For the Time Being (19 page)

Often in a church I have thought that while there is scant hope for me, I can ask God to strengthen the holiness of all these good people here—that man, that woman, that child … and I do so. In St. Anne’s Basilica it struck me in the middle of a white-robed priest’s French service that possibly everybody in that stone chamber, and possibly everybody in every other house of prayer on earth, thinks this way. What if we are all praying for one another in the hope that the others are holy, when we are not? Of course this must be the case. Then—again possibly—surely it adds up to something or other?

E N C O U N T E R S
      
       In Cana lived a Palestinian merchant who gave wine to all comers. “Wine for everyone,” he cried into the street. “On the house.” He wore an open jacket and a blue shirt buttoned to the top. He brandished a silver tray full of tiny wineglasses. My friends would not enter his shop. They thought it was a trick. It
was
a trick: Put a man through life for sixty years and he is generous to strangers. I took a glass of red wine from the silver tray and drank it down. In my ordinary life, I don’t drink wine. Fine: This man
was supposed to be selling souvenirs to tourists, which he was not doing, either. We ignored his merchandise. Leaning in his open doorway, we talked; we traded cigarettes and smoked.

Across the steep street we saw the church at Cana, built where John’s gospel says Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. Then, in the late 1990s, he was one of 130,000 Palestinian Christians in the Galilee. Those I met were a highly educated bunch. Now almost all have fled into exile.

The shopkeeper had no beard; white strands lighted the black hair at his temples. He was content to look me in the eye and converse about the world—a trait one finds among the world’s most sophisticated people, like this shopkeeper, and also among the world’s most unsophisticated people. Tribal Yemenis reaping barley in their high mountain villages understand faces too, and
caboclo
men and women killing chickens in the Ecuadoran Oriente along the Río Napo, Nicaraguans fishing over the Costa Rican border, Inuit shooting geese at the edge of the Bering Sea, and Marquesas Islanders eating breadfruit in the Pacific. People whose parents were perhaps illiterate read strangers’ eyes—you can watch them read yours—and learn what they need to know. It does not take long. They understand that grand coincidence brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering generation of human life on this durable planet—common language
or not, sale or no sale—and therefore to mark the occasion we might as well have a little cigarette.

They settle in comfortably to talk, despite any outlandish appearance. This happens among people who have never clapped eyes on a tall woman, or a bareheaded woman, or a barefaced woman, or a pale-haired woman, or a woman wearing pants, or a woman walking alone; these wise men and women discard all that in a glance, and go for the eyes.

A Roman Catholic priest passed, and the shopkeeper called out, “
Come sta?
” They conversed in Italian. Why Italian? I asked later. “Oh, we all speak many languages here. Actually, that priest is from Holland.”

Do you think I don’t know cigarettes are fatal?

T H I N K E R
      
       The paleontologist Teilhard, according to his biographer Robert Speaight, “was not very much bothered by ‘who moved the stone.’”

“We are Christians,” he wrote deadpan in a 1936 letter, “in a somewhat renovated manner.” A modern abbot, Abbé Paul Grenet, quoted this in a 1965 biography—
Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur
—which describes Teilhard as always faithful to his calling and to the Order of Jesuits.

In
Gravity and Grace
, Simone Weil, that connoisseur of affliction, lists four “evidences of divine mercy here below”: The experience of God is one; the radiance and compassion of some who know God are another; the beauty of the world makes a third. “The fourth evidence”—nice and dry, this—“is the complete absence of mercy here below.” This introduction of startling last-minute evidence requires two takes from the reader and one footnote from the writer: “NOTE: It is precisely in this antithesis, this rending of our souls, between the effects of grace within us and the beauty of the world around us, on the one hand, and the implacable necessity which rules the universe on the other, that we discern God as both present to man and as absolutely beyond all human measurement.”

Life’s cruelty joins the world’s beauty and our sense of God’s presence to demonstrate who we’re dealing with, if dealing we are: God immanent and transcendent, God discernible but unknowable, God beside us and wholly alien. How this proves his mercy I don’t understand.

Some writers have given describing Being a shot. Hisham ibn Hakim, a Muslim theologian of a minority school, wrote: “Allah has a body, defined, broad, high and long, of equal dimensions, radiating with light… in a place beyond place, like a bar of pure metal.”

What does indestructible “Buddha-nature” look like? “Like
the orb of the sun, its body luminous, round and full, vasty and boundless.” So said seventh-century Chan master Hongren, in his
Treatise on the Supreme Vehicle
. (He added, as if Platonically, that it resides in the bodies of all beings, “but because it is covered by the dark clouds of the five clusters, it cannot shine, like a lamp inside a pitcher.”)

Hegel wrote a letter to Goethe in which he referred to the “oyster-like, gray, or quite black Absolute.”

E V I L
      
       Who is dead? The Newtonian God, some call that tasking and antiquated figure who haunts children and repels strays, who sits on the throne of judgment frowning and figuring, and who with the strength of his arm dishes out human fates, in the form of cancer or cash, to 5.9 billion people—to teach, dazzle, rebuke, or try us, one by one, and to punish or reward us, day by day, for our thoughts, words, and deeds.

“The great Neolithic proprietor,” the paleontologist called him, the God of the old cosmos, who was not yet known as the soul of the world but as its mage. History, then, was a fix.

And God was a Lego lord. People once held a “Deuteronomic” idea of God, says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. God intervened in human affairs “without human agency.” (In Flaubert’s
A Sentimental Education
, one character wonderfully
accuses another of replacing “the God of the Dominicans, who was a butcher, with the God of the Romantics, who is an upholsterer.”)

The first theological task, Paul Tillich said fifty years ago, by which time it was already commonplace, is to remove absurdities in interpretation.

It is an old idea, that God is not omnipotent. Seven centuries have passed since Aquinas wrote that God has power to effect only what is in the nature of things. Leibniz also implied it; working within the “possible world” limits God’s doings. Now the notion of God the Semipotent has trickled down to the theologian in the street. The paleontologist in his day called the belief that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent God “fatal,” remember, and indicated only one escape: to recognize that if God allows us both to suffer and to sin, it is “because he cannot here and now cure us and show himself to us”—because we ourselves have not yet evolved enough. Paul Tillich said in the 1940s that “omnipotence” symbolizes Being’s power to overcome finitude and anxiety in the long run, while never being able to eliminate them. (Some theologians—Whitehead’s school—rescue the old deductive idea of God by asserting that God possesses all good qualities to an absolute degree, therefore he must be absolutely sensitive, and so absolutely vulnerable. They could not have known then that this made God sound like a
sensitive new-age guy. At any rate, subjecting our partial knowledge of God to the rigors of philosophical inquiry is, I think, an absurd, if well-meaning, exercise.)

God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men—or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome—than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call “acts of God.”

Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?

Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads
invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. “Later on,” a Hasid master said, you don’t see these things anymore.” (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn—for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable—to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor.)

Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God’s hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he intervenes only “under certain conditions.”

Does God stick a finger in, if only now and then? Does God budge, nudge, hear, twitch, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is praying eudaemonistically—praying for things and events, for rain and healing—delusional? Physicians agree that prayer for healing can work what they routinely call miracles, but of course the mechanism could be autosuggestion. Paul Tillich devoted only two paragraphs in his three-volume systematic theology to prayer. Those two startling paragraphs suggest, without describing, another mechanism. To entreat
and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. God participates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to God; that willing surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which God can use. Since God works in and through existing conditions, I take this to mean that when the situation is close, when your friend might die or might live, then your prayer’s surrender can add enough power—mechanism unknown—to tilt the balance. Though it won’t still earthquakes or halt troops, it might quiet cancer or quell pneumonia. For Tillich, God’s activity is by no means interference, but instead divine creativity—the ongoing creation of life with all its greatness and danger. I don’t know. I don’t know beans about God.