Unfortunately, as many of us move on in chronology, we tend to stay stuck in the “It’s not fair!” frame of mind, which, for the adult, is crippling. It takes great courage to live in a world where fairness simply doesn’t play a part, and hasn’t, since Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And one of Satan’s most successful ploys is his insistence that things ought to be fair. The good should be rewarded; the bad should be punished. If we think forensically and earn enough merit badges everything will work out just as we would like. But that is not how grace works.
In a fair world, that tornado which devastated our trees would have gone some place where people didn’t lovingly tend the land. But tornadoes don’t have anything to do with fairness. It is easier to understand that the “natural” world operates on principles where fairness plays no part than it is to understand that we cannot dwell overmuch on fairness with human nature, either. In a fair world no child would be struck down by a drunken driver; no family would have to grieve; no one would have to carry the burden of killing. In a fair world there would be no crime, no violence in the streets, no body cells growing out of control with cancer. Fairness is devoutly to be desired, but it is not the way things are. In this world the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer, and the Lord of all is no respecter of persons, and may sometimes speak through the wicked even more clearly than through the innocent.
In our own cumbersome, unwieldy court system, which is nevertheless one of the better court systems in the world, those who can afford the best lawyers are more likely to be given a verdict of Not Guilty than those who have to take whatever lawyer the state assigns them. During my time on jury duty in January, I was very aware that the two arrogant men had managed to retain very clever lawyers, who were doing their best to clear them, according to the law, whether or not they believed them to be guilty of the crime of which they were accused. We jurors were not at all sure that justice was going to prevail.
And in my own life I was struggling to accept the fact that justice was not going to be done. I did not have to be exonerated over that spilled secret. I did not have to know who told, and then allowed me to be blamed. I had to let go thoughts of justice and vindication, and live with the situation as it was, as lovingly as possible. Which was not very.
Why is it so hard to understand that in this world everything is not going to turn out all right, all strings neatly tied, and justice triumphant? If we take the short view, it would be almost impossible not to drop into pessimism. It is not easy, in the midst of tragedy or trauma, to take the long view, to understand that ultimately there is meaning, meaning we may not in our lifetimes ever understand.
It is impossible for us finite creatures to understand the infinite Author of All in any definitive way. We can never say, This is God, Q.E.D. We would like to feel that we understand God, and the Creator’s ways, but we can’t. We never have. Not since the Garden. The important message, throughout Scripture, is that God understands us and loves us, and so frees us to keep our concept of el open to change as revelation comes to us in new and unexpected ways.
When Jacob tricked his twin brother, Esau was justly outraged. Outrage is an emotion we are all familiar with. When something horrendous happens we want the perpetrator of the crime to be punished. We look for justice, absolute justice, rather than mercy. The Psalms are full of outrage and demands for redress:
Let my adversaries be clothed with shame, and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a cloak….Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths, smite the jawbones of the lions, O Lord. Let them fall away like running water; when they shoot their arrows, let them be rooted out. Let them slime away like a snail, and be like the untimely fruit of a woman, and let them not see the sun. Or ever your pots be made hot with thorns, he shall take them away with a whirlwind, the green and burning alike. The righteous shall rejoice when he sees vengeance, he shall wash his footsteps in the blood of the ungodly.
No!
Not anymore.
Now we have to move beyond that.
Am I only like my dog with her rawhide bone, chewing and chewing until there is nothing left? It has been pointed out to me that this vengeance against enemies was obedience to the Lord, and that this obedience is the highest law. But is it? Didn’t Jesus break the Mosaic law in order to obey the higher law of love?
It takes more maturity than many of us possess to want the monstrous criminal to repent, saying to God and to us, “Forgive me. I am horrified at what I have done. I am sorry, sorry, and I will never do it again. With your help I will turn my life to love.”
Hate the sin and love the sinner is too easy. As long as there is any hate in us we are not ready for heaven, not as long as we’re shutting the golden doors on anyone else.
I continued my own struggle during that time on jury duty. Several evenings, when I was tired and wanted to relax, I received angry phone calls from people condemning me for telling that terrible secret I had not told. All I could say was that I had not breathed a word. Some people believed me. Some did not. It is a taint in human nature to like to see someone else do wrong so that we can affirm our own righteousness. My own wish to find out who had told the secret was a part of this taint. I was well aware that, as my friend Tallis points out, we cannot afford the luxury of hurt feelings. My head could get that all straight, but there was still hurt in my heart.
I thought of the heavenly banquet, where part of my job might have to be blowing up the balloons and setting the place for whoever it was who willingly dumped blame on me—a job which would have to be done, ultimately, with love. Not just forgiveness, but love. And I knew I wasn’t ready, yet. And what was going on in the courtroom during the day helped me to see the situation more clearly than otherwise might have been possible.
But it still hurt.
And I had to let that hurt go. I could not hold on to it.
Ernest L. Boyer, Jr., in A Way in the World, writes, “Forgiveness is, then, a renewal, and for love to grow it must be renewed every day. This renewal is not one that seeks somehow to return to the past, however; rather, it seeks to revitalize the present. To carry a grudge is to live in the past, to live with the bitterness of disappointment of the expectation of a future that never was.”
To carry a grudge is to live in the past. That hit home. It helped me to move into the present so that there might be hope for friendship to be reborn.
Boyer continues, “Both of these—the past that is now gone and the future that never was—are illusionary worlds. Forgiveness frees a person to live in the reality of the relationship’s present.”
Esau has something to teach us here. He was willing to sell his birthright to satisfy his immediate desire for food, but he did not carry grudges. He did not live in the past. He had no expectations of impossible futures. Once his anger at Jacob was spent, he did not dwell on it. He let it go.
The two men who were being tried for assault in the second degree struck me as grudge keepers. Shouldn’t that have taught me something?
The heavenly banquet cannot begin until we are all there, and I can greet with love the two resentful men, and everybody who has caused me pain, and call out a welcome to them all. The heavenly banquet cannot begin until all those whom I have hurt are ready to welcome me, in all my flawed and contradictory humanness.
Forgiveness which leads to welcoming, with open arms, the forgiven ones to the party, comes less from an act of will than from a gift of grace. Sometimes prayer opens the door to this gift.
Prayer is most real when it moves away from forensic demands, from a crime and punishment, eye-for-an-eye thinking, and into an open and vulnerable listening. It is not so much talking to God as being quiet and focussing on listening, so that perhaps we will be able to hear if God has something to say.
When I was a little girl I used to say my prayers, ending, “and God bless me and make me a good girl.” As I grow older, I become less and less sure that it was a good pra
yer, as I become less and less sure what being a good girl actually meant.
I suppose in my case it meant that I was to honour my mother and father, and I can’t fault that. It meant that I was to obey them which, as long as I was a child—accepting everything from them, food, clothing, housing, ideas, schooling—was right and proper, especially since they were reasonable and loving parents. It also meant that I was not to tell lies. That I was to keep clean. That I was to be courteous. To be considerate of other people.
So what’s wrong with it?
Did it imply that being a “good girl” was in my control? Did it imply a degree of conscious direction of my feelings and actions which life has taught me that I don’t have?
Sure, I want to be “good,” but can I consider myself “good” in a world where a small proportion of the people have too much to eat while the rest of the world is starving? Where a small proportion of us live comfortably if not luxuriously, while the rest of the world is in favelas and barrios and ghettos or out on the streets? Can I closet myself in my “goodness” while there is injustice and prejudice and terrorism?
Perhaps I may not personally cheat the government, consider the poor expendable, murder, steal, mug, or rape. Perhaps I may not use a knife with the intent to injure or kill. Perhaps I try to eat a diet suitable for a small planet. But can I separate my own health from the rest of the world? My own good nutrition from the poor nutrition of billions? My longing for peace from the warring in the Middle East or South America or Ireland or anywhere else at all? In a universe where the lifting of the wings of a butterfly is felt across galaxies, I cannot isolate myself, because my separation may add to the starvation and the anger and the violence.
I am not burdening myself with a lot of guilts which are impossible for me to resolve. But to separate myself from the suffering of the world is dis-aster. If I call myself “good” is that not separation?
Jesus said,
“Why do you call me good? Only my father is good.”
Aren’t we supposed to be good? Do we always have the wisdom to know what good is? If we truly understand what Jesus was saying, we know that what matters is not moralism, but understanding that God with infinite grace can work goodness through us. Goodness is of God; we cannot make ourselves good through an act of will.
Surely the Inquisitors thought they were being good, that they were doing God’s will, when they tortured people (whether innocent or guilty is hardly the point). Terrorists think that they are being good, nay, holy, when they throw bombs and shoot guns in religious zeal. Those in South Africa who believe in apartheid think they are being good when they assume they are superior to anyone of another colour.
Trying, of our own virtue, to be good, usually leads to disaster. If I, self-consciously, try to make myself good, I am unwittingly separating myself from those I love and would serve.
I learned this the hard way during our four summers of four generations living together under one not very large roof. I wouldn’t have missed those summers. They were a kind of miracle in this day and age, and I have written about them in A Circle of Quiet and The Summer of the Great-Grandmother. I learned that if I tried to be good, that is, if I tried to be the perfect wife, mother, daughter, grandmother, all I did was become exhausted and ill and humourless and help nobody. If I spent the morning at the typewriter; if, in the late afternoon before I cooked dinner, I went off with the dogs for a walk, the entire household was happier, there was more laughter and song. I learned that if I was what I had considered selfish, that is, if I took reasonable care of my own needs, we had a smoothly running household. Paradox, as always.
If I am ever good, it is not because I am trying to be, but because goodness is for a moment offered me as a gift of sheer grace. Jesus made it very clear that goodness comes from God, not from el’s creatures.
Not that I want to wallow in my own sin and badness, or that I see myself as hated by God because I am human and often do wrong. Actions have consequences, but that is not what “original sin” means, and we need to rethink “original sin” just as much as we needed to rethink the impassible God who could not suffer. Does any mother, holding her newborn babe in her arms, see anything except innocence and purity and God’s delight?
How did we get hung up on “goodness” as a criterion? If that were so, God would not have called Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. Especially not Jacob. It is quite clear that Jacob was not “good.”
Nor was he particularly religious; he was slow to accept the God of his fathers. But even before he had decided to call their God his God, too, he made altars, upon which he poured sacred oil. How many altars Jacob made! One day I’ll count them, but I’m less interested in adding up numbers than in the need to make altars, to understand sacred spaces.
I, too, have my altars, such as the Star Watching Rock and the Icon Tree. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all have our own altars (and a kitchen stove on which meals are cooked with love is not an unworthy one), altars which may be for us ladders of angels, joining heaven and earth, God and creature.
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In this time of increasing stress and tension we need our altars of affirmation, our ladders drawing us to adoring awe.
Not easy. If, twenty-five years ago, I had somehow been allowed to see a few clips from almost any evening’s news, I’d have found it impossible to believe. We’ve had assassinations, scandals, bombings, kidnappings, hijackings, and crisis after crisis among nations.
In my own neighbourhood in New York, in twenty-five years I’ve seen stores previously only locked at night now protected with iron gates to keep out vandals. Private guards help the city police to patrol the streets. Not long ago my husband put me in a taxi to go downtown to give a talk, and told me to put my gold earrings in my pocket till I arrived, commenting, “Isn’t this a terrible way to live.”
He was not being an alarmist. Only a few days before, a friend of ours had been walking along Broadway past Lincoln Center, when she felt an arm go about her neck—and her gold chain was gone. She said the thief must have been extremely professional, because she could not find a mark on her neck.
What has happened to our country in the past quarter-of-a-century would be incomprehensible to my grandparents, but it has all happened and is happening. We need to be aware of it, and to try to listen to God for what our part is in trying to change it, to bring terrorism to compassion, greed to generosity, lust to love. We don’t have to succeed, single-handedly, in reforming the world, or in improving the morals of those around us by our own goodness. God-Within-Us-in-Jesus did none of these things.
But if we listen, we will be given the courage to do whatever it is that God wants us to do, big things or, more likely, small. This faith in God’s gifts of courage and grace is like a foundation of rock under my feet, even as I help pile the wood from the trees ripped off at their roots by the twister, even as the bed shakes under me in the earthquake, even as I take the crowded rush hour subway down to Manhattan’s criminal court.
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How can we expect peace in the world, sanity in our cities, when as Christians we cannot live creatively together with all our wonderfully diverse ways of affirming our love of God? Why are we so concerned about those who do not express their faith in exactly the same way that we do? If I need a doctor, I am not going to ask, “What is your denomination?” any more than I am going to inquire about sexual preference. What I want to know is: Is this a good doctor? Will I be treated effectively? Can I be cured?
When we worry about someone’s denomination, we sometimes forget that this person may be a superb surgeon, or pianist, or car mechanic. We sometimes forget that our own vocations are not limited by denominational boundaries. Our responsibility as faithful people of God is in every area of our lives, not only in our churchgoing.
If I am true in my living to what I proclaim in my writing it is because of grace, not virtue. It has little to do with my denomination. I pray for grace, knowing that it is not mine to gr
asp; it is a gift of love.
And of course I am not always true to what I proclaim. I am human and flawed and frequently fall flat on my face. All of us do, even the saints. But we struggle to be true. If we struggle honestly, humbly, the angels will help us.
When they do, it is usually when we least expect it, when we have to respond to something or someone immediately, and so don’t have time to get ourselves in the way. I turned from the typewriter to answer the phone, and it was a young woman in Oregon. We’d met at a writers’ conference, and corresponded sporadically. She’s lively and bright and talented.
Her question came at me out of the blue. “Madeleine—all the things you’ve written, do you believe them?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You really do?”
“If I didn’t believe them, I couldn’t survive.”
“I’m in the hospital. I had a hysterectomy. I can’t ever have a baby.”
To a young woman in her twenties this is a bitter blow. What she had expected to be a simple D and C (though she’d signed the release for further surgery if necessary) had revealed a malignancy.
“The doctor says the outlook is good, but he wants me to have chemotherapy, anyhow. Oh, God, Madeleine, I try not to say, Why did this happen to me—” She started to cry.
I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her, and did the best I could, long distance.
When she had stopped crying, she said, “I don’t know why I had to call you and tell you all my troubles. I just need to be sure you believe what you say in your books.”
A Stone for a Pillow Page 5