Could it happen again? Yes. New life would be born, and new civilizations would rise. But would they not fall as all previous ones had fallen? And what was the cost in terms of human misery and lost souls? Why did God permit it? Was He powerless? Elijah flinched away from the thought as if from a devouring fire that had once burned him, not fatally, but leaving a scar that had only just healed.
Stripped before his eyes was the fundamental problem of his soul: he had been given everything and it did not suffice. He had been graced to see the actions of God as few men have seen them. The consolations poured out upon him and within him were extraordinary, and not the least of them was this day’s miracle. And yet. . . and yet, the ancient scar of Adam within his nature dragged him inexorably back, again and again, to this desire for certainty. Not that he wished to force the Creator of the universe into a position of justifying His will, but he hungered for a trace of explanation.
He knew full well that if it were given he would soon need a larger one, and a still larger one after that, until in the end no explanation would fill the yawning abyss of his doubt. The illusion of understanding would only breed deeper confusion, more binding forms of inner protest against the violation of all that was beautiful. Not-knowing was the way to ultimate union with the Love whose embrace was the filling of every doubt, the binding up of all wounds. As a Carmelite, he knew the theology and spirituality of the mountain of faith, the way of nothingness—nada—the path that led by the straight route up the mountain of God. Why this relentless pull to the left and to the right, as if a path zigzagging through perilous ravines and precipitous heights were a better way. It was not a better way. He knew it, and yet the tug remained.
The question returned again and again, nagging, biting, seizing his attention whenever he sought to fix his mind on the Presence. Why did God permit it? Why? Were the little arrangements of man destined to fall ever short of the heavenly Jerusalem, endlessly repeating themselves until there came about some radical and comprehensive fall, some awful and majestic collapse into an ultimate evil, wiping away all delusions about the perfectibility of man?
Was this long lesson strung out through the course of history not a form of cruelty? Oh, yes, he knew all the replies, back and forth, up and down, inside out. Freedom. Human will. Man could not love if he were unable to choose love, and with this choice came the ability to choose love’s opposite. Elijah could argue an atheist into silence, if one would listen, and he could go farther to implant the questions that could lead a soul in darkness to fairest hope. But beyond that there would loom the wider and more perilous questions still. His convert would have to face it eventually, for he, Elijah, was still facing it after all these years.
“Why do You permit evil to go so far? Would you let it devour everything?”
Not everything, said the quiet voice. Not everything. And from a single seed comes forth entire forests, waiting to unseal their code, to cover the earth with life.
He saw the many faces that, like seeds, had sunk into the dark soil of his memory. Ruth, the baby in her womb, Anna, Pawel, Mother, Father. So many had perished, consumed by the enemies of God. It was impossible to understand why God had permitted it. This question, the one that had haunted him from the moment of his parents’ arrest when he was seventeen years old, had appeared and reappeared like a sharp stick probing the incurable wound. Yes, the consolation in the cave had refreshed him. Yes, he knew that God existed. Without such faith he would long ago have grown weary and stumbled, pleading with God to depart and to take with Him the pain of seeing. He was past that crisis, he knew. The despair of his youth was over and the losses that had followed were patiently borne, but beneath the scar tissue there remained an abscess—a question and the doubt.
He went back outside again, stepping over the sleeping companions in the dark. He sat on the edge of the well, watching the stars, asking for light.
The faces of those he had loved came to him with increased poignancy then, and he felt a sob within himself that could take no exterior form. They were gone. A fixed landscape of absence. Yes, he understood the message of the cave—that the small woman, the firstborn daughter of Zion, was a sign of the resurrection of the flesh on the Last Day. But now it had dwindled to a promise, a word he had once heard, an event that lay in some distant and possibly abstract future. He believed that God would draw the beloved faces after her into the sky, swirling up like birds of fire, up and up into a voluminous light that poured down to greet them. The vast panorama of man’s history would become a memory, a simple tale told swiftly and soon over. All grief would slip away and all questions would be remembered as the uncomprehending wails of a newborn who did not grasp the meaning of his existence and hungered only for milk.
Within the box of time a drama had been enacted. The final scenes were approaching, but it might be that other births and deaths awaited this aging planet. Night and day. Seed time and harvest. Thrones rising and falling. The Word and the Antiword circling each other endlessly in a combat from which there was neither escape, nor relief nor truce. As long as man remained man, there would arise again and again the machinations of those who had no hope beyond the tactics of worldly power; always they would kill the gentle in their desperate efforts to rearrange the furniture on the stage. Metaphors collided in Elijah’s mind, swarming, clashing, breaking apart into confused designs, like the shattered glass of an image that had once reflected the hidden face of God, and which now bore only the imprint of a boot.
He saw many scripts and many audiences. Palaces fell and the dwellings of the humble rose again from the ruins. He saw a world covered with the activities of the holy angels, and the songs of man feebly greeting them, as the morning star greets the dawn. But he also saw dragons coiling about cities and devouring wave upon wave of human souls who dwelt in them, as if the city of man were the city of eternal strength. Cities built by men who would not be born for another ten thousand years.
The ache and the futility of it hit him hard.
You see that time must have an end, said the voice.
“Can You give us more time?” he pleaded. “A little longer and we might yet make a place for love on this earth.”
Evil cannot be permitted to devour the good indefinitely.
“I understand, my Lord, but is there not one more chance for us?”
Can you, My son, measure the full weight of time or track the seed of man in his course throughout the order of creation? Do you know the number of the stars and the number of the offspring of the flesh who would come into existence because of your pleading? Were I to grant another thousand years many souls would enter Paradise who might not have existed, and many others would throw themselves willingly into the pit of Hell.
He shrank from this knowledge.
“That is the explanation?”
The voice did not reply to this. For the briefest moment, Elijah felt the smile of his Creator, but this was a passing sense, and he wondered if it were only a sentiment. He turned to his intellect for help. He prepared a summation of his case.
“You are a fertile God. Many seeds are dropped into the soil. Many do not sprout. Yet beneath the appearance of waste nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Giant trees crash to the forest floor, decompose, and become the soil out of which the saplings arise. Similarly, in human affairs, movements are created, rise, do Your work in the world, decline, go back into the soil, and provide the rich humus out of which new life springs. Generations come and go. Sun and rain, winter and summer, seed time and harvest. Always Your Word remains constant. Your people are called over and over, generation after generation, back into this constancy, back to this mysterious fluid stability—the only security worth having. Can You not waste a little more time on us?”
Can you bear the weight of the souls who would despise this time of grace?
“If You give us time to warn and to protect!”
How much time I have already given. Two thousand years, and once again they fall into forgetfu
lness.
“Give us the voice to speak with authority.”
If I were to make your voice shake the foundations of the earth like thunder, would they make themselves more deaf in order not to hear?
“O my Savior, You know our state, You know our weakness. How fragile is man! The mighty of the earth are moving toward absolute power to establish control over the chaos of the human condition.”
They would make themselves divine in order to flee from God.
Elijah felt that he was debating with a Judge who was not only Mercy but Justice, the Pantocrator, the Lord of all creation, presiding at a trial in which the accused did not grasp the extent of their guilt. All heaven observed, and all hell. Unseen hosts were listening to the debate. Once, long ago, in the cold apartment of Pawel Tarnowski, during the worst days of the winter of 1943, he had found a book containing a poem about Heaven and Hell. He had read it to Pawel while all around them evil men were shooting the innocent.
What in me is dark, illumine,
What is low, raise and support;
That to the height of this great Argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
With what naïve joy he had read those words aloud. With what enthusiasm! He remembered the sound of his childish voice and the look in Pawel’s eyes—his silence the only reply.
Now here he was, more than fifty years later, a man himself, moreover a man who had taken a shape the boy could not have foreseen. A man in a desert at the end of an age, seeking to justify the ways of man to God.
“O Father, may I argue our case with You?”
You may do so, Lawyer Elijah.
Anna had called him that. Anna who had died at the hands of evil men, just as Ruth and the baby and Pawel had died.
“I am a poor lawyer in the court of God. But, my Lord, is it so impossible that mankind may be restored? Nothing is impossible with You. Did not Mary’s womb contain the impossible, the unthinkable? In that sacred little room of hers was nurtured the seed that would save the world from darkness. Encoded there, as if on a double helix, were the martyrs and mystics, the cathedrals and the statues, the Christian East and the West, the songs of the monks, the encyclicals, the poems, the millions of children who might not otherwise have been.
“Joseph too-small, hidden man from the least of villages—he contained the heart of a true father and made it possible for a new world to come into being. Joseph—fosterfather to a fatherless world, living icon of the Father. He remained open to messages and thus helped make it possible for You to come as man. His obedience protected Your very existence. His vigilance, his justice, his love, made it possible for You to grow as man. What a marvel this is—and what a scandal. Why all this weakness? Why the poverty, the smallness, the hiddenness? It does not make sense: You chose to be born in a cold time. Heaven came down to earth in a season of peril. The Savior of Israel revealed as powerlessness during the final ruin of the nation—for my people, my elders, it was the End. Therein lies the puzzle, the paradox, and the scandal: You came at the worst possible moment.”
I came at the impossible moment, and the world, which was powerful and sick unto death, burning and dying in its sins, was born again.
“Where has that light gone? When did the hope that was born with Your birth depart? So much time has passed. It is hard to see in the dark. You must tell us again and again: Your strength is to be found in weakness. Nazareth of Galilee was the place where that small, clear, indestructible message was first lived. She taught us that, Your Mother. It is lived again and again in each generation, often in the face of overwhelming odds. Civilizations rise and fall. Saints and tyrants, kings and poor men are born, grow old, and die. Cultures, theories, opinions, fashions, theologies, movements, rise up and disappear again. That is why our faith can never be merely a system of religious thought, a set of ethics, or a beautiful culture. That is why miracles and visions can never be enough. When everything is stripped down to its essential form, our faith is a belief in One who loves us; in Jesus, true God and true Man, the only Christ, dwelling in the heart of His Church, He who was, who is, and who is to come. That is why our home is the universal Church, the throne on which You reign, a Church that is within time and yet outside of time. That is why her doors stand ever open to Anna and Severa and Smokrev and Billy and me and even to this possessed man who desires to rule the world. Do You intend to close the doors to mankind?”
You speak as if the sum of human souls is a single thing. Mankind is not an organism. Each soul is weighed as if he were the only one.
“Do you wish to end all of that? If You do, I will accept. I may even understand. But I see a thing I would litigate with You: the Church passes through eras in which she glories in the summer’s triumph, and other periods when she goes down into the cold earth, apparently beaten. It may well be that her highest glory is to be found hidden beneath a stone, to all appearances dead, but very much alive, waiting for spring. I think often of our martyred Severa lying in the catacombs of Saint Callistus: Sleep, little dove, without bitterness, and rest in the Holy Spirit. Little girl, overcomer of lions! She will rise on the Last Day. We will see her face to face. We will chat with her, our small sister, our mother in the spirit. And my daughter who never came to birth, who never climbed the mountain or played in the wind. I see her child’s drawings, her poems, her songs that never came to be. I see her smile. I see the seed time of Ramat Gan and the harvest that did not come. I see all that might have been. These frail letters inscribed on the surface of creation would have told a story larger than the sum of its parts. ‘I am’, they proclaim. ‘I was here’, they say. ‘The world is beautiful. It makes me happy and I love it!’
“And at a deeper level they express the soul’s awareness that, ‘He who made the almond blossom made me.’ She did not live long enough to tell You this.”
I made her and she belongs to Me. She is happy. She tells Me this.
“Your words console, but in my boldness, I beg Your patience, for I must grow bolder still. Give us daughters and sons, and time, that You may have many children of the light. I cannot know the future, for I am a small man, and blind. You have anointed my hands with power to bring You to this earth so that we might feed upon Your very self. Yet will there be any flock to feed? The Church may yet go on to the third millennium and convert the world, or she may continue to shrink to a small remnant. Will there be any faith left on the earth when the Son of Man returns? We do not know. Only You know. But of this we can be sure: those whom You touch with Your fire will become what You wish them to become. Give us this fire, for we are dying of the cold.”
How many are like you across this dark age? A few only. Elijah, My good and blind child, you are an almond tree flowering in dry ground.
“Let me then make the seed of a second spring, seed not of the flesh but of the spirit, bringing dead men to life again. For You have made me this way, and You have told us that we are wonderfully made. You have planted this longing within me. You have created this soul who pleads with You. Give us a while longer to speak the word that shatters lies. When the tyrants and the propagandists and the experimenters have all gone, when the hatred and hopelessness have exhausted themselves, the earth will grieve and be born again. Let it be this way, Father, let it be that Your Bride the Church will remain. Let those who have sown in sorrow reap a harvest in joy.”
But the Voice did not reply, and he was left alone with the stars. He went in, lay down on his mat, and slept.
* * *
On Sunday morning, Elijah hiked up the mountain with Brother Ass. They ascended the topmost heights and came to a barren flat land of brushwood and untended fields. They crossed it and came to a dirt road that meandered east toward the Christian village. It was a two-hour walk, and he took the opportunity to ask the small brother about his experience in the cave.
“I was awake, Father. All the time I knew where I was, inside the cave with you and Fat
her Prior. At the same time, it was like watching a film, but I was inside the film too.”
“You spoke as if you were one of the apostles.”
“I was beside them. I told you only what I heard them saying. I didn’t understand it much. They didn’t look like the apostles on the holy cards. They were a different kind of Christian from us. But they were the same as us too. The Holy Spirit took me there in my soul, and I saw it just as it happened. I heard it inside the ears in my heart. I saw it all. I cried when they cried. I was happy when they were happy. She was so beautiful. Her face. . .”
The brother’s description faltered, and no amount of encouragement induced him to continue. He would only say: “I don’t know how to tell you about it. You have to see it for yourself.”
The small one whistled and skipped along like a child, occasionally lapsing into a reverie that clearly involved the vision he had seen. Whenever the young man’s thoughts returned to it, his face glowed with a light that seemed more than natural.
A single telephone wire snaked out of the hills toward a dusty cluster of approximately twenty houses and shops. There was a decrepit petrol station and a post office, a food store, and a stuccoed Byzantine church, its windows smashed, its front doors boarded.
Elijah went into the food store. He was greeted by a shout of delight from a fat, white-haired woman in a greasy pink dress. . This was Mrs. Cohen, the Jewish convert. She embraced him bustily and conducted him to a back room. For forty-five minutes, he heard confessions, then he robed in the Eastern Rite vestments someone had salvaged from the church. He offered the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom for the gathering of a few dozen souls—farmers, shopkeepers, housewives, and children.
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