The Special Dream is different. It, like prayer, is a gift.
The retreat center at Covington is part of a much larger complex. There is a seminary, a school, a church. As I was being driven through the grounds to the retreat center I could see that a service was about to begin at the church, for a large group of people of all ages was going up the steps and through the doors. And I was told that it was a funeral for a high school senior who had died in an inexplicable automobile accident; her car had been found slammed into a tree. As so often seems to be the case when someone dies young, she had been a popular and happy girl, with an excellent academic record, expected to be able to get into any college to which she applied. No one knew what had happened to make her car go out of control. And she was an only child.
A chill shadow was cast over the day.
Then I was being shown through the beautiful retreat center; the retreatants began to arrive; I joyfully met old friends, was introduced to new. Because I was fully in each present moment of the retreat, everything else faded.
At the end of the evening I went gratefully to bed, read for a few minutes, and went to sleep. Perhaps I had been thinking about God taking Abraham out at night and showing him the stars. I slept, and I dreamed. A Special Dream. Many such dreams are golden. This one was diamond.
It was a gorgeous night, and I was outside with many of the people who were on the retreat. I was joyfully looking at the stars which were clustered far more densely than usual, in brilliant, intricate patterns. Suddenly, in the east, there was a child of light, of dazzling light, and all the stars began to dance about the child in joy. And we were part of that joy.
That was the dream. I didn’t remember it on first waking, but something brought it flashing up to my conscious mind. And I realized that I had been given the gift of a resurrection dream.
And I knew that the girl who had died was part of that glory and part of that joy. For the brief moments of a sleeping dream I had been caught up in that love which is eternal and knows no restrictions of time.
God is omnipotent. All time is in el’s hand. Past, present, future.
So what (the question asks itself once again) does that do to our free will?
And again the astrophysicist, rather than the theologian (though I am well aware that there are many poor astrophysicists, just as there are many poor theologians) comes to my rescue. As God created time to be free, so el created us to be free. As we are capable of change, so is time. What we do is going to make a difference to the future, may change the future. And here we come to an astrophysical theory which is so extraordinary it is hardly conceivable: What we do may change not only the future; it is possible that it may change the past.
How? Well, there are many theories, such as alternate universes and time warps. But that time is free, past time as well as future, is being put forth as a serious theory, and it is the theory behind A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
Possibly I am reading more theology into astrophysics than the scientists intend, but if there is no dichotomy between sacred and secular, then everything is theological, from a solitary hot soak in the tub to the dance of the galaxies to the changing of a diaper. The new theories of time certainly leave us with more questions than answers; but allowing ourselves to move from question to question, knowing that in this life we are not likely to find all the definitive answers, is part of prayer.
In our daily reading of Scripture, when we move from reading to thinking and, if the gift is given, from thinking to praying, it is not surprising, nor is it bad that we often find ourselves far from the original verses which have triggered our thoughts.
Surely Sarah prayed for a child. Perhaps she argued with God, cried out to el in anguish and anger. Why was Hagar able to conceive when Sarah was not? Why was Hagar’s response smugness and pride with herself, and scorn toward Sarah?
Perhaps Sarah even tried to bargain with God. Is that not one of the first things the tempter taught us? And one of the saddest?
But what were her prayers all about? Did God even hear them? And, if el heard, why did el not heed them? Why was the answer always no?
And then, of course, came the miracle.
And I think of some of the miracles of my own life.
Many happenings in my life are beyond reasonable understanding. But that they happened there is no doubt. One of the most amazing and the most glorious has to do with prayer, my prayer, bad prayer. At least, it was the kind of prayer I had been taught to believe was bad. If I learned nothing else in those Anglican boarding schools, I did learn that we are never, ever, to say, “This isn’t fair. This shouldn’t have happened to me.” Especially, most especially, we are not to say this to God. Not ever. No matter what.
When my children complained, “It’s not fair,” I told them that nobody had promised them life was going to be fair. And I thought that I, myself, had learned this lesson.
One spring I had some complicated eye surgery, done by my marvellous ophthalmologist. I also had some nasty foot surgery. Each of these operations would have meant three months out of my life, and as I could not see taking six months off, I talked the doctors into doing the foot surgery first, and ten days later, the eye surgery. Preferably a short time of intense unpleasantness than dragging it out, I thought.
I went home from the hospital with everything going well, pins sticking out of the toes of my right foot, and a patch on my right eye which I was to take off when I bathed.
After I’d been home about two weeks, we went to the ballet to see our ballet-dancing son, a young man who had become part of our family a few years earlier. We went out to dinner first; the ballet was beautiful, and it was a happy evening. We went home and started getting ready for bed. Because of the pins still sticking out of my toes, I had to get into the bathtub bottom first, the right leg hanging out of the side of the tub. (Fortunately we have a right-legged tub.) While I was bathing, the phone rang. Hugh was in the shower down the hall, and I knew that he couldn’t hear it. But when the phone rings at eleven-thirty at night, we answer it. There have been enough accidents and unexpected crises in our family so that I never just let a phone go on ringing. With some effort I heaved myself out of the tub and limped toward the phone. It stopped, after only three rings, so I knew it was not one of our children. They would have let it go on ringing.
I turned back to the bathroom. Perhaps because I was wet and slippery, I slipped and fell, hitting my eye, right on the wound, on the corner of a chest.
I kept saying, childishly, “Don’t let anything have happened. Don’t let me have hurt my eye. Don’t let anything be wrong.”
But the world which, day by day, had been slowly coming back into view, had disappeared into a yellow fog.
Hugh came out of the shower and I told him what had happened. (All this in the space of a shower!) He called my doctor, who told us to get to the emergency room at Saint Luke’s, fast. We dressed hurriedly, and took a taxi to the hospital. The emergency room of a city hospital is a lot like hell. Out of a loud speaker rock music was blaring. This may have been comforting to some people; it made me ready to scream my way up the walls.
And Hugh was surrounded, by both patients and nurses. Everybody wanted Dr. Tyler’s autograph. At any other time I would have thought it was funny, but being very aware of the grave damage to my eye, and being very, very frightened, I wanted to get to the ophthalmological department as soon as possible.
Nothing happens quickly in an emergency room unless you are spouting blood. Having “Dr. Tyler” with me did help, because he was able to cut through some of the red tape as though he were a “real” doctor, not simply one out of a soap opera.
By the time that my eye was examined, the pressure in the eyeball had dropped to zero, meaning that the eye could collapse at any moment. This was further complicated by the fact that the eye was hemorrhaging internally. The doctor was honest with me; I was admitted to the hospital and prepped for an operation in the morning which I knew well might mean t
he removal of the eye.
It was the early hours of the morning by the time I was left alone. I had been given a sleeping pill which was supposed to knock out an elephant. It might as well have been a bread crumb, I was so wide awake, and so very aware of the seriousness of the situation, and my adrenaline was pumping full force. I tried to lie quietly, to pray quietly. I was grateful to the night nurse for her gentle concern. I tried to offer everything to God, not to be frightened.
And suddenly I heard myself saying in a loud voice, “Lord, have I ever, in all these years, have I ever once said: This isn’t fair? Have I ever once said: This shouldn’t have happened to me? You know I haven’t. Well, now I’m saying it!”
After that outburst I was able to lie quietly, to rest on the strong lifeline of the Jesus Prayer for the rest of the seemingly endless night.
In the morning when the doctor came, the pressure in the eyeball was up to normal. Half of the hemorrhage had already absorbed. And this simply is not possible. But it happened.
My doctor said with amazement, “You’re all right, and I’m going to send you home, but just in case, I want you to lie flat on your back for ten days.”
At that time I was working on the final revisions of Walking on Water, and Hugh called Harold and Luci Shaw to tell them what had happened, and to warn them that there would be a ten-day delay. Immediately, Luci called me back.
“Madeleine,” she said, “I feel strongly that this was demonic interference.”
The idea of demonic interference has not been part of the Episcopal tradition for a long time, though once again the possibility of it is being recognized. And I remembered that when I had been teaching at a writers’ conference in Nashville, Tennessee, a lovely young woman I had never seen before came up to me and said earnestly, “Madeleine, I want you to know that I pray for you every day. Your work has made you vulnerable to attack and you need protection.”
I lay there, flat on my back, and it seemed to me likely that the protection had somehow slipped, but then the angels came in and drove out the demon and undid his mischief. It is as reasonable an explanation as any.
When I went to the doctor to be checked, the eyeball pressure was still normal, and the hemorrhage had completely absorbed. That quickly? Not possible. But it happened.
Now every morning I put in my contact lenses and the world comes into view and I cry out, “Miracle!” and “Thank You!” There has yet to come a morning when I’ve taken restored sight for granted, and I doubt if there ever will, for the difference between seeing a vague, general blur, and seeing is not only quantitative but qualitative. Daily it is miracle, and awe, and joy.
I am grateful to the young woman in Nashville for her prayers of protection, and for the prayers of many others, for it is my firm conviction that it is these loving prayers which have kept me seeing, and which go on keeping me seeing. And the miracle of prayer is daily as fresh as the first daffodil in spring.
As to the phone call which was the superficial cause of all this: It was to tell me that A Swiftly Tilting Planet had won one of the National Book Awards.
—
A sensitive question was asked me. “In regard to intercessory prayer, if one prays for healing for someone, and the healing occurs, can we conclude that the healing would not have occurred had the prayer not been offered?”
Again, there is no easy answer, for if the healing would have occurred anyhow, why pray?
So we approach the mystery of intercessory prayer. George Macdonald answers one question with another: “And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question. ‘Why should my love be powerless to help another?’ ”
It is a beautiful question, and I believe that our love is never powerless to help. Thinking is powerful, and prayer is highly focussed thinking, and it can be offered for good, and, alas, it can also be used for evil. The stories told about practitioners of the dark arts hurting and even killing people by the power of thought are not figments of the imagination; such things happen. But if the power of darkness is strong, the power of light is even stronger. In the physical world, the laser is a demonstration of the power of light. Love is power, and loving prayer is one of the greatest powers in the world.
As I was typing this page, the mail was put on my desk, and one of the letters was from a woman who questioned the prayers which are answered with a No, or, what is almost worse, with a hollow, echoing silence. I have had a great many Yes answers to prayers, but I have also had a great many Noes, including a decade-plus of my life which seemed to be nothing but Noes. I don’t have any cut-and-dried answers to this. If I did, I could probably make a fortune as a psychologist.
The Book of Job is a struggle to understand this question: Why do terrible things happen to good people? Is it their “fault”? Is it part of something so great that we cannot understand it, or even our tiny role in the great drama? I have a friend who is a brilliant singer, and yet one event after another has kept her career from flourishing. Why? I have no answers. Only an offer of hope, of a tiny little flickering light of hope that cannot be extinguished no matter how many Noes we receive.
We do not like it that our love is often powerless to help in the way that we would wish. Sometimes our prayers for curing are answered with a Yes, sometimes with a No, and in the end, death comes for all of us. As I write this, a close friend of my own age is dying in great pain, dying of cancer. My love is powerless to save her life. But it is able to enter her suffering, as Jesus entered the suffering of all human creatures. It is not powerless to be part of the journey we all must take, from this known life into the unknown life of resurrection.
If our calling is to be co-creators, isn’t the healing of all the brokenness and sorrow of the world part of that co-creating? Do we sometimes help in this great vocation in our dying as well as in our living?
George Macdonald writes:
“ ‘O God,’ I said, and that was all. But what are the prayers of the whole universe more than the expression of that one cry?…He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.”
O God!
Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me becomes more and more my deepest prayer, and the form in which I couch my intercessory prayer, and the me is never myself alone, for I, like quanta, cannot live in isolation, but only in relation to all others, to the Other.
We live not within ourselves but within God. In God we live and move and have our being. This is indeed mystery, but one which Jesus illuminated for us when he told the disciples to remember him when they broke bread and when they drank wine. Re-member. Make anew these members. Can these dry bones live again?
From Luke’s gospel:
He took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”
In God we live and move and have our being. God within us that we may be part of God, God’s beauty our beauty, that we may be God’s beauty. This is not magic. It is part of the miracle of the total unity of the universe. Thomas Aquinas writes:
The eucharistic food, instead of being transformed into the one who takes it, transforms him unto itself. It follows that the proper effect of the Sacrament is to transform us so much into Christ, that we can truly say: “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
This is as gloriously true for those who view Communion as no more than a memorial service as for those who believe in the “real presence” in the transformed bread and wine. Transformed? Not into the actual corporeal body and blood of the dead Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, but into the risen body of the living Christ.
Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me. May I be you. And you be me. May I be myself and my dying friend. Myself and my living friend, living in the new life of the risen Christ. May Christ
have mercy on me and be in me as I grieve for my friend, for my parents, lovers, acquaintances, strangers dying in famine and flood and drought, all of creation groaning in travail until the redemption of all things, until the coming of the kingdom.
I learn my lessons slowly, seldom once for all. Continually they have to be learned and relearned, not with solemnity, but with awe and laughter and joy.
Grandfather George again: “It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in his presence.”
And William Temple: “It is a great mistake to think that God is only or chiefly interested in religion.”
So I learn with laughter, sometimes rueful laughter, as the Spirit teaches me with a sense of humour I have not always appreciated. But the wind blows where it will, and the Spirit moves how and where and as the holy Wind chooses.
—
I, like most people, tend to make specific demands of God, not thinking them all the way through. And making specific demands thoughtfully is not a bad idea, for if we think seriously about what we are demanding, we may find out that it is not, in fact, something we want to ask for. Or we discover perhaps, that we do not want to ask it as unequivocally as we thought we did. Or, we may end up wanting simply, in our cloud of unknowing, to turn it over to God.
But sometimes—too often—we don’t stop to think.
Because of faulty depth perception I have taken more than my share of falls, crashing down steps I have not seen. I have finally convinced my husband that when we are on vacation, in strange terrain, it is wise for him to walk slightly ahead of me, with me following a step behind, like a good Middle Eastern wife. If I see him going up, I know that I must step up. If he goes down, I know that I must step down. Often his hand comes out to warn, to guide me. But before this pattern was established, before he was convinced of the wisdom of what might superficially be considered discourtesy, there were two vacations in a row in which I had bad falls, damaging my psyche as well as my body, and losing a week of our vacation with bruises and pulled muscles and a body outraged at such violence.
And It Was Good Page 15