When he leads trips to Israel, Abbot Philip Lawrence of the monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, gives only one charge to his flock. “When they show the stone with the footprint of Christ in it,” he says, “don’t laugh.” There is an enormous footprint of Buddha, too, in Laos.
“Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable,” Thomas Merton wrote. “Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.” Suddenly!
One of the queerest spots on earth—I hope—is in Bethlehem. This is the patch of planet where, according to tradition, a cave once stabled animals, and where Mary gave birth to a son whose later preaching—scholars of every stripe agree, with varying enthusiasm—caused the occupying Romans to crucify him. Generations of Christians have churched over the traditional Bethlehem spot to the highest degree. Centuries of additions have made the architecture peculiar, but no one can see the church anyway, because many monasteries clamp onto it in clusters like barnacles. The Greek Orthodox Church owns the grotto site now, in the form of the Church of the Nativity.
There, in the Church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeonlike corridors where hushed people passed. The floors were black stone or cracked marble. Dense brocades hung down old stone walls. Oil lamps hung in layers. Each polished silver or brass lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone, the darker the space.
Packed into a tiny, domed upper chamber, Norwegians sang, as every other group did in turn, a Christmas carol. The stone dome bounced the sound around. The people sounded like seraphs singing inside a bell, sore amazed.
Descending once more, I passed several monks, narrow men, fine-faced and black, who wore tall black hats and long black robes. Ethiopians, they use the oldest Christian rite. At a lower level, in a small room, I peered over half a stone wall and saw Europeans below; they whispered in a language I could not identify.
Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues. The music threaded the vaults.
Now I climbed down innumerable dark stone stairs to the main part, the deepest basement: the Grotto of the Nativity. The grotto was down yet another smoky stairway, at the back of a stone cave far beneath street level. This was the place. It smelled of wet sand. It was a narrow cave about ten feet wide; cracked marble paved it. Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of floor. People had to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps, to see it.
A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall. This silver star was the X that marked the spot: Here, just here, the infant got born. Two thousand years of Christianity began here, where God emptied himself into man. Actually, many Christian scholars think “Jesus of Nazareth” was likely born in Nazareth. Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy. Here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy. It must have struck many people that we were competing with these lamps for oxygen.
In the center of the silver star was a circular hole. That was the bull’s-eye, God’s quondam target.
Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole’s flat bottom. When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a fringed satin drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole. I could feel some sort of soft wax in it. The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide petri dish. I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.
Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God’s presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto. The ugliness of the blunt and bumpy silver star impressed me. The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps—some humans’ idea of elegance—bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.
“Every day,” said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, “the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement.”
The lamps’ dozen flames heated my face. Under the altar cloths, in the corner where the stone wall met the marble floor, there was nothing to breathe but the lamps’ oily fumes and people’s exhalations. High above my back, layer after layer of stone away, people were singing. After the singing dwindled, the old walls still rang, and soon another group took up the general song in a melody faint and pure.
In the fourth century, those Jewish mystics devoted to Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot wrote a text in which Rabbi Isaac said: “It is a five-hundred-year journey from the earth to the firmament…. The thickness of the firmament is a five-hundred-year journey. The firmament contains only the sun, moon and stars…. The waters above the firmament are a five-hundred-year journey. From the sea to the Heaven of Heavens is a five-hundred-year journey. There are to be found the angels who say the Kedushah.”
The text goes on to describe more five-hundred-year journeys upward to levels each of a thickness of a five-hundred-year journey: to the level of myriads and myriads ministering to the Prince above the firmament, to the level of the Canopy of the Torah, to the rebuilt Temple, to “the storehouses of snow and the storehouses of hail,” and above them to the treasure-houses of blessing and the storehouses of peace. Above all that lies a thick layer of wings and hooves, and “the chariot to come.” Above these seven heavens and the seven thicknesses between them is a layer of wings as thick as all the seven heavens and the distances between them together, and “above them is the Holy One, blessed be He.”
Standing again, rubbing my fingers together, I found more stone stairways, more levels, and the street, the sunlight, the world. I found a van in the parking lot of what used to be, I try to tell myself, a stable—but this story was worn out for now, the paradox and scandal of any incarnation’s occurring in a stable. More powerful at the moment was the sight of people converging from all over the world, people of every color in every costume, to rub their fingers across a flat hole in a bossy silver star on the cracked marble floor of a cave.
Rabbi Menahem Mendel brought Hasidic teaching to Palestine in the eighteenth century. He said, “This is what I attained in the Land of Israel. When I see a bundle of straw lying in the street, it seems to me a sign of the presence of God, that it lies there lengthwise, and not crosswise.”
I could not keep away from it. I saw I had a minute or two to rush back from the van into the church and down the grotto stairs to kneel again at the silver star behind the brocade, to prostrate myself under the lamps, and to rub my fingers in the greasy wax.
Was it maybe tallow? I felt like Harry Reasoner at the Great Wall of China in 1972, who, pressed on live coverage for a response, came up with, “It’s … uh … it’s one of the two or three darnedest things I ever saw.”
E N C O U N T E R S Joseph took one of my cigarettes, and gave me one of his. He was a Palestinian in his fifties; his straight hair was graying. The deep lines in his face showed feeling. We smoked just outside the van, in the heat. This morning as every morning, we had smoked together after breakfast. Now at noon in a town parking lot, we were waiting for the others, who were buying jewelry.
Joseph drove a tourist van. Like 18 percent of Israelis, he was a Palestinian. Like 15 percent of Israeli Palestinians, he was a Christian. He spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and some English. Driving, he never said a word. He wore a thin cotton shirt in all weathers.
After our cigarette I found the jewelry store in whose lounge the others would meet after shopping. The lounge was air conditioned, and a vending machine offered cold drinks. It beat waiting in the parking lot, so I gathered Joseph from the van, led him inside, and got him a Coke. We were sitting on distant couches; I brought out my book.
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�Tonight or tomorrow night,” Joseph said abruptly, “I invite you.”
I raised my head; he saw my look.
“Before dinner, at hotel, I invite you.”
Across the room, on the couch, Joseph appeared kind and sincere, as always. Thank you, I said, but I’ll stay with my friends. I got myself another bottle of water. I closed my book. Joseph’s lined face was relaxed.
Do you have a family at home? Joseph, with some animation, said indeed, yes he did, and told me he had a wife of many years, and two sons and three daughters. After a suitable interval, I hauled out pictures of my husband and daughter to show him. We were sitting comfortably; we smoked another cigarette in silence.
After a longer interval, Joseph brought forth mildly, “When I say ‘I invite you,’ I mean—for drink. For drink only.”
Oh. I laughed at my mistake. Tolerant, he joined the joke.
“I invite you—for drink, only. In lobby.” He was smiling. An easygoing fellow. When we parted, weeks later, he gave me an old coin swollen and layered with age, which I prize.
T H I N K E R C. S. Lewis once noted—interestingly, salvifically—that the sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. That was a load off my mind. I had found it easier to contemplate the square root of minus one.
Why must we suffer losses? Even Meister Eckhart offers the lame apology that God never intended us to regard his gifts as our property and that “in order to impress it on us, he frequently takes away everything, physical and spiritual…. Why does God stress this point so much? Because he wants to be ours exclusively.”
It is “fatal,” Teilhard said of the old belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent. It is fatal to reason. It does not work. The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God’s omnipotence. As Baron von Hügel noted, Aquinas said that “the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only the power to effect what is within the nature of things.”
Similarly, Teilhard called the explanation that God hides himself deliberately to test our love “hateful”; it is “mental gymnastics.” Here: “The doctors of the church explain that the Lord deliberately hides himself from us in order to test our love. One would have to be irretrievably committed to mental gymnastics … not to feel the hatefulness of this solution.”
E V I L Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, “All your actions show your wisdom and love.” Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, “That’s a lie!”—just to put things on a solid footing.
“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.
“He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.”
When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. In a soup kitchen, I see suffering. Deus otiosus: do-nothing God, who, if he has power, abuses it.
Of course, God wrote no scriptures, neither chapter nor verse. It is foolish to blame or quit him for his admirers’ claims, superstitious or otherwise. “God is not on trial,” I read somewhere. “We are not jurors but suppliants.”
Maybe “all your actions show your wisdom and love” means that the precious few things we know that God did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, and all other events derive not from God but only from blind chance, just as they seem to.
What, then, of the bird-headed dwarfs? It need not craze us, I think, to know we are evolving, like other living forms, according to physical processes. Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers—so that, as the paleontologist said, “at every moment it releases a given quantity of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death).” That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.” It is hard to find a more inarguable explanation for the physical catastrophe and the suffering we endure at chance from the material world.
“Even when we are exercising all our faculties of belief,” Teilhard continues, “Fortune will not necessarily turn out in the way we want but in the way it must.” Karl Rahner echoes this idea: It is a modern heresy to think that if we do right always, we will avoid situations for which there is no earthly solution.
Guy Simon was a Presbyterian minister in Michigan. He sailed some friends out on Lake Charlevoix; the boat capsized, and a child and a man drowned. After he got ashore, he walked up and down the beach hitting his hands together and saying, “Oh, pshaw! Oh, pshaw!”
N O W There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
There is no less holiness at this time—as you are reading this—than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter, or the day Peter walked on water, or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.
Purity’s time is always now. Purity is no social phenomenon, a cultural thing whose time we have missed, whose generations are dead, so we can only buy Shaker furniture. “Each and every day the Divine Voice issues from Sinai,” says the Talmud. Of eternal fulfillment, Tillich said, “If it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all.”
There is, or was, a contemporary religious crank named Joel Goldsmith, for whose illogical, obscurely published books I confess a fond and enduring weakness. He says that God (aka “It”) has nothing to give you that he (It) is not giving you right now. That all people at all times may avail themselves of this God, and those who are aware of it know no fear, not even fear of death. “God” is the awareness of the infinite in each of us. Repeatedly and reassuringly, God tells Joel Goldsmith (and for this I cannot dismiss Goldsmith, clearly an American, possibly a football fan), “I am on the field.”
CHAPTER FOUR
B I R T H This hospital, like every other, is a ho
le in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time. On wards above and below me, men and women are dying. Their hearts seize, give out, or clatter, their kidneys fail, their lungs harden or drown, their brains clog or jam and die for blood. Their awarenesses lower like lamp wicks. Off they go, these many great and beloved people, as death subtracts them one by one from the living—about 164,300 of them a day worldwide, and 6,000 a day in the United States—and the hospitals shunt their bodies away. Simultaneously, here they come, these many new people, for now absurdly alike—about 10,000 of them a day in this country—as apparently shabby replacements.
At the sink in the maternity ward, nurse Pat Eisberg is unwrapping another package. This infant emerged into the world three weeks early; she is lavender, and goopy with yellow vernix, like a Channel swimmer. As the washcloth rubs her, she pinks up. I cannot read her name. She is alert and silent. She looks about with apparent concentration; she pays great attention, and seems to have a raw drive to think.
She fixes on my eyes and, through them, studies me. I am not sure I can withstand such scrutiny, but I can, because she is just looking, purely looking, as if she were inspecting this world from a new angle. She is, perhaps for the first time, looking into eyes, but serenely, as if she does not mind whose eyes she meets. What does it matter, after all? It is life that glistens in her eyes; it is a calm consciousness that connects with volts the ocular nerves and working brain. She has a self, and she knows it; the red baby knew it too.
This alert baby’s intensity appears hieratic; it recalls the extraordinary nature of this Formica room. Repetition is powerless before ecstasy, Martin Buber said. Now the newborn is studying the nurse—conferring, it seems, her consciousness upon the busy nurse as a general blessing. I want to walk around this aware baby in circles, as if she were the silver star’s hole on the cave floor, or the Kaaba stone in Mecca, the wellspring of mystery itself, the black mute stone that requires men to ask, Why is there something here, instead of nothing? And why are we aware of this question—we people, particles going around and around this black stone? Why are we aware of it?
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