At dinner, always a communal affair, one of the grownups would talk a little about the enormous privileges of freedom still open to Americans, and we would all hold hands to say grace, and we took seriously, in our small community, our American heritage.
But the world has changed. Sparklers are outlawed. We’ve had Vietnam and assassinations and Watergate. And apart from a Bicentennial year, we barely note the fourth. There is an ambiguity about the holiday which embarrasses us.
But it reminds me, with an unexpected jolt each year, that we are still at war, that creation still groans with the strain of it.
But the growing of the garden is on our side. The plashing of the brook is on our side. The green of grass and the brilliance of flowers and the song of the birds are on our side.
In Dragons in the Waters an old gentlewoman from South Carolina is rather unexpectedly in a Quiztano Indian village in Venezuela. In the morning before dawn she arises and walks across the greensward to the lake’s edge:
Umar Xanai was there before her, alone, sitting in Charles’s favorite position.
The old woman sat down silently, slightly to one side and behind him. Around her she could sense the sleeping village. Someone was moving on the porch of one of the Caring Places. Soon Dragonlake would be awake. All around her she heard bird song. A fish flashed out of the lake and disappeared beneath the dark waters. Above her the stars dimmed and the sky lightened.
When the sun sent its first rays above the mountain, Umar Xanai rose and stretched his arms upward. He began to chant. Miss Leonis could not understand the velvet Quiztano words, but it seemed to her that the old chieftan was encouraging the sun in its rising, urging it, enticing it, giving the sun every psychic aid in his power to lift itself up out of the darkness and into the light. When the great golden disc raised itself clear of the mountain the chanting became a triumphal, joyful song.
At the close of the paean of praise the old man turned to the old woman and bent down to greet her with the three formal kisses.
She asked, “You are here every morning?”
He nodded, smiling. “It is part of my duties as chief of the Quitzanos.”
“To help the sun rise?”
“That is my work.”
“It would not rise without you?”
“Oh, yes, it would rise. But as we are dependent on the sun for our crops, for our lives, it is our courtesy to give the sun all the help in our power—and our power is considerable.”
“I do not doubt that.”
“We believe,” the old man said quietly, “that everything is dependent on everything else. The sun does not rise in the sky in loneliness; we are with him. The moon would be lost in isolation if we did not greet her with song. The stars dance together, and we dance with them.”
Thou also shall light my candle, sings the psalmist. The Lord my God shall make my darkness to be light.
To sing this is already to choose sides.
To look for community instead of cocktail-party relationships is part of choosing sides in this vast, strange battle. To say, “I’m sorry”; to be silent; to say “I love you,” “I care.” It is these little things that are going to make the difference. For God chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, the weak to overthrow the strong. Out of failure he brings triumph. Out of the grave he births life.
It is difficult for me not to make impossible demands on my communities as I sometimes make them on myself. It is difficult for me to accept that there is still war in heaven, and that I must join the battle lines on one side or the other, because the wars of the world’s history have confused me about battle lines. It would be easy to fall into the Manichaean heresy, where good and evil were born simultaneously and have been battling since the beginning. But that takes away the Godness of God, and I can’t live without God as one, God as all. There was war in heaven, part of God’s creation turned against him, and like it or not, we are caught in it and we have to choose creation or destruction; and I might sometimes teeter on the edge of despair did there not shine for me that light in the darkness which the darkness cannot put out.
It is difficult to accept that all my beloved communities are going to die, and that even while they exist there are incredible spaces between human beings, even the closest. And, despite all my urgings toward community, I will always be, like Abraham, a wanderer, far from home. But the people who are most aware of their own impermanence are the most able to throw wide the doors of heart and hearth to the stranger, to hear his message, receive his blessing.
To make community misunderstood is a powerful weapon of the Destroyer—to promise permanence, to insist on perfection, to strangle freedom, so that instead of having community, we have a concentration camp.
Crosswicks may be noisy and on occasion extremely untidy, but it has never, thank God, remotely resembled a concentration camp. And it has taught me about Trinity, that unity in diversity which has been mouthed so often that it is now part of the jargon and has become as empty as meaningful and relevant, but it’s still the kind of oneness I mean. The kind which comes when our wildly diverse family is gathered about the dinner table and Bion and Hugh differ noisily (within this unity) as to whether we’ll eat entirely by candlelight or turn on one electric light bulb. The kind which I have known, and Hugh still knows, in the theatre, where everybody is working together to bring a play to life. The kind I know when Alan and I play piano and violin, respectively and together, even the cacophony of our invented Bartók weaving its Trinitarian joy.
3 = 1.
1 is 3.
And this is good.
And this is God.
11 … Setter and Swallow
The Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Pentecost, all speak to me in the same luminous language. They are all lit with the same incredible gold light. And the story of Nathanael is also in a brilliant tongue, the language of the dark parable which cannot be comprehended by sunside alone, and I am not at all surprised that it is found in the first chapter of John’s Gospel.
Once upon a time there was a man whose name was Nathanael. Jesus called Philip to follow him, and Philip went to Nathanael, and told him that he had found the one for whom they sought, Jesus of Nazareth. Rational Nathanael replied dubiously, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” Philip replied, “Come and see!”
Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and said, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.”
Nathanael said, “How did you know me?”
Jesus answered, “Before Philip called you, while you were sitting under the fig tree, I saw you.”
Nathanael, his reason knocked out from under him, replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.”
One evening I was talking about this story to Hugh, and he said, “I don’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“What was so extraordinary about Jesus seeing Nathanael under the fig tree? Why would that make Nathanael say he was the Son of God?”
“Oh—” I said, and remembered and told Hugh about the fig tree in my grandmother’s back yard in North Florida. When I was visiting her when I was a little girl and had had too much of the grownups and of the Florida heat, I would go out in the yard, smeared with lavender oil to keep the insects away, and lie in the cool shade under the fig tree and read until someone came out and called me in. Whoever it was had to call; I couldn’t be seen in the deep shade of the fig leaves. “So it was extraordinary that Jesus saw Nathanael under the fig tree. He probably was sitting there just because it was private and he couldn’t be seen.”
“Well, maybe.”
Nathanael, in any event, was astonished.
Jesus answered him, “Because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree you believe? You’ll see greater things than this. I tell you in truth that you shall see Heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”
For Nathanael this was a moment of total reality, a moment when reasonable, ch
ronological time was broken open, and he glimpsed real time, kairos, and was never the same again.
But that once upon a time two thousand years ago might equally well be today. I suspect that most of us are very like Nathanael, eminently reasonable people. Like Nathanael we see things the way they are—at least we think we do. And it’s jolting to discover that our reasonable view of things just isn’t the real view. When this happens to me, and it often does, I remember Nathanael, and try once again to be like him, not the reasonable Nathanael safe and hidden under the fig tree, but the astonished Nathanael who was told that he would see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.
He must have been frightened. How could he, how can any of us visualize angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man? When I try I get a mindscape, powerful though not very visual, of Jacob’s ladder with the angels of God ascending and descending superimposed on Jacob himself wrestling throughout the night with the angel. And I get a vision of a special kind of brilliance, not golden, but like the light of the moon shining on diamond-coated branches and twigs after an ice storm. But that’s not it. That’s not even a glimpse of angels ascending and descending upon the Son of man.
And yet Jesus promised Nathanael that he was going to see them. And I ask myself exactly when was it that Nathanael actually came to see this promised vision? If I had to make a guess I’d say that it was probably on Good Friday when the sky darkened and the tree whose seed was buried with the first Adam held the second Adam. The old tradition that the cross on which Jesus was crucified stood on the same place, and grew from the very seed of the tree from which Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and that Adam’s skull (calvarius) is still there, under that tree, seems to fit in with the opening of Nathanael’s eyes.
How can I see in the same way that Nathanael saw his extraordinary vision, a vision which had in it the promise of resurrection? It isn’t easy to accept the fact that such a vision is more real, more true, than something within the realm of provable fact. But I’ll never accept it if I stay safely hidden under my fig tree, and I want the courage to move out of the shadows so that I may have my own glimpses of transfiguration.
As always, they may be very small things, so tiny that it seems presumptuous to set them down beside something so grand as angels ascending and descending. But they are moments of revelation for me, when suddenly sunside and nightside know each other. This summer there has been the amazing friendship of Timothy, the red Irish setter, and his swallow.
Timothy was three and a half years old when he came to us, and for those first three and a half years he had been beaten. Dog and child abuse in whatever form are mysterious horrors to me. When we got Tim he was approximately twenty-seven in people years, and we were not at all sure we were going to be able to help this miserable, terrified creature who crawled abjectly on his belly. But within twenty-four hours he began to walk upright, and to come sit on the floor by me and hold up his paw to be held. It took him nearly two weeks to learn that it was safe to walk by Hugh to get to me, because whoever had beaten him was evidently a man, and he was still afraid of all men. There are times when Tim is in so paw-holding a mood that Hugh could wish he still inspired a little awe in the big red creature.
He came to us in the early autumn, and by Thanksgiving he had learned that he was allowed to come without a personal invitation into the kitchen with Hugh and me in the evening, while we had a drink and I cooked dinner. The kitchen is large for a city apartment, large enough for two comfortable, if shabby, chairs, and Timothy quickly took over the larger and shabbier—he gets away with things no other dog of ours has been allowed to do. Bion’s first night home for the Thanksgiving holidays, he came out to the kitchen with us and sat comfortably in the old green chair. Tim poked his long red nose around the corner, ambled slowly across the kitchen, took a flying leap and landed, legs sprawling every which way, on Bion’s lap. After all, Bion was in his chair.
So we knew that there was hope for him. We’ve had him nearly four years now and he’s come a long way, but he’s still a neurotic creature full of fears. Any man with stick or cane makes him cringe with terror. And it isn’t a full year since he’s come to trust the world enough to wag his tail, and only this summer that he’s had the confidence to thump it on the floor.
For this summer Timothy has his swallow.
I think it was Bion who saw it first, but we’ve all seen it. Timothy will rush out to the big meadow, his once-timid tail waving ecstatically. He looks adoringly up at the sky, wagging, listening, and the swallow comes to him, flying very low, and then Tim will run along with the bird while it flies, back and forth, round and about, in great parabolas, all over the big meadow. Then the swallow will fly off and up, and Tim will stand looking upward, swishing his tail, and waiting for his friend to return.
It has been a great joy to us to watch this amazing friendship. Day after day they play together, and the game never palls. There is nothing of the stalker or hunter in Timothy’s actions when he is with the swallow. Occasionally he will accidentally flush a pheasant, and then his tail goes straight out and still, and one forepaw curves up and he points. But with his swallow, his tail never stops waving. The two of them are lion and lamb together for me, a foretaste of Isaiah’s vision. When I watch them playing together in the green and blue, it is a moment of transfiguration.
And it seems especially right that it should be shy, frightened, loving old Timothy rather than any of the other family dogs who are around Crosswicks during the summer. By and large they don’t even seem aware of what is going on, and have shown only the mildest interest in Tim’s atypical ecstatic behavior.
We often have friends visit us during the summer, and one weekend it was a family who live in our apartment building in the city. Their son was away at camp, but they came with their two little girls, the same ages as Léna and Charlotte, and their charming mop of a dog, Esau.
It was, despite showery weather, a lovely weekend. Between showers we went berrying, swimming in Dog Pond, walking down the lane. We ate and talked and were comfortable together. On Sunday afternoon when the sun came out we took the children and the dogs for a walk. It was much too wet to go through the high grasses and dripping bushes and brambles and trees to the brook, but we went down the lane and attacked some of the bittersweet which used to be a rare treasure, but which is now growing rampant and strangling the young trees. When we started back to the house we saw that Tim was already in the big meadow playing with his swallow friend. They were swooping about, Tim’s nose heavenward, his tail wagging in a frenzy of joy.
Esau, the little mop, saw it too, and unlike the other dogs wanted in on the game. We human beings were so enchanted with Tim and the swallow that we paid no attention to Esau, until Tim saw him and very definitely did not want any interference in his private game.
We all began to run, but they were halfway across the meadow.
Timothy is a big dog and Esau is a small one. If Tim had wanted to, he could have broken Esau’s neck with one shake.
The men with their longer legs reached the two dogs first. Bion, watching from the kitchen windows, said that it had looked to him as though Tim were simply standing over Esau, and evidently what he had been doing was simply keeping Esau away from his swallow. But he had drawn blood; there was a definite nick in Esau’s neck.
It was not a tragedy. But suddenly we were in a fallen world again. It was no longer lion and lamb in peace and amity. It was the world of battlefields and slums and insane asylums.
What did I expect?
Until the eschaton our moments of transfiguration are essentially flashes of brief glory. To want Tim and his swallow to live in Eden is like Peter wanting to build tabernacles around Jesus and Abraham and Moses.
But while Peter was speaking, foolishly trying to trap glory in a man-made tabernacle, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and they were afraid, and a voice came out of the cloud saying, “This is my beloved
son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.” And when they opened their eyes they saw Jesus as they were used to seeing him, Jesus of Nazareth, a man like themselves. And he told them not to tell anybody of the vision until the Son of man be risen from the dead.
Suddenly they saw him the way he was,
the way he really was all the time,
although they had never seen it before,
the glory which blinds the everyday eye
and so becomes invisible. This is how
he was, radiant, brilliant, carrying joy
like a flaming sun in his hands.
This is the way he was—is—from the beginning,
and we cannot bear it. So he manned himself,
came manifest to us; and there on the mountain
they saw him, really saw him, saw his light.
We all know that if we really see him we die.
But isn’t that what is required of us?
Then, perhaps, we will see each other, too.
Too often we don’t see each other. It takes something like Tim and the swallow, Tim and Esau, to open my eyes for a moment. When I watch Tim and his swallow now they are as beautiful as ever, and yet I watch them with a tinge of sorrow because we are still far from home.
When will we once again be one?
Not long after the episode of Tim and Esau, I was privileged to be given an experience of the kind of oneness seldom experienced. It was a spiritual oneness and helps me understand why the Song of Songs, that unabashedly physical love poem, is also the only language for spiritual love.
The Irrational Season Page 22
