by Steve Tesich
There are no corners to turn in this void, or bends to go around that reveal a vision or a vista. Therefore it is not only next to impossible but entirely impossible to convey the manner in which Ulysses suddenly sees God the Creator.
Even “suddenly” is an inaccurate way to describe it. When Ulysses sees God, the only thing that’s sudden is his own realization that he has been seeing Him for a long time.
There is no meeting as such between Ulysses and God. No kneeling, no handshakes or embraces. There is not even the dropping of the anchor, as if Ulysses, after all his wandering, has finally reached his final destination and can henceforth rest in bliss in the kingdom of God.
There is, Ulysses sees, no such kingdom. The God he sees is not a king who reigns or presides. The God he sees is a working God. He is God the Creator and Ulysses sees Him and continues to see Him in the act of creation.
He sees God hurling Himself from the outermost edge of existence into the nothingness beyond, plowing into that nothingness like a living plowshare and causing more time and space to be born. Over and over again, the Creator hurls, and keeps on hurling Himself, into nothingness. There is every reason to believe that this is an endless process.
Ulysses sails on after Him, in the wake of new worlds being born.
Sometimes it seems to him that God’s joy of creation is so great, and His love for what He does so all-consuming, that He doesn’t even notice Ulysses sailing along in His wake.
At other times, right now, for example, he worries that all of creation is a cosmic wheel and that all that God creates turns into nothingness and comes around again, so that God has to begin at the beginning and create time and space and life all over again. Over and over again.
When he prays, Ulysses no longer prays to God but rather for God to live on, so that nothingness will not have the final word.
The little faith Ulysses had, and to which he clung with maniacal desperation, is now completely gone. He has no need of faith anymore, be it large or small. In its place is an effortless kind of love for anything that lives. A love without motive of any kind.
He sees the living God plowing into the nothingness and pushing it back with creation. In addition to time and space being born, Ulysses sometimes sees, like an ocean of sparks from a forge, an ocean of subatomic particles streaming out of the nothingness and streaming past him on all sides. In those particles Ulysses sees the flora and the fauna of the subatomic world. Each little particle, he sees, is alive.
But all is not as Ulysses thought it would be when he set out to look for God. He was sure that finding God would be an answer to all his questions. It’s not.
His question as to why he lived the way he did remains unanswered.
The great “Wherefore?” is still with him.
So is the pain for all the many crimes he committed.
He had hoped that God would make this pain go away once and for all, but now discovers that there is no such thing as once and for all.
Amends, he discovers, cannot be made.
Love as he might, and love as he does, he now knows that not a single moment of unlove can ever be made up.
Not ever.
Nor can he bridge the gap that separates him from God. He sails on through created time and space, but God the Creator is always ahead, always creating more, and the distance can never be bridged.
And so Ulysses sails on, following God, with no hope of ever catching up to Him, or ever reaching a place called home.
He doesn’t know what course he’s on, but he does know that he’s not lost in the universe.
Every now and then he prays:
“Blessed be anything that lives. Father, mother, brothers, sisters, children of the earth, blessed be your very lives, for they are the joy of the world.”
And then he sails on.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781448182268
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Bambino Productions 1998
Cover illustration: Nina Chakrabarti
Steve Tesich has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1998
First published by Vintage in 1999
Published by Vintage 2006
www.penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099777915