EXCERPTS


From Things Seen and Unseen

   In the beginning, I would go to church and cry. I spent a year crying in church. I couldn’t say the Nicene Creed. I refused to pledge, to promise a monthly sum to the church. I made myself as invisible as possible in the church and the church, an upper-class parish in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, took little notice of me. I did kneel at the rail with the other communicants, and take the sacrament. Then I returned to my pew, to kneel and cry again. Very often, I didn’t know what I was doing there. Many layers of feeling, experience and habit had to come together before I understood religious faith, including my own. I felt at first as if I were learning a new language or how to dance: I was so awkward and foolish that at every turn I wanted to quit.
   Why did I cry so much? Apparently, many people who return to church or discover it later in their lives, end up crying in the pews. At the time I understood my tears psychologically - that is, I understood them to be about something unresolved in myself and I took myself to a therapist. Now I understand those tears both psychologically and religiously, different ways of understanding or different when the psychological is understood to be about something one can fix, rather than about something one can make room for. A friend of mine, a writer, once said he had no gift for religion. A friend of his, a believer, told him not to worry, God would find him. In religious terms, I was lost and on the verge of being found.
   I loved the ritual, the cross held high before the lines of choir, the swinging incense, the bowing and kneeling. I loved the liturgy of the Episcopal Church: each week, each Mass, the same form, from the Book of Common Prayer. Each Sunday morning the service began with a hymn, then the opening acclamation, said by the priest: “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” To which the people responded, “And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen.” Then what is called the Collect of Purity: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts...”
     The trouble was, I didn’t believe that it was about anything real. I went to church as if it were a ballet. I went to the ballet on Sunday, felt many different kinds of feelings, couldn’t bring those feelings into line with my intellect or figure out how to integrate those feelings into my own experience and so gradually they faded as the week wore on. It didn’t connect. I suspect that many people who faithfully attend church remain in such a state and don’t know what to do about it. (And those who watch us from the outside, wonder, rightly, What’s the point of all this?) What I finally understood was that simply going to church doesn’t do it, but neither does not going to church.
   It takes a long time to understand what is being asked, and who is doing the asking.  Part of the problem is that we do not want to hear the voice or understand the message. In a sermon at Mt. Calvary monastery, Roy Parker, a lean monk whose running shoes poke out from beneath his robes, said that the presence of God was like a bit he’d seen on Candid Camera. The camera crew had arranged a large terra-cotta pot next to a table in a restaurant. In the pot was a trick plastic plant that would “grow” suddenly when someone sat down. A woman arrived and was seated.
   “So she’s sitting there and the cameras are on her and suddenly the plant starts growing and she looks at it, bug-eyed, and then she looks furtively around, as we all might do, to see if anyone else has seen it and when she sees that they haven’t - they are just eating and talking - she moves to another table.
   “When we are visited by grace,” Roy concluded, “and everyone else is
just eating and talking, we tend to move to another table.”
   That year, I was torn between dealing with God and my own habit of
moving to another table.

From Practicing Resurrection

   At the end of John’s gospel, there is a small resurrection appearance, hardly worth a mention against  the others, no locked doors, no vanishing acts. Peter and his crew are out fishing --it’s after Jesus has died and one imagines them sorrowful, empty. They’ve caught nothing. And then a man from shore yells out to them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat. Dubious--they’ve tried this-- they try it again and catch so many fish their nets begin to break. Peter recognizes his lord, jumps into the water and swims to him. And when he gets there, Jesus is cooking fish on the beach. I thought of Jesus the Sunday I served the bread. I thought of him as the man who calls out to us from the shore, the man who cooks breakfast after a long night of work. After his death he is a more humble man; he doesn’t heal, he has no dark fantasies of the end of the world, he does not proclaim himself either the son of man or as much of anything else. The gist of what he says
is mild and low: love one another, forgive each other, feed each other.
   Faith is only an approximation, as is memory, one never knows if one has the real thing in one’s grasp. It’s always only a reaching towards, but the day when I served the bread at Communion I thought that I knew something of the man Jesus by handing out his body, that he was much lower than I had thought before, much sweeter. He was like the movement of a crane’s wing, or a brother’s habit of saying, “baby sister,” or a woman suffering from clinical depression who is brave enough to want to live valorously. He was like all of these things, these movements, tied together, or he was the thing that tied them together. Maybe this was what was meant by communion, that he was still at it, helping us along, calling to us from shore. And we are meant to respond, to jump into the water, to swim toward him and toward each other.
   On the day Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered by Dan White in San Francisco in 1978, I was a cub reporter for TIME, and I was sent out into the streets to gather “the people’s response.” I ended up at City Hall, having rushed across the Bay Bridge from a class I was lecturing to in Berkeley. Crowds gathered there, the site of the murders, in a park across the street from the broad front steps. Thousands of people had come there, by instinct, to stand quietly, just stand, or talk softy. I was standing next to a woman wearing a luxurious mink coat. She was not really, I said to myself, my kind of person. Too rich, wearing fur.  Then Joan Baez stood up on the steps of city hall with a microphone and started to sing Amazing Grace. And we all started to sing with her. And I reached over without thinking and took the hand of the woman in the fur coat and she took my hand and we stood there, singing and holding hands with the tears running down our faces.
   At the end of his essay on faith, the English composer Sydney Carter writes: “Do I have this experience or do I just imagine it? Is it nothing but possibility, like a song that is asking to be written? If that is all it is, that is good enough for me. That, after all, is one kind of reality, perhaps the only kind of religious reality. Song, God, a waving possibility: you must trust it, travel with it­­ or it is not there.”
     This is good enough, I thought that day in front of city hall, holding the woman’s hand in the crowd, and as I finished serving Communion; this is
good enough for me.

From Changing Light

Part One: The Man by the River
March, 1945
 
Eleanor stood up in the garden from tilling a plot for early lettuce, shook off her hands and stuffed them into the sleeves of her brown wool sweater. The wind was up; it blew dirt from the adobe wall into the newly hoed ground, dry pods from the chamisa bushes rattled like bones. She walked towards the house, sniffing the air like the dog beside her, climbed the steps to the door, opened it, walked past the stove, her hands still nestled in the sleeves  ­ like one of those Chinamen she thought to herself ­ and turned into the bedroom where she put him last night.

             All night long he listed between sleep and a rushing wakefulness muttering in what she thought was German but couldn¹t be sure. “Lotte,” he cried, “Raus aus dem Feuer!” And then, a word she thought might be English but didn¹t know. “Implosion,” he said. She had placed rags on his head soaked in water and chamisa to break his fever, get him to sweat. He looked to her like men she’d met in New York: dark, Jewish, probably; curly black hair. Last night when she found him, lying in the bosque beside the river, his face was turned towards the sky. The dog circled him. She bent over him, her heart beating in her throat. His lips were cracked, his eyelids shut. His wet khaki pants clung to his legs like vines. He grasped a pair of boots by their laces and a heavy belt in his right hand. Her eyes moved from the boots to the river and the mesa that rose up on the other side.
           She bent down. “Hello?” she said, “Hello.” His head moved, the eyelids lifted. His eyes were a pale, startling blue. “Lotte?” he said.
           “No,” she replied. His accent on the name was thick, and she heard someone’s voice speaking with these inflections in her memory, like an echo off a high stone wall. “Are you ill?” “Ill,” he repeated, ran his tongue over his lips. She walked back through thick sand to the Ford, took her canteen out of the glove box, returned. He drank in small gulps like a bird; she could see the water traveling down his throat. The water fell out of his mouth and onto his chest and he shivered. She jerked the canteen away. “Can you walk?”
           She wrapped his head in her father’s old sweater, the arms crossed over his eyes. She stood between his legs, grasped his ankles and pulled. When she got him to the Ford, she squatted down, put her arms under his shoulders and heaved him up to sitting against the front tire, then pulled him forward, whispering to him as she did to a horse, “Easy, now easy, don”t fall.”
           She had planned to drive him straight to the hospital, but as she started the engine, he whispered to her, “No doctors.” She had looked over at him and seen in his face a barely controlled desperation. And so she had taken him home. She shouldered him into the house as she had her brother when he came home drunk from a debutante’s party, and tipped him into bed.
             She stood over him in the room plastered white with thick adobe walls that she and Estaban built last May before the sudden rain came in July and washed all the plaster off the outer walls and the dirt out of her garden leaving only gravel and she had to dig her carrots up with a pick.
            
He whispered in his sleep, half-wakeful. His eyes opened and he saw her arm pass over his body like the shadow of a bird.
           “What happened to you?” she asked. Leo turned his head to the wall, licking his lips.
             We tickled the dragon’s tail, Leo thought. One of us was burned.
 Slotin was moving the two half moons together with screwdrivers. The counter ticked and the red signal lamps were blinking. The lamps blinked faster as Slotin moved the half spheres closer like a drummer or a Japanese with his chopsticks.
           Then there was the sound of a screwdriver hitting the floor. The meter stopped. Leo heard the silence first. He yelled to Slotin, “Raus aus dem Feuer!”  
 
The moon had pulled him across the deserted streets, between the trees, to the hole in the fence that the teenagers made to out-fox the guards. His legs felt like sacks filled with sand. He got down on his hands and knees, and bowed his head, feeling along the sharp ends of the linked fence with his hands first before he pushed himself through.  He sat on the other side, his breath hot in his lungs, and then started to weep, his whole body shuddered. To be free of the place. He pulled the knapsack stuffed with a blanket and bread and cheese through the fence after him, adjusted the heavy belt stuffed with money that he  carried with him through all border crossings, stood up and began to find his way. In the dark were animal shapes, moving through the trees, a deer, then a wild turkey, its wings folded neatly against its round breast. After awhile he noticed the small swift bats flying past his nose, sonar alerting them to his head. He felt a sudden calm, to be among them, the life of the world; as a boy he had always loved the dark.