That was one of the times I learned enough about pain to be able to be compassionate about pain in others. I learned more than I had known before about Hugh’s loving patience. I learned to stay on my feet even when tears were constantly close to the surface, and too often overflowed—always at the worst possible moment. I learned what real friendship means, and what it is to be let down by those I had expected to hold me up. I undoubtedly learned a lot of things I’m not even aware of yet. I think some of what I learned in this still not quite conscious area has to do with the gifts of the Spirit. Certainly, as St. Paul said, more important than speaking in tongues is interpreting tongues, is understanding each other, as did those early Christians of all races and tongues on that first Pentecost.
If I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity I am hollow, unreal.
Meanwhile, my doctor experimented with eye drops and found some on which I was quite comfortable for about a year. Then, on the night before I was to fly West to teach at a writers conference, my eyes declared a new allergy, and I taught through the conference weeping copiously!
Experiments again, and now a glorious miracle! I am on brand-new eye drops which are hardly properly on the market and to which my eyes are almost completely tolerant. I walk through many days without headache for the first time in over five years. When it is cloudy and there is no glare facing me, I even know once again the joy of driving our car along familiar roads. This may be a miracle of science, but as far as I am concerned it is sheer miracle of grace, and I know that Ewen’s continuing prayers are part of it, and the prayers of other friends and companions along the way. Please don’t stop!
But somehow we have all, all of us, lost something since the tongues of fire descended on those first Christians. We’ve fallen headlong into every mistake they made, despite all of Paul’s warnings. That outspoken man was loud and clear in his condemnation of anyone who felt special and singled-out by any gift of the Spirit.
Something has been forgotten, forgotten for two thousand years, or maybe it’s far, far longer than that; we’re not very good about chronology. We’ve forgotten something of ultimate importance, something I ought to remember, I do remember, no, it’s only the faintest of echoes, only the sad susurration of whispers:
It was there once; we could hear the melody; we knew the words; we understood the language:
I listen for the dim whisper, funneled down the ages, of the dark parables of the old prophets telling the people of God that God is One and God is All, and whenever we make any part of his creation into God, or think of any of his people as divine, or think that we can do anything of our own power and virtue rather than his, we sin. But the voices are faint, and we heed them as little now as the ancient Jews did then.
The children at the party
sit in a circle playing games,
rhythm games, singing games, clapping games,
and finally the whispering game:
the little girl in the white organdy dress and blue sash
whispers a sentence to the little boy in grey flannel shorts
and he in turn whispers it to the little girl on his right
and so it goes all the way around the circle
round and round
as the earth whirls round the sun
and the sun swings in the great circle of the galaxy
he is risen
we thought he was the one who
we thought it was he
he is risen
he is exactly like us but sinless
not like us then
sinful
he is risen
three in one
and one in three
and the great hawk cracks the sky
he in us
we in him
bread and wine
ashes to ashes
and
dust to dust
he is risen
is he
And the sentence returns to the little girl
and she says the nonsense words aloud
and everybody laughs and no one understands.
The whispers are no more than echoes and we forget there is something to be heard. We forget that there are two sides to Mercury. We sit in the brilliant sunshine of intellect and don’t even know that we are not whole.
It is not popular to be willing to admit to sin. The churches are still deleting miserable offenders from the General Confession. There appears to be a general misconception that if we admit to sin, then we are wallowing in it, like hippopotamuses in mud. Maybe some people are.
But freedom and lightness follow when I say “I’m sorry” and am forgiven.
It is equally unpopular to say “I can’t do it myself.” The misconception here is that this means a whining attitude and an unwillingness to try, being a coward under the blows of fate, instead of fighting back. Nor can I blame my favorite scapegoat, Madison Avenue, for this. Again I have to unlearn the ‘virtues’ I was taught in my Anglican boarding schools. But Jesus of Nazareth always said, ‘I don’t do this. It is my Father speaking through me.’
Once Alan preached about the necessity for Christian atheism; we must stop worshipping the false gods which have crept into Christianity (all those Anglo-Saxon moral virtues); we must be atheists for Christ’s sake. He did not mean, of course, that we are to stop believing in God, God who is One, God who is All, but that we must be certain that it is God we believe in, and not all those false spirits masquerading as the Holy One. We must shun the lovely little idols Satan erects for us, idols much easier to accept than the One God who is so difficult to believe in, whose ways are not our ways, who says No and expects us to understand that this is the prelude to a true Yes, who would make us whole, for whom sunside and nightside are alike, who is willing to be in our hearts and who would ask us to put our minds in our hearts that we may know him there.
But I have trouble with the words Christian atheism, which are too likely to recall the God-is-dead-ism of the sixties, an ism which was certainly the appropriate response to the activism of those days when man was convinced that man-on-his-own can take care of all the problems of the world, and the help of the Spirit is irrelevant.
I read some of the God-is-dead books, though by no means all, because they dealt with problems which simply did not exist for me, and I disposed of them rather ribaldly by writing: “If God is dead/And man’s the Head/We’re in a hocus focus./We’ve all been spliced/To an orphaned Christ/And that’s a bogus Logos.”
It is impossible for us human beings not to keep coming up with anthropomorphic gods. The righteous Lord of the Old Testament is an analogy of human righteousness as it was understood then. The gods we make today are equally anthropomorphic, God in our own image, because it’s inevitable with finite human nature. Occasionally we are given the grace to turn away from our own image and toward God’s image in us, and we have the model for this image in Jesus. He may have been fully man, but he was most unlike us, or we are most unlike him, in that his Father was not an anthropomorphic God, but a Being entirely new, so new that we still can’t understand the glorious Father Jesus showed us in everything he did and said and was.
If I cannot be a Christian atheist because of the confusion which this term arouses, I can shun Christolotry; I can try to live by symbole but sans idole, though, being human, I will never entirely succeed. But I can keep on trying, and listening for the whispers of the Spirit.
When I am referred to in secular reviews and articles as a ‘practicing Christian,’ it usually is not meant as a compliment, and on the rare occasions when it is said with approval, it still makes my hackles rise, and this reaction disturbs me. Why should it make me uneasy to be referred to as what I am struggling to be? If I reply by announcing that I am a Christian atheist, or that I am against Christolotry, not many people are going to understand what that means, either.
It annoys me least and amuses me most when my Christianity is referred to with condescension: ‘Poor dear
, she sometimes writes quite nicely even though she isn’t clever enough to know that only fools believe in God.’
D’accord. I am basically intuitive rather than intellectual (which is probably why the the third person of the Trinity is the least difficult for me), although I don’t discard or discount my intellect; nightside alone is as incomplete as sunside alone. I stumbled back into Church after years away, not out of intellectual conviction, but intuitive need. I had learned through sorry experience that I cannot do it alone. I am often so irritated in church that I can manage to sit through the service with a reasonably good grace only by writing poetry or memorizing my favorite Psalms. If I go to services with reasonable regularity it is largely because I believe that if I am attempting to understand what it means to be Christian, this cannot be done in lofty isolation.
I may not want to be associated with much that passes today for Christianity; nevertheless I am part of it, even when I rebel because being Christian is becoming more and more a do-it-yourself activity. I rebel when the Church feels that it has to succeed. My theology of failure is incomprehensible to many, intolerable to some. I am saddened when the very air I breathe throughout Christendom is Pelagian: the Church can take care of all the ills of the world as long as we are morally virtuous and politically liberal. Not that I am against either virtue or liberalism! But I watch in horror as a great liberal, passionately interested in the cause of—shall we say—the leper, very carefully avoids speaking to the leper in his path, in order to get on with the cause. And it occurs to me that Jesus couldn’t have cared less about the cause of the leper or the rights of the leper. But when there was a leper in his path he did not walk around him, like the priest walking on the opposite side of the road from the man set upon by thieves, on his way to Jerusalem to preach his famous sermon on compassion. Jesus stopped. And healed. And loved. Not causes, but people.
If I see and rebel against activism in others, it is because I have had to see and rebel against it in myself. We can’t see a fault or flaw in others unless we have at least the potential for it in ourselves. I don’t want us to sit back smugly and serve ourselves, and ignore the suffering around us, but neither do I want us to fall into those temptations which Jesus saw for what they were, and had the meekness to reject. And I remember again that it was the Spirit who led Jesus to be tempted. The Spirit, too, sees through the snare of avoiding pain by taking up causes. It was the Spirit who gave St. Francis the stamina to return day after day to the stench and ugliness of the leper house, to minister to the lepers—not as a group, not as a cause, but one mutilated person at a time. The people who make up causes are often too revolting to be loved easily, but the Spirit will give us the strength to love the unlovable if we ask for help.
An intelligent and thoughtful young woman interviewed me for a course she was taking at Columbia. In answer to one of her questions I talked about doing the small things which are daily put into my path to do, such as smiling at the dour man trying to deliver those boxes of groceries down the metal slide, and she said, “Some people would consider that self-serving.” Is it? It may be, but if I cannot see the hungry people I pass each day, if I do not smile at the dour man, if I do not feed the stranger who comes to my door, or give a glass of cool water to the thirsty child, then I cannot see the starvation of people in India or South America. Perhaps if I see pictures on the news or in the papers of victims of earthquake, flood, drought, I will write a small check for the cause of world hunger, and I may even refrain from meat on Wednesdays; but as long as I am responding to a cause it will not affect my entire life, my very breathing. It is only when I see hunger or thirst in one human being, it is only when I see discrimination and injustice in all its horrendous particularity as I walk along Broadway, that my very life can be changed. If it was necessary for God to come to us as one of us, then it is only in such particularity that I can understand incarnation. I am not very good about it. I don’t pray, give, give up, nearly as much as I should. But a response to a cause will never change my life, nor open my heart to the promptings of the Spirit.
We may be a global village, but instant communication often isolates us from each other rather than uniting us. When I am bombarded on the evening news with earthquake, flood, fire, it is too much for me. There is a mechanism, a safety valve, which cuts off our response to overexposure to suffering.
But when a high-school student comes to me and cries because the two and three-year-olds on her block are becoming addicted to hard drugs; when the gentle man who cleans the building in which the Cathedral library is located talks to me about his family in Guatemala, rejoicing because they are alive although their house has been destroyed by earthquake; when a goddaughter of mine in Luxembourg writes me about the hungry children of the immigrant Portuguese family with whom she is living, then in this particularity my heart burns within me, and I am more able to learn what it is that I can and ought to do, even if this seems, and is, inadequate.
But neither was Jesus adequate to the situation. He did not feed all the poor, only a few. He did not heal all the lepers, or give sight to all the blind, or drive out all the unclean spirits. Satan wanted him to do all this, but he didn’t.
That helps me. If I felt that I had to conquer all the ills of the world I’d likely sit back and do nothing at all. But if my job is to feed one stranger, then the money I give to world relief will be dug down deeper from my pocket than it would if I felt I had to succeed in feeding the entire world.
Even spirituality and meditation and mysticism have become activities with easy success offered. Do such and such and you will have a mystical experience. You may have an experience, but it won’t be a mystical one. Such experience cannot be bought.
Evil doesn’t bother to infiltrate that which is already evil. Where there is darkness there is no need to snuff out the light. No wonder Satan rushes to churches filled with the sound of tongues—to any church at all. The Tempter has acquired many hard-working followers within the Christian establishment, and often in the name of the Holy Spirit. What better place for him to work than in the Church which is essentially a place for his redemption. I often feel his breath during a church service, am tempted by his sweet, seductive whispers. He is reasonable, never offends my intellect; whereas my Trinitarian God is frequently unreasonable and intellectually offensive—and yet speaks to the whole of me, mind and heart, intellect and intuition, and speaks most clearly to that element in me which accepts the incomprehensible beauty of love: married love; the loves of friendship; to that element in me which participates in music, poetry, painting. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in C minor will take me a lot further than any number of books on theology.
After I had given a lecture at a very Protestant university, three postgraduate students, all married and with children, approached me, and the spokesman blurted out, “Does your Church mean less and less to you?” I paused, said “Yes,” then “No,” then, “What is the Church?”
Not the building in which I stand or sit, often uncomfortably, often irritably. Not any denomination of any kind—and the fact that the Body of Christ is broken by denominations is another cause for Satan’s pleasure. Why can’t we worship in our differing ways and still be One?
I doubt if Christian unity will ever come through paperwork and red tape. The time has come for us to leap across boundaries. I gave the same series of lectures on myth, fantasy, and fairy tale at a Fundamentalist college and a Roman Catholic monastery, and the responses and questions were the same, and that rejoiced my heart. I am comfortable and at home when I sing hymns with my most Protestant friends. One time I was off to Wheaton College, Illinois, a fundamentalist college with extraordinarily high academic standards, and I said to Josephine that I was going to be met in Chicago by my Baptist priest friend; I used this appellation several times before she said, “Mother, what are you saying?” And only then did it strike me that ‘Baptist Priest’ is an odd combination. And yet this man is my ‘Baptist priest friend’ and one year I s
ent him an icon for Christmas.
I have lovingly been offered, and received, communion in the Roman Catholic Church, and while this may be irregular, it is the only response of love possible. Last summer the elder daughter of my beloved nanny, Mrs. O, celebrated her golden anniversary as a Sister of Charity, and I was asked to read one of the lessons at the Festival Mass.
As we drove from Crosswicks to the convent in the Bronx, I wondered what I ought to do about receiving. On the way to the church I whispered to one of the Sisters, “Is it all right if I receive?” And she whispered, “Of course, as long as it’s all right with you.” “It’s fine with me.” But even without this unofficial permission the problem would have been quickly resolved. I sat up in the chancel with two of the Sisters; two Sisters who dressed completely in secular clothes; so the priests there that afternoon consistently called me Sister, and there was no question, when it came to the bread and wine, that I was to be with all the others gathered there that day, part of the unbroken body.
It’s not quite that easy with the Protestant denominations where the communion service is simply a memorial service, a looking back at Maundy Thursday and Jesus’s celebration of the Passover. But I have always felt that God is quite capable of taking care of his own table, and that thousands of nonbelievers are not going to rush up to receive the body and blood without any belief in the Real Presence if we have ‘open communion.’ And even if some do, isn’t God still in control of what is going on? And if we believe in the real and very power of the body and blood, may this power itself not make all the difference?
The Irrational Season Page 16