For the Time Being (20 page)

Nature works out its complexities. God suffers the world’s necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed.

N O W
      
       “Spiritual path” is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars
and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape: they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it awhile, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life’s fine, impossible goal justifies the term “spiritual.” Nothing, however, can justify the term “path” for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage—except one thing: They don’t quit. They stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in front of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark.

The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling: constellations shift without anyone’s gaining ground. They are presenting themselves to the unseen gaze of emptiness. Why do they want to do this? They hope to learn how to be useful.

Their feet catch in nets: they untangle them when they notice, and keep moving. They hope to learn where they came from. “The soul teaches incessantly,” said Rabbi Pinhas, “but it never repeats.” Decade after decade they see no progress. But they do notice, if they look, that they have left doubt behind. Decades ago, they left behind doubt about this or that doctrine, abandoning the issues as unimportant. Now, I mean, they have left behind the early doubt that this
feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen is a reasonable way to pass one’s life.

“Plunge into matter,” Teilhard said—and at another time, “Plunge into God.” And he said this fine thing: “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”

Here is how adept people conduct themselves, according to Son Master Chinul: “In everything they are like empty boats riding the waves … buoyantly going along with nature today, going along with nature buoyantly tomorrow.” Was he describing people now extinct?

“Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself—even to make of oneself a righteous person.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assassinate Hitler.

“I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath,” said Teilhard, who by no means stopped for breath. But what distinguishes living “completely in the world” (Bonhoeffer) or throwing
oneself “into the thick of human endeavor” (Teilhard), as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker’s life, a shoe salesman’s life, a mechanic’s, a writer’s, a farmer’s? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hoboes, nuns, and monks. Were these two men especially dense, that they spent years learning what every kid already knows, that life here is all there is? Authorities in Rome or the Gestapo forbade them each to teach (as secular Rome had forbidden Rabbi Akiva to teach). One of them in his density went to prison and died on a scaffold. The other in his density kept his vows despite Rome’s stubborn ignorance and righteous cruelty and despite the importunings of a woman he loved. No.

We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious—the people, events, and things of the day—to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels an individual soul to undertake to divinize, transform, and complete the world, to—as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter
and spirit—“subject a little more matter to spirit,” to “lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned,” to “establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence,” to “work for the redemption of the world,” to “extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost,” to “help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of creation in which we are living,” to “mend the shattered unity of the divine worlds,” to “force the gates of the spirit, and cry, ‘Let me come by.’”

When one of his Hasids complained of God’s hiddenness, Rabbi Pinhas said, “It ceases to be a hiding, if you know it is hiding.” But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circumstance, for anyone.

B I R T H
      
       Our lives come free; they’re on the house to all comers, like the shopkeeper’s wine. God decants the universe of time in a stream, and our best hope is, by our own awareness, to step into the stream and serve, empty as flumes, to keep it moving.

The birds were mating all over Galilee. I saw swifts mate in midair. At Kibbutz Lavi, in the wide-open hills above the Sea of Galilee, three hundred feet above me under the sky, the two swifts flew together in swoops, falling and catching. These alpine swifts were large, white below. How do birds mate in midair? They start high. Their beating wings tilt them awkwardly sometimes and part those tiny places where they
join; often one of the pair stops flying and they lose altitude. They separate, rest in a tree for a minute, and fly again. Alone they rise fast, tensely, until you see only motes that chase, meet—you, there, here, out of all this air!—and spiral down; breaks your heart. At dusk, I learned later, they climb so high that at night they actually sleep in the air.

Birds mated in dust, on fences and roads, on limbs of trees. Many of these birds migrated from Africa; like humans, they fed their passage north by following the fertile Rift Valley. I saw a huge-headed hoopoe fly from a eucalyptus to flounce on a fence. Excited, it flashed and dropped its crest over and over, as a child might fiddle with a folding fan. Another hoopoe flitted in a chaste tree nearby. They looked bizarre: pinkish, with striking black-and-white wings and tails, their heads heavy with ornament. Leviticus 11:19 forbids Israel to eat hoopoes, along with storks, herons, and bats.

Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl: “All being itself is derived from God and the presence of the Creator is in each created thing.” This double notion is pan-entheism—a word to which I add a hyphen to emphasize its difference from pantheism. Pan-entheism, according to David Tracy, theologian at the University of Chicago, is the private view of most Christian intellectuals today. Not only is God immanent in everything, as plain pantheists hold, but more profoundly
everything is simultaneously in God, within God the transcendent. There is a divine, not just bushes.

I saw doves mate on sand. It was early morning. The male dove trod the female on a hilltop path. Beyond them in blue haze lay the Sea of Galilee, and to the north Mount Meron and the town of Safad traversing the mountain Jebel Kan’an. Other doves were calling from nearby snags. To writer Florida Scott Maxwell, doves say, “Too true, dear love, too true.” But to poet Margaret Gibson, doves in Mexico say, “No hope, no hope.” An observant Jew recites a grateful prayer at seeing landscape—mountains, hills, seas, rivers, and deserts, which are, one would have thought, pretty much unavoidable sights. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE MAKER OF ALL CREATION.” One utters this blessing also at meeting the sea again—at seeing the Mediterranean Sea, say, after an interval of thirty days.

Later, in an afternoon drizzle, I watched snails mate on a wet stone under leaves. During the first hour the male knocked the female’s soft head with his, over and over. Some snails have a penis on the right side of the head. Her two tentacles recoiled. To bump heads, he had sprawled from his shell and encircled her. At first she, too, extended herself a bit, leaning his way, and on impact they looked as if they were kissing. Over the course of the second hour she withdrew
her head completely, but not her foot, and he seemed to be sticking his head inside her shell as if to inquire if she still wanted to knock heads. I quit watching. All the religions of Abraham deny that the world, the colorful array that surrounds and grips us, is illusion, even though from time to time anyone may see the vivid veil part. But no one can deny that God
per se
is wholly invisible, or deny that his voice is very still, very small, or explain why.

That night there was a full moon. I saw it rise over a caperbush, a still grove of terebinths, and a myrtle. According to the Talmud, when a person is afraid to walk at night, a burning torch is worth two companions, and a full moon is worth three. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, creator of the universe, who brings on evening; whose power and might fill the world; who did a miracle for me in this place; WHO HAS KEPT US IN LIFE AND BROUGHT US TO THIS TIME.

The next morning, it was tiger swallowtails. He carried her around in the air. Her wings folded and joined over her back. Flying for two, he nevertheless moved not a bit awkwardly. He lighted on a sunny spot on a spruce branch seven feet up. His abdomen bent sharply to clasp hers.

Lively spot, that kibbutz. Sun split the ground and rain cracked the buds. Wild mustard sprang from fields with speedwell and hard-eyed daisies; bees fumbled in mallows at ditches. Checking on the snails, I found under the soil a wet batch of eggs that looked like silver. Some snails bear live
young: fully formed, extremely small snails. How many of these offspring—hoopoes, doves, snails, and swallowtails—would develop normally? It is a percentage in the high nineties, normality is. Of course, most offspring get eaten right quick.

S A N D
      
       During the Roman assault on Syracuse, Archimedes, oblivious to the tumult around him, traced parabolas in the sand. When a soldier found him and tried to drag him to the Roman general, Archimedes said, “Pray, do not disturb my circles.” And he told the soldier, “Wait until I finish my proof.” Unwilling to wait, evidently, the soldier killed him on the spot.

Near the end of Jesus’ life, legal scholars brought to him a woman caught in adultery: they stood her before him as he taught by the Temple. The law required stoning her to death. What did he say to this?

But Jesus stooped down and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

When they continued asking him, he lifted himself up, and said to them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.