Story: The blessed treadmill

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Dave's movement through time was endless kneading, as he backed away from the world (or maybe from his own sleazy impulses to rob that world for his own benefit), as he backed into God's hands, which shaped and were warm sides of prayerspace. Alone in prayerspace, the ex-con would beg God to change his heart. Then God would knead his heart like the stiff dough that it was. The man would emerge from God's hands renewed, re-energized, and find himself in a new place, one that prayer itself had opened.

There it was possible to breathe and exist (and even hold down a job) for a few minutes or days, until his impulses (only they weren't truly his) took control again and he was forced to call out to God: take me back into your hands! Then the kneading began again.

It was not a way of life in which you could make plans, build a career, do the things other people did. Dave lived from moment to moment, except that the units of this life were not really temporal "moments". The rule that measured them was God's, of God. God measured out the units of one's comings and goings. Secular life felt like little more than a slide show in the front of the auditorium, while one's real life was a whispering in the back of the room.

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When he began to imagine that he was all right -- whenever he stopped the routine of prayer -- then the bad things happened. Prostitutes would come up to him in his car to ogle his tattoos. Passersby made outlandish offers in the local park. And his eyes would start to measure the swelling of a stranger's wallet, the ugly bulge of credit cards. Avert thine eyes! The purses of the women at church would practically caress his fingers. He stayed clean, he stayed clean. But casual acquaintances found his fervent piety to be disquieting. You're going to go nuts without some more diversion, his sister told him. You can't just pray all day. It isn't right, it isn't healthy.

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Yes but you could see the temptations only came when he was off prayer duty. It was as though the world could sense when he was susceptible and weak. So he had no choice. He was bound like a slave to his own begging.

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Dreams struck him in his foolish tender parts. He dreamed he was stealing his own church blind, taking crisp bills that were secreted (such is our dream security) in the white paunch of a teddy bear. You took a bill and the bear sang to you. The bear watched his own being despoiled and made no other comment. His sadness was the only witness. During stormy nights, robbers would tear themselves off crosses to shake their fingers at him. Morning dawned at the church picnic as the parish's poorest child, who was somehow also Dave, was cruelly singled out and given Rupert for a prize. Where is the bear's stomach? the child wailed. For the poor creature had nothing but a hole in his belly. All his assets had been stolen!

Dave, you have robbed our children, one of the matrons cried. Of course, her voice was really his voice when he woke up.

In the morning he read psalms with desperation. "Must I then return what I never stole?" But once a thief -- well, no matter what, you always will still feel like one. God pardons you, yes but as a thief and it is as a thief that you receive the pardon. You are innocent but you retain your identity, whatever you still have. Because the self God had laid his hand upon was this one and not some imaginary other.

So each morning Dave climbed back onto the blessed treadmill of prayer. And the kneading of salvation rebegan. And he was very glad.

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