When it was over, I said to Tallis, “You have a lot more faith in me than I have.”
He grinned. “I’m always right. You’re much better when you don’t think.”
And that is true. It doesn’t mean that I must never think. It doesn’t mean that he hadn’t been training me for a good many years. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a full barrel to draw from. It does mean that the creative actions do not come from the cognitive part of the brain alone, but from a much larger area. When I write, I realized, I do not think. I write. If I think when I am writing, it doesn’t work. I can think before I write; I can think after I write; but when I am actually writing, what I do is write. This is always the instruction I give at writers’ workshops: “Don’t think. Write.” And I put a time limit to the assignments. “You may not work on this for more than an hour. If you’re not finished at the end of an hour, that’s all right. Stop.” It’s a lot easier to write without thinking if there’s a time limit.
One workshop participant said to me one morning, “I thought what you were asking us was absolutely impossible. But then I woke up at two o’clock and I did it.” And she smiled with delight at what she had done.
To relinquish our conscious, cognitive selves is an act of hallowing. It should be true of any activity, not just writing stories. It should be true of the doctor, and too often it isn’t. Those who must make instant life and death decisions are put in the position of being God, and being God is woefully addictive. The great physicians are those who know that it is not their mortal hands which heal, but God’s hand using the human one. It is God’s name that should be hallowed, not ours. When we put ourselves before God then inevitably we come to grief—one of the most common griefs of all.
Thy kingdom come. That is what co-creation with our Maker is all about, the coming of the kingdom. Our calling, our vocation in all we do and are to try to do is to help in the furthering of the coming of the kingdom—a kingdom we do not know and cannot completely understand. We are given enough foretastes of the kingdom to have a reasonable expectation. Being a loved and loving part of the body; praying together; singing together; forgiving and accepting forgiveness; eating together the good fruits of the earth; holding hands around the table as these fruits are blessed, in spontaneous joy and love, all these are foretastes.
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. God’s will. Do we always know what it is? I’m afraid not. At least I don’t. Often I get caught up in oughts and shoulds that are not necessarily God’s will. When I capitulate to too many oughts and shoulds I overdo my physical strength and that is not God’s will. As I continue to recuperate from my accident it is very difficult for me to know when (as Ma Katzenjammer said) too much is enough. I do more than my healing body is ready for; I get exhausted; I have been willful rather than obedient, and the line between the two is not easy to discern.
On occasion King David substituted his will for God’s will, and with all the good will in the world. Once he had built himself a palace in his holy city of Jerusalem, he felt that it was not fitting for himself, a mortal king, to live in a palace, while God’s tabernacle was kept in a tent. David said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.”
Nathan comes into the story abruptly. Samuel the prophet has died. Another prophet is needed, and so the biblical narrator produces Nathan.
Then Nathan said to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the LORD is with you.”
But it happened that night that the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying,
Go and tell my servant David, “This is what the LORD says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling.”
Trying to put God in a house is to misunderstand, to anthropomorphize (as usual). When Nathan told David what God had said, David accepted God’s words and sang joyous praise. To try to put God in a house is to try to imprison the Lord of the Universe. It cannot be done. The house of God becomes more important than the God within—as happens in some churches. There are times when I wish that we had no church buildings, that we met in each other’s homes. But then I remember churches where I have felt blessed by the presence of God, because we have not built a house for God, but a house for ourselves where we can be quiet and wait for God to come to us. I feel this in the great, beautiful space of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and I feel it in the much smaller Congregational church in northwest Connecticut.
When I pray, in church or without, in my prayer corner at home, or on the street as I walk to and fro, I pray that God’s will may be done, and I pray it especially fervently during those many times when I am not able to discern God’s will. Is this man the right man for the young woman I love? Or vice versa. Can this marriage be saved? Can this life be saved? Should I say Yes or No to this request? Often I do not know, and so I throw myself upon God’s will.
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Heaven is not a place name. Heaven is wherever God’s will is being done. When, occasionally, it is done on earth, then there is heaven. It is the most difficult thing in the world for most of us to give up directing our own story and turn to the Author. This has to be done over and over again every day. Time and again I know exactly how a certain situation should be handled, and in no uncertain terms I tell God how to handle it. Then I stop, stock-still and (sometimes with reluctance) end by saying, “However, God, do it your way. Not my way, your way. Please.”
And God’s will, no matter how fervent our prayers, is not always done. We human creatures abuse our free will, set it over against God’s will. Sometimes when we may truly be doing God’s will, it is thwarted because of the abuse of free will by others. My faith is that ultimately God’s will will be done, and I know to my rue that when I am willful I am obstructing that will. At my occasional best, I am lovingly obedient to what I pray is the will of God. Loving obedience should never be difficult; we are not being coerced, or manipulated. Loving obedience is doing the Lord’s will with enthusiasm—doing the Lord’s will filled with the Spirit of God.
Give us this day our daily bread. Not next year, not tomorrow. Today. Jesus is emphatic about the importance of the present day, without over-concern for the morrow. My grandmother was fond of quoting, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Scripture reminds us of the beauty of the flowers, beauty that they cannot work for or earn, but which is given to them by a loving Creator, a Creator who will take care of us if we are not overanxious about the morrow, thinking that we have to take care of it, do it ourselves.
Like many people, I have a tendency to project. As a storyteller, I am trained to say, “What if—?” But while this is important for story, it can be crippling in real life. If I am too worried about what may or may not happen tomorrow, I cannot concentrate on what is happening today. Sometimes when we are caught up in tragedy we are better able to live in the moment than when things are going along normally. Both Luci and I knew this when Harold and Hugh were dying. We were blessed by being allowed to live in the now, the very moment.
While I was in that difficult English boarding school, when I was twelve to fourteen, on Sunday afternoons we were allowed to spend two hours in our bedrooms—the only time we were allowed there except to sleep or change our clothes. I always brought with me enough books to keep me busy for two weeks rather than two hours. When I travel I still bring with me too many books. This is not a bad kind of projection. It does no harm, other than making my bag heavy to carry. But it is a reminder. Don’t live five hours from now. Live now, fully, creatively, lovingly.
Give us this day our daily bread. Not mine, but ours—everybody’s. Our responsibility to the starving world is implicit in that sentence. As long as any part of the body
is hungry, the entire body knows starvation. But again, we do not need to think of our obligations in terms of success; we would fail to do anything at all if we knew we had to succeed. We simply do what we can; we offer our little loaves and fishes and leave the rest to the Lord.
The story of the loaves and fishes is sometimes explained away in a reasonable sort of manner. It was something like a potluck supper, I have been told. The people who had been listening to Jesus were so moved by his words that when it came time to eat, those who had brought picnics with them shared their food around.
The reasonable explanations don’t really make much sense. Jesus took the stuff of nature, bread and fish, and working from what already existed, multiplied it. He refused to turn stones into bread, which he could have done. But stones are not bread; they are stones. Instead, when he fed the multitudes, he took the loaves, he took the fish, and there was enough for everybody. In John’s Gospel it is pointed out that a lad came up and offered what he had, and this act of offering was essential for the miracle.
Another important part of the miracle is Jesus’ concern for the fragments, because he is always concerned about the broken things, the broken people. Only when we realize that we are indeed broken, that we are not independent, that we cannot do it ourselves, can we turn to God and take that which he has given us, no matter what it is, and create with it.
In my neighborhood in New York the past few years have brought out many panhandlers, people begging for money. One night I was walking home with one of my granddaughters, and she said, anxiously, “Gran, what do you do about the panhandlers?” At that moment a young woman came up to us, begging for money for food.
We were standing outside a small cafe near our apartment. I said to the woman, “Come on in here, and I’ll buy you some food.”
She said, “What I really want is Chinese food.”
I said, “It’s late, and I’m on my way home, and I’ll buy you food here.”
“They don’t like me in there.”
“They’ll like my money. I’ll buy you some food. What would you like?”
“Well, I really want to go to this Chinese restaurant…” (it was several blocks away).
I said, “Good night,” and walked on. I turned to my granddaughter and said, “That’s what I do about panhandlers. She did not want food. She wanted money.”
How do we distinguish the people with scams from those who are truly hungry? It’s not always possible. In the past year more and more people have accepted my offer of food, and I am grateful that I am able to buy them hamburgers or sandwiches or whatever they want. It is not enough. It is never enough. But it is what I can do. And I try not to forget that the churches and synagogues in my neighborhood have coordinated their soup kitchens, so that every day there is always a place where hungry people can get a hot meal.
Some may be hungry physically, but are hungrier spiritually, and try to assuage their anguish and emptiness with drugs. Some of my friends give money. “If they want drugs, let them have them.” Something in me does not want to do that. Food, not drugs, are what I am willing to offer. Am I right or wrong? I am not sure.
It is no coincidence that Jesus follows Give us this day our daily bread with Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Am I trespassing against those who ask for money by offering food? I do not know. Am I adding humiliation by offering food, by assuming that my money will be misused? I don’t know. But many of the people who ask for money want it for drugs, not food. Is there any other way to tell them apart? I don’t know. Forgive me.
As we forgive, so are we forgiven. Jesus makes that point more than once. If we cannot forgive, we dose ourselves off from forgiveness. Quite often the person we find hardest to forgive is our own self—because we are taught by the world to set up false idols of ourselves, to have unrealistic expectations of what we ought to be. This is reflected in the lack of penitence in the present Episcopal Prayer Book.
Perhaps the 1928 Prayer Book was over-heavy on penitence, but proper penitence is not groveling in humiliation. Proper penitence is repentance. When we are truly penitent, we are able to accept forgiveness, and then we are able to glorify the Lord. Over and over again I pick myself up out of the dust and try again, praying to become healed and whole and holy by the grace of God, not my own virtue. Proper penitence is being able to forgive ourselves, because only if we are able to forgive ourselves are we able to forgive others.
Refusing to forgive ourselves is succumbing to temptation, and the next line of the Lord’s Prayer is: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
We beg the Spirit not to lead us into the wilderness to be tempted, as the Spirit led Jesus after his baptism, because we know that we are not immune to temptation. “Save us from the time of trial,” one of the new translations says, which is more or less the same thing. We know that we are fallible. Jesus’ temptations were a testing of his dual nature as human and divine. We are human, and so we ask that we may be delivered from the plausible temptations of the evil one. We know that we are not immune; we have seen kings and princes, and princes of the church fall for the temptations of the evil one over and over again. The more power and responsibility we are given, the more we must resist the temptations. If we’re willing to give up that do-it-yourself kind of autonomous control, the Spirit will not lead us beyond our power to recognize and resist the tempter.
There seems to be a good deal of nostalgia for the “wonderful days of the sixties”; but while there were many needed awakenings, there were also many evils. When we moved back to New York in 1960, to the Upper West Side of the city where I still live, not one of the stores had to be protected at night by a grille. The proprietor went out and closed the door; that was all that was necessary. Nobody had to be “buzzed in” anywhere. Now, in Diocesan House at the Cathedral, where the beautiful, oak-paneled library is, where I am the volunteer librarian, one has to be both buzzed in and announced. It is not safe to leave the door open.
In 1960 Broadway was still the Great White Way. It was in that decade that the pornographic movies came in, the massage parlors, all the abuses of eroticism. Crime increased radically.
But perhaps what is saddest is that our recognition of many evils, racism, sexism, ageism, poverty, illness, was followed by do-it-yourself-ism. With the best will in the world we thought we could do it all ourselves. That seems to me to be the problem of the New Agers. They have a case of the sixties.
But we couldn’t do it ourselves. We had horrible and ambiguous wars. We built sterile housing developments that encouraged crime. We fell into all the temptations of hubris, all those temptations that Jesus rejected.
The fact that the tempter succeeds so often in being irresistible is a source of grief to us, and that grief is necessary preparation for help in resistance. Today one of the temptations is to feel that we must be either politically correct, social activists, or that we must be withdrawn from the world in order to pray. Why should these two be exclusive? Won’t our action more likely be God’s will if we have prayed about it first? Won’t we be more likely to correct some of the terrible social inequities with which we are surrounded if we ask ourselves what Jesus would have done, and how? Don’t we need to withdraw from the world for a while to ask God what we should do? It is a temptation to gallop in and try to make everything all right, without really knowing what that everything is.
Deliver us from evil.
O God, please. Please, deliver us from evil.
Some of my friends believe that my accident on July 28 was a manifestation of evil, not just the evil of the truck driver who was not paying attention, but the evil which is always out to destroy, annihilate, uncreate.
That was one of the problems of the sixties. There was much good in our awareness of the terrible needs of minorities, but wherever there is good the echthroi rush in, trying to undo it, an
d one of their easiest weapons is pride: You’re wonderful! Of course you can take care of integration and poverty and everything else if you just try hard enough.
Well, it’s not that easy.
Certainly my accident felt echthroid. Whether it was or not I do not know. But I will be succumbing to the echthroi if I do not turn it over to God. Right now it is very difficult for me to turn my physical weakness to God, to understand that I am not completely healed. Those hematomas up and down my left side are enough of a reminder. They are getting smaller, and when they are completely gone maybe I will have more right to be impatient. When I do my leg exercises I see the bruises that still remain. When they are gone maybe I will have more right to push myself into a full schedule.
O God, deliver us from evil.
I listen to the news and I shudder. War. Crime. Lust. Drugs. Disease. Riots. One cannot listen to a news report and not be aware of the evil with which we are surrounded. Unfortunately good news is not news, and that in itself is part of the evil, for there is good news, love, and marital fidelity, and friendship, and compassion, and concern. All these combat the evil and should not be ignored or forgotten.
It is an odd quirk of the human memory that it is especially vivid and retentive during times of pain and stress. I remember watching the evening news one day after coming home from the hospital where my husband was dying. Tucked in with all the bad news was a charming story of a major highway in Tokyo that was completely shut down for the length of time it took a mother duck and her ducklings to cross the eight lanes on their way to water. There must have been many delightful little slices of life on the news since then, but that is the one I remember.
The Rock That Is Higher Page 13
