Walking on Water (9 page)

We were not meant to be any more restricted than Jesus was during his sojourn with us here on this earth. If we take seriously that during the time of his Incarnation he was truly man, truly human as we are, then anything he did in his lifetime is available to us, too.

Am I suggesting that we really ought to be able to walk upon water? That there are (and not just in fantasies) easier and faster ways to travel than by jet or car? Yes, I am. There are too many stories of mystics being able to move hundreds of miles through the power of contemplation for us to be able to toss them aside. Over and over again throughout the centuries we have made choices which were meant to free us, but which ultimately have limited and restricted us. But the artist has retained some of the freedom we have lost in the industrial dailiness of our living.

Our way of looking at the place of the earth in the heavens changed irrevocably when the first astronauts went to the moon. Standing on the lunar surface, they looked back and saw “earthrise”—and all their concepts of up and down, backwards and forwards, left and right, changed. Since there is, in space, neither up nor down, left nor right, here nor there, backwards nor forwards, we can either fall apart in terror of chaos or rejoice in the unity of the created universe. Just as Jesus knew a world of nonlinear time, so, too, he knew a world of nonlinear space.

Theologians, back in the sixties, tried to grapple with this by saying that God is not “up there,” that heaven is not “up,” and they listened in awe as Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut to go into space, said that of course there is no God; he was out in space looking for God, and he didn't see him. (As I try to visualize the “God” Gagarin was looking for, all I can do is smile.)

We look into outer space, and because we cannot “see” a God we can touch, a God we can comprehend with our rational intellects, we invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy, little gods who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, hands and touch not, and who have nothing to say to us in the times of our deepest need.

Montaigne saw this and wrote, “O senseless man who cannot make a worm, and yet makes gods by dozens.” We have been doing this for centuries, and perhaps only the coming of the kingdom will stop this futile activity.

Nonlinear space/time is more easily understood by poets and saints than by reasonable folk. Back somewhere around the end of the eleventh century, Hildevert of Lavardin wrote:

And that says all that needs saying.

When I am looking for theologians to stimulate my creativity, theologians who are contemporary enough to speak to these last years of our troubled century, I turn to the Byzantine and Cappadocian fathers of the early years of the Christian era, because their world was more like ours than the world of such great theologians as Niebuhr and Tillich and Bultmann, who were writing in the framework of a world which was basically pre–World War II, and definitely pre-the-splitting-of-the-atom. In the first few centuries
A.D.
, Rome was breaking up; civilization was changing as radically as is our own; people were no longer able to live in the luxury they had become accustomed to, as the great aqueducts and water-heating systems broke down and the roads were no longer kept up. Such people as St. Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and his brilliant sister, Macrina, were facing the same kind of change and challenge that we are, and from them I get great courage.

And when I try to find contemporary, twentieth-century mystics to help me in my own search for meditation and contemplation, I turn to the cellular biologists and astrophysicists, for they are dealing with the nature of being itself, and their questions are theological ones: What is the nature of time? of creation? of life? What is human creativity? What is our share in God's work?

In his letter to the people of Ephesus, Paul wrote, “Each of us has been given his gift, his due portion of Christ's bounty.” To accept our gift means accepting our freedom. This involves a new understanding of time and space, the same understanding towards which the astrophysicists are struggling, that same understanding which Jesus was offering John and James and Peter on the mountain, despite their obtuseness. They didn't begin to understand this kind of freedom until after the mighty acts of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit.

And the men and women to whom Jesus offered this gift were ordinary human beings, faulted and flawed, just like the rest of us. He gave his disciples no job descriptions; he did not disqualify Mary Magdalene because she had been afflicted with seven demons; he did not spend a lot of time looking for the most qualified people, the most adult. Instead, he chose people who were still childlike enough to leave the known comforts of the daily world, the security of their jobs, their reasonable way of life, to follow him.

For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our
archaic understanding,
a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.

What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts or having some kind of important career. Several women have written to me to complain about
A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
They feel that I should not have allowed Meg Murry to give up a career by marrying Calvin, having children, and quietly helping her husband with his work behind the scenes. But if women are to be free to choose to pursue a career as well as marriage, they must also be free to choose the making of a home and the nurture of a family as their vocation; that was Meg's choice, and a free one, and it was as creative a choice as if she had gone on to get a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics.

Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think.

Long before Jung came up with his theories of archetypical understanding, William James wrote: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.”

The creator is not afraid to leap over the “accidental fences” and to plunge into the deep waters of creation. There, once again, and in yet another way, we lose ourselves to find ourselves.

One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking. The creator, and the mystic, have tended more towards Platonism than Aristotelianism, and tend to be willing to accept Plato's “divine madness,” with its four aspects of prophecy, healing, artistic creativity, and love.

These divine madnesses have been nearly lost in this century, and so we've lived almost entirely in the pragmatic, Cartesian world. I wonder if Descartes knew what he was doing when he wrote his famous
I think, therefore I am,
and subsequently, if not consequently, we began even more than before to equate ourselves with our conscious minds.
Cogito, ergo sum
nudges us on to depend solely on intellectual control, and if we insist on intellectual control we have to let go our archaic understanding and our high creativity, because keeping them means going along with all kinds of things we
can't
control.

And yet, ultimately, our underwater, intuitive selves are never really incompatible with the above-water, intellectual part of our wholeness. Part of Jesus' freedom came from the radical view of time which allowed him to speak with Moses and Elijah simultaneously, thus bursting through the limitations of time accepted by the intellect. Yet what he did is not at all inconsistent with what contemporary astrophysicists are discovering about the nature of time. Secularists have long tended to laugh away the story of “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon,” but according to some new research, it now seems as though something actually did happen to the physical world at that time; the earth may have shifted slightly on its axis, and time would have been affected, and the sun for a moment may indeed have stood still.

For the astrophysicist as for the saint,
chronos
and
kairos
converge. Robert Jastrow in his book,
God and the Astronomers,
talks about the astronomers, after all their questions, struggling up to a mountain peak and finding the theologians already there.

Chronos:
our wristwatch and alarm-clock time.
Kairos:
God's time, real time. Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily
chronos;
during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in
kairos.

Chronology, as we know it, began with Creation. Time exists only where there is mass in motion. A certain amount of consternation has been caused among some scientists because our great radio telescopes are giving clues that indicate that this universe did have a beginning, when an unexplained and violent explosion of an incredibly dense ball of matter suddenly burst into the void. As it exploded and expanded, our galaxies and solar systems were formed, and the original explosion continues as the galaxies hurtle outward into unknown space. What our radio telescopes are picking up now are echoes of the sound of that primal explosion, so long ago that it is scarcely expressible numerically.

As the echoes of the beginning linger, so, too, all that we say moves outward in gradually diminishing but never-ending sound waves. One of the more delightful mysteries of sound came when the astronauts on one of our early spaceships heard a program of nostalgic music over their sound system and radioed NASA to thank whoever it was who had sent them the program. From NASA came the rather baffled reply that they had sent the astronauts no such program and knew nothing about it.

This phenomenon triggered a good deal of interest and research: who had beamed the music to the astronauts? What was its source? All the radio and TV programs all over the country at that day and hour were checked out, and none of them was responsible for the music the astronauts had so enjoyed. Further research. Could they all have imagined hearing a nonexistent program of old popular songs? Was it a kind of mass hallucination? It seemed highly unlikely. Research finally revealed that that particular program had been broadcast in the 1930s.

How do you explain it? You don't. Nor can you explain it away. It happened. And I give it the same kind of awed faith that I do the Annunciation or the Ascension: there is much that we cannot understand, but our lack of comprehension neither negates nor eliminates it.

We simply do not understand time. We know that a moving mass is necessary for the existence of time as we define it and that time had a beginning and will have an end. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable and that pure energy is freed from the restrictions of time. But even
chronos
varies from time zone to time zone. When I flew to Cyprus, I had to make a seven-hour adjustment. Even within the United States I have had cause to tell someone who phones me at midnight, “Hey, I am not in California, and it is not nine o'clock here.”

In my grandfather's lifetime there was no standardization of time such as we're accustomed to today. Every locality set its own time, according to its own convenience; one village might be two or three hours different from another just a few miles away, and there was outrage at the violation of freedom when the time zones were made obligatory. I have to admit that a certain amount of consistency is practical and helpful. However, no matter how we systematize it, chronological time does not work out evenly in the long run. We base it on the movement of the earth as it turns on its axis and around the sun, and on the movement of the stars across the sky—but every two thousand years or so the astronomers all have to adjust their timepieces a few seconds.

In
chronos
we are restricted to this unevenness; in
chronos
we live most of our lives and watch our bodies growing older, our skin losing its elasticity, our energies their powers of duration. For most of us a watch is accurate enough so that we know when to get up, to go to work, to go to church, to meet a friend. But even though we now have a moderately consistent chronology according to our clocks, there is considerable variation in our interior clocks. How long is a toothache? How long is a wonderful time? Lewis Carroll expressed a profound truth when he had the Mad Hatter say, “If you knew time as well as I do, you wouldn't be talking about wasting
it.
It's
him….
We quarrelled last March…and ever since that…he won't do a thing I ask.”

Lewis Carroll was a storyteller, an artist, as well as a mathematician, and artists often have a more profound sense of what time is all about than do the scientists. There's a story of a small village (about the size of the village near Crosswicks) where lived an old clockmaker and repairer. When anything was wrong with any of the clocks or watches in the village, he was able to fix them, to get them working properly again. When he died, leaving no children and no apprentice, there was no one left in the village who could fix clocks. Soon various clocks and watches began to break down. Those which continued to run often lost or gained time, so they were of little use. A clock might strike midnight at three in the afternoon. So many of the villagers abandoned their timepieces.

One day a renowned clockmaker and repairer came through the village, and the people crowded around him and begged him to fix their broken clocks and watches. He spent many hours looking at all the faulty timepieces, and at last he announced that he could repair only those whose owners had kept them wound, because they were the only ones which would be able to remember how to keep time.

So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.

We may not always be able to make our “clock” run correctly, but at least we can keep it wound so that it will not forget.

Since time was created, had a beginning, and will have an end, it is a creature with whom we can have understandings and misunderstandings. All artists know days when time collaborates with them and they can do more than they can do in one day. There are other days when they are equally diligent, and yet get little or nothing accomplished.

Perhaps one of the saddest things we can do is waste time, as Shakespeare knew when he had Richard the Second cry out, “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

But
be
ing time is never wasted time. When we are
be
ing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on
kairos
and are freed from the normal restrictions of time. In moments of mystical illumination we may experience, in a few chronological seconds, years of transfigured love.

Canon Tallis says that his secretary does not understand that when he is thinking, he is working: she thinks he is wasting time. But thinking time is not wasted time. There are some obvious time wasters, such as licentious living, drunkenness, adultery, all the things Paul warns us about. A more subtle time waster is being bored. Jesus was never bored. If we allow our “high creativity” to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the supermarket. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.

Some random words from my seatmate as I was flying to Evansville, Indiana, gave me the idea for a sort-of-science-fiction story: We see more and more Japanese-made cars on our roads, and if the Japanese wanted to retaliate for the dropping of the atomic bomb, they could make cars to self-destruct after a certain span of time or number of miles, killing all the occupants…I will never write this story; it was, however, practice in seeing story wherever I go, whatever I do.

Time is to be treasured, worked with, never ignored. As the astrophysicists understand time now, it is not like a river, flowing in one direction, but more like a tree, with great branches and smaller limbs and twigs which may make it possible for us to move from one branch to another, as did Jesus and Moses and Elijah, as did St. Andrew and St. Francis when they talked with each other in that light of love which transcends all restrictions of time.

Kairos.
Real time. God's time. That time which breaks through
chronos
with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because
kairos
has nothing to do with chronological time. In
kairos
we are completely unself-conscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time. The saint in contemplation, lost (discovered) to self in the mind of God is in
kairos.
The artist at work is in
kairos.
The child at play, totally thrown outside himself in the game, be it building a sandcastle or making a daisy chain, is in
kairos.
In
kairos
we become what we are called to be as human beings, cocreators with God, touching on the wonder of creation. This calling should not be limited to artists—or saints—but it is a fearful calling.
Mana,
taboo. It can destroy as well as bring into being.

In
Our Town,
after Emily has died in childbirth, Thornton Wilder has her ask the stage manager if she can return home to relive just one day. Reluctantly he allows her to do so. And she is torn by the beauty of the ordinary and by our lack of awareness of it. She cries out to her mother, “Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me…it goes so fast we don't have time to look at one another.” And she goes back to the graveyard and the quiet company of the others lying there, and she asks the stage manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” And he sighs and says, “No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”

Poets and saints. What an odd coupling. And yet Freud, too, puts them together, saying that they are the two classes of human beings who defy all his psychological categorizing, who are full of surprises. Are we willing and able to be surprised?

If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves. Because our reflexes have been conditioned as thoroughly as those of Pavlov's dog, this is never easy. But reflexes can be unlearned, or reconditioned. When my husband was on Broadway we were, perforce, night people, going to bed in the small hours of the morning and sleeping late. Now that Hugh is on a daytime television show, we have had to recondition our reflexes to become morning people, getting up early and changing our bedtime, too. It wasn't easy, but we made the transition, and now I find it difficult not to wilt around ten in the evening.

Daylight at first can be shocking and painful to the night-conditioned; it hurts the eyes, burns the skin; it takes a while to want it. And once we decide that we want the light, we must learn to trust it. We are given hints along the way, our nighttime dreams for one.

In our dreams we are bound by neither time nor space. We move through the ages and all over the world and sometimes beyond. In dreams we are able to fly, and though the Freudian frame of mind would label this as a mere sex symbol, I believe that it is far more than that, that it is a remembering of how we are meant to be.

I have always enjoyed my dreams and can remember clearly some that go back as far as my eighth or ninth year. I am often someone else in my dreams; I was once, when I was around eleven, an Elizabethan pirate. I am often not present in my dreams at all, not even as a conscious observer. Sometimes I dream full stories, and they are so satisfying as dreams that I seldom have any desire to put them on paper. Only very occasionally does something that comes to me in a dream end up in whatever it is that I am currently writing.

I do not want to become faddy about dreams, though I took them seriously long before it was popular to record them. If I wake up in the middle of the night with a dream which interests me, I do not turn on the light and write it down, which would stop me from sleeping for several more hours. I turn over and go back to sleep. If I'm meant to remember the dream in the morning, I will. I try to think about those I remember, to see if I may find in them some message from God which I was too stupid to understand during my waking hours.