In this very century—not now, but in the early years—an actor could not be buried in consecrated ground. I was married to an actor for forty years, and I know that in his acting he was true, not infallible, but true. Many Christians have either tended to toss the arts off as unreal and unimportant, or as being sinful. And that is to miss the point. Anything good—and all that God made is good—can be distorted and made ugly and bad. That does not change the original good. I am glad that Joseph refused Potiphar’s wife, even though it meant his going to jail. I am glad that he enjoyed Asenath.
If we have to be infallible we are not free to seek truth. We are not free to say No, this time, and Yes, that time. Truth often comes by revelation when we least expect it. It was in the middle of the night that I realized that Benjamin would have no idea that his brothers, his own brothers, had sold Joseph into Egypt.
My writing teaches me. It gives me truths I didn’t know and could never have thought of by myself. Truth is given us when we are enabled to believe the contradictory and impossible. Jesus is wholly God? Jesus is wholly human? That’s impossible. But it is the conjunction of these two impossibilities that make light.
Stagehands refer to light plugs as female plugs and male plugs. I remember hearing a stagehand yell, “Give me a male plug.” You have to have a male plug and a female plug to get light.
Light itself is a particle, and light is a wave. It is not that difficult to believe in the impossible because it is the impossible that gives us joy. The possible really isn’t worth bothering about.
One of the bits of dogma that used to concern me was that Jesus is exactly like us—except he’s sinless. Well, of course if he’s sinless he’s not exactly like us; he’s not like us at all. And then I arrived at a totally different definition of sin. Sin is not child abuse or rape or murder, terrible though these may be. Sin is separation from God, and Jesus was never separate from the Source. Of course if we were close to our Source, if we were not separated from God, it would be impossible for us to commit child abuse or rape or murder. But when we are separated from God, that sin makes all sins possible.
Far too often we drift away from the Creator even if we don’t deliberately turn away. We fall into self-satisfaction or self-indulgence. And we want above all things to be right. To insist on being infallible is to turn away from our Source, for only the Creator is infallible. And whenever we look for infallibility in any one of us, or in ourselves, we are putting ourselves in the place of God. Hubris: pride. That, of course, is the great danger of idolatry, of idolizing another human being. We are turning that human being into God, and of course no human being can be God—and disaster follows.
When we are without sin, we are totally in communion with the Creator who made us, along with galaxies, and quasars, and quail eggs, and quarks.
All I have to know is that I do not have to know in limited, finite terms of provable fact that which I believe. Infallibility has led to schisms in the Church, to atheism, to deep misery. All I have to know is that God is love, and that love will not let us go, not any of us. When I say that I believe in the resurrection of the body, and I do, I am saying what I believe to be true, not literal, but true. Literalism and infallibility go hand in hand, but mercy and truth have kissed each other. To be human is to be fallible, but it is also to be capable of love and to be able to retain that childlike openness which enables us to go bravely into the darkness and toward that life of love and truth which will set us free.
Sometimes when I think about us human beings with all of our quirks, all of our flaws, all of our strangeness, our hilariousness, I wonder why God chose to make us this way. I have to assume that God knows better than I do, that this is indeed the way we are supposed to be, human beings bearing God’s image within us. In the same way that we don’t see those we love, but know those we love, we don’t see God’s image, but we know God’s image. It is not a matter of sight but a matter of insight.
We human beings are creatures who live with questions that lead to new questions. What few answers there are come in the form of paradox and contradiction. I believe in the power of prayer. I believe in miracles, although Spinoza felt that a miracle was a denial of God’s existence. Spinoza says,
Now, as nothing is true save only by Divine decree, it is plain that the universal laws of Nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened Nature’s universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree….Therefore, Miracles, in the sense of events contrary to the laws of Nature, so far from demonstrating to us the existence of God, would, on the contrary, lead us to doubt it.
Since the universe is God’s, I don’t see why love can’t alter any law which Love demands. Jesus made it very clear that love comes before law. So I have no trouble with miracles. The problem is: Why is this miracle granted, and this miracle withheld? Why does this child live and this child die? Why is one person cured and not another? Why is this prayer answered with a wonderful Yes, and other prayers with silence, or a No?
We don’t understand the “no” answers, and probably we are not going to understand many of them in this life. But we will understand ultimately that the “no” always has a reason. When we say No to our children, we say No because there is a reason for saying No, a reason for their greater good. When my kids were little I’d say, “Do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it. Then I’ll explain to you that there’s a truck coming down the road.” Quite often we simply do not see the truck on the road that God is warning us against. We may never in this life know that it was about to run us down.
Surely when Joseph was sold into Egypt he knew only the ugliness of what his brothers had done, and had no inkling of how God was going to use it for good.
To be human is to be able to change, knowing full well that some change is good and some change is bad; some change is progressive and some is regressive, and we often cannot discern which is which. But if we lose the ability to change we stultify, we turn to stone, we die.
Remember, yesterday’s heresy is tomorrow’s dogma. Nowadays even the most avid creationists don’t burn those who believe in the possibility of evolution. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because he had moved on from the belief that planet earth is the center of all things to understanding that we are part of a universe—a glorious, exciting part, called on to observe and contemplate, but still only a part.
The Church with its reluctance to change helped, if not forced, scientists into a position of atheism, in which many of them remain stuck to this day, with the absurd idea that religion and science have nothing in common and are, indeed, in conflict. The Church insisted, and sometimes still insists, that if you do not believe in God in a certain, specific, rigid way, then you are not a Christian. And so you come to equal folly on the part of the scientists. An article in the New York Times quoted the Academy of Sciences as saying that “religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought.” Here is another example of rigidity and short-sightedness. At their best and wisest, religion and science enrich each other.
When Moses asked God his name, God said,
“I am. Tell them that I AM sent you. I am that I am.”
The better, more accurate translation is, “I will be what I will be.” Free. Free to manifest the glory in more brilliant ways of revelation than we can conceive of.
All through Scripture, the revelation of God and the people’s understanding of God change. In the early chapters there are two quite different ways of looking at God, as there are two Creation stories, and two stories of the forming of Adam and Eve. There was a tribal god, who was one god among many gods. This tribal god was the warrior god of the patriarchs, who would expel the heathen from their own land so that his own people could occupy it, because the heathen were “them” and the tribal god wanted “us” to have the land.
Shattered remnants of this tribal thinking were be
hind England’s empire, and behind our own treatment of the American Indians as we moved into the American continents. This refusal to change in our understanding of the Creator has brought about some very dehumanizing results, one of the least of which was forcing “them” to eat alone.
But there is also in Genesis a vision of the One God, the Maker of the Universe, the stars, and all things. This One God, unlike the tribal god, is a God of love, the One Jesus called Father, Abba, Daddy. There are suggestions in the Old Testament that the tribal god has a bad temper and is likely to throw thunderbolts if we arouse his anger, but the One God, the Creator, is lovingly merciful, quick to forgive. As Alan Jones reminds us, God says, “All is forgiven! Come home!”
We human beings are less quick than God to forgive, and quite a few Old (and New) Testament characters complain about God’s forgiveness, saying that it is not reliable of God to be so forgiving, to say, “Come home. Let’s have a party. Get out the fatted calf…“But God is love, and that love keeps breaking through our elder-brotherism, our stiff-neckedness, our resentments, our unwillingness to change. It is interesting in the story of Joseph and his brothers that Reuben and Judah, two elder brothers, were willing to change.
An amazing number of physicists have discovered that a belief in evolution does not necessarily mean that the Creation of the universe was happenstance. It is quite possible that this is how God chose to create. But it is important to remember that our present knowledge is far from the whole truth, and we probably have as far to go as the old earth-centered establishments in understanding the working of the Creator.
John said to the people of Laodicea,
“I know what you are. You are neither hot nor cold. I wish you were hot or cold. But because you are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm I will spew you out of my mouth.”
Let us not be lukewarm. If we are passionate (rather than fanatic) we may be totally wrong (fanatics are never wrong), but we are still capable of change, capable of saying, “I’m wrong. I’m sorry.”
Computers are passionless. I can probably have a relationship with my computer, but it is not love. And computers at airports cannot cope with apostrophes, and I’m having a terrible time keeping the apostrophe in L’Engle. I don’t plan to give in to the computer and give it up. Computers do not know how to change. But we are able to change because we have passion—or better, compassion.
To be willing to change is to be willing to let go our most cherished beliefs, be they religious or scientific. But no scientific discovery has ever shaken my faith in God as Creator and Lover of us all. That is central. The rest—Baptist or Episcopalian, creationist or evolutionist—is peripheral. We are at a time on our planet when we must return to the central things, to understanding that we are all human beings on a very small planet and that we have, as Gandhi said, “enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”
God feels deep pain when any of creation is rebellious and has turned against the Power of Love which made it all. We have hospitals because people cared about taking care of people who were ill or injured. By and large hospitals are not very good right now, but the love that started them was right. It’s just that our technological knowledge has grown too fast and our compassion can’t keep up with it, and a resurgence of compassion is essential. We can’t have the absolute magnificent feast until everyone is well, and until everybody—Simeon and Levi, all of the family—is there, until everyone has said, “I’m sorry, I want to come home.” And then the golden gates will fling open and the party can start.
When we are in communion with the Creator we are less afraid, less afraid that the wrong people will come to the party, less afraid that we ourselves aren’t good enough, less afraid of pain and alienation and death. Jesus, who comes across in the Gospels as extraordinarily strong, begged in the garden, with drops of sweat like blood running down his face, that he might be spared the terrible cup ahead of him, the betrayal and abandonment by his friends, death on the cross. Because Jesus cried out in anguish, we may, too. But our fear is less frequent and infinitely less if we are close to the Creator. Jesus, having cried out, then let his fear go, and moved on.
A few months after my husband’s death I went to speak at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. One of the professors asked me, “What has your husband’s death made you think about death?”
I answered, “It’s made it seem much less important.”
“What do you mean by that?” he asked.
I don’t know what I meant by that. I just told him what was. Probably it had something to do with closeness—closeness to the Creator and therefore to all of Creation—past, present, future, not separated by time, but part of God’s eternal is-ness.
Eternity is not a time concept. It is almost impossible for us to glimpse what eternity is like because we were born into time. Our bodies move through time. We will die in time. But eternity, that which we are promised, has nothing whatsoever to do with time. It is not time stretched out, on and on forever. It is something wholly different.
My forbears and their contemporaries in Saint Margaret’s graveyard on Fleming’s Island knew during their lifetimes far more about death than we do, because death was far more present. There are not very many old people in that graveyard. There are many children a year, two years, three years old, cut down by diphtheria or scarlet fever. My cousin Myra, my mother’s first cousin, told me that when she was a child, five of her brothers and sisters died of scarlet fever in a week. Those who managed to grow up faced malaria, yellow fever, and pneumonia—with no antibiotics. It was not possible to forget or hide death then as secular society today urges us to do. To lose five children in a week! How did the families endure such grief? They endured it because they had to, and such tragedies were not uncommon. Only faith kept the living going.
It is no longer possible—for me, at any rate—to have the same kind of literal faith that my ancestors did. We have acquired a lot of knowledge, as well as antibiotics, since then. Our knowledge has kept people alive today who would have died early deaths a century ago. When there were a few cases of scarlet fever in our village when my children were little my first reaction (remembering Cousin Myra) was panic. I was told to relax; with our new medications, scarlet fever was no longer a killer. A century ago I, myself, would have died twice in childbirth, hemorrhaging, like Rachel, with no way to staunch the blood. Our medical knowledge exploded during and after World War II, and our miracles of science are miracles indeed. But we have saved lives so successfully that we tend to forget that to be human is ultimately to die. Our thinking about death has atrophied to the point where we reject it as being a medical failure. People are put away in hospitals or nursing homes so that we don’t have to be tainted by death and perhaps catch it.
We are all going to die, and I suppose whether it is sooner or later makes little difference in eternity, for eternity is total is-ness, immediacy, now-ness. Living in eternity is, in fact, the way we are supposed to live all the time, right now, in the immediate moment, not hanging on to the past, not projecting into the future. The past is the rock that is under our feet, that enables us to push off from it and move into the future. But we don’t go bury ourselves in the past, nor should we worry too much about the future. “Sufficient unto the day…” my grandmother was fond of quoting. God in Jesus came to be in time with us and to redeem human time for us—human time, wristwatch time (chronos), and God’s time (kairos). But even chronos is variable. How long is a toothache? How long is a wonderful time? When I fly from New York to San Francisco to see my eldest daughter and her family, I have to set my watch back three hours and I always have jet lag. Even chronological time is full of surprises.
We know that we will never get out of the solar system as long as we have to travel at the speed of anything, even light, because the intergalactic distances are so enormous. Added to that, the faster a moving body moves, the more slowly time moves. So if we got into a spaceship and went to Alpha Centauri, which
is seven light years away, and turned right around and came back, we’d have been away for fourteen years. But about a hundred and fifty years would have passed on earth while we were away. So travel at the speed of anything involves the whole space-time continuum which is still something we do not understand.
In the heart and spirit we are less restricted by time. We are given glimpses of kairos in our own living, moments that break free of time and simply are. It is fascinating that music is so bound up with time and yet some of the greatest moments of music are the silences between notes. We all have moments of kairos, though we seldom recognize them till afterwards. One such glimpse that I remember with particular delight came after a long and very difficult labour when my doctor and friend dropped a small wet creature between my breasts, saying, “Here’s your son, Madeleine.” And I heard the angels sing.
It can be far less cosmic. It can be dinner with friends. Last spring when I came home from the hospital after knee surgery, my bed became the dining room table. One evening five young friends brought in dinner, and afterwards were sitting on or around the bed, and we began to sing hymns and folk songs. One of the girls started “Patrick’s Breastplate,” one of the longest hymns I know, and we sang it all, every single verse. And it took a fraction of a second. It is, as always, paradox.
And I rejoice.
I want my church to think about eternity. I want to hear preached from the pulpit the Good News of Christ coming into time for us in order to show us how to be human. I want to hear the affirmation that God is powerful enough to do something with ashes if, indeed, something needs to be done. I want to hear that my husband’s soul (yes, let’s call it that), and the souls of my parents, my friends, are safe in God’s care, reclothed in the “spiritual body,” growing in God’s love. I want to be helped to understand that we are not always ready to receive God’s love, that we turn away with selfishness, permissiveness, despair, but that God is always waiting for our cold hearts to turn warm, our anger to peace, our willfulness to love. When we truly love someone we do not want to let that person down. We want to please, not to get Brownie points, but because we love. I want to love God so much that I will no longer obscure the lovely light, but will let it burn brightly.
Sold into Egypt Page 17
