American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Only out of such atheism can true faith emerge. He who worships a false god may in fact be worse than the honest atheist. At least the atheist acknowledges the perceived emptiness above him. The so-called “believer,” whose belief is in a falsehood, is not nearly so close to the truth even as that.

  As Cherity lay awake with a smile on her face, basking in the memory of the day, the shell surrounding her spiritual self was already splintering into a thousand pieces. In Seth Davidson she had experienced the camaraderie of human brotherhood. In Carolyn Davidson she had felt the warmth of human motherhood, which is no less a reflection of the divine character than human fatherhood. From the warmth of both loves, Cherity’s fertile heart had been strangely stirred to look up with wonder at what, and Who, might be the source of Light above her. Like a thirsty plant, she had drunk, and had begun to be satisfied. In Seth she had met one worthy to be called a true brother. And in Carolyn she had met a woman worthy of becoming a home for a girl’s heart.

  In her father’s room in another part of the house, a very different spiritual battle was under way.

  James Waters was not at all pleased with what he was feeling. He was on edge, tense, irritable.

  He could not blame his hosts for his condition. Richmond and Carolyn had shown him and Cherity every courtesy and kindness. Nor could he blame them for talking about spiritual things. He knew Richmond Davidson’s predilections. If he didn’t like it, in a sense he had no one to blame but himself. No one had forced him to come here. Yet he could not deny that their talk about God’s goodness grated on him. If God was so good, what had he ever done for him?

  His complaint was not with the Davidsons… his complaint was with God.

  Unlike his daughter, James Waters was not feeling the warmth of the Father-Sun and gentle spring showers of his Spirit. Many of those, and in abundance, had already been sent to him through the years, not a few through his wife, whose sweetness of spirit far exceeded that of the five-pointed theology in which she had been steeped. That her intellect knew no better had not prevented God’s true nature from elevating the character of her heart above that theology. Many there are like her who, though their doctrinal beliefs remain of the vilest, because their faces are turned toward the Light come to radiate Christlikeness in spite of the fact that they never grasp the reality of Christ’s true work—to illuminate the character of a Father worthy of the name Abba, not an Almighty Holiness from whose wrath we are told Jesus died to protect us.

  James Waters had been married to such a one. That it had not caused him to seek that divine character, but only to react against the lowness of that doctrine, is a sad but common result of unfortunate elder traditions that must, in a sense, be laid at the doorstep of both husband and wife. Now that she was dead, however, the responsibility to discover whatever truth toward which her life might have pointed shifted solely to him. And in that exercise he had thus far failed.

  In his mind—and one fueled by analysis and intelligence, for his was an intellect both keen and shrewd—stood many imagined forms of God—some cruel, some weak, some malicious, some more interesting than others, yet all shrouded over with the uninspired and scripturally inconsistent conventionality of the religious training of his later youth and early adulthood. He had come to see their collective falsehood without feeling any corresponding compunction to discover what might be true. To refute and oppose is the easiest of all intellectual endeavors. But to deny is not to know truth.

  James Waters had never sought the full truth of his Creator’s nature and character because his deepest being recoiled from admitting to the possibility of a God to whom his obedience and submission might be due. The idea of a being with rights over him, or of obligations on his part toward such a one, was odious in his eyes. Thus, his self-reliance of heart hid behind his intellect, and what he considered the many unassailable arguments against God’s intrusion into his life.

  In his self-satisfaction James Waters had as a result steadfastly ignored many whisperings of his Maker. Like multitudes of believers and nonbelievers alike, the fact that he did not, as he supposed, need God, and was, as he further supposed, getting along fine without him, was to James Waters argument enough against attempted closer approach.

  Scarce feebler argument exists for human relationship than “need.” We do need him, of course, yet on a deeper level than most can apprehend. In the very act of creation, God placed within man a remarkable capacity to fend for himself and, in so doing, to sustain his own life. God gave man the capacity not to need him. Then he draws and woos and whispers, inviting us to need him anyway—to lay down our self-reliance and come to him with the empty hands of freely chosen childhood.

  He invites us, in the absence of need, to choose to need him, to choose to rely on him, to choose to trust him, to choose to be a child though no one forces such spiritual childness upon us.

  But when such wooings and whisperings against are not enough, when the warm sun and gentle rains of spring do not succeed in softening self-will, God may send harsh blasts of hail and freezing snows and bitter winds to see what they can do to crack open its stubborn outer shell, that the flames of hell will not be required in the end to melt and consume it.

  James Waters had not felt many of life’s severest pains. He had had it far easier than he realized. Yet his wife’s sudden and unexpected death had blown a bitter gust of the Spirit’s wintry winds against his face from which he had never fully recovered. Instead of softening him, however, it had hardened him yet further in his self-reliance. Rather than bow before it, he had silently cursed the bitter inevitability of what he called Fate. And thus, though he himself would have been the last to recognize it—indeed, all who knew James Waters considered him a genial, likeable, pleasant, and personable man—the embers of quiet anger festered and smoldered in his heart toward any God who would make him suffer.

  As much as he spoke of Cherity’s need of a mother—which need God was even now providing—in truth, his resentment stemmed from that all-too-common malady of thinking that he himself had been a victim of life’s inequity. Most are not nearly so magnanimous as they think. As long as they are riding on the crest of good times, life seems to them a good thing. They are perfectly happy with the world until storm clouds blow over their own houses. They are not nearly so concerned about life’s unfairness… until it bites into their own comfortable existence. Then suddenly are the accusations roused against God for masterminding such a tragic scheme, as the world and all human existence must surely be.

  In spite of our accomplishments, such small-minded creatures we are!

  Thus on this night, like his daughter, James Waters also lay awake. But whereas she lay smiling, he lay stewing. The openings of light in her heart were widening and she rejoiced to feel life flowing out from within her. He felt a crack in his comfortable level of self-reliance, and it brought only irritability and annoyance. And he fought tooth and nail inside himself to keep the precious shell of pride and independence intact.

  How much his uneasiness may have originated from yet deeper places within him he had not yet considered. Cherity was not the only one who had had to endure youth without a mother. He had had to do so without mother or father. And certain conversations since arriving at Greenwood had forced a childhood he thought he had put to rest up out of the mists of memory to the surface of his consciousness. As the autumn of his life loomed closer and closer, suddenly he found himself unexpectedly pondering many questions anew.

  Twenty

  This time Cherity Waters rode toward Harper’s Peak by herself. She had to be alone. She had to think. There was no place she would rather do it than on horseback, and no place she could think to do it other than this high outlook that had already grown special to her for many reasons.

  But she was not thinking about horses or races or Seth on this day, but about her talk with Carolyn Davidson. She had not been able to forget it, nor forget what she had felt when trying to befriend Moonbeam. She had wanted the h
orse to see that she wanted only good for her… and not mere good, the very best!

  Was that really how God felt about her?

  It was too overwhelming a thought, that those same thoughts and feelings stirred in God’s heart… toward her. That he knew her, loved her, and wanted to call her by name.

  How long, she wondered, had he quietly been whispering to her? Was she now perhaps… at last ready to listen?

  The thoughts that had been occupying the mind of Cherity’s father for the past few days were much different than his daughter’s. His agnosticism had resulted in a reaction against God for taking his wife. In his grief, he had railed and complained against the Father-will of the universe rather than asking what might be the higher purpose of that Father-will to which he might bend his knee, sorrowfully perhaps, yet in willing acknowledgment of the truth that his ways are higher than our ways. By a series of self-centered responses rather than truth-seeking responses, he had thus embittered himself against the great truth that the Father-will of the universe has only the best for all his creatures in its heart.

  Cherity, on the other hand, had not reacted against God himself at all but against an image of him which she could not in good conscience accept. Her announcement of atheism had, in reality, been a step toward the reality of his being rather than away from it. By it she had expressed her own heart’s belief in the first of all spiritual truths, the foundation stone of any quest to know God: the imperative necessity to know God truly. Many there are indeed whose belief is rather in one of many false caricatures that are dreamed up by minds of men who have never sought to know him by obeying him. They have never paused to examine the vital question whether the god of their imagined belief is a God worthy to be believed in, and worthy to be called the Father of Jesus Christ.

  So while to appearances, upon their arrival at Greenwood, Cherity and her father may have looked to be near the same point on a continuum of so-called belief, they were, in fact, miles apart. The direction of spiritual progress or declension is of far more import than where one happens to be on that continuum at any given moment. Two men or women may intersect at an apparent common point of belief or unbelief, and yet the one may be on the road of increase, and thus gradually becoming more God’s child, while the other may be on the road of decrease, and gradually becoming less his child. Belief is always growing or declining according to one’s responses to life’s circumstances. Living things can never be stagnant. Belief is alive—it must either grow or die.

  James Waters had been for so long taking baby steps away from God, allowing himself to become entrenched in his latent resentment, that being at Greenwood was jarring to a heart that had become comfortable in its unbelief. But he could not help being strangely warmed by the love and hospitality shown him. By the end of their time here, he would honestly have called Richmond and Carolyn friends of the deepest kind. If they just didn’t have the annoying tendency to turn everything toward God.

  That Cherity Waters, however, had been on the road of deepening spiritual hunger for longer than she herself realized had suddenly become clear from her recent conversation with Carolyn Davidson. Not only was she hungry after truth, she was hungry to be loved by a mother heart. The blossom of her spirit had therefore opened itself and drunk.

  The next day Cherity came to Carolyn where she sat alone in the parlor.

  “May I talk to you again?” asked Cherity.

  “Of course, dear. Would you like to sit down?”

  “I have one main question,” said Cherity as she sat down. “Everything you say about God sounds good. But I have heard other things about him that are so different. I want to believe what you tell me, but how can I know it is true?”

  “There is no way to prove it intellectually,” replied Carolyn, “if that is what you mean. People have been trying to do so for centuries, but there is only one way—though it is not an intellectual one—for any man or woman to know God, and to know that he is.”

  “What is that way?” asked Cherity.

  “By getting to know Jesus Christ himself more intimately and personally, and doing what he said.”

  Then followed a long talk with many questions, during which Carolyn told her anew the old tale of the man who was God, a story at once so familiar but to most so badly misunderstood, but such as few people, least of all Cherity, ever heard it—the story of the perfect man who told mankind how we could know God too, and said that he could free us from sin and selfishness so that we could live as God’s sons and daughters.

  The delight in Carolyn’s eyes as she spoke was in itself enough to draw Cherity all the way into the reality of the story. Carolyn spoke now of this person to whom the Lord spoke and then of another, removing this confusion, showing her the right reading of this or that troublesome point. At last Cherity could not but believe that the Savior Jesus had truly lived and walked the grassy hillsides and rocky shores of Palestine, and said and done the glorious things of which Carolyn spoke.

  “And you see,” Carolyn concluded, “by obeying his Word—which until you are sure of him may be an obedience that takes the form of personal duty and the following of your conscience—he will prove himself to your intellect. Action always leads, understanding follows. It is the way God established his world, and his human creatures, to function. It is why he placed the conscience inside us, so that duty would lead to light, and obedience would lead us to truth.”

  “You make it sound altogether wonderful to obey him.”

  “Of course—because through such obedience we will come to know his Father. What could be more wonderful than that!”

  “Then what do you think I should do right now,” asked Cherity, “today, this minute… even though I am still not altogether sure of him?”

  “If you have but the vaguest suspicion that what I have been telling you is true, then it seems your first duty is to open your eyes and ears and senses to the things he said and taught. Eventually you will not be able merely to take my word for it, or anyone else’s. The truths which he spoke will have to get inside you. If you find within yourself that they ring true to your conscience, ring true with the world around you, and ring true to your experience… then what can that mean but that the truth of the story, and the truth of Jesus himself and his Father is proving itself to your whole being.”

  Cherity sat absorbing Carolyn’s words.

  “I would like to read some of it… for myself, I mean,” she said at length. “Do you have a Bible? Can you show me where to begin. I want to read what Jesus said to do.”

  It did not take many minutes more before Cherity was walking outside, one of Carolyn’s Bibles in her hands, with several slips of paper indicating places Carolyn had noted to read.

  When Cherity returned three hours later and again sought Seth’s mother, Carolyn knew immediately that there had been a change.

  They sat down together and Carolyn waited. Cherity stared down at her lap for several long minutes before speaking.

  “I realize now that I’m not as much of an atheist as I thought,” she said at last. She looked up at Carolyn and smiled sheepishly. “Or else,” she added, “if I was, I realize that I don’t want to be anymore.”

  Carolyn nodded and returned her smile.

  “I am ready to have him put the bit in my mouth,” said Cherity. “I am ready to be broken and be God’s horse. I want to know him as my master, Mrs. Davidson… just like you do, just like Jesus spoke about.”

  Tears filled Carolyn’s eyes.

  “Cherity, dear…” she began, then rose and rushed to where Cherity sat. The next moment they were in each other’s arms on the couch.

  “I am so happy for you,” said Carolyn. “Once you know his voice and have begun to answer his call, life will never be the same again.”

  Gradually Carolyn pulled back and they sat together for a minute or two in contented silence.

  “Will… will everything change for me now?” asked Cherity at length.

  “Your outlook w
ill change,” replied Carolyn. “That is the main thing. Once we are aware that God is with us all the time—or I should say, that we are with him!—life takes on different meaning. We may talk to him about everything as a child talking to his father. We may ask him questions about what he wants us to do and how he wants us to think. Other than that, things don’t change a great deal. You still have good days and bad days. Some things still go right and other things go wrong. You will not instantly become a different person. But you know all that already, don’t you—once a horse is broken, he is still the same horse with the same personality, isn’t he?”

  “I see what you mean,” smiled Cherity.

  “One thing you musn’t do is expect life as God’s child always to be an easy life or a happy one. But it will always be a life full of meaning and purpose… because you have a new Father now, a heavenly Father who will be with you every moment.”

  “So… what do I do?” asked Cherity. “How do I take his bit? It’s not like a horse, where there’s a real bit. Everything takes place in your heart, doesn’t it?”

  “Have you talked to God about it?” asked Carolyn.

  “A little, I guess. I don’t really know what to say.”

  “Just tell him what you are thinking and feeling. Thank him for opening your eyes to him and for him revealing himself to you. Tell him you want his bit in your mouth. Tell him you want to be his daughter. Tell him you want him for your Master and Father. And then just place your heart into his care.”

  “But it’s so… it’s so new and different.”

  Carolyn smiled. “But it’s wonderful too, isn’t it, to realize, when you talk to him, that God has a smile of welcome on his face—like you did when you were speaking to Moonbeam—rather than a frown?”