all on the same page. My own church feels that way sometimes, like a safe city with a tower that has a cross on top, making a name for its builders by how far it reaches into the heavens. It is a beautiful place to rest, but it is not the best place to stay. If God’s revised will for Babel is any indication, then the clamorous world outside is the best place for human beings to stay—to stay on the move, that is, entering into conversations with neighbors who are as different from one another as they can be. In the United States plenty of them are farther from their safe places than I will ever be, which makes my efforts to communicate with them all the more important.
Why do it at all, when the chances of agreeing on politics, religion, or anything else are so slim? I cannot answer that question for anyone else. My sole hope is to give God one more chance to work on me, by coming to me in the guise of a stranger who does not speak my language, asking me questions I cannot answer, until I become so interested in what can and cannot be said that the stranger and I go off to find lunch, leaving our half-built tower standing silent in the sand.
Way back at the beginning of this book, I said that one of the reasons I left parish ministry for the classroom was because the living water in my well was running low. My bucket kept hitting sand. My cup did not overflow. I moved to the classroom in order to learn more about what was in other people’s sacred wells and how they served it up. Though I had faith even then that all our water came from the same sacred source, I did not think that was something I could say in church. Our Christian sediment had settled pretty definitively by then. No one seemed very interested in shaking it up, and even I could see why.
There were kids in my church. There were new people who were just coming to faith. They needed to learn the Christian story before they started reimagining the story. They needed to tend their own holy ground before they began seeing how the yard next door might be holy too. Envy could wait—but should it ever arise in them, I want them to know that it does not mean there is something wrong with them. It just means they are ready to meet some new neighbors. By God’s grace, it means they are ready to draw the circle wider.
Laurie Patton, the president of Middlebury College, once asked me a question that I have never been able to forget. “What is the story you are working on,” she asked, “that doesn’t have an ending yet?�
�� In the years since she first asked that question I have come up with many different answers, but today my answer is: the story I have told so far in this book. After becoming so disillusioned with my faith that I could not look it in the eyes, I have left as many of its self-interested truth claims as I can, arriving at a place where it is possible to resume the work of loving God and my neighbor as self-forgetfully as possible. This is more than enough Christian teaching for a lifetime. It seems unlikely that I will ever get around to selling all my possessions or forgiving anyone seventy-seven times. Most days I cannot even bridle my tongue. But I can love more. I know that. I also know how much it can cost, which is why I do not do it more often.
While I am waiting to learn how this story I am working on ends, I will continue to ask much of my tradition, especially since it has much to answer for. I will keep insisting that it produce good fruit in a changing world, even as it helps me and others like me catch the new wine of the Spirit that is being poured out. When I am thirsty, I will dip my cup in the well nearest to hand, while longing to return home to the one I know best. Even if the water in the Christian well does not belong to Christians—even if it is funded by the same great underground river that feeds all other wells—I know where mine is and I know how to use it. My Christian cup works well enough, and when it does not, I can still use my hands.
11
The God You Didn’t Make Up
The Spirit arrives incognito, bringing the indwelling love of God. Those who do not refuse it become lovers of the only God there is, because the only God there is has loved them first.
CHARLES HEFLING
A few years into my tenure at Piedmont College I was invited to teach Christian spirituality at a Presbyterian seminary during the summer term. The baccalaureate address was behind me, which meant that I was comfortable on the sacred way of unknowing—so comfortable, in fact, that I was not sure I knew what “spirituality” meant anymore. Maybe no one was. Maybe “spirituality” was another of those words we use without thinking very much about what we mean. So I started asking people what they meant by it, building a list of definitions that included everything from “Spirituality is an escape hatch for people who would rather live in heaven than on earth” to “Spirituality is anything that helps you feel closer to God.”
Finally I asked my friend Judy, who spent many years as a student of Sufism and who embodies fana—the self-annihilating love of God—as well as anyone I know. When I asked her to define spirituality for me, she thought for a moment and said, “Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn’t make up.” I loved that. I also did not know what it meant.
I could not argue with the part about making God up. All you have to do is dust my Bible for fingerprints to find the favorite parts and the ignored ones—or follow my tracks on Google, or check my book purchases on Amazon, or poll my friends. I stick very close to sources that support my view of reality. Even when that view shifts, as it does every time I teach Religion 101, I still gravitate toward the new truths that sound the most like mine. There is really no easy entry for anyone with whom I seriously disagree about who God is and how God does (or does not) act.
Through the years I have worked hard on my divine mosaic, which reflects my hopes and fears about God all the way from my early childhood until now. It has pieces in it that I collected from the various churches I have passed through, from classes I have taught and taken, from my favorite teachers and writers about God. It has more than I like to admit from my social location in this world—a rich white woman who has never so much as broken a bone—and from my North American-ness, in which I am so immersed that it is invisible to me except when someone points it out.
Once, when I wrote an article for The Christian Century about the fortunate alignment of Easter with the spring equinox (so that the grass really is “springing green” when Resurrection Sunday arrives in Georgia), the editor received at least two angry letters from readers in New Zealand and Australia, where Easter arrives in autumn, following their spring equinox in September. What can I say? I never saw it that way. It was one more of those things I needed someone else to point out to me.
None of this makes my mosaic bad or wrong. It simply confirms that I made it up. How rude of Judy to point that out. My view of God is my own creation, made from bits and pieces of received or perceived knowledge about divine reality that I hope or fear are true. My mosaic has my fingerprints all over it. Ask anyone what she means when she says “God” and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God. So how does one get beyond that? How do any of us actively pursue the God we did not make up?
For a number of years I thought I had to surpass Christian tradition to get there, rising above all the familiar words and images in order to open myself to the divine reality that lay far beyond them all. The more I learned about the religions of the world, the more I became convinced that they were all pointing to the same sacred mystery beyond all human understanding, so why not stop granting priority to any religious language and become more proficient in them all?
Some of my farsighted friends had already gone there, devoting themselves to the perennial wisdom that funds all of the world’s great religions without granting priority to any of them. Following their lead, I learned as many faith languages as I could, gaining a great deal from the distinctions Hindus make between the God who is made manifest in physical form (think Jesus) and the God who transcends form (think Spirit). I gained similar insights from learning about the differences between Theravada Buddhists (who emphasize liberating the self) and Mahayana Buddhists (who emphasize liberating others), which helped me think differently about Christians who emphasize individual salvation and those who emphasize social justice.
I could go on. There is no way to overstate the importance of what I have learned from studying the world’s great religions, but here is what I noticed: I was still drawn to the teachings that I liked. I did not spend much time on the hot and cold hells of Buddhism, for instance, which include being impaled on a fiery spear until flames come out the nose and mouth, and being frozen until one’s body cracks open and internal organs are exposed. It was easy to think of Christian parallels, but I did not want to go there. Neither was I drawn to learn more about the antipathy some Muslims have toward dogs or the Native American ceremony that involves eating sacred puppy stew. But this is not about what other people do; this is about what I do: I make my own mosaic. Whether the resources at my disposal come only from my own tradition or from a wide array of traditions, my ego stays very active selecting the ones that please me most. So how is this any different from the gospel cherry-picking that drives me crazy when I see members of my own religion doing it?
There is an additional problem, which is that I am not a born multilinguist. As hard as I work at learning other religious languages, the subtle differences between the subdenominations of Shia Muslims are as difficult for me to understand as the differences between the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Churches of Christ, and the unaffiliated Christian churches and churches of Christ, all of which grew from the American Restoration Movement of the early nineteenth century. If the way forward involves panoramic knowledge of other faiths, then I do not see how someone like me is ever going to get there. I am barely up to speed on the historical record of my own denomination, which is only a couple of hundred years old.
I had a kind of epiphany during the spring semester, in the middle of an upper-level course on death and dying in the world’s great religions. After the students and I had learned the main differences in the ways Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, and Christians treat their dying and lay their dead to rest, we learned about the vast differences within those traditions, depending on everything from cultural background to theological worldview. Catholics and Protestants do not do things the same way any more than Sunni and Shia Muslims do. Hindus who live in India do things differently from Hindus who live in Great Britain. Americ
an converts to Buddhism are worlds apart from Asian Americans who received the tradition from their parents and grandparents. How was I ever going to learn all of that?
Imagine being a hospital chaplain in a major urban center. Your first visit of the day takes you to the room of an Orthodox Jew who is having a small refrigerator installed in his room for ready-to-eat kosher food during his stay. He asks you to make sure to call his rabbi, not a Reform rabbi, to come to see him. From there you go to the room of an elderly Hindu woman who is clearly dying and whose family is trying to lift her out of bed to put her on a blanket on the floor according to their custom. After you have alerted the nursing staff to that eventuality, you head to the room of a Sikh child on the pediatric oncology floor, where the child’s mother is trying to explain to the lab tech why the child’s steel bracelet—the symbol of a Sikh’s unbreakable bond with God—is not coming off even if it does get in the way of the IV tubing.
While I was getting hand cramps from writing all of this down, I came upon these two sentences in the assigned reading:
It may help immensely to have competence in the language of the bereaved person and to know much about that person’s culture, but often what is most helpful is to be authentically human. At times, a genuine and caring offer of sympathy, shared tears, or a hug has more meaning than stilted efforts to try to act like people in the other person’s culture.1
Holy Envy Page 17