Alice Asks the Big Questions

by Laurent Gounelle

  Jeremy continued listening to her in silence. Alice was surprised that he didn’t seem annoyed or even surprised by her words.

  “Jesus,” she continued, “went so far as to affirm that each of us could carry out miracles: ‘I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.’ And you see, Jeremy, the thing that troubled me the most was realizing the meaning of the words he said to his disciples: ‘Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ The translators preferred to change the end to say it ‘will be granted to you,’ implying there was an external, all-powerful God. What strikes me is that Jesus doesn’t say ‘believe that you will receive it,’ a hope for some time in the future, but ‘believe that you have received it,’ affirming that reality will conform to our perception of it. It’s obviously surprising and a little upsetting for anyone with a rational mind. I’ve thought about it a lot over the past few days, and I think I’ve found a way out: let’s assume that God exists—”

  “That doesn’t take a lot of effort on my part, you know.”

  Alice laughed. “If I hope to obtain something, the formulation of that thought presupposes that I do not have the thing in question: if I want it, it means I don’t have it. So ‘I don’t have it’ is the message I am sending to God. Conversely, if I believe I have received it, if I succeed in believing I have it, then that is the message sent to God. So perhaps God conforms to my visions, because God…is within me. If I am a fragment of God, then there is a creative force in me. A creative force that makes my thoughts concrete, that makes real what I believe is real. Perhaps that is also the reason why Buddha said we create the world with our thoughts. And you remember our personal development seminars with Toby Collins? To help us realize our dreams, he advised us to act as if we already had the ability to do so.”

  The dark clouds moved en masse toward Beaujolais, revealing to the west a golden sky tinted the color of cognac, allowing the sun to cast, here and there, a shimmering bright light over the wooded countryside. Some large birds of prey hovered calmly above, masters of the sky, their black shapes standing out against the natural scene below.

  Sitting on the edge of the rock at the top of the mountain, legs swinging in space and her face caressed by a breeze that smelled of rain, Alice felt she was sitting up in the first balcony watching a spectacle of startling immensity.

  “This view of a God within brings with it a mixture of self-confidence and confidence in life,” said Alice. “Perhaps that’s what faith is.”

  Jeremy smiled. “If we were in the Middle Ages, that view would mainly cause my superiors to tie you to a stake and burn you as a heretic!”

  Alice burst out laughing again. “The idea of confidence, of faith, that creates reality reminds me of the Bible story of Jesus walking on water. The first time I read it, I laughed my head off, but if you get used to the idea of the supernatural, there’s something interesting about it. I can’t remember the exact words, but—”

  “‘The boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it,’” Jeremy began reciting from memory. “‘Shortly before dawn, Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost!” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.” “Lord, if it is you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down.’”

  “That’s it. Jesus doesn’t say that supernatural power comes from an external divine force. He insinuates it comes from a state of confidence. As soon as Peter doubts, he loses his power.”

  One after the other, two lightning bolts struck between the dark clouds near Beaujolais. The storm was heading south.

  “In the Gospel of Thomas,” she continued, “Jesus gives another means of finding that power: ‘But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty.’ In other words, self-knowledge helps to free us from the ego, and unless we do that, we have no power.”

  Alice looked out into the distance.

  Wings outstretched, a falcon carried by the wind rapidly flew past, seemingly effortlessly, as if he were gliding between the clouds and the sky.

  “That view of internal divinity also gives me the feeling that there is a dimension in which the notion of time does not exist,” said Alice, “something that certain physicists are working on proving. Perhaps I exist outside of time, and my incarnation in this body is not essential. The stardust that I am, that fragment of the whole, might exist in another reality beyond this temporal, earthly world. By freeing myself from my ego, which separates me from other people and from everything, I emerge from the duality, and by leaving that duality, I leave temporality. ‘Before Abraham was born, I am!’ Jesus said. What I had taken as a mistake in verb tenses is perhaps actually the most profound and troubling sentence of all.”

  The storm began to move farther south, gradually revealing the sky. On top of the hill, the wind was dying down a little.

  Alice looked at Jeremy. “When I told you about the Gospel of Thomas, you didn’t ask me how I’d found out about it.”

  He didn’t reply, but she thought she could see the beginnings of a smile on his impassive face.

  “You’re the one who directed the deaf-mute nun! Admit it!”

  He sighed, then smiled. “You made me promise never to talk to you about God. I kept my promise.”

  “But…does that mean you share this view of man’s divine nature?”

  Jeremy sat still for a moment.

  Then he made a face.

  Finally, slowly, he assented.

  “Well, then, I really wonder why you continue to belong to this church, which has done everything it could to fight against that view.”

  “I don’t belong to a church, Alice, I belong to God. It’s the ego that pushes someone to consider themselves Catholic, Buddhist, or Muslim. The ego seeks to belong to one camp to stand out from the others, to cause rifts. Every true spiritual force, on the contrary, aims to be free of the affiliations, the identifications of the ego, so it can be linked to others, to the universe, to God.”

  As she took the path back to her car, Alice thought back to Jesus’s supernatural powers. Ever since she had read Campbell and his analyses of hundreds of myths from all over the world, she couldn’t help but see, in the events of Jesus’s life, a mythology that carried messages. Except that Jesus, unlike mythological characters, was a historical figure, a man who had truly lived. And yet she obviously found it difficult to take literally that he had cured the blind and the crippled, brought the dead back to life, been resurrected. Her rational mind found it difficult to believe in the supernatural, and she couldn’t help seeing in those events stories that had been invented to emphasize Christ’s messages.

  When we read in the Bible that Jesus cured the blind, how could we not see an illustration of his desire to open our eyes? He told the cripples to pick up their bags, stand up, and walk. Was he not asking us to take responsibility for our lives? When he raised the dead, was that not a call for us to awaken, to realize that living only on the materialistic plane was the same as not living at all? If we are told of his death and resurrection, is that not to invite us to die and be reborn, meaning to extinguish our ego to allow our divine nature to blossom?

  Either his disciples had embellished his story with imagined events in order to emphasize their master’s message—in which case it was astonishing that pious men would lie to that extent, since the Bible affirms that liars are banished f
rom God’s presence—or Jesus had truly carried out miracles, his life unfolding to illustrate his messages right to the end. And if that were the case, he couldn’t have been a simple human being.

  “I,” he said, “am the way and the truth and the life.”

  28

  Jeremy stretched his legs out diagonally in the confessional to relax them. He could hear the curtain being opened next to him.

  “Father, I have come to confess…my gossiping.”

  He couldn’t help but smile when he heard the familiar voice of the elderly woman, whose contrition sounded somewhat forced.

  “Tell me, my child, what are you feeling guilty about?”

  “Guilty?”

  Her voice suddenly sounded confident again.

  “Let’s say,” she continued, “that I sometimes think it necessary to alert parishioners to the misdeeds of others, when I should, perhaps, leave them alone in their naivete.”

  “I understand.”

  “You see, some people let themselves be fooled. Their eyes need to be opened!”

  “My child, Jesus said, ‘Consider carefully what you hear. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you.’”

  “But…I only reveal actions that are contrary to Christian charity!”

  “My child, do you come to confess your sins or justify them?”

  As she did not reply, he added, “Saint John said, ‘Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness.’”

  She said nothing.

  He remembered the penance proposed one day by the Curé of Ars to one of his female parishioners who had confessed to being a gossip.

  “This is what you are going to do, my child: go and ask for a bag of feathers from the Cannata farmyard and spill them out in the middle of the ruins of the abbey. Then go back to the same place the next day and pick them all up.”

  “All the feathers? But that’s impossible! They will have all been blown away by the wind. I’ll never get them back!”

  Jeremy remained silent, allowing her to reflect on her own words.

  She left, mumbling that it was much simpler when she was asked to say the Lord’s Prayer ten times.

  * * *

  “It’s a way of defying your authority, Your Grace.”

  The bishop walked the hundred paces along the row of high windows in his office. When he had a difficult decision to make, he needed to walk. Movement allowed him to think freely.

  “You’re certain that a date has been set to baptize the child?”

  The curate confirmed it. “Sunday, August 28, at the end of Mass.”

  “And Father Jeremy knows that the curate from Charolles refused the family?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  The bishop stared at him for a few moments, then started to walk again.

  When he was trying to control his irritation, the curate ended his sentences by pursing his lips, which looked like a pout.

  “He’s testing you, Your Grace. It’s a provocation of your authority. If you don’t react, nothing will stop him. And then it will be too late.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  “There are many parishioners behind him. More and more of them. Wait any longer and they’ll make him into a saint. Then your hands will be tied and you’ll be obliged to accept him. He’ll be a thorn in your side forever.”

  The bishop sat down at his desk. The priest was staring at him with an anxious look on his face. He wasn’t wrong. Madame de Sirdegault herself had warned him twice in the past. Though he hadn’t seen her in a long time since then.

  “He could get away with anything, Your Grace.”

  The bishop sighed.

  “He must be sanctioned,” said the curate. “Then calm will return to the parish of Cluny.”

  The bishop hesitated. How would a sanction be seen by the other priests? Would that confirm his power or discredit him?

  “Think of everything he’s dared to do in the space of a few months,” stressed the curate. “Allow him to keep going and he’ll become uncontrollable. The Holy See would call us back to order in vain, and we’d be seen as incompetent.”

  The bishop twisted his amethyst ring around and around.

  He was beginning to grow weary of the problems coming from Cluny. His patience mustn’t turn into indecision, or sooner or later he would pay the consequences.

  * * *

  The man waited patiently in line. It was actually the first time he had seen a line for a confessional. He had never been to confession himself. Or to church, for that matter. Except sometimes, for concerts. And the only times he had prayed were when his father had been seriously ill, then his mother, and then only out of desperation. But his cousin had insisted so much that she finally convinced him to make the trip from Mâcon.

  When it was his turn, he slipped into the narrow space and closed the curtain behind him. He had the impression that he was in a photo booth. Except there was no stool. Just a kind of badly installed bench just above floor level. He had to bend over to sit down, and then felt a shelf digging into his shoulder blades. Pretty basic, comfort-wise. But given that it was free, you couldn’t be too demanding. At least he wasn’t falling asleep as he did on the couch at the shrink’s he’d gone to see once, years before.

  “I’m listening, my son.”

  “Hello, monsieur, I’ve come to see you because I’m having a problem with my upstairs neighbor. I live in an apartment building in Mâcon, and my neighbor looks down on me—he totally snubs me. I feel bad as soon as I leave my place because if I run into him, it’s going to put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. And what’s even worse is that we have the same schedule. We see each other almost every day.”

  “Tell me a little more about the situation.”

  “Oh, it’s simple—I often go up in the elevator with him. He lives one floor up. He speaks to me in a condescending way. I can tell that he looks down on me, that he thinks he’s better than me, much better, even.”

  “You’re not responsible for what other people think.”

  “But he shouldn’t think he’s better!”

  “That’s his problem, not yours.”

  “But it’s very unpleasant. It makes me furious!”

  “And that’s your problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His feeling superior is his problem. You can’t do anything about that—you’re not his shrink. The fact that it upsets you, that’s your problem.”

  There was silence as the man thought about what those words meant. “But…it’s normal to feel bad. I’m not made of stone.”

  “Does the fact that this person thinks he’s superior to you change your worth?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “So what does it change?”

  He gave him time to think about it.

  “Perhaps…my perception of my worth,” he admitted.

  “It’s because you’re not sufficiently convinced of your worth that you’re sensitive to other people’s opinions of you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And if this neighbor behaves so haughtily, can you guess what the reason for that might be?”

  “No idea.”

  “It’s probably because he also doubts his worth. And in that case, he has the same problem as you. It’s just that his ego manifests it differently. Should you hold it against someone who is suffering the same as you?”

  “He might be suffering as much, but I don’t take it out on anyone.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “We’re not always aware of how we unwillingly hurt other people.”

  “All right. So what’s the solution in the present case, with the guy who looks down on me?”

  “If someone else’s ego touches you, and you respond to that ego, you’re reinforcing it. If you manage to see beyond the ego and speak to that person, y
ou will free that person from his prison. In relationships, someone else’s ego is a cell whose bars disappear when you manage to see the person behind them.”

  The man sighed. “But what should I do, practically speaking?”

  The priest waited a few moments before replying.

  “Jesus said: ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.’”

  The next evening, the man came home from his office and ran into the neighbor from upstairs. He was standing in front of the mailboxes at the entrance to the building. The man said hello, trying to sound friendly. The neighbor looked him up and down, raised his chin, and grudgingly deigned to give him a brief “Good evening,” as nasty as could be.

  If you respond to his ego, you’re reinforcing it.

  The man decided to give him a particularly cheerful smile.

  The neighbor quickly looked away.

  They entered the wooden cage of the old elevator, and the internal sliding door slowly closed, then the heavy wrought-iron door slammed shut on them.

  The man turned toward his neighbor, who was staring at some invisible spot on the ceiling as the elevator crawled up ever so slowly. Their proximity weighed on them, as did the silence that surrounded them.

  The man started to talk quietly and was anxious to hear his words echo, breaking the silence.

  “I went to church yesterday…”

  He immediately felt his neighbor tense up and stare even more intently at the ceiling.

  “And I prayed for you,” he continued.

  The other man’s eyes widened, still staring at the invisible spot, as if he had been hypnotized by some magic words.

  Silence fell again, but the words continued to echo. The old wheezy elevator continued to rise with difficulty.

  “I prayed that people might manage to see your kindness behind the mask of your appearance.”

  He saw his neighbor’s lips begin to tremble, as if he were muttering something, but no sound emerged.