For the Time Being (10 page)

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.

“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.”

B I R T H
      
       This hospital, like every other, is a hole 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.