And they are dividing the kingdom, and Jesus warns that a kingdom divided against itself will fall.
There are times when I may have had it with Christians, but I do not want the kingdom to fall. My hope and my faith is that we can worship God in our different ways, and still be one body. My feet walk, my eyes see, my nose smells, but I am still one body. And that one body is a part of the body of Christ.
As Christians, we have a responsibility to love one another, not to be suspicious and judgmental. The early Christians were not divided into inimical factions. Jesus Christ, and him crucified, and risen from the dead, was what mattered. Anyone looking at the divided body of Christ today might be tempted to imagine Jesus gathering the disciples together and saying, “Hey, Peter, you start the Roman Catholic Church. John, why don’t you get the Episcopalians going? James, do you want the Baptists? Andrew, what about Methodism? Philip, can you start the Presbyterians?”
Is that the kind of body of Christ Scripture talks about? How can we have an effective evangelism if we are a divided body? How can we even call ourselves Christian?
Many years ago I belonged to a group which put on a musical comedy each spring, the proceeds going to the two churches in the village—I won’t bother to mention what denomination they were. One year the regular director was away, and I was asked to take over. I didn’t want to immerse myself for several months in music I might get tired of, so with incredible naiveté and a notable lack of common sense, I decided that we would do Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. The Bartered Bride, I discovered to my rue, is no musical comedy. It is not even an operetta. It is an opera. Eventually we came up with an excellent production, but I was totally exhausted, and those of us involved called it not the Bartered Bride, but the Battered Bride.
That’s us, the Christian church right now, the Battered Bride. We are supposed to be the bride of Christ, but what kind of bride are we? Not very beautiful.
The terrible difference between us, the bride of Christ, and the tragic brides who are beaten by their husbands, is that it is we, ourselves, who are doing the battering. With our warring denominations we have scratched at each other’s eyes, pummeled and punched each other and ourselves, and so disgraced our host. What kind of a bruised and bloodied face do we show to the world? What kind of a bride of Christ do we make visible?
We will not become beautiful again until religion becomes a unifying and not a divisive word. We will not be beautiful again until we look for love, rather than Satan. We do find what we look for.
A letter came to me from a woman who was in charge of taking photographs for a conference where I had recently been a speaker. She asked me if I had a picture I could send her; the snapshot she had taken of me was not usable because I was surrounded by an aura of light which, she wrote, was surely a mark of the presence of the Holy Spirit. And then she continued, sadly, that she had mentioned this to a friend, and the friend’s response had been that perhaps I was worshipping Satan, and that was what had caused the light.
Such a reaction saddens me. And frightens me. Because we do find what we look for.
As to the picture of me, it was taken with one of those cameras which spit the picture out at you, and we’ve all seen what odd tricks of light result, blue eyes turned to glaring red, for instance. Or it could have been old film. But it certainly did not indicate Satan worship.
I sent the photographer another picture, and in her response she told me that she had talked to another friend, who had laughed, and commented of the woman who had suggested I might be worshipping the devil, “Oh, she’s on that toot, now, is she?” And my correspondent continued, “As for the tooter, I bumped into her in the supermarket the other day, and she does not look happy. Positive, but not happy.”
Can one be happy while looking for Satan? I doubt it.
There’s another story of light in a photograph. In Malcolm Muggeridge’s book, Something Beautiful for God, he is writing about Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She believes that each day we should do something beautiful for God. I’m a lot happier with that than with looking for Satan. Malcolm Muggeridge describes going to one of the houses where Mother Teresa and her Sisters take care of the dying people they have rescued from the streets of Calcutta. They are tenderly nursed until they die or, in some cases, recover because of the loving care they are given. Muggeridge wanted to get a picture of the room, but Mother Teresa would not allow a flash bulb. She would not have her dying people disturbed as they were being led out of this life and into the waiting arms of Christ. Muggeridge told his photographer to take a picture anyway, without using the flash.
The photographer replied that it would be pointless; there wasn’t enough light for a picture. Muggeridge said, “Take one, anyway.” When the picture was developed, it had indeed taken, and the room with the cots of dying people was bathed in a lovely golden light. And that, Muggeridge felt, was a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. He was looking for holiness, and so he found holiness.
In Desert Wisdom, Sayings from the Desert Fathers, “Abba Mios was asked by a soldier whether God would forgive a sinner. After instructing him at some length, the old man asked him, ‘Tell me, my dear, if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away?’ ‘Oh, no!’ he replied. ‘I would mend it and wear it again.’ The old man said to him, ‘Well, if you care for your cloak, will not God show mercy on his own creatures?’ ”
One of the desert fathers says that a dog is better than we are, because a dog loves, but does not judge. Surely that is how Doc, my golden retriever, loves me, with unqualified love, without judging me and with no expectation that I will ever be less than lovable to her. If I am judgmental of the woman who has expectations of devil worship, I am falling right into the same trap she has fallen into.
One of my books was listed in a Midwestern newspaper as being pornographic. I reread the book, looking for pornography, and for the life of me could find none. Perhaps I do not know as much about pornography as the person who saw it in A Wind in the Door.
A beautiful letter came to me recently, in which the writer told me how much my book A Ring of Endless Light had helped her through her grief over the death of a friend. But, she said, someone had commented to her that I use swear words in the book, and how could I, as a Christian, do that?
I wrote back saying that I wasn’t about to go through my book looking for swear words, but as far as I could remember, the only word in that book which might be considered a swear word is zuggy, a word I made up, and which means nothing, and is used by a spoiled young man who is far from being a Christian. I coined the word zuggy, used by that same young man, in The Moon by Night, in order to avoid using the current swear words. Somebody had to be looking very hard for swear words in order to find them. (What an ugly way to read a book!)
Even when a writer does, in fact, use such words, because they seem appropriate within the vocabulary of the character using them, searching out four-letter words is no way to read a book. A librarian friend told me of a woman who attacked Catcher in the Rye, a frequent target, as having in it, say, four thousand eight hundred and thirty-two swear words. “How do you know?” the librarian asked. “I counted them,” the woman said. “But did you read the book?” “No.” How sad to pick up a book looking only for dirty words and thereby perhaps missing an encounter with Christ.
Catcher in the Rye does use the language the young protagonist would use. But that is not what the book is about. It is about the loneliness of adolescence, and some of the harder lessons which must be learned in growing up, and it has helped many thoughtful youngsters to accept themselves and the world as being less perfect than we would like.
I wonder if those who search out dirty words realize that this indicates how well they know them?
What are we looking for? We should be very careful, because that is what we are going to find.
I don’t want to stop being a Christian because Christians can upset and confuse me, because I fear judgmentalism in others, and also in
myself, or even because sometimes in Christian settings I have seen a lack of faith in a God of love, and seen instead a God of fear and hate.
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asked.
The Gospels tell us that the professionally good people weren’t looking for Jesus, and when they did, it was tentative. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, so that he would not be seen approaching this radical teacher. Jesus was, and still is, a threat to the very establishment which proclaims him as Lord. He emphasized that he had not come to save the saved, but to save the lost, the sinners, the broken. To save the sinners, the lost, the broken, who want to be saved. It is possible to wallow in whatever our own particular misery is, almost taking a perverse pleasure in it. We must want to be healed, whole, and holy, before we can turn ourselves to Christ, and ask that we may be infused with the Spirit, and mended, so that God’s image in us may become visible.
And I doubt if we can turn to Christ for healing while we are condemning anybody else.
If we, like some of the good people in Jerusalem and Nazareth and Bethlehem, are looking for people who disagree with us in order to put them down, we’ll find them. If we look for people who may disagree with us, but who will challenge us to examine our own opinions and our own beliefs in a creative manner, we’ll find them. And we may find some wonderful surprises, as did the wounded people who flocked to Jesus.
Recently I was shown a book said to be a Christian bestseller in which the author is identifying people who worship Satan—or people she suspects of worshipping Satan. When she included Teilhard de Chardin on her list I started to laugh, then realized it was not humorous. Instead of seeing a man so in love with God that he could express his love in a book such as The Divine Milieu, all this author saw was a man whose view of God and Creation differed from hers. This to her was a mark of a Satan-worshipper. She also cited a fondness for unicorns as a mark of the Satan-worshipper, which is equally hilarious and frightening. The unicorn is a creature of utter purity who will approach only a true virgin of complete innocence. Since to turn toward Satan is to relinquish all innocence, is it likely that a Satan-worshipper could get anywhere near a unicorn?
Do I believe in unicorns? Is a belief in a symbol of purity incompatible with belief in Christ? If so, wouldn’t we have to stop having the loveliness and the family warmth of bringing in and decorating a Christmas tree, since the Christmas tree was originally a pagan practice? If a symbol leads us to a wider love of each other and of the Creator of us all, has it not in its truest sense become a Christian symbol? What would happen to my faith if I had to destroy all symbols—bread and wine, the cross?
Our faith is a faith of vulnerability and hope, not a faith of suspicion and hate. When we are looking for other people to be wrong in order that we may prove ourselves right, then we are closing ourselves off from whatever unexpected surprises Christ may be ready to offer us. If we are willing to live by Scripture, we must be willing to live by paradox and contradiction and surprise.
And what surprises! When the wonderful day of Pentecost, promised by Jesus, came, it was received with such joy that the disciples were accused of being drunk although, as it was pointed out, it was only ten o’clock in the morning! We are Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit, not through our own virtue. And the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of love and joy, not of hate and suspicion.
Witchcraft and the worship of Satan do exist. They are serious and dangerous phenomena. But when Christians look toward other Christians who worship Christ in a different manner and call them Satan-worshippers, they must please Satan. When someone accuses Teilhard de Chardin of being a Satanist, then whoever is making the accusation does not see the real Satan-worshipper who worships destruction and hate, and works for the annihilation of Christian love.
The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine where I am the volunteer librarian backs onto Harlem. To the north is Columbia University. Spanish Harlem is south, and a melting pot of ethnicity to the west. One evening my friend Canon Tallis and I went into one of the larger chapels in the Cathedral to teach a class on preaching. There we saw pennies on the floor, arranged in the design of a pentagram. We picked them up, and I understood how my dog feels when the hair on the back of her neck prickles with apprehension.
I have been told that a chicken was found behind the altar, with its head off—a ritual, demonic blood sacrifice. I am afraid of the Satanists with their dark and secret rituals which include the shedding of blood. Sometimes, during a black mass, an infant is actually slaughtered and its blood shed. How different is this horror of shedding blood in order to appease Satan from the life-giving blood of Christ offered in the sacrament of the Eucharist. A black mass is a terrible mockery, a perverse imitation of Holy Communion, because the devil and his worshippers cannot make anything original; they can only foul and distort what God has designed with love.
As far as I know I have never met a devil worshipper (do Satanists ride the subway?) and I never want to. But I take them very seriously, and I fear them.
And I pray that we will listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and not serve Satan’s demonic purpose by accusing other Christians and confusing them with Satan’s followers. I pray that we will learn to love one another, as the early Christians were recognized by their love, so that in all the richness of their diversity they were At One.
One of my favourite passages in John’s first epistle is,
Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love. God’s love for us was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son so that we could have life through him. This is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us.
It is not a simple thing to accept God’s love, because if we do, we must return love. Jacob was tentative about accepting the love of his father’s God, and he wanted to make sure that this tribal deity would keep his share of the bargain before he accepted him. It was not until Jacob was alone in the desert that his need overcame his wariness, and he was at last able to receive God’s revelatory love.
Was it because Jacob knew himself to be a cheat and a fraud that he was able to receive the vision of God without being tempted to arrogance by it? He felt holy terror, not smugness. Self-satisfaction is what Satan offers us immediately after any manifestation of the Holy Spirit. For Satan is still a Spirit, still an angel, even if a fallen one, a negative angel eager to distort God’s vision of love and turn it small and sour and selfish.
The early people of the risen Christ were not checking on other groups to see if they were less Christian than their own group, and when they did set themselves apart, Paul took them severely to task. They knew that love was what it is about, not an exclusive love, but an inclusive love, embracing all creatures, all corners of the cosmos.
When we are once more known for our love, we will be the hope of the world, and we will bear the light.
I don’t want ever again to say, “I’ve had it with Christians,” because, first of all, it isn’t true. I’ve never really had it with Christians. What I’m fed up with is judgmentalness and coldness of heart. What I’ve had it with is those who would look for Satan, rather than Christ; who would sniff for the putrid odor of pornography rather than the lovely scent of love.
When I meet people who are truly Christian, which is often my privilege and my joy, I see people who are willing to bear the light, to be the light of the world—not just their own denomination’s, not just the light of Christians, or of Americans, but of the world. To love where love is not easy. To bring people to Christ not through fear and coercion, but through love.
What are we looking for? The love of Christ which comes to us through the power of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit who blew in the very beginning, before there was anything at all, who spoke through the prophets, who always was, is, and will be.
In the beginning of Genesis, God affirms that the Creation is good—very good. The Incarnation is a reaffirmation of the innate goodness of all that God has made.
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Teilhard de Chardin says that “for a soul to have a body is enkosmismene.”
Enkosmismene. To have our roots in the cosmos. We are like trees, drawing spiritual water through our rootedness in Creation. This is the affirmation of incarnation.
Even in time of tornado, earthquake, ice storm, our very roots are part of the entire cosmos. Surely Jacob, picking up the stone he had used for a pillow, and pouring oil on it as it became an altar, was making this same affirmation in his cry that here was the house of God. Jacob was indeed rooted in cosmos. At that moment he knew at-one-ment.
What actually happened to Jacob? Did God really speak to him in his dream of angels? Later, was it a physical angel who grappled with him? Is the word physical combined with angel a contradiction? Is any of this important?
As we are rooted in cosmos these images are part of the myth which the Creator gave us so that we may begin to understand something which is beyond literal interpretation by the finite human being.
On a TV interview I was asked by a clergyman if I believe that fantasy is an essential part of our understanding of the universe and our place in it, and I replied that yes, I do believe this, adding truthfully that Scripture itself is full of glorious fantasy. Yes, indeed, I take the Bible too seriously to take it all literally.
The story of Job is a wrestling with deep spiritual questions rather than dry factualism. And I love it when, in the beginning of this drama, the sons of God are gathered around, speaking to God, Satan was among them. Fallen angel or no, Satan was still God’s son, and at that point was still speaking with his Creator. I wonder if he is still willing to do that, or if he has so separated himself from at-one-ment that he and his cohorts can no longer bear to be in the Presence?
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