“I do.” God help me, I do. Even when I don’t, I do.
(And that is the truth: Even when I don’t, I do.)
“You’ll pray for me?”
“Of course.” This means simply holding this young woman out (or in) to God’s love, and visualizing her as whole and healthy and beautiful.
The important thing about this conversation was that I was given the grace of affirming all that my books say at a time when that affirmation was needed. And not only by my young friend, by me, too.
Now, this young woman was not in any conservative sense of the word, a “practicing Christian.” But she asked for prayers, and that was enough, more than enough.
Jesus did not limit his love to those accepted by the establishment. He spoke with Samaritans, even making a Samaritan woman the protagonist of one of his parables, despite the fact that the Samaritans were the socially despised, the religiously untouchable. In that culture one didn’t take water from a woman in the casual way that Jesus did, and even less from a Samaritan woman. But he did.
If we Christians truly love one another, that love spreads out to include all the Samaritans and the Canaanites and unbelievers and worshippers of Baal and the unorthodox and the heterodox and even the Shiites and Khomeini and Idi Amin and Muammar Qaddafi—and the two men on trial in criminal court.
Perhaps we have been giving too many answers instead of asking questions, of ourselves, of each other, of God. Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?” sits more comfortably with me than Descartes’s “Je pense, donc je suis.”
The most brilliant people really don’t know very much. We will not move along on our journey if we are afraid to ask questions. What is my place in this glorious universe? Where shall I set my stone pillow to make an altar? Will there be a ram? Or a butterfly? What do you want me to do? How can I criticize less and love more? How can I show in my own life the loveliness of creativity? Can I call a Christian from another denomination less Christian than those in my own without further battering the broken bride of Christ? How do I help to heal and not to separate?
Never with pride. Never with being sure that I am right and everybody else is wrong.
There’s an old story of a student who went to a famous old rabbi and said, “Master, in the old days there were people who could see God. Why is it that nobody sees God nowadays?”
The old man answered, “My child, nowadays nobody can stoop so low.”
—
Why are we afraid of stooping so low? Didn’t the second person of the Trinity stoop lower than we can even conceive when he willingly relinquished all power and glory to come to earth as a human baby?
We find it difficult to understand that the magnificence and might of all Creation is also small and vulnerable. Isn’t the Creator supposed to be invulnerable? Isn’t that what used to be taught in seminary? If God can be hurt, what kind of protection can this suffering servant give us?
But God, in choosing to become incarnate, with all our human limitations, also chose the possibility of being hurt. Possibility? Probability? Inevitability? Those who are fully alive are also usually those who have been deeply wounded, and the God who came to us in Jesus of Nazareth was fully alive, with an awareness and a joy and a perceptiveness most of us can only wonder at. Along with the joy was a willingness to assume all of our human sufferings, which should make us look differently at our own pain.
Would I really be able to worship a God who was simply implacable power, and who was invulnerable? If I am hurt, I don’t turn for strength and help to someone who has never been hurt, but to someone who has, and who can therefore understand a little of what I am going through. The people I know who are the most invulnerable also tend to show the least compassion.
The kind of person I turn to is someone who has been strong enough to face pain when it comes—and it does come. Someone who faces it, endures it, and tries as hard as possible to go through it and come out on the other side. Someone whose urge for health is strong enough to hold on to wholeness even in the midst of suffering. And someone who manages to retain a sense of humour, who has the gift of laughter.
As these are the qualities I look for in another human being when I am in need of healing, so these are the qualities I look for in God.
And it is God who promises the Heavenly Banquet, the banquet which is for all of creation, for every single one of us, all us members of the jury, the two arrogant defendants, and their clever lawyers. We will all be changed in the twinkling of an eye (though that may be many thousands of years in human time), come to ourselves, even if it brings us bitter tears of self-revelation before we can turn to love.
To be in a state of unforgiveness is to know hell, at least in a small way. I know, because I’ve been there. It’s not easy to get out of hell, but it can be done, when we come to ourselves and turn to the source of all love.
Belief in hell is lack of faith, Berdyaev said to me in his book as I sat in the jury room. “Belief in hell is lack of faith because it is to attribute more power to Satan than to God.”
I know what Berdyaev was trying to say. He was emphasizing Satan’s ultimate downfall. In the meantime hell remains to be conquered. I believe in hell, but my faith in the power of Satan and the fallen angels is nowhere near as strong as my belief in the eternal and infinite power of the Creator. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, asks,
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
But then he makes a marvellous affirmation—
Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
Though Satan cannot win the final victory, during our lifetimes we will all experience the sting of death, the dark power of hell and the grave. But it is not the last word. It is God who has the last word!
We are all going to face God’s judgment, but we will not receive forensic judgment from the throne of heaven. Listen to the way judgment is referred to in these lines from Psalm 98:
Show yourselves joyful in the Lord, all you lands,
sing, rejoice, and give thanks.
Praise the Lord upon the harp, sing to the harp
with a psalm of thanksgiving.
With trumpets, and with horns, O show yourselves
joyful before the Lord, the King.
Let the sea make a noise and all that is in it;
the round world and all that dwell on it.
Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills
be joyful together before the Lord,
for he is come to judge the earth,
With righteousness shall he judge the world
and the peoples with his truth.
That sounds more as though we were preparing for a celebration than judgment, but isn’t that what judgment is really about? For the judgment of God does not falter. God is not going to abandon Creation, nor the people up for trial in criminal court, nor the Shiites nor the communists nor the warmongers, nor the greedy and corrupt people in high places, nor the dope pushers, nor you, nor me. Bitter tears of repentance may be shed before we can join the celebration, but it won’t be complete until we are all there.
The book of the prophet, Micah, ends with these words:
Who is a God like you, who pardons iniquity, and overlooks the transgressions of us all. He does not hold on to his anger, because he delights in mercy. He will have pity on us, and will subdue our faults, and will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. Grant Jacob your truth, and your mercy to Abraham, as you promised to our forbears from the days of old.
This is the God of Scripture, the God of forbearance, forgiveness, and unqualified love. We have been living in a world where we have viewed God and each other in a forensic way for too long, and it should be apparent that it is not working, and that it is not going to work. This forensic world is not a scriptural world, but a clever projection of the Tempter. It is not helping our traffic jams. It will not help the national debt. It will not help our peacemakers to keep the peace.
Our planet totters on the brink of disaster. Our only hope for peace, within our own hearts, and all over our small green earth, is for us to open ourselves to the judgment of God, that judgment that makes the waters and the hills to sing. For God’s judgment is atonement, at-one-ment, making us one with the Lord of love.
Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills
be joyful together before the Lord,
for he is come to judge the earth,
with righteousness shall he judge the world
and the peoples with his truth.
When I was a child nobody told me that I should read the Bible piously, so I read it just as I read Hans Christian Andersen and George Macdonald and books of fairy tales. I read it as story, great story, about fascinating and complex people called by God to do amazing things.
Perhaps it was a blessing that as a child I was not taken to Sunday school. I have met far too many people who have had to spend years in the difficult task of unlearning bad Sunday school teaching, who have found it almost impossible to get rid of the image of an angry God, out to punish them.
My church teaches that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation. What on earth do we mean by that?
I can affirm it only if I know what the Bible is, and what it is not. It is a living book, not a dead one. It urges us to go beyond its pages, not to stop with what we have read. It is a book not only of history, and of the prohibitions of the commandments and laws, but of poetry and song, of fantasy and paradox and mystery and contradiction.
It is not the only book in which I will look for and find truth. There is much to inspire me, to widen my understanding of the Creator, in the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoyevsky. There are important insights into the nature of God in the sacred books of other religions. When I was a child, my parents had these words framed and hung in the bathroom:
Listen to the exhortation of the dawn.
Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities
of your existence,
the glory of action—the bliss of growth
the splendour of beauty.
For yesterday is but a dream,
and tomorrow is only a vision,
but today, well lived,
makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
Such is the salutation of the dawn.
Good words, those, good words to live by. They come from the Koran. Does that mean that my Episcopalian parents were flirting with Islam? Of course not. I’ve memorized those words, because they help keep me aware of the wonders of each day, even when they may be painful.
Hugh and I spent seven hours in the emergency room of a big New York hospital, a scene of pain, noise, fear, confusion. Hugh woke up with a pain in the chest. Our doctor was away for the weekend (of course this was Saturday), so it was off to the emergency room. Seven hours, mostly spent waiting, once the electrocardiogram was normal. But then there were hours spent facing the possibility that the pain might be from a pulmonary embolism. And at last, at the seventh hour, the welcome news that it was from pulled muscles, with perhaps a cracked rib, from the strain of trying to open one of the recalcitrant, ancient windows in our apartment. Oh, the joy of sitting down together at our own table, an hour after Hugh was released, to eat dinner together! The joy in the simple ordinariness of a simple meal in our own home! Indeed, look well therefore to this day.
It is not only in the religious writings of various peoples that I find truth. I find that my forbearance is widened, my understanding of human potential expanded, as I read fiction, even if it is only to disagree with a narrow or ugly view of life, or to turn away from discontent. The fiction to which I turn and return is that which has a noble understanding of God’s purpose for all that has been created.
My theology is deepened and broadened as I study the new sciences. I do try to read with discrimination, to turn to writers whose vision is not mean or narrow or degrading. It was a sad moment when I had to admit to myself that I was not going to be able to read, in this lifetime, all the books I need to read!
I turn daily to the Bible because in it are the stories of my own tradition, of what Jung calls our racial memory. The story of Jacob is my story, too.
Karl Barth said, “I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally.” The Bible is a book which urges us to keep our concept of God open, to let our understanding grow and develop as we are illumined by new discoveries. If we stopped where Scripture leaves us, in the New Testament as well as the Old, we could still, with clear consciences, keep slaves. The apostle Paul exhorts masters to treat their slaves well, and slaves to be obedient, with no hint that slave-owning may not be a good thing in the eyes of God. According to the law, a woman taken in adultery was to be stoned. To death. Not men. If we stopped, literally, with Scripture, we could keep on justifying going into any country we wanted, when we needed extra living space, and slaughtering the heathen natives, because God is on our side, and will help get rid of the pagans for us, so we can have their country.
Who are the pagans? A child, asked this question in Sunday school, replied, “The pagans are the people that don’t quarrel about God.”
It is terrifying to realize that we can prove almost anything we want to prove if we take fragments of the Bible out of context. Those who believe in the righteousness of apartheid believe that this is scriptural. I turn to the Bible in fear and trembling, trying to see it whole, not using it for my own purposes, but letting its ongoing message of love direct me.
The problem of extra living space for an overcrowded planet is one with which science fiction writers have honestly struggled in their depiction of space exploration, with few answers. The old legalism was, perhaps, behind the way the pioneers treated the Indians—not all the pioneers, thank God, but some of them. Did they justify giving the Indians blankets impregnated with smallpox virus because they knew God wanted the white man, not the heathen, to have the land?
Scriptural literalism has caused and still causes incredible damage. But I don’t want to throw up my hands and toss out Scripture because we have constantly misused it.
How do those of us who are not seminary students or theologians read the Book creatively and not destructively? Not, I think, with volumes of interpretation—not, that is, for our daily reading. We must take it as it is. What a passage says to us today may not be what the same passage will say when we next encounter it. We must strive to be open to the deeply mythic quality, expressing the longings and aspirations and searchings of the human race.
After a tiring day on jury duty I sat in my quiet corner and picked up the Bible. In Matthew’s gospel, I turned to the eleventh chapter where Jesus was speaking to the multitudes about his cousin, John. He asked,
“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken in the wind? But what did you look for? A man clothed in soft raiment? Look, they that wear soft raiment are found in king’s houses. But what did you look for? A prophet? Yes, a prophet indeed, and more than a prophet.”
And he continued, asking the people,
“What is this generation like? It is like children sitting in the marketplace, and calling to their companions, saying, ‘We have piped for you, and you have not danced, we have mourned for you, and you have not grieved.’ John came, neither eating, nor drinking and the people accused him of having a devil. And the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they accused him of being gluttonous, and a wine bibber, and a friend of publicans and sinners.”
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asked the people.
What are we looking for? Are we looking for things we can criticize, or are we looking for Christ, for love and compassion? Are we looking for evidence that our Christian group is the group, with the truth, or are we looking for at-one-ment?
I care very much about Chr
istian unity, and therefore it gives me great joy when I am privileged to speak with many different kinds of Christian groups. I had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker in Boston at a gathering of two thousand United Methodist women. Shortly thereafter I had the joy of receiving an honorary doctorate from Wheaton College, in Illinois, and from there I went to Dallas, Texas, to teach at a Christian Writers Conference. Following that, I preached at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York; on to Immanuel Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Hartford, Connecticut. Back to Boston for the Catholic Library Association, and on, the next weekend, to Presbyterian Wilson College in Pennsylvania. I came home from all this ecumenical travelling, and I said, fervently, to my husband, “I’ve had it with Christians.”
How could I possibly say such a thing?
Not because of the majority of loving, faithful people I met, but because of a minority, small, but growing, of people who seemed to think they were called to discover the devil in other people. (Believe me, when you look for the devil, you’ll find him.)
Jesus was accused of casting out devils by the Devil. He was
casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And when the devil was gone out of the man, he was able to speak. And some of the people said, “He casts out devils through Beelzebub, the chief of devils.” Jesus answered them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will fall. If Satan is divided against himself, how can his kingdom stand? You say that I cast out devils through the devil, well, if I cast out devils by the devil, by whom do your sons cast them out? They will be your judges. But if I, with the finger of God, cast out devils, then the kingdom of God is come upon you.”
What are we looking for?
The people who accused Jesus of casting out devils by the Devil frighten me. The people who are looking to see if they can accuse someone of being in league with the Devil frighten me, too. There aren’t many of them, yet, but I met or heard one or two every place I went. They are powerful, and they claim to be Christians, to be even better Christians than those of us who are looking for Christ, for love, rather than Satan.
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