And this is the man who housed the second person of the Trinity.
But how? The impossibility bothered me, for a long time, and stopped bothering me only when I could rest with joy in ‘the mystery of the word made flesh.’
There are analogies which help me to understand the first lines of John’s Gospel. There are times when all of us willingly (and sometimes unwillingly) limit ourselves for the sake of others. When my children were little I was hungry for adult conversation, for discussion of abstract ideas and concepts, but until they neared their teens our conversations had to be somewhat limited, even on our excursions up to nearby Mohawk Mountain to thrash out the problems of life and death. So I was only a part of my fuller self, but that part was still me; it was not something other than Madeleine, but it was not the whole Madeleine.
The week of Hugh’s parents’ golden wedding anniversary I was certainly a different, and perhaps better, Madeleine than the usual one, but the self I brought to Tulsa was still part of the whole me.
Analogies are never completely accurate. The willing limiting of the second person of the Trinity is far greater, and I struggled with it in writing, in Mary’s voice, speaking these words from Ephesus when she was old and near time to die.
Now that I have spent these years in this strange place
of luminous stone and golden light and dying gods,
now that I have listened to the wild music
of given-son, John, I begin to understand.
In the beginning I was confused and dazzled,
a plain girl, unused to talking with angels.
Then there was the hard journey to Bethlehem,
and the desperate search for a place to stay,
my distended belly ripe and ready for deliverance.
In the dark of the cave, night air sweet with the moist breath
of the domestic beasts, I laughed, despite my pains,
at their concern. Joseph feared that they would frighten me
with their anxious stampings and snortings,
but their fear was only for me, and not because of me.
One old cow, udders permanently drooping,
lowed so with my every contraction
that my own birthing cries could not be heard,
and so my baby came with pain and tears and much hilarity.
Afterwards, swaddled and clean, he was so small and tender
that I could not think beyond my present loving
to all this strange night pointed. The shepherds came,
clumsy and gruff, and knelt and bought their gifts,
and, later on, the Kings; and all I knew was marvel.
His childhood was sheer joy to me. He was merry and loving,
moved swiftly from laughters to long, unchildlike silences.
The years before his death were bitter to taste.
I did not understand, and sometimes thought that it was he
who had lost sight of the promise of his birth.
His death was horrible. But now I understand
that death was not his sacrifice, but birth.
It was not the cross which was his greatest gift;
it was his birth which must have been, for him,
most terrible of all. Think. If I were to be born,
out of compassion, as one of the small wood lice
in the doorsill of our house, limit myself to the comprehension
of those small dark creatures, unable to know sea or sun or song
or John’s bright words; to live and die thus utterly restricted,
it would be as nothing, nothing to the radiant Word
coming to dwell, for man, in man’s confined and cabined flesh.
This was the sacrifice, this the ultimate gift of love.
I thought once that I loved. My love was hundredfold less
than his, than is the love of the wood lice to mine,
and even here is mystery, for who dares limit love?
And has he not, or will he not, come to the wood lice
as he came to man? Does he not give his own self
to the grazing cattle, the ear of corn, the blazing sun,
the clarion moon, the drop of rain that falls into the sea?
His compassion is infinite, his sacrifice incomprehensible,
breaking through the darkness of our loving-lack.
Now I am old and sight and thought grow dim, limbs slow.
Oh, my son, who was and is and will be, my night draws close.
Come, true light which taketh away the sin of the world,
and bring me home. My hour is come. Amen.
I seek for God that he may find me because I have learned, empirically, that this is how it works. I seek: he finds. The continual seeking is the expression of the hope for a creator great enough to care for every particular atom and sub-atom of his creation, from the greatest galaxy to the smallest farandolae. Because of my particular background I see the coming together of macrocosm and microcosm in the Eucharist, and I call this Creator: God, Father; but no human being has ever called him by his real name, which is great and terrible and unknown, and not to be uttered by mortal man. If inadvertently my lips framed the mighty syllables, entire galaxies might explode.
As I read the Old and New Testaments I am struck by the awareness therein of our lives being connected with cosmic powers, angels and archangels, heavenly principalities and powers, and the groaning of creation. It’s too radical, too uncontrolled for many of us, so we build churches which are the safest possible places in which to escape God. We pin him down, far more painfully than he was nailed to the cross, so that he is rational and comprehensible and like us, and even more unreal.
And that won’t do. That will not get me through death and danger and pain, nor life and freedom and joy.
There is little evidence for faith in God in the world around me. Centuries ago a man whose name is unknown to me cried out, “If God were one whit less than he is, he dare not put us in a world that carries so many arguments against him.”
And, if I take the stories of the Bible seriously, when God’s people turn from him for too long, he withdraws. He has not answered my knock for a long time, and this is beginning to make me angry. Why isn’t he there when I need him so desperately? So I write him another
LOVE LETTER
I hate you, God.
Love, Madeleine.
I write my message on water
and at bedtime I tiptoe upstairs
and let it flow under your door.
When I am angry with you
I know that you are there
even if you do not answer my knock
even when your butler opens the door an inch
and flaps his thousand wings in annoyance
at such untoward interruption
and says the master is not at home.
I love you, Madeleine,
Hate, God.
(This is how I treat my friends, he said to one great saint.
No wonder you have so few, Lord, she replied.)
I cannot turn the other cheek
it takes all the strength I have
to keep from hitting back
the soldiers bayonet the baby
the little boys trample the old woman
the gutters are filled with groans
while pleasure-seekers knock each other down
to get their tickets stamped first.
I’m turning in my ticket
and my letter of introduction
you’re supposed to do the knocking.
How can I write to you
to tell you that I’m angry
when I’ve been given the wrong address
and I don’t even know your right name?
I take hammer and nails
and tack my message on two crossed pieces of wood.
Dear God,
is it too much to ask you
to bother to be?
Just show your hindquarters
and let me hear you roar.
Love,
Madeleine.
I have often been told that when one first turns to God, one is greeted with brilliant Yes answers to prayers. For a long time, that was true for me. But then, when he has you hooked, he starts to say No. This has, indeed, been my experience. But it has been more than a No answer lately; after all, No is an answer. It is the silence, the withdrawal, which is so devastating. The world is difficult enough with God; without him it is a hideous joke.
The Trinity is unity in diversity; the Trinity is our model for Community.
What happened?
I turn again to that time when there was war in heaven, and Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. This is indeed a dark parable, this story of the breaking of the Original Community. Does it go as far back as the Big Bang? Or even further?
Once upon a time, back in kairos, so long ago that very likely it was before time, that strangeness where there wasn’t even once upon a time, long before man was made and Adam was called to name the birds and the beasts, the most beautiful and bright of all the angels rebelled against the love of God, and his rebellion was put down by the Archangel Michael and his angels. But Michael’s victory was only partial, at least for us human beings, because the bright angel walks our earth, lording it over us, bringing evil and distortion and hate in his wake, and even managing to make us believe that his power of non-ness doesn’t exist.
It does. He does. If I can understand the truth of Love only through the Incarnation, so also I can understand destruction and annihilation only in particular. Satan is reasonable, tolerant, beautiful. If he were unreasonable, implausible, ugly, he would have no attraction for us; he would not be the Tempter, the one we pray that we will not be led to. He is immensely attractive and kind. He wants everybody to be happy, right here, right now. He can alleviate all poverty, cure all disease, and give us all the comforts of technocracy. As for free will, who needs that? Free will is a beastly burden a cruel creator has put on us, a creator whose ways are not our ways. If we have any sense at all we will follow the successful Prince of this Earth and reject the Lord of the Universe.
Free will is indeed a strange gift, fit only for the very mature. Why did he give it to us when we weren’t ready for it?
When our three children were little, we had friends with one small boy, handsome, though tending to blubber because he ate nothing but ice cream. In the glow of their adoration for this creature of theirs, his parents gave him free will. He was allowed to decide what he should eat (ice cream), what he should wear, when he should go to bed. When there was a family decision to be made, they turned to this child, when he was three, four, five years old, to make it. As we watched this little boy turning into such a loathsome brat that our children groaned when they were forced to play with him, it seemed to us that his parents were not, in fact, giving him the free will they were talking about; they were making him God. They adored him as only God should be adored. They turned to him for decisions with the kind of expectation one should not have of any human being, and certainly not of a child.
So it became clear to us that this small boy was ending up with no free will at all. Somehow or other, the loving parents had swallowed one of the Tempter’s hooks, and the child was given total self-indulgence, which is far from free will.
He still tempts. The ancient, primordial battle to destroy Community, to shatter Trinity, still continues. Creation still groans with the pain of it. Like it or not, we’re caught in the middle.
Satan is the great confuser. I’m sure he whispered sweet reasonableness into the ears of the men who decided to build a city, and in the city put a tower that would reach heaven.
But the tower fell and they were divided and broken. Up until the time of the Tower of Babel, the children of Israel lived in close-knit communities. Each person, great or small, had an intrinsic share in the life of the community. When one suffered, everyone suffered. Oh, yes, there was sin and evil and too much wine and conniving and all the bad things which come from fallen man in a fallen world. But the paradoxes of human nature were still accepted. And wherever man went on the face of the known earth he spoke the same language; everybody could understand everybody else. It wasn’t like that first Pentecost when everyone in that large group gathered together was suddenly able to understand each other’s language as had not been possible since the days before the building of the Tower of Babel.
God broke his people at Babel and I doubt if I will ever understand this. But one of Satan’s dirtiest devices is to promise infinite understanding to finite creatures. And so he has promised us success, and his success is delusion, and the breaking apart of community.
Those early communities of the Hebrew children were not successes. The people bickered. They turned away from God and worshipped a golden calf. They coveted each others’ wives. But they knew that they could not get along without each other. They accepted their interdependence. When they turned away from God and built their temples to Baal they knew how to repent and to say I’m sorry.
It is far more difficult for us to say I’m sorry today than it was for the Hebrew children, because to say I’m sorry implies admission of failure, and we live in a culture where failure is not tolerated. In school, for instance, a child is not allowed to repeat a grade more than a certain number of times; then he is automatically moved ahead, ready or not. A black student whose high-school education, to our shame, simply has not been adequate to prepare him for college must be admitted anyhow, and given a diploma, which thereby becomes a worthless piece of paper. Some of my college-age friends are discouraged from taking a course outside their field which nevertheless may fascinate them, because they may not get the high grade they need on their record if they’re to go on to graduate school, and so they take the less challenging course in order to get the high grade which no longer has any real meaning.
When Hugh and the children and I were living in the country year round, I learned a lot about failure and about community, almost in the way that those old children of Israel learned about community.
I had already begun to understand failure as creative in terms of my marriage, and this understanding was tested with the coming of children. There’s an odd law about families; they tend to grow; it may be dogs, or cats, or babies, or birds, or plants, but families need to blossom. Our family grew in all kinds of ways, for Hugh taught me early that a family with closed doors is not a family.
During our Crosswicks years, one of our baby sitters, aged thirteen, came for an evening and stayed two years. And because we lived outside the village, playmates for our children had to be fetched and carried, and we usually had at least three extra for the weekends.
Then there was the community of the church, the white-pillared, tall-spired church which stood directly across from our General Store in the center of the village. When we moved to Crosswicks, neither of us had been in church for a long time. For good reasons, of course. We found more real community in the theatre than we did in city churches. The church seemed to hold up to us a God who had nothing to do with the stars which crackled above us on cold nights, or with the frogs whose deep clunking announced that the iron earth would thaw and pussy willows come and the geese honk high and wild.
But our village church wasn’t really like a city church. I’m not even sure that it was like what most of us think of as church. It was the center of the village geographically, and became so in our lives, though it had no relation to a social club, although it was the largest part of our social lives, too. In those days, before I’d ever heard of ecumenism, the Congregational Church in our village was truly ecumenical. The war was not long over; there was not one of us who had not in some way been touched by the war, participated in it, either abroad or at home, lost people we loved in it. Two of the women who were to become my good friends were English war brides. We all knew that mankind, left to its own devices, makes slums and battlefields and insane asylums, and many of us had
settled in the little village looking for something else, something which bore little resemblance to the success-oriented cities and suburbs. Our doctor had deliberately chosen, when the war was over and he could leave the army, to be a village general practitioner instead of a big city specialist. Hugh and I, too, had rejected the values of the city, being too young and untutored to understand that city or country has little to do with the symboles by which we live.
We soon found ourselves swept into a tight-knit little band of struggling Christians. There were six or eight couples of us, all about the same age, all with small children, who threw our lives into the life of the church, guided by the young minister who, also, with his wife and baby, had left a big city church, and come to this small green and pleasant land. It was within the community of these people who sang in the choir, taught Sunday School, visited the sick, that I first experienced, without realizing it consciously, a truly Christian community. I doubt if I will ever experience it in the same way again, not only because I am now grandmother as well as mother, but because there are few villages in the Eastern United States as small as ours was then; it, too, has grown; we now have five hundred telephones and our phone number has had to be changed and I am finding it hard to remember the new one.
I understand the depth of our commitment better now than I did then. A community, to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it. We knew that we were struggling to be Christian, and that we often failed, and we knew that we couldn’t be community on our own, and so the grace of community was given to us.
Today I must seek community in a different way. Traveling along the fjords of Norway one autumn, Hugh and I passed many villages with no more than a dozen houses, and boathouses instead of garages; and I looked at these little clusters with longing, because such a village cannot exist without being a community. But in life as I must live it today, community must have a new form. I do not know what it will be, and I suspect that I won’t know until memory tells me that I am having it right now without knowing it, just as we were unselfconscious about it when we lived year-round in Crosswicks.
I sympathize with experiments in communes, but any time we try to go back to the Garden it can mean being led by a Manson.
The Irrational Season Page 20
