The following year our vacation was on a freighter which left from Brooklyn and went to the great ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Newport News, and was then to head out into the Caribbean; we were to fly home after having traversed the Panama Canal. The first days of the trip were cold and rainy, but marvellously relaxing. There was nothing we had to do, nowhere we had to be. It was total release from dailiness. On the first warm, sunny day I was sitting in a deck chair, writing, minding my own business, when the first sign of a sudden squall made the little ship lurch violently and the deck chair, with me in it, was flung across the deck. I put out my arm to break the fall, and spent the rest of the trip with my arm in a cast.
I was very angry, and totally unamused when I seemed to hear gentle laughter, and the words, “But you didn’t fall!”
The following winter I left New York for a week of lecturing, first at Mundelein, then at Wheaton, then on to the Episcopal Diocese of Idaho—a very ecumenical jaunt.
As I was being driven from Mundelein to Wheaton, I felt a tightening in my throat, a hoarseness in my voice. All the signs said that I was coming down with a heavy laryngeal cold. “Please,” I prayed, “I have eleven more lectures to give. Please, please don’t let me get laryngitis.”
That evening I was a guest of honour at a small dinner party at Harold and Luci Shaw’s. I had a wonderful time despite the fact that I definitely did not feel well. I went to the Lorentzens for the night, asked for a glass of orange juice for my throat, and went to bed, with apologies. The next day I felt miserable, but managed to get through the various assignments on my schedule.
That night I had to cut short my evening lecture. I was, fortunately, close to the end, when I realized that if I did not sit down I was going to faint. And when I wound down, rapidly, and sat down, I realized that I had to get to the bathroom, quickly. There was no way I was going to be able to attend the evening reception which had been planned to follow the lecture. I was driven back to the Lorentzens where I spent an exhausting night, rushing to the bathroom every few minutes. By morning I was expelling burning hot, clear fluid. It was, in fact, the worst attack of intestinal flu I had ever had.
But my voice was fine.
I was anything but amused by this turn of events. I said to myself, “If I was at home I’d go to bed for a week, and instead I have to go to Idaho.”
I managed to give the Wheaton College chapel talk in the morning. Then Luci and two of my other friends drove me to O’Hare airport, broke all rules and carried my bags, and almost carried me, onto the plane where they prayed for me, with the laying on of hands. I’d never have made it otherwise. And only their sustaining prayers and amazing grace got me to Salt Lake City, where I had to change planes, and on to Idaho.
How should I have prayed? Are we never to ask for specifics? Of course we are. That is how we find out whether or not our prayers are appropriate. We may always begin our prayers like the small child with the Christmas list. Only after we have gone through the “gimme” prayers can we let them go and move on to true prayer.
Jesus asked for specifics. In the Garden of Gethsemane he begged, with anguish, to be spared the horror of crucifixion. According to Mark:
“My soul is exceeding sorrowful until death: tarry here, and watch.” And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible with you; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what you will.”
And Saint Luke adds:
And there appeared an angel from heaven, strengthening him.
Yet, despite the comfort of the angel,
being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
What is true of the great things is also true of the little things (are galaxies larger than quanta?). It is all right for us to pray for the continuing, full quality of life for those we love when they are ill. Sometimes it is given; sometimes it is not.
It is more than all right for my friends to continue to pray for my eyesight, and I accept this miracle with untellable joy, knowing also that at some time in the near or distant future this exterior vision may be taken from me. It is all right for me to pray for the small, silly things—Do not let me fall, Do not let me get laryngitis—as long as I hand the prayer, no matter how minor, no matter how foolish, to God. Your way, Lord, not mine.
Does Satan interfere in our prayer? Tempt us to plea-bargain, to try to manipulate? Or, more frightening, does he work for bodily death, for blindness, for self-centeredness? Probably. Satan does have tremendous power in this world. I cannot contradict Scripture. But his power is only temporal; it is not eternal. It may slow down the coming of the kingdom, but it cannot prevent its ultimate arrival. He may cause cancer and fire and obscenity and terrorism, but he cannot do so beyond a point. Love is always greater than hate, has more power than hate. The name of Jesus does make Satan shudder. The cross has the power of life over death. God’s mercy is stronger than Satan’s vindictiveness.
I doubt if I will ever unravel the mystery of intercessory prayer, for myself, for others. I know that there are powers of healing that Jesus tried to teach the disciples, and us, to tap. But the disciples could not throw out the unclean spirit from the possessed boy because their faith was not sufficient. If we had faith, we could indeed move mountains. And I learn faith, I deepen my faith, not only by exercising it but by reading Scripture, and contemplating the mighty acts of God. And perhaps most of all by being near people of faith, for faith is beautifully contagious.
I know that God does not want us to be ill, that el wants us to be whole. But sometimes our prayers for the cure of an illness belong to a transient, rather than an eternal wholeness. We are trapped in the now and cannot see the eternal picture. For God’s good reason, Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” which he begged the Lord to take away, was of more use in God’s purposes than would have been his curing. I do not know why my friend is dying young, and in pain; but my faith is nothing if I do not believe that in kairos, in God’s time, she will be made whole, and that even now she can be used by God—as, indeed, she has been, during this illness, as a witness to gallantry, laughter, and joy. But ultimately God’s will for her is wholeness, and I do not have to know how or when or where God’s purpose for her, and for us, will be achieved.
Sometimes when I have not understood why God has not answered my prayer my way, it has been made clear to me later. Sometimes when it has seemed that my way has been done, I have learned later that it was not the best way. I am gradually learning to turn everything over to God, sometimes grudgingly, often argumentatively (like my favourite Old Testament characters), but I am still learning.
We tend to skip over or disparage parts of Scripture, such as Abraham’s passing Sarah off as his sister, or Lot’s daughters sleeping with their father, because such distasteful events arose out of cultures vastly different from our own. We have damaged each other and ourselves in the name of Christ in our contempt for and ill-treatment of Indians and Africans and Asians; because they, too, have cultures different from our own, we are suspicious of them. Like the people of Sodom, who called Lot a foreigner, we assume that because foreigners are not “us” they are therefore not as good as we are.
F. S. C. Northrup in The Meeting of East and West writes:
Nothing is more evil and tragically devastating in actual consequence than one’s own moral and religious ideals, fine as they may be, when they are accompanied by ignorance and resultant provincialism and blindness with respect to people and cultures different from one’s own.
A careful and steady reading of Scripture helps free us from this insularism. Jesus spoke and ate not only with sinners, but with foreigners; with “them”—with Samaritans, who were looked down on with contempt by the good, middle-class people of his day; with a Syro-Phoenician woman; with the Roman enemy. He made it clear that people who are
different are not therefore inferior. He knocked all our race and class distinctions to smithereens.
So. Lot and his daughters were saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham moved from Mamre to Gerar, and once again tried to pass Sarah off as his sister, this time to King Abimelech. But God warned the king in a dream not to touch her. Abimelech heeded the dream, and was, to put it mildly, annoyed at Abraham for his deception. Then,
The Lord blessed Sarah, as he had promised, and she became pregnant, and bore a son to Abraham when he was old.
With man such a thing is impossible. With God nothing is impossible. Sarah’s prayers were answered, not in human time, but in God’s time.
The boy was born at the time when God said he would be born. Abraham named him Isaac, and when Isaac was eight days old Abraham circumcised him….Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born. Sarah said, “God has brought me joy and laughter.”
Now she could acknowledge her laughter, could revel in it and share it and rejoice in it. She said,
“Everyone who hears about it will laugh with me….Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”
I think often about Sarah’s prayer, answered not in human time, but in God’s time. In a way, the very outrageousness of the time in which Sarah conceived and gave birth is a re-emphasis of the truth that God is not restricted by time;
The child grew, and on the day that he was weaned, Abraham gave a great feast.
How fathers love to give parties for their children! We can almost think of those first mighty acts of creation as the grandest party ever thrown, and ever since, God has thrown a party whenever possible.
And of course, as with anything good, Satan and the fallen creatures he has gathered around him, angelic and human, move in and distort the good, so we get the excesses of cocktail parties and sex orgies, parties which are not parties at all in the real sense of the word. How lovely real parties are! Every time one of the children has been away and comes home we have a party, candles on the table, and flowers, and maybe presents, and meals cooked with loving care, even if it’s mostly vegetables from the garden. A party is a celebration of love, just as a punishment is a lesson of love.
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One day Sarah saw Isaac playing with Ishmael, the son of Hagar—Hagar who had scorned Sarah’s barrenness—Laughter playing with Bitterness. And Sarah still had bitterness over Hagar’s scorn lodged like a splinter of ice deep in her heart; and when she saw the two boys playing together she was afraid.
So she went to Abraham and asked him to send Hagar and Ishmael away, so that Ishmael would not inherit anything that Sarah felt belonged rightfully to Isaac.
Abraham was troubled. Ishmael was his son, too. But God informed him that it was all right to do what Sarah had asked; el would take care of Ishmael. So Abraham gave Hagar
some food and a leather bag full of water. He put the child on her back and sent her away. She left and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba. When the water was all gone she left the child under a bush and…said, “I can’t bear to see my child die.” And she began to cry.
So did her son.
God heard the boy crying, and from heaven the angel of the Lord spoke to Hagar: “What are you troubled about, Hagar? Don’t be afraid.”
Don’t be afraid! How often the Lord’s angels start their conversations with us this way: Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid, the angel Gabriel said to Zacharias and later to the fourteen-year-old Mary. Don’t be afraid, an angel told the shepherds on the hill outside Bethlehem.
We need this reassurance. Even for those of us who believe implicitly in angels, to be confronted by one is an awesome thing.
So the angel reassured Hagar and continued,
“God has heard the boy crying. Get up, go and pick him up, and comfort him. I will make a great nation out of his descendants.” Then God opened Hagar’s eyes, and she saw a well
where no well had been before. “Why are you troubled? Don’t be afraid,” God’s angel reminds us over and over again. “Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in me. It will be all right,” Jesus told his anxious friends. What will be all right? If I put my arms around you and comfort you and say, “Let not your heart be troubled, it will be all right,” what am I promising?
In the world’s terms, nothing. In the world’s terms I am being a lie and a cheat to give such empty comfort. There are miracles, indubitably. But there are other times when the answer is No, or silence. When we put our arms around someone to give comfort, we cannot bring the dead back to life, or keep the spouse from walking out in favour of someone else, or stop the course of debilitating illness. We cannot prevent flood or drought or war. So what does the promise that “it will be all right” mean? What will be all right?
God’s purpose. God’s purpose for us and for all of creation. In God’s time. In kairos. El did not prevent Abraham from sending Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. And Hagar had no way of knowing that many generations later, when Joseph’s brothers would sell him to some merchants, those same merchants would be descendants of Ishmael.
God’s purpose. God’s plan. The Great Dance, the ancient harmonies, weaving and interweaving to make the pattern perfect. Often it is difficult to see that there is any pattern. We are too small to see the richness of the whole. But all of creation is pattern, from the Great Dance of the galaxies to the equally Great Dance of the submicroscopic, subatomic particles, existing only because they are dancing together. Satan tried to make dissonances, to interrupt the rhythm, to distort the pattern. One of his most successful ploys is to make us believe that his distortions of the original good have destroyed that good. But they have not. It is only the distortions we must fear and shun, never the original good itself, kything, singing and dancing, loving.
God created, and saw that it was good. In the beginning was the Word, the Word which is the Light that the darkness can neither snuff out nor comprehend.
The Lord told Abraham that it was all right to give in to Sarah’s fears and emotional wounds and send Hagar and Ishmael away, and then this God of creation produced a well where there had been no well before. The skeptic might say, “The well was underground all the time and just happened to break surface at that moment.” But did not God choose to have the waters break surface at that moment? As he chose to allow the waters of the Red Sea to divide at the particular moment in which Moses needed to lead his people out of Egypt? If all of Creation belongs to God because el made it, el can do what el wills with it, and what el wills may, to us, be miracle.
But we never earn or deserve our miracles. Often the most deserving people don’t get them. God always hears our cries, but sometimes el does not answer in a way we think fair, and because we are too small to see the whole pattern, we don’t understand why. And not all the No answers come from God. Illness and accident and death can come from man in his fallenness, from the temporary victories of the enemy.
More people have been killed in automobile accidents than in all of the wars in all of our history. And surely those who invented the internal combustion engine and made cars and airplanes had no idea that it was going to cost so heavily in human life. It was an example of what we know with our intellects being far ahead of our wisdom to understand all the implications.
It was the desire to know which led us to explore the heart of the atom. The desire to know is part of what makes us human, and in its proper rhythm it is a creative desire. But, alas, it was the Second World War which accelerated the interest in splitting the atom and provided the enormous funds needed for research, which would not have been available in peace time: the rhythm distorted again. Surely if those first atomic scientists in New Mexico had had the slightest idea where their experiments were going to lead, if time had curved and they had seen visions of the victims of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, they might well not have exploded that first atom bomb.
But what we already know, we
know. That’s one of the messages implicit in the story of Adam and Eve. We cannot turn our backs on what we know, or bury our heads in the sand. We need to try to find wisdom enough so that our knowledge will serve us and the rest of the human race creatively and not destructively.
How, O Lord, do we learn wisdom as well as knowledge? It is somewhat like miracle and magic. Wisdom, like miracle, is yours, Lord, and to be received as gift. The enemy tries to keep us from it, by praising us for our great knowledge, our knowledge, and so shattering us into further fragments. But the Spirit who danced upon the face of the waters in the beginning and who came to us as Comforter after the Ascension will help to heal us, will help to mend our broken pieces with spiritual glue so that the break does not even show.
God can and does come into the most terrible things and redeem them. I do not believe that God wills cancer, or multiple sclerosis. I do not believe that we are ever to regard the brutal death of a child as God’s will. I know only that el can come into whatever happens, and by being part of it, can return it to wholeness. This is a large part of the meaning of incarnation. Nothing ever happens to us alone. It happens to God, too.
This used to be considered heresy, but yesterday’s heresy is today’s truth. Within our own century it was taught in seminary that God is impassible, that he is inaccessible to injury, and therefore does not and cannot suffer. What does such teaching make of the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah? What does it do to the Incarnation? To the Cross? If Jesus was fully man as well as fully God, surely he suffered. This impassibility of God makes no sense to me. If Jesus suffered, but God did not, what does that do to the concept of the Trinity, except split it into polytheism? The impassibility of God seems totally incompatible with everything I read in the Bible, and with all my experience.
And It Was Good Page 16