what sticks

What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame.

-- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Job’s wife told him to curse God and die, but he wouldn’t. “Shall we receive the good, and not the bad?” he said, and nothing more.

Then his friends came to comfort him, and they waited seven days for him to speak. When he spoke, it was more than they could bear. “The arrows of the Almighty are in me;” he said, “My spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me.” The Scripture says that Job spoke truly when he said this, for God was indeed the author of his grief and of his suffering. Flabbergasted, his friends fought with him, leaving us timeless texts in how not to counsel grief, until God had to come down and sort the whole thing out, this thing that God had started in the first place, and for the most unworthy of motives.

I sat with a woman by the deathbed of her daughter, whom she had put through a private school and assisted through college by the work of her hands. This mother had born three children to a shotgun marriage with a man who raped her, abused her, and then abandoned her after the sons grew up. The daughter was her youngest child.

“We’re with the Lord,” she says.

Where was the Lord when you were raped? I’m thinking.

“We accept the Will of God.”

And Whose Will is it, that we should watch our innocent children die?

“I know she’s going to a better place.”

I hope so, I’m thinking. A place not ruled by insecure middle-management deities, who put us to suffering to see how much we love them.

“She keeps me going, she’s my pride and my joy.”

Job’s wife is my confidant. I think this mother might have to curse in order to survive. Curse God and live.

But she doesn’t curse. She is grateful for what she has had, for a chance to love, and an opportunity to rise above adversity. Has she worked through her anger, or never admitted it? “I don’t know how I’ll get on without her,” she says. And this is what concerns me.

Some people need to rage. If she needs to rage, I can send her to Job, who drew up the grandest and most complete indictment of God’s universe. He cursed the day he was born. He named God as his persecutor. He summoned God to a courtroom, to give account. Job never gave up his demand for justice. If this was God’s will, then there had to be someone else up there to talk to. “I know that my advocate lives.”

Those who speak without irony of the “patience of Job” never read beyond the second chapter. There are forty other chapters. The story shows that you can’t just decide to “receive the bad,” merely because you received “the good.” It’s not that simple.

“Everything happens for a reason,” some say. You don’t have to be Christian, or a believer of the Book, to say it. It’s an instinctive expression of hope. We’ll get through this. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Every cloud has a silver lining.

But when you’re grieving, there is no meaning to it. Your viscera have been torn out, and you have no strength, and you can’t stand up because there’s nothing to hold on to. You’re on your own, collapsed in the road, violated and unengaged and unattached.

Sooner or later, somehow, most of us find ourselves walking again, going somewhere, toward something, with someone. We’re heading in some direction or other, and the direction of our movement is its meaning. But the meaning comes from now, not then. We make the meaning now by moving again. And then we retroject that meaning: “Oh! That’s why it had to happen;” we say, or “So that was God’s purpose.” But it wasn’t the purpose, of God or anyone else. It’s the meaning of now, the stir of your blood, the tingling of your breath, your recovery and your survival. Sometimes we suffer before there is meaning again, but that doesn’t mean that the suffering had meaning. It proves that we make something out of nothing.

It’s not for me to direct this mother. I cannot make her rage, just because I would. If she starts to tend that way, I can name it, and show her the tradition of rage at divinity, the healing and the blessing that may come after. Is she in denial or in transcendence? I’ll have to observe her. In the meantime, she teaches me.

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these days

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-- W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The book on us is that we lack intensity. The book of those whose opinion we care about.

There’s another book on us, of course. The book of those who say we are the devil’s spawn, godless, traitors, killers of what is Christian and American. But we don’t read that book. We don’t care about the opinions of those who have always metaphysically reviled us. They are to us buffoons. Unless they bring their guns. Then they are buffoons with guns.

The book that hurts us is the book of those with whom we would be solid. When people of color say they can’t trust us, because we lack passion and our solidarity is lukewarm, it staggers us. When they say we can’t be solid with them because we’re people of privilege, we feel ashamed. We don’t know from oppression, they say. If we did, we’d be as passionate as they are.

We’d like to say, we have the courage of our convictions. We’d like to say, we have studied the situation, we have risen above our location, we can see the struggle for justice from the height of our principles. We know where our loyalties should be.

And what good are you up there in your balloon? says the hurtful book. White people can’t jump, don’t know how to clap their hands, can’t sway without falling over. You lack rhythm, have left your bodies and lost your souls. Your truth is not incarnate.

I rise each morning in a particular place and time, to do work that gets my attention. Some days I am proud of what I have done. Then I’m tired, and I have to recreate myself. I go home. I read. I write. I look out the window. I meditate. In my own way, I pray. I go to sleep. If I don’t recreate myself, I can’t come back in the morning. Not honestly. I can fool myself for a while. My well-trained reflexes will continue to operate. Only the spiritually gifted will notice that the soul has gone out of my eyes.

I have a reasonable chance, on a given day, of fulfilling the prophet’s requirement. Today I might love kindness, act justly, and walk humbly with my God. If I fail today, I may succeed tomorrow. If I succeed today, it’s something. I can’t do everything. Part of humility is knowing how much I cannot do.

To our kinfolk of color we would extend the hand of fellowship. Welcome. We know you were unjustly treated. We know you deserved better. We have read your story, in books and in your eyes. We want for you to do well. That’s how we were raised.

We want for you to do well. To say such a thing sounds condescending, but not to say it is a sin. We want it in principle, because it is right that you should do well. We want it also in our bodies, to ease the sickness at the pit of our stomachs. We are nauseated by what our country did to you.

I don’t say that our pain is your pain, or its moral equivalent. But we would like you to know that we also hurt from injustice. We have trouble getting that across.

The hurtful book says we are privileged. I learn that, though I do not have all advantages, I am privileged because I am tall, and firstborn, and male, and born to people who valued education. I also learn that white folks are privileged because they are white.

It’s hard to get your mind around the thought of privilege when you’re not rich and you’re not powerful, and you’ve more or less barely survived. So perhaps I don’t deserve to have survived. I have been rescued a number of times, given several chances to succeed. For others it’s one strike and you’re out. Or none. To me it has seemed a hard struggle to get here, and here seems no place of eminence; but the little I have should perhaps be taken away, because I got it by unfair means, born as I was with fair skin, blue eyes, male sex and blond hair.

If you say I’m privileged, you’re saying I’ve got the things you want and deserve. Among those things is power, to determine my destiny and that of others. If I hold such power, I hold it therefore in trust. I should use it not in triumph but in doubt. I cannot be of single mind about it. Some of it can be given away, but not all. It’s hard to deploy one’s power if one feels unworthy to do so.

You may not recognize my struggle of discernment as passion. You may think I am dispassionate. And yes, I am dispassionate; I must disown the instinct of privilege, which is to grab and consume, and to make of others the means to my happiness. I must rise above entitlement and climb out of my native joy, before I can come to meet you.

So I don’t come to your story as you do. Yet I want to hear it, I want to take it in, I want to grow my nerves into it. If I learn your song, my passion will not be yours; it will be the passion of a person born elsewhere, who came to meet you. I will have learned it, and you will have to hear it from me, in my own accent and idiom, inflected with harmonies that my parents lovingly taught me. That’s the best I can do. It has to be good enough. It’s all the conviction I’ve got.

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brute material

All theologies, knowingly or not, are theologies of specific life-experiences.

-- Otto Maduro, “Liberation Theology”*

We must admit that Unitarian Universalism has a specific, sometimes alienating culture, and we must change it.

-- Rosemary Bray McNatt, “We Must Change”**

Marx would say that ideas of God are epiphenomenal. Which is to say, they are sparks flung out by clashes of brute material: ideas do not make history but are made by it. The god of rulers justifies their rule, while the god of those who are ruled consoles them in their oppression. Religion is the sword of the mighty, the opiate of the masses.

“The history of the world, my sweet,” sings Sweeney Todd, “is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.” The liberation theologians begin with Marx’s view of history, bottoms-up: theologies arise, they say, from specific locations in time and place, and answer the needs of those who live in those places. No theologian wants to think his ideas of God are mere gurgles in history’s gullet, so the liberationists choose one of God’s locations as the right one. God, they say, has taken a “preferential option for the poor,” adopting the location of the oppressed as Her own. But the Oppressed do not love their location; they want to change it. So when the God of liberation joins the poor, He must help them move out of Egypt and into the Promise. “Congratulations to the Poor! for they shall inherit.” But what they shall inherit is somewhere else.

Let’s say it again. Every theology has a social location. And every social location has a theology. When the Oppressed arrive at their Promise, they will take on the theology of their new location. They shall all be changed, and will no longer be the people whom God had preferred. Oppressed people want to become, in at least one respect, like liberals. They want to be autonomous. They want what liberals have – the physical, social and intellectual capital of autonomy. As oppressed people rise up and free themselves, with or without God’s help, everything will change for them.

Again. Every theology has a social location. The liberal church is not the church of everyone. Nor is the church of the oppressed for everyone. Liberals hope to be saved through each person’s affectional, intellectual and spiritual freedom. Oppressed people hope to be saved through communally enacted dreams of a better future. To liberals, a free mind is the holy of holies; to the oppressed, a committed heart. These priorities do not amount to the same thing. But priorities change as people change their location.

Again. Every theology has a social location. Every social location has a theology. So it’s not a sin to be socially located. Nor is it a virtue. But each theology, in its social location, is an occasion of sin; we are called to own our location and know its boundaries, to contain its deathly tendencies and to enhance its powers of life, knowing that if we stood in a different place we would believe differently, and knowing that we owe solidarity, regardless of their theology, to those who were born with a boot on their necks. We liberals, unlike other people of privilege, know that we owe such solidarity. We know it because we are highly educated, and because we inherit the Enlightenment with our education. Our ethic of solidarity is a product of our social location.

We white liberals will never be born with a boot on our necks. We missed that bus. People like me did not create black liberation, nor did we give to people of color such freedom as they have. Liberation belongs to those who need it and have struggled for it. At times we have been solid with them, and we owe such people our solidarity, but not because they’re liberals – many are not. We owe them solidarity because they have been badly treated and deserve better. When they have achieved the Promise of autonomy, when they choose their loves, their works and gods, and respect that choice in others; then and only then will some of them be liberals. But it’s not for me to say that they should become liberals. Liberated people are not obliged to love my songs and thoughts, or to vote my way in the next election, just because at times I was solid with them. Their only obligation will be to become, each of them, who they are. I am not the one to say who they are.

Again. Every theology has a social location. Liberal religion is a specific culture. Some like it. Some don’t like it. Some are at home in it, some are alienated from it. But being who you are is not a sin.

Harvard is a great university, so great that its name stands for excellence. Everyone aspiring to college, in a sense, wants to go to Harvard. But if everyone went to Harvard, then Harvard wouldn’t be the thing that makes everyone want to go there. So our world doesn’t really need for everyone to go to Harvard; what it needs is for Harvard to endure, so that talented people of many races, nationalities, beliefs and cultures can be educated there.

Unitarian Universalism is a great American religion. It could be larger and more influential than it is, but it will never be a religion for everybody. So America doesn’t need everyone to be a Unitarian or a Universalist. What America asks of us is to endure, so that people of talent and integrity, who reject both arrogant metaphysics and brute materialism, can continue to practice the third way of religion.

We will endure better, and spread our values more effectively, if we look more like America as it is becoming, and less like the society of Mayflower descendents we once were. We might have to diversify our musical choices, learn to permit enthusiasm, and apply our curiosity to the scriptures of America’s great religions. But I don’t want my church to “look like America” in its sexual ethics, or in its view of biblical authority. I don’t want a church that demeans the value of women, or the role of conscience in Revelation. These are not superficial matters. Liberal religion will always alienate somebody, but it doesn’t deserve to die on that account.

Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t spread our message very well is that we have lost our faith. Liberationist thinking has done such a number on us that we feel unworthy to be good. They tell us that our principles are mere rationalizations for our privilege. We remind ourselves that we are creatures of privilege, corrupted in our judgment, undeserving of what faint power we hold. But self-loathing is not a persuasive quality. If we could own our social location, claim our besetting sins and our besetting virtues, take responsibility for our errors and pride in our achievements, perhaps it would be easier to attract diverse communities to our fellowship. They don’t know, after all, why we look so sheepish and guilty. It’s a mystery to them.

Again. Every theology has a social location. We should learn from the liberationists that we liberals are not oppressed. We are, compared to many of our neighbors, privileged people – and the choices before us are the choices of privilege. I cannot become black, or gay, or female; but if it is true that my lack of such credentials amounts to power, then I should use that power without apology on behalf of my brothers and sisters. The problem is not that some are comparatively free. The problem is that so many are not.

*A New Handbook of Christian Theology, eds. Donald W. Musser & Joseph H. Price (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992)

**UU World (Feb. 15, 2010)

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lethal consequence

Though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us.

-- Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner

Long ago when I was a professor of theatre, she came to me with a problem. Her project was to direct Antigone, and she didn’t know what to “do with” the chorus. How to deal with their strange lyric interruptions to the action, those choral odes so clumsy in speech, so difficult in tune. This is the most essential question in Greek drama: what do we have to substitute for a convention of song and dance that is utterly lost? Nobody asks what to “do with” a number like “Hernando’s Hideaway” or “O-o-o-klahoma, where the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain;” you sing and dance them in the best Broadway style, silly. But what are the steps and vocal styling for “Zeus hates with a vengeance all bravado”?* You’ll have to make it up as you go, and it had better be good. Few professors have the chops for it. (They think the play will “speak for itself.”)

But this problem was only the container of a deeper one. She couldn’t see what to “do with” the chorus because she couldn’t feel what to do with the play.

Her leading character baffled her. “Why does she do it?” Why would Antigone (a woman about the same age as she) choose to die? Why perform a gesture of respect for one of her dead brothers, no better than the other one, knowing the lethal consequence?

That, I told her, is yours to answer. The answer to that question is your interpretation of the play. If you can’t answer that question, you won’t know what to do.

“I can’t answer the question,” she said. She was young and immortal. And honest.

There’s nothing much good about death as far as I can tell, but it’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s only what we all must do. There are worse things than dying, and discovering what those worse things are is the recovery of soul.

When you know what is worse than death, you know what is better than living forever. 

Which is a good thing to discover, since we shall not live forever.

If you can answer the question, you might understand why a person would choose to die now rather than later, knowing the better thing rather than the worse would happen because of their choice. You might know what it is to live for something, ready to die for something.

Thoreau went to a life in the woods so that, when it came time for him to die, he would not discover that he had not lived. People around us – firefighters for instance, or doctors who take their skill to chaotic countries – put their lives in danger to save lives. It’s not just the lives of others that they save. They save their own lives as well, ensuring that they have lived. Others may jump out of airplanes, or climb mountains. Their insurance brokers would rather they did not.

Speak truth to power. Declare your sexual orientation. Stand in front of a tank. Save your life.

It’s a lot to ask – that a young suburban woman, from a pampered country and class, never subject to violence and unacquainted with grief, should know what is worth dying for. I praise her honesty. She knew her deficiency. She could have pretended to knowledge, like many of her bright-eyed peers. She could have latched on to schools of criticism, ideological slogans of right or left, to cults or theologies eager to explain everything. But she knew her answer had to come from the gut rather than the liturgy.

The interpretation of a play, as of a life or a song, is not a matter for the seminar table. It doesn’t help to be clever. It’s not a matter of getting the right answer, but rather of getting an answer that serves. Can you feel what it’s trying to do? Does it move you? Does it wake you at three in the morning? Does it burn without consuming? Does it resound? If your project resounds, you know what to do.

For the moment, this honest youth wasn’t qualified for her project. She didn’t have the chops. Her play couldn’t be saved. Not till she would begin to recover her soul.

*trans. Robert Fables

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hospital bed

Expect the newly widowed, childless, friendless, or loverless to wail and cry, to fall down on the ground, to gnash their teeth, perhaps to vomit or eliminate.

-- Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

I am a teachable person. Some of my teachers have never met me.

It began softly. It might have been a patient calling her nurse in from the hallway. But she said it again and again. In a cubbyhole laughably called the chaplain’s office where five or six people plug in their laptops and store their junk, the social worker and I looked at each other. Louder, longer grew the cry with each repetition, and more guttural. We heard the word – “Mommy!”

Then we knew who it was. Her brothers had expressed their concern – that she would “go to pieces” when her mother died, that her heart, not metaphorically but literally sewn together just a year before, would break for the last time. That she would die at the breast of death.

“Mommy!” She had tended the dying mom round the clock, driving her siblings away and resenting their absence. She and the mom had been preternaturally bonded, thinking each other’s thoughts and feeling each other’s pains. Now she was bonded to a corpse. No answering beat from that other heart, no matching breath from the open mouth. “MOMMY!” The social worker and I left our cubbyhole.

Paula held onto the rail of the hospital bed, her face turned upward as the song came out of her gut. MOMMEEE! No stopping her. No telling her not to cry. No shame of the orphaned body. This was something that had to happen. I put my hand on her back. As if to say, but not saying, we feel your pain. We’re here. You can fall into us.

Her legs quivered and failed. She settled toward the floor, climbing down the side of the hospital bed as if it were a rock-face, grabbing each bar and lever like a piton. “MOMMEEE!” She shuddered, and I feared she would get caught in the apparatus, cut herself on an edge or bruise on a knob. I got on the floor. I wrapped around her from behind. Not to restrain but to join her. You are not alone. As she held you, you are held.

What should one say?

Not, “It’s all right,” because it’s not all right. And if it’s ever going to be all right, we’re not the ones to know when or how.

Not, “She’s in a better place,” because here she is in this place, dead. And if there is another place, I’m not the one to visualize it.

What did I say?

I think I said, maybe, something like, “You’ve done a good job. You loved her. She knew you loved her. You’re a good child. You did everything you could. Let us take care of you now.”

One might wish to say that she relaxed in my grasp, that her wailing subsided, that there was peace and reconciliation in the room. Cue the violins.

What actually happened is that she held on to the bed and kept wailing. We brought her water. We brought her Kleenex. We got her to sit in a chair. Her brother came to console her, and we took them to a private room. We let them console each other.

No, our response wasn’t perfect. What wasn’t awkward was utterly stereotypical. But grief is an imperfect thing. It reduces us to clichés of reflex and body fluid.

I have been taught by people whom I’ve never met. There’s a chaplain in Maine, widow of a cop, who became a minister to game wardens. She goes with them on searches for people who have disappeared. Sometimes the news for those who love the missing is good; but a lot of the time it’s bad. She has held people together as they break apart. She has been on the other side of the transaction. She has broken apart, as someone held her together.

As I walked down the hallway to the room where Paula’s mother died, my teacher walked with me. She said, it isn’t always a matter of esthetics. Or of your pastoral presence. Life, love and death sometimes exceed the textbook.

When they’re breaking apart, you hold them together. When they’re hitting the floor, you don’t stay on your feet. You join them where they are alone.

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darkest valley

Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.

-- Sigmund Freud, “Dissection of the Personality”

Freud’s aphorism is best left in German, where it is so brief, and means so many things. “Werden” is both an auxiliary and a verb in itself. To say “Ich wird gehen” is to say that I will go; but to say “Ich wird Mensch” is to say I am becoming a human being. So what do we mean if we say that something “soll werden”? That it “should become,” or rather, it should come into being. But what exactly should come into being? “I” should.

Freud capitalized the common pronouns es and ich, making them into proper names for parts of a personality, technical terms of psychoanalysis. In English we separate indifferent pronouns (I, it) from the psychiatric terms (Id, Ego) by medical Latin. But Freud’s theory in common language is poetry, unparaphrasable. “Where id was, there shall ego be.” But also “Where It used to be, I should come to be.” And “The ego shall dislodge the id.” And “There where it was, it is my duty to come to be.” What had seemed to be something else, I must see face to face, no longer darkly.

Or as Socrates said in his Apology, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

The id must have what it wants right now, knowing no time or contradiction. The ego wants to choose a good outcome, aligning with reality and consequence. Id is the power and ego the wisdom. Id is the horse and ego the rider. Id is the impulse and ego the strategist.

This is no zero-sum game. I do not win by extinguishing the Other. If I kill the horse I die. If I contain the horse in a secret corral, it will leap the fence and trample my chessboard, leaving me to wonder what it was and whence it came. If I am to become whole, I must come into right relationship with it. I must accept and authorize its power.

I want to talk about the afterlife, she said. How many can get into heaven?

I’m not Catholic, I said; so perhaps you know your church’s teaching better than I do. 

There’s heaven and hell – and then there’s purgatory, so they tell me, where lots of people spend lots of time getting cleansed of their sins. Have I got it right?

That’s what the priests say. But what do you think?

You don’t trust your priests?

They’re not here. You are. What do you think?

I’m torn, I said. I have to think that God wants all of us with her, and my religion says she didn’t make us all in order to damn most of us.

But what?

I didn’t say “but.”

You might as well have.

All right then. But I also have to think there is judgment.

What does that mean?

If I arrive at the Great Banquet, should I pass the potatoes to Slobodan Milosevic?

She was full of questions. How long might it take to purge one’s sins? Were there sins that could not be purged? Can one do the work in advance? Is purgatory a place of suffering? Or of tedium? Might it be a sort of classroom, where one writes “I will not . . .” a billion times on the blackboard?

Good questions. This was all very intellectual. I was in over my head, and outside my expertise. She was agitated. We weren’t getting anywhere.

Marjorie, I said, are you feeling fear?

She stared at me. The knot in her forehead unraveled.

Are you afraid of dying?

She grinned more widely than I thought possible.

Yes, she said. That’s what I’m feeling. Fear. I’m afraid.

We sat for several moments in glory.

Thank you, said she.

You’re welcome, said I.

Pastoral counseling isn’t always this easy. She had done most of the work, painted herself into a corner from which only the power of a name could extricate her. She had to make the unconscious conscious.

Not for nothing did Yahweh bring the creatures of the garden before the universal father, so that he could name them. When he had thought of their names, Adam had dominion; he was now responsible for the garden and its inhabitants. They (except perhaps the serpent) had no corresponding name for him. They did not have dominion. They were not responsible for him. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. We’re supposed to take care of the least of these (and not they of us), but we cannot tend and keep even our interior garden without naming its members.

Marjorie was still afraid, but now had named it. She had a handle. She was riding the horse that might have trampled her. When she named the beast, she put the bit in its mouth. It might still get away from her. She might send it in the wrong direction. But now she could watch and keep herself.

I will die later than she: I cannot tell her, have no right to tell her, not to be afraid. To live with her fear until she dies, she must know she is afraid. Though I walk through the darkest valley, your rod and your staff they comfort me. I must hear her fear and help her name it. I must protect her from those who would shame her for it. I must bless her fear. I must travel with her, in the steps of her fear. Where It had been, there was now only Marjorie.

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stanislavski's cat

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

-- Mark 8:36 (KJV)

Some say that life is an opportunity to grow a soul. If the soul is something we have to grow through a lifetime, then it follows that we start with only the dry seed and not the thing itself. Garrison Keillor, pastor to the largest congregation of liberals, says that if you’re planning to sell your soul, you should nurture it a while so it will go at a good price.

The organization that trains me, judges my work and declares me fit for my ministry has pledged itself to “Recovery of Soul.”* This pledge presumes that soul has been lost. Lear said that “the first time that we smell the air we waul and cry.” Something is always already missing – not on the world’s first day but on the first day of our sentience.

Our cry of birth, the sign of new life, cues our parents’ joy. They celebrate our loss, and we seek our restitution from them. When they disappoint us we go into the world, assuming that somewhere out there we’ll find the missing part of us. We try out our various toys, loves, works and deeds. Some of them are worth living, perhaps even dying for. But none of them is the thing missing. When we think that one of these obsessions is our soul, that’s what’s called idolatry.

Stanislavski loved to watch his cat relax, leaving a round full imprint on the pillow. He wished his theatre students could do the same, but of course they can’t. They’re human, and they’re in the theatre, and they leave a jagged imprint where they lie. We actors and human beings are split by definition, so our weight comes down to earth irregularly. It’s not our fault. It’s our paradoxical blessing, that we’re not cats but human beings. We’re not made for spherical oblivion on the counterpane. Our great opportunity begins with the bum’s rush, flaming sword behind us, nostalgic for what we can’t remember because it isn’t memorable, yearning to be again in the place where we didn’t know where we were, each of us free malgré lui.

Before we managed our appearance before God – before we donned our fig-leaves, corsets, cravats and tuxedos, rags and uniforms, spectacles and lab-coats, bikinis and little black dresses – we had no knowledge of ourselves. To know ourselves is to know that we are missing something. They’re watching us, and we forgot to get dressed. We wish we were better, or at least better-looking; but we’re not, and so the costume parade commences, the greatest show on earth.

We’re not born bad. The notion that we are infernally blotted because our first ancestor didn’t stay in the womb is one of those fantasies engendered by idle, idol theology – faith with too much time on its hands, envious of house-cats. We’re not created evil, but rather with something missing, all of us like Macduff untimely ripped, because there is no time for such a word.

I talked to a man of business who suffers unbearable pain. Every year or so he comes back to treat the pain again. What is the reason of this torment? Is God trying to tell him something?

For that matter, is suffering the slang of God? Is the slaughter of Haitian innocents a kind of singing telegram, a way of getting our attention?

My Baptist businessman and I agree that God doesn’t massacre babies or torture a man’s spinal cord to prick the conscience. Nature follows her courses, and from agony and outrage a conscience may arise, but that is our accomplishment not God’s. Rain falls and buildings collapse on the just and on the unjust alike. Pain recurs to this man in spite of his faith and prayers, in no discernable relation to his balance of good and bad deeds. If this is the divine message, then God is a poor communicator.

The world is what it is, not what it would be if . .

And so my Baptist becomes a Stoic. “The world is what it is,” he says, “but I have my grandmother in my pocket.”

His grandmother was wise. She had seen many idols exposed. She could bring him back to himself, from the worship of what his hands could make, and she gave him an icon, a little cross he carries on his keychain. When the world that is what it is goes into deathly spiral, he can put his hand on wisdom. Grandma reminds him to wait here incomplete, and to resist the lust for sirens of completion.

Seductive are these demons, born of our dearest hopes. The financial industry is our most recently burst pustule of idolatry, but liberals must remember that wealth is not the only corruption. If only I could publish this book, or get this body pregnant, or found this church, or cure this disease, or change this unjust law, or get this child of mine into the correct pre-school, or win this woman’s love . . . All these projects are born of the life instinct. All of them can, without appearing to change, turn deathly. We should ask of the priest, the politician, the doctor, the social worker, the protester, the parent, the lover, what we long to ask of the banker: is your dream the means to a greater end, or has it become the end itself? Are you its master, or has it eaten your soul?

When Moses saw God in a burning bush, the bush was not consumed, and the flame that was not a flame carried the voice of a God who was not there. When Isaiah saw God, the hem of God’s garment filled the temple, which was the prophet’s way of saying that, though he heard the voice there, God was not in the temple but somewhere else.

“It is in your power, whenever you shall choose, to retire into yourself,” wrote the stoic emperor Aurelius.** To recover the soul is to take Grandma out of the pocket. Which is to come back to ourselves. Which is to remember our mortal incompletion. To be full and round, leaving an even imprint on the pillow, is to be dead before we die.

The soul is recovered when we know its absence.

*Covenant of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy, www.cpsp.org

**Meditations IV.3 (trans. George Long)

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