Then there is the waking dream. I hope I never outgrow my need for daydreams, for they are a part of the healthy psyche—as long as we do not confuse them with reality.
—
Far different is the relaxing control which comes as a gift. It is the goal of contemplation, and although it can be sought consciously, it cannot be attained consciously. When it happens it is given to us. And sometimes it is given to us in surprising ways and in surprising places and when we are not even looking for it.
One Sunday in July each summer, Hugh and I take the worship service for the Congregational church in the village, and to be asked to do this, and to do it, is a special privilege. Our two younger children were baptized in this church. I have cried, laughed, learned, questioned in this church. To work on a sermon to be preached from the old wooden lectern is probably a more demanding task than to prepare one to be preached from the great stone pulpit of the Cathedral in New York.
Last summer after the church service I said to Hugh, “Go on and get the paper. I want to walk home down the lane.” We were having friends in for dinner and I wanted to pick wild flowers.
It was a perfect July day, the sky high and blue with a few fair-weather clouds; warm, but not humid, with a gentle, northwesterly breeze. I ambled down the lane, pausing to pick flowers as I saw them, daisies, buttercups, and my mind happily drifted with the breeze. And I was not thinking at all. And then I moved, was moved, into what I suppose would be called an altered state of being. It is, when it happens, a far deeper state of being than the one we live in normally. Everything is more real. The sheer beauty of creation has something of the fresh miraculousness of Eden. Wonder and awareness are heightened. Friendship and love are deeper and richer than anything we encounter in ordinary living, and that is indeed a strong statement, for friendship and love are what make the wheels go round.
When I am returned to myself, as it were, then the glory fades, and once it is over it cannot really be recalled nor described. But it is glory, and it is a way of being that I believe we were meant to know. The loss of it is one of the results of the Fall. These glimpses of reality are not given frequently; we could not often bear such intensity. I suspect that this gift of reality is a gift of the deepest kind of prayer. I know that it cannot be sought consciously, that like all prayer which is out on the other side of words it comes from the infinite grace of God. It is not easily talked about, not only because it is impossible to describe, but because in this frenetic world it is neither easy nor customary to pause and listen to God, and when we talk about people having visions, we’re more apt to think they’re ready for the mental institution than that they are receiving a message from the Lord.
But we live by revelation. Paul writes in his second letter to the people of Corinth about being taken up to the third heaven, whether in his own body or out of it he is not sure. And immediately after this glorious experience he complains that he has a thorn in the flesh, and that he has asked God not once, but three times, to take it away from him. And the answer is, “No, Paul. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”
Ecstasy is frequently followed by pain, and perhaps it is the joy that gives us the courage to bear the pain, and to experience the pain as birth pain, and to offer our weakness to our Maker, knowing that it can be turned to el’s strength.
We were meant to be finely-tuned receivers, but we have created our own static, the messages are no longer clear; we are losing our ability to tune in, an ability we desperately need to renew.
But sometimes the gift is given, as it was as I walked down the old dirt road and my human feet trod glory.
And the Lord came to Abraham in a vision, saying, “Fear not, Abraham. I am your shield and your exceedingly great reward.”
And Abraham said, “Lord God, what will you give me, seeing I go childless?”
And the Lord brought him out and said, “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if you are able to count the number of them: and he said, so shall your seed be.”
God does not hesitate to repeat something if it is important.
And Abraham believed in the Lord, and el counted it to him for righteousness.
Abraham believed, and Abraham did not believe, because, later on, God spoke to Abraham about his wife, Sarah, and said,
“I will bless you, and give you a son of her; yes, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations, kings of people shall come from her.”
Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed, and said in his heart, “Shall a child be born to him that is a hundred years old? And shall Sarah, who is ninety, bear a child?”
And God said, “Sarah your wife shall bear you a child indeed, and you shall call his name Isaac.”
Isaac. Itzak. Laughter. Where was the joke?
The story flows on. One day Abraham
sat in the tent door in the heat of the day, and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by him.
Abraham and his three angelic guests. For the ancient Hebrew an angel was not only a messenger of God, an angel was an aspect of God, was God. So those angels were an icon of the Trinity, the Trinity which was, from the beginning, before the beginning, and will be at the fulfillment of all things.
One of the greatest thrills for me was to see in Saint Basil’s Church in Moscow that magnificent icon of Abraham and his three guests. There was the Trinity, sitting at the table, with bread and wine, an affirmation of the dignity of all creation, and the magnificent mystery of the Creator. And the affirmation was all the more poignant because Saint Basil’s Church, with its multicoloured onion domes, like something out of a fairy tale, stands in Red Square, in a state which denies the existence of God. (I did not know until we reached Moscow that red and beautiful are the same word in Old Russian, and that Red Square was so named in the fifteenth century.)
So I looked at the icon of the Trinity and thought of Sarah, who was summoned from the tent. She, too, is told that she is going to bear a child, and she, too, thinks that the idea is hilarious. It cannot have been happy laughter. Sarah had wanted a baby for a long time, so long that a baby was no longer even a possibility. It must have seemed a cruel joke indeed that now that it was too late, now that she had given Abraham a child by Hagar, her maid, and had been scorned, now, after all these years of hope and disappointment, she is told the incredible—that her withered womb is going to ripen and open and she is going to have a son.
And she does. For man it is impossible; for God, nothing is impossible.
(“I didn’t laugh,” Sarah protested. “Oh, yes, you did,” insisted the Lord.)
And so, despite incredulous laughter, Sarah conceives and bears a child, and his name is called Isaac.
God’s ways are not our ways. Often we would like them to be our ways. Each generation in turn creates its own god in its own image, thereby hoping to tame all Glory in order to make it comprehensible. It is the attempt to make a poor photocopy of God which produces all the confusion about God’s sex, thereby further confounding us about our own sexuality. And we are as confused as were the ancient Romans in the frantic centuries before Rome fell. To bear a child is considered by some people to be degrading (like reading the Morning Office in the bathroom?). Pleasure becomes more important than joy. Transitory thrills are offered as the cure for boredom, restlessness, and that discontent which is surely not divine.
Abraham and Sarah were simpler than we are in many ways, as a nomadic people, close to the rhythms of the earth, dependent on community; one did not make it alone in the desert. There the stars at night were like the stars at sea, undimmed by city lights. They must at times have been overwhelming.
I like my creature comforts, my stove and refrigerator and washing machine, and certainly, oh, most certainly, my electric typewriter, and even the black felt pen I used on the ship as I began to set down these thoughts on the back of the ship’s daily newsletter. But technology, for all its obvious advantages, has its limitations, and has dimmed our sens
e of the numinous. At Crosswicks when the power goes out, as it does in winter ice storms or summer thunder storms, and the rooms are lit only by firelight and candlelight, then the darkness comes alive, as it must have been alive for Abraham and Sarah. Shadows move, stretch up the walls, shrink down again. We cannot quite see what that dark shape is, lurking in the corner. The fear of darkness is supposed to be an acquired fear, but I suspect that we acquire it early, inheriting it from our father, Abraham. The old Scots were totally serious when they included these words in their litany: “From ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, the good Lord deliver us.”
Abraham and Sarah knew the fear of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night (they’d never have denied their existence by banning books which mention them); and they had absolute trust that the good Lord would deliver them, even when they laughed at el’s outrageousness. For even when God spoke to them in the form of three angels, el was present, tangibly present, giving el’s creatures free will, and then poking a celestial nose in, poking a finger in the pie, being part of the story, which is, after all, God’s story.
But if it is el’s story, where do we come in? What happens to our free will?
There are many people who believe that we have no free will at all, that everything is predetermined. Each event leads to another, unchangeable event. Ultimately everything will wind down. We will die. The universe will flicker out.
Then, among those who tolerate the thought of free will, there is an increasing tendency to believe that free will dooms us to failure. That when God created us free, free to make wrong choices, as Adam and Eve made wrong choices, el made our failure inevitable.
But why? If we are free to fail, we are also free not to fail. We are free to love God, and to be obedient to el’s will. Our free will is most evident when we are being co-creators with God. We may have little free will about outward events, granted. There was nothing most of us could do with our free will to stop the eruption of war in the Falklands. We cannot stop the fighting in the Middle East. Our free will lies only in our response. To be able to respond is to be human, and I learn about this human free will from the great characters in Scripture.
Genesis is a book of contradiction and paradox, just as our lives and thoughts are full of contradiction and paradox. Indeed I am beginning to feel that without contradiction and paradox I cannot get anywhere near that truth which will set me free.
Abraham and Sarah, leaving the comforts of home and going, in their old age, out into the wilderness, were following God’s way, definitely not the world’s way. In the New Testament it is spelled out even more clearly: We are to be in the world, but not of it.
In New York, far more than when we are at Crosswicks, we cannot escape being surrounded by the world, and we are constantly offered the world’s temptations, sometimes in extreme forms. When someone asked Hugh where the hot new night spots were his response was laughter; the hot night spots are no temptation for us. But there are other, subtler temptations. The more brittle women’s libbers (who have lost a view of true liberation) are terrified to accept their fair share of man, made in the image of God, male and female, and abdicate their responsibility by insisting on being their “own woman,” and fulfilling their potential by seeking pleasure, or success, or money, at any cost. I am seriously advised that I have really not been fulfilled because I have limited myself to one man, and that any personal problems I may have are the result of this limitation. Or, they may be the result of my parents’ overprotectiveness; or, perhaps, their underprotectiveness. If I listen, my free will becomes undermined. Or rather, if I listen without selectivity. Women are supposed to be themselves. Her true self is what Jesus made Mary Magdalene when he freed her of possession by seven devils. She became her own woman by completely surrendering herself to the Lord; and it was to Magdalene that Christ first showed himself after the Resurrection.
Keeping myself for one man does not mean that I do not have deep and fruitful friendships with other men. These friendships strengthen rather than lessen, my love for the one man with whom I made my promises. And the same thing which is true for me is true for him.
We are supposed to free ourselves from unhealthy ties to our parents, childish overdependencies. But we are not supposed to free ourselves from genuine love and concern.
Pleasure in itself is not a bad thing; it is a good thing. But when we seek it frantically, we lose it. One of my favourite pleasures is soaking my weary bones in a hot bath. It is particularly a pleasure because when our children were very young, and we were living in Crosswicks year round, running the general store in the village, we didn’t have enough money to pay for the oil to heat the water for regular tubs for the entire family. So about twice a week I would fill the tub and put one of the children in with me. As soon as we could afford private baths, it occurred to my children that this was one time when they could be with me alone, and frequently one of my daughters would ask, “Mother, can I come talk to you while you take your bath?” And now my grandchildren do the same thing. So when I get into a hot bath, all by myself, it is a privilege, and one I have never yet taken for granted. And it is all the more special because it has not always been my privilege. It is, I trust, an innocent pleasure, but it is surely a pleasure.
It reminds me of a young woman I met at a writers’ conference. She was a successful writer for magazines all across the country, and was leading the nonfiction workshop. In awe and amazement, the second day of the conference, she said, “Last night was the first night I have ever spent in a room all by myself.” She had slept in a room with her sister until she was married, and ever since then in a room with her husband, whose work did not take him away from home. To spend a night all by yourself for the first time! What a pleasure! So is ice cold lemonade on a hot day, or running across the sand into the water, or curling up under the eiderdown on a cold night.
Seeking pleasure as the ultimate good, however, leads to all the porno houses on Times Square in New York, which once was the glamorous Great White Way of the theater, but which is now ugly and shoddy. The pursuit of pleasure when pushed to the present extremes leads to perversion and violence. Instead of affirming the dignity of human beings, pleasure misused turns us into things to be used and tossed away.
Abraham and Sarah had no time for this kind of pleasure, nor did our forbears. Staying alive took all the energy the human creature possessed. The people who built our home, Crosswicks, around two hundred twenty-five years ago, worked from morning to night. The great beams of the house were hewn from forests of virgin pine. About four miles from the house is the last stand of the old trees left in the state, and it makes me understand Longfellow’s lines:
This is the forest primaeval,
The towering pines and the hemlocks.
Both men and women were essential to survival. Candles had to be made; meals cooked, wool spun, meat salted. Simply living was a full-time job. Pleasures did not have to be frenetically looked for; an evening of singing and dancing for the entire community brought great joy.
Let me not sentimentalize our forbears, for they were human beings, as pragmatic as Abraham passing Sarah off as his sister, as shaken by terror of great darkness, as stubborn and self-centered as the men and women of Scripture. But perhaps they were blessed in not having time for massage parlors and adult bookstores and nervous breakdowns, nor time to spend on worrying about self-fulfillment and all the other self-indulgences which come with too much spare time; we all need some time for ourselves, some quiet be-ing time, but too much time, like too much of anything brings trouble.
The paradox is that self-surrender instead of being a denial of personal pleasure brings with it the gift of joy which is to be found in true pleasure. Sarah had to let go her bitter laughter and surrender herself before she could conceive Isaac and receive God’s gift of true laughter.
But paradox and contradiction were no surprise to Abraham and Sarah. They were not surprised to see angels,
even though they laughed at their messages. They knew how to get themselves out of the way in order to listen. What we call contemplative prayer was an ordinary and essential part of their lives.
In the Western world in the past several centuries we have denied ourselves this kind of total communion with the Creator because we have been afraid of it. Not just we, as individuals, but we in the corporate body of the church, where the tendency has been to sweep the numinous under the rug and pretend it isn’t there. Many students ask me about Zen methods of contemplation, about Hinduism, about Sufi, and are astonished to hear that we Christians have a heritage of contemplative prayer without our own scriptural tradition.
The methods of contemplative prayer are similar in all traditions. Sit quietly, preferably comfortably, so that your body works for you, rather than against you. The fourteenth century mystic, Richard Rolle, said that he liked best to sit, “because I knew that I longer lasted…than going, or standing, or kneeling. For…sitting I am most at rest, and my heart most upward.”
One of my most-loved places for this kind of prayer is a large glacial rock on which I stretch out, flat on my back, so that I can feel that I am part of the turning of the planet, so that rock and I merge, becoming part of the energy of creation.
Having found the physical context, breathe slowly, rhythmically, deeply. Fit the words of your mantra to this rhythm. And don’t be afraid of the word, mantra. One young college student came to me full of self-righteous indignation, saying that the use of a mantra was forbidden in the Bible.
“Where?” I asked.
She did not know. But it was there.
Jesus warned us against vain repetition. But allowing the name of Jesus to be part of our life rhythm is never vain unless we try to take credit for it.
“But the Bible says a mantra…”
And It Was Good Page 11
