The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (19 page)

He maintains that his hands are God’s hands, seeing that they are loose and attached to no body. Whereas yours and mine, alas, seeing they are attached to human bodies, are merely human hands. I leave on one side without further comment the insufferable self-conceit and bumptiousness of the fellow, and confine myself to the bare facts. His hands look much the same as ours, don’t they? Compare those primitive pentadactylic appendages, much like those of a frog, resting on the rail of the dock over there, with the similar appendages resting on your laps, members of the Jury. What’s the difference? Why, his hands look to me rather more batrachian than some others I can see around the court. Does he mean to say that -

JUDGE: Need this aspect of the matter be pursued further? Aren’t you giving it far more attention than it deserves?

COUNSEL: As Your Honour pleases. I was about to come to the gravamen of my argument.

Reflect, members of the Jury, on what those hands of his (and yours and mine, no less) get up to out of court. Picture the things they did last night and this morning, and will do before the day is out. Some of them nice and clean things, some grubby, some foul. As foul as foul can be. Some of them acts so indecent that it’s a criminal offence to perform them in public. Is he telling the court that Almighty God (may He forgive me for mouthing such a notion!) is grubby and foul, indeed
obscene?
Or that He delegates His job of wiping bottoms to certain of His angels?... Very well, Your Honour, I won’t pursue the matter further... [The court simmers down.] I don’t need to. Believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. In effect, the Accused is implying that the Almighty can sink to petty larceny. That He’s quite capable of the occasional flurry of shoplifting in the Witness’s store. No, I’m not accusing John a-Nokes of bagging from time to time a can of anchovies or dressed crab or Caspian caviare, and forgetting to produce it at the checkout. What I’m saying is that he
could
do so, using those very same loose and free-ranging hands which he says are the Almighty’s. To tell the truth, I shouldn’t be surprised if he does occasionally help himself to the Witness’s choicest goods; after all, the Divine Customer he pretends to be is certainly entitled to the lot, for free! The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. From which it follows that Sainsbury’s is the Nokes’s, and the dressed crab thereof!

Need I say more on this disgraceful topic? With great respect to Your Honour and the court, I had to say as much as I did. I’m told that certain mystics in the past have got away with the boast that God has no hands but theirs. To some pious folk, I guess this may not sound blasphemous. But only go into the implications a little, as I have been obliged to do today, and it’s evident that blasphemy of a peculiarly disgusting kind lies behind that seemingly innocuous sentiment.

The Accused has himself sawn off the branch he thought he was sitting pretty on, has uncoiled enough rope to hang himself with - several times over. The Jury will be fascinated to witness his efforts to survive his own Defence.

MYSELF: Having acknowledged that l’m almost as impressed with Counsel’s dirty story as he is, let me assure him that I too shall listen with much interest to the response it evokes here. I swear to you I don’t know in advance what the One under attack has up His sleeve for the court - a sleeve which, though abbreviated (as we’ve seen), is much more capacious than would first appear. In so far as He’s conducting His Defence right here, all will go well. In so far as the man you see is doing so, it won’t. Well, here goes:

Counsel at pains to disinfect the Almighty and jack up His social standing - till He’s salubrious and respectable enough to be invited to a dinner party thrown by a retired company-director’s wife in Riseholme or Tilling, or even Bognor Regis - now there’s a delightful spectacle! It’s a lily that requires no gilding by me. Except perhaps to remind Counsel that dirt is matter in the wrong place, and nothing in God’s world is in the wrong place. To the Pure all things are pure. Unattached hands are never dirty, attached ones never clean.

The point I do want to make is a very simple and very serious one. As so often in the course of these proceedings, what the Prosecution supposes to be the end, the
coup de grâce
of my case, is the practical start of it. Repeat,
practical.
The One who has the whole world in His hands doesn’t mishandle it. When I consciously live from Who I really am right here, from this inverted and decapitated body which is His and not Jack’s, I find these hands caressing His world and doing His work, I find these feet going on His journeys, I find this voice speaking His words. I challenge anyone to see steadily into his or her True Nature, and do violence to it. Impossible! ‘Turn the man loose who has found the Living Guide within him,’ says John Everard, ‘and let him neglect the outward if he can.’ If you find your hands conjuring packets of smoked salmon from the Witness’s shelves into your shopping bag instead of your shopping basket, or changing nappies with nose-wrinkling disgust, or swatting flies instead of letting them out, or washing dishes while you are wool-gathering leagues away, or doing any sort of botched job - why, then you can be sure they aren’t God’s hands. Or be sure, rather, that you are putting them forth in ignorance of Whose they really are. In fact, I challenge anyone to overlook his or her True and Divine Nature, hallucinating in its place his or her false human nature, and not to go on to steal and lie and be disgusted and unkind and inefficient and all thumbs - in some sense and to some degree.

Meister Eckhart said that if he had to choose between God and Truth he would choose Truth. The same here. I don’t take notice of and insist on these loose hands and feet because they are efficient, or even because they are God’s, but because they are
God-given
- or rather, plain
given.
Because they are actual and factual and true, and no hallucination.

Do what you like to me, I will live from what I see is here, not from what you say is here. And I will tell the world about it. And I will take the consequences. Meanwhile, I swear to you that to live from this is really to live. Which is to live Godly.

COUNSEL, in the falsetto he ascends to when he’s absolutely horrified: Oh, no! You’re not getting away with that one! What’s given - in your self-portrait as the upside-down and headless monster to which you attribute divinity - what’s given isn’t just hands and feet. There’s also a truncated trunk. A trunk furnished with sex organs. Sex organs activated by lust. Don’t tell me there’s any other sort.

I’ll spare the court a detailed exposition of what this means. The Jury will already have spotted that here we have what must be the Arch-blasphemer at his most uninhibited - a creature who makes out that even his sexual exploits are divine! Talk about irreverence! This is dragging the Highest down to the level of the farmyard!

MYSELF: I'm told He doesn’t need dragging. He
chose
to be born among the beasts in that stable in Bethlehem. Beasts whose sexuality was uninhibited. And innocent.

Like so much else, our sexuality comes in three instalments.
First,
that of the animal and the young child. It’s as blameless and decent as their eating and drinking.
Second,
that of the human grown-up, which is unnatural and indecent in so far as it’s what D. H. Lawrence called sex in the head, and I call eccentric sex, or spying on one’s own lovemaking. The genuine sexuality of the headless First Person on the bed is spoiled by the false sexuality of the headed third person at the bedroom keyhole - of the one who never felt the least stirring of desire.
Third,
the sexuality of the truly grown-up, of the Seer who is no longer beside himself. Ceasing to be his own voyeur, he regains at a higher level his lost innocence and spontaneity. Along with his head he loses sex-in-the-head, and finds the real thing in his loins. Head he loses, tail he wins.

And, after all, Counsel putting on his holier-than-thou act (shocked to the core yet again is our Sir Gerald!) is rather comical. And misinformed. Eastern spirituality insists that only God sees and hears and is aware - which must mean that only God enjoys sex. And again, Western spirituality insists on a God who, humbling Himself, becomes man. Which must mean He takes on a sexual life as real as yours and mine. Moreover, as the All-in-all-aside from Whom nothing is - He can’t escape sex. Does He then find Himself disgusting? Hardly! He leaves that to Sir Gerald and his friends, stuck waist-deep in their second-stage sex-in-the-head.

Now for my main point. Just as I challenge you to see into your Godhood and help yourself to boxes of Suchard liqueur chocolates from the Witness’s shelves, so I challenge you to see into your Godhood and misuse sex for showing off or dominating or hurting instead of for loving. How could you truly make love except as the One who alone makes Love and is Love?

JUDGE, to me: How ever did we get from the Witness’s supermarket to this extraordinary palaver about sex? I think it’s time you summed up your response to his testimony.

MYSELF: It was Counsel, Your Honour, who dragged in the subject of sex. A Whitehousean stick to beat me with - he thought! In fact the issue before this court is a very simple one:
whose appendages are these?
[I hold out my arms.] The contrast between the little fellow you see and the Big One I see here can scarcely be exaggerated. It’s staggering, and it extends from their respective limbs to all aspects of their lives. Those hands drive a Land Rover. These drive the Land. Those feet stumble and shuffle and shilly-shally on Jack’s business. These stride forth on God’s business. Those hands fend off the world. These embrace it. Those hands manipulate. These heal and bless. Those hands compose, play, paint, sculpt, and write run-of-the-mill pieces. These turn out the Master‘s masterpieces.

Only see Him nearer than hands and feet, and at once they are HIS hands and feet, busy and effective in His service. True
uccelli di Dio.

Members of the Jury, if you think that this time I really have gone too far, have indeed gone way out on a fantastical limb of my own, listen to my witnesses. A well-thought-of company, I do assure you.

The Great Function manifests Itself without fixed rules. Meeting each situation on its own terms, It’s never too soon, never too late. Thrusting and retracting, advancing and retreating - all happens beyond the realm of thought. When you’re in harmony with It, arms and legs operate on their own.

Japanese Zen Master Bankei

I touched my limbs; the limbs were strange, not mine.

Tennyson

Gary Snyder
has a poem about a climber who’s stuck, in mortal danger, on a rock-face. And then his limbs move with a positiveness and precision with which, it seems, he has nothing to do. I say: his human body as such had to die before the limbs of his divine body could take over.

It is one’s spiritual Nature in Enlightenment that moves these arms and legs.

Bodhidharma

You did not throw when you threw, but Allah threw.

The Koran

I [Allah] am the Hearing wherewith he [My slave] heareth, and the Sight wherewith he seeth, and the Hand wherewith he smiteth, and the Foot whereon he walketh.

The Traditions of the Prophet

We wake up in the body of Christ

and Christ wakes up in our bodies.

My poor hand is Christ.

He enters my foot, is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and - O wonder! -

My hand becomes Christ…

I move my foot, and at once

Like lightning he appears.

St Simeon the New Theologian

My head is the sky, my feet are below the Earth, and my two hands are East and West.

Abu ’l-Hasan Khurqani

Prosecution Witness No. 13

THE CANADIAN WIDOW

COUNSEL, to Witness: I believe you know the man in the dock over there. Will you please explain how you came to meet him and what happened.

WITNESS: A few months ago I was flying from London Heathrow to Vancouver, and he was in the seat next to me. We began talking about this and that. I told him a little about myself, and how I’d lost my husband recently and was returning to my native Canada. Then it happened. I’m not clear about all the details, but it was something very extraordinary. He exercised a strange power over me, so that I went quite peculiar for a time. Not all there, up for grabs. I feel very ashamed of it now, very embarrassed that I should have been so gullible.

COUNSEL: No need to feel ashamed, especially as you are no longer under his influence. I’d like you to tell the court what you remember about his behaviour on that journey of something like eight hours.

WITNESS: Well, we had dinner, with some wine. I was feeling very relaxed. I must say I rather took to him. It was then that he hypnotized me.

COUNSEL: Exactly how?