Story: The Ridiculous Knight (Part 3 - El barrio rojo)

*

The red light district, it was set up as a hallucination -- a visual puzzle designed to keep people from thinking sustained thoughts such as this one -- or thoughts any longer than this one -- thoughts that might burst like a lion through the hoop of sorrow into another world -- but the marketers had decided and recommended.... oh they had done their work.... and so the colors flashed just barely off the beat -- so that whenever a bit of human mentation threatened to sprout, the flashing lights would burst into your visual field and kill it. As a movie this red district would have had no tracking shots a la Max Ophuls, only a series of disoriented quick cuts, frenetic like the kind of television show whose whole purpose is to make sure the viewer doesn't click the remote or remember anything at all including what was just said, no, already forgotten. The whole thing was exciting, but nothing that could be followed and cut loose. You were meant to live short term, just sensing everything... or everything but the One you could not sense in this immediate way. So vice was a powerful tool for keeping God out of the picture. And the quick cuts were meant to cut God like flesh.

The tourists gaped at the billboards with their subliminal changes. Slippage, despair. Hey, everywhere, utterly nude hostesses advertising car batteries, life insurance and the coldest wettest beer. The weirdness wasn't just the images of these hostesses but the way people, that is, mostly men would now take them for granted, forcing them to be outrageous to be noticed at all.... for all this slavelike labor of being sexy. So was there a sadness, a reflective sorrow behind the fake allure? Oh it seemed so. But all they were there to do was sell things.

The convict, the Christian, the ridiculous knight tied his imaginary horse in the bower next to a giant performance space -- or was it a casino? or was it a bar? or just a warehouse? -- which was the place where Don now lived, prodigal son of a Father that our air's perfumed insecticides -- country fresh incense of forbidden love -- tried to whoosh away with its spray. I think I said that already, did I? but the sensory overload in this neighborhood has emptied my head! Did I already say this too? Because you couldn't think a straight thought in this place, the atmosphere was too heavy and twisted and off. And yet God was said to be here, even here, lowering hooks to catch the humans and save them. The hooks would have to be extreme, to be sure.

*

The bouncers Sans Foy and Sans Loy, 2 huge ugly brothers, blocked the door with their elbows. Behind them giant posters of Duessa holding up a Coke. She would be performing tonight.

What kind of luck you got today? Sans Foy asked Sans Loy. Then Sans Loy said to Sans Foy, I got the best of luck today, brother, and pulled a rabbit's foot out of his pocket. The foot was still bleeding and still twitching, very fresh. God help me, tell me that the blood is not real. Would this be part of the allegory? Because they say that writers use allegory for 2 different reasons: 1) to express things that can't be stated in any less mysterious way; and 2) to mask the direct expression of all of the things in the world too horrible to be said directly. In other words, to say what must be said but is too horrible to say.

Because sometimes it is a sin to hide the truth and equally a sin to tell the truth. And that's when you have to ask for help from the bag of magical evasions.

The brute Sans Loy put the rabbit's foot back into his pocket while the foot continued to try to run away. There was a rabbit's scream but it was imaginary, it hadn't happened. This is a personal gift from Duessa, he said.

And the 2 of them refused to let anyone in and they beat the people who tried. Their uncle Sans Joy was a miasma in the back alley that was trying to swallow up stray pedestrians and cars.

*

So staring at the 2 bouncers, you felt nausea flood your heart and overcome it, a familiar sensation alas. Your head still worked but somehow it didn't care to. It was pulling in its horns. In this neighborhood people laughed a lot and were very afraid. But the ridiculous knight was maybe too dense to catch the ordinary signals. He walked up to them and committed one of the sins he was known for: he lost his temper big time. First breaking the nose of the closest one, he leaned to the side and disabled the kneecap of the other. So immersed in violence he became violent. Crying, get away from me you goons, he pushed his way into the warehouse, stood open mouthed at the the tapestries of blood that hung like brochures until their slaughterhouse smell overcame him and he began to totter. And someone knocked him out from behind, felling him like the flat of a sword.

*

He collapsed through hallucinations and a vision of Don lying buckled to the wall, connected to an electric prod. Did you come to rescue me? Don asked. But Dave wasn't listening. He lay like one dead.

*

The Reader's Digest Prayer

*

- When you pray, do not just pray the Reader's Digest prayer (the anchoress said).

- What do you mean? What kind of prayer is that?

- Well, there is a magazine, or there was a magazine that made its reputation on rescue stories and "life endangered" stories. A girl rescued from a stalker, a town saved from a forest fire, a little boy who gets his donated kidney just in time.

- What's wrong with that? Is there something wrong with being rescued?

- Well there was a question that the magazine never asked. Once the rescue has happened, what kind of life does the rescued person live? Is it that they shopped at Walmart, then had their danger, then were rescured, and then went back shopping at Walmart every day? As though nothing had really happened?? Was that the rescue? Was that the good life they were born to live?

- I'll bite. *Was* it?

- But that's not the question I'm asking, not exactly. (Since I don't even know the person who was rescued.) I'm not asking whether their ordinary life, outside the emergency, was a good life. I'm asking, how do we decide? How can we know? And why doesn't the writer of this article help us answer this? Why this focus on protecting the normal day to day secularity and never looking beyond.

- And when it comes to prayer....

- Do not settle for the Reader's Digest prayer. That was what I was saying. Do not be so sure you know what to pray for. When a person living an empty life suffers a fire in her house, pray for her to survive the fire, pray for her house to survive. But don't stop without also praying for that life that was rescued also to be rescued, if need be -- rescued a second time, a deeper time. Even if that second rescue comes in the form of fire.

*

Poem: Epigram of the pilgrim

*

May my life pacify my faithful aching
and every move I make be of God's making.

*

Interlude: Wisdom stands at the intersection

*

Wisdom stood at the intersection calling. The cars would cover her voice and then roll away.

Follow me and stop medicating yourself with wine and speed. Don't flee your sorrow but turn and face it, confront it, let it shape you into the person you were born becoming.

This here is prayerspace, she said. Not somewhere else but here.

Wisdom was with God before he even created the world. He did not shut you folks out of his blessedness -- not ever -- nor did he ever choose to exclude this place. This place here. Therefore the first step into his kingdom can be, could be, taken just as well here as anywhere.

*

Come listen to me, Wisdom called, but the pimps and dealers laughed at her ill-fitting clothes and un-made-up face and they swore they would never stop and eat her charity food or sleep in her hermitage. She wasn't to their taste, they said. The others, most of them, walked by without stopping. A certain heedlessness bound rich and poor, young and old, black and white. They were all equally averse to her words. And outside her retreat the cars went by in a relentless mood, a form of fury, ready to run over anyone of any age who got in their way.

The convict stood in the street and drank in her words. He never wanted to move past her. And it wasn't that he lived by what she said, as much as he might have wanted to. It was just that he was nourished by hearing them and he wanted to listen forever.

*

Story: The Ridiculous Knight (Part 2)

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So the knight in Spenser's Arthurian poem, saddled and caparisoned to such a point that his will disappeared beneath allegorical paint -- how did he manage to move at all? Every inch of ground became so meaningful and symbol laden that the horse's hoof sank in and could not could not move. Dave in his nightmare rode the horse (though he didn't know how to ride a horse) while beautiful Elise (in reality strong minded, definitely stronger than he) fell out of her natural role and stood at the edge of the clearing wringing her hands. Find Don and bring him back to reality, she implored him in the "voice without refusal" that Dave at least would not know how to refuse.

But was this reality? Dave looked down at the valiant Arthurian knight that he was pretending to be. His body, his real body, was covered with tattoos and arty obscenities from his former life. He was no knight, he was not in any shape to rescue anyone. All his own color was ashen.

He woke up slowly, cautiously, and dressed (it was like putting the eggshell back onto the egg). Then he set out to find this guy, this Don whom Elise valued so much.

*

St Diodochos of Photiki distinguished evil dreams from innocent ones by pointing out that the demons were by nature restless, squirming in their misery, unable to hold still, and the dreams that they sent were the same. A reality forever in flux was like the doubled tongue in the Book of James. You needed to gallop through this particular land without letting it touch you and convince you. Likewise the first temptation of our leader in the wilderness was the work of the master of flux: "tell these stones to become bread".

*

Whereas the person of faith -- whether artist or Arthurian knight -- sought nothing so much as to live in a vision that was sustained. But this aspiration was not simply granted, it had to be achieved.

*

But what held steady was not the symbols, only what they pointed to. Dave stopped and rested his steed, wiped his sweaty forehead as best he could. In the baddest part of town the gas statons were all shuttered up and the anchoress's soup kitchen was practically the only legitimate business. Prostitutes from the casinos floated by the pumps waiting for their dealers. They were very sad and very hard, no, the hardness only masked the sadness but made it impossible of access because time was running out. They needed medication to get through the day. Their medicines came from the south. The wino with the bag of wine, sitting on the bench, he too was in desperate search for medication. All of them, they looked at Dave and recognized one of their own, just in the way he was flinching.

*

I cannot go through with this, he said to himself.

*

The world as an entity?

*

Some people assigned this world of ours to the devil, others insisted that it belonged wholly to God. Well, manifestly the 2 of them never "co-owned" any entity, or played a game of sharing, so did that mean that our world was not an entity, not a thing per se, but rather a transition, and a place of transition? More like an arena than a home?

So that one couldn't own it or survey it or even describe it, one merely crossed over and hoped the direction was a good one?

In any case, its basic transience somehow seemed truer in October than in August.

*

Am I well yet? An interlude

*

No, not yet. September has come and gone and I am far from healed, far from being a Christian. As the month on the calendar changed, the ridiculous knight rode through all the brittle leaves on the sidewalk, the emblem of October. On the corners children gathered and began to prepare for the coming day of pagan fear and family closeness on the last day of the month. But it couldn't really be October, could it be? Could time be moving so fast? The calendars and chronometers didn't lie -- but in a way they did. They would run down like thermodynamic laws, they went in only one direction, which was that of the knight's and everyone's dissolution. But he was riding in the other direction, against biology and physics really, not against in any conceptual sense but in a ride more fundamental than that -- just the other direction, against whatever flow they made. So as he moved into middle age, into withering and death, he felt a strength and even a dim glowing of light up ahead, if he only could figure out -- just how to move into the place where it was.

Horses grazed and humans rested, only it wasn't really resting. It was resting that was full of tension and needed another name. In twilight the anchoress prayed and let all the poor people through her gate. You had to assume that she knew which direction one was supposed to go. She looked like Elise. Otherwise he would have run away.

So Dave lay down and dreamed his usual irrational nightdreams, knowing that the devil would be sure to use them to try to ruin him - but knowing also that God was in there too, hidden within the burning yellow images and crackling October leaves.

*

Prayer as a Wave

*

The prayerful kneading is like a piece of death because you don’t know where it’s going to take you and you have absolutely no say. Nor could you nor should you.

*

So what more to say of the kneading except that it is full of terror? Is that why people don’t go to this wonderful place? Is this why we avoid intimacy with our God? The immersion – in God – is like body surfing within the megawaves, the ones that hold you down forever and rub your nose in sand. Your mouth, your shoulders, slide in the strong feel of reality, the sweetness in the core of turbulence. Can you survive this power? And you stand up stupefied in the water, look behind you and see an even bigger wave coming up. And then you pray to God that God’s own wave won’t kill you. And the kneading begins again.

*

PRAYER AS ACTION

So that for you the realm known as providence waits on the other side of prayer, can only be found there, and you must ride, or be carried, through your own annihilation to get there. Captives go free but first are captives. A true prayer must be a kind of action, a form of change, a behavior that leaves you changed. The verb in the prayer is the oar that rows you closer – yes but closer? closer to where? Closer to where the prayer itself is going. You cannot say that place before you are there. And words fail you when you are there.

*

PRAYER AS THE EAR CHEWING WHAT IT HEARS

Therefore, for you, ugly Dave, listening to reality’s word became a most active passivity. The ear moved and changed within the word it heard. And this was not only like chewing food but also like being chewed by one’s food.

*

A PEACE INSIDE THE ROAR

Prayer was the peace in the midst of the roar. It was perhaps found nowhere else. There was no other access road. In prayerspace all people of faith gathered together. The rest of the world was there too but with a different look a different feel. A different slant of light fell on all things and made a different kind of shadow. Things were softened and loosened. That was because they were now prayed for.

*

PRAYER AS TEMPORARY OR TEMPORAL

One of the requirements for being here was that you had to step back out again. God was going to pull you like dough back into the world. You didn’t want to go.... but on the other hand, it was God’s world to which you were called or called back.

*

Story: The Ridiculous Knight (Part 1)

*

All faith reflections stopped abruptly on the avenue where Don lived, or used to live. A black cat walked up to Elise and rubbed her calf. The cat was emaciated. No, I can't believe it. This is Don's cat, Elise said. he's letting her starve to death. This is impossible. I can't be seeing this but I am.

How could he ever be such a brute?

She looked at Dave in a state of melting bewilderment, even her features were moving. Indeed he had never before seen her not in control. It was horrible. He would never have been able to say, before it happened, how unnerving it was to see this woman in distress.

You could say that seeing Elise in a helpless state put him in the same state -- or worse. After all, she was one of his pins, one of the people who kept him pinned and upright. She led the study of scriptures, she discerned things correctly, she spent all her time helping the poor and sorrowful, she knew how to pray without making other people's flesh crawl, she was always always calm. He depended on her to be dependable, always. Seeing her in distress made him come undone. It was as though every 911 phone in the universe was ringing at once.

Here, give her to me, he said. I'll go feed her, he said. (Referring awkwardly to the little cat.)

Yes, but where is Don? Elise asked. What has happened to Don?

*

When Dave came back from the convenience store (carrying a round bundle that wanted to get back onto the ground), he found Elise talking to a stranger. She seemed worse than before, more disturbed if possible, and Dave's heart began having -- what was this? Were these palpitations? He did not love her. What he felt for her was a whole lot worse (that is, better) than love.

Elise, calm down. Elise, please. got is still h ere.

The stranger, probably the landlord, was saying: He just disappeared, lady.

I can tell you, miss, it bothers me considerably not having him around.

He was my best tenant.

*

When he saw Elise crying, Dave turned *instantly* into the Knight of Courage and Sorrow, a knight out of Spenser or Don Quixote, a ridiculous role for an ex-con, a former criminal, an all-around terrible Christian, such as this worm called himself, but by the time he had ascertained this obvious fact, the armor was already all but buckled on. Never fear. I'll find him, ma'am. This I promise. The little kitten, Tinker Bell, curled around Dave's ankle. This man Don was missing and needed to be found.

TO BE CONTINUED

*

The Bent Witness and In the Darkness with a Candle

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I cannot evangelize you, my sweet Lord, because I am broken. When an advertisement appears on TV, the models are always young and strong and beautiful. They are not allowed to sell a product unless they appear to be sound.

But I am bent over inside and my soul, considered in itself, is not a pretty sight. How can I “sell” you, my sweet one, when I myself am so ugly?

Now it is true that you hate advertising and therefore want me to witness in a different way.

But don’t I need to be healed first? Doesn’t my body need to witness what you can do? Doesn’t your power need to be seen in me?

Or is it that this breaking of me, this humiliation and the way I am knocked to the ground, is it that this is the witness of your love and your wisdom?

*

IN THE DARKNESS WITH A CANDLE

*

Here is how the kneading of Dave's relation with the Lord would act itself out in reality. To begin with, he found deepest intimacy with God only when he was alone, in a room without windows. In the darkness with a candle. Withdrawn from all women and men. In solitude so deep that it was beneath any loneliness. Yes but in the solitude what did he find? What it contained was the command to go into the community.

But you couldn’t *be* in community without going through here first. Community only existed on the far side of your withdrawal into God.

*

Story: The blessed treadmill

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

Interlude: The circle

*

I believe my little dog has a language of his own, powerful and expressive and full of redundancies that I enjoy.

When he is hungry and knows I am moving to the bucket of kibbles -- or maybe I am about to pull like a band-aid the plastic lid off the dogfood can using my magical powers to produce the wonder of *food* -- and all the time he knows absolutely that this is going to happen -- all during this time he runs in little circles on the rug and the kitchen tiles. These circles are a language. I read them with great ease. They express an idea and transmit it to me, and I am in no doubt whatsoever what the transmission is about. I know what my doggie is saying.

Sometimes I may misunderstand the words of an actor on television. But I never ever misunderstand the words used by my dog.

Each circle is perfect and elegant. It is like the loop underneath a "g", ornate, almost baroque. The excessive nature of the loop, its extravagance, is part of what it communicates. Dachshund language is anything but ambiguous.

And I hurry to the bucket, no doubt making a loop of my own that he in turn perfectly understands. Bless the little lad.

*

Story: The house church and the parable of the "bad" Christian (Part 2)

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THE PARABLE OF THE "BAD" CHRISTIAN

As Elise told it, there was a church in a downtown area that was losing parishioners and needed restoring. Some people say it was a megachurch in the suburbs that had lost its charismatic pastor and was now suffering budget shortfalls. Others say it was in the middle of a city from which all the wealthy people had fled. In any case it was a church that people pitied or criticized more than they respected. And the more energetic members felt it needed a lot of work.

There was a "bad" Christian who belonged to this church. Well, no doubt there was more than one, but in this parable there only needs to be one. The trouble with this "bad" Christian was that people didn't find her interesting or useful. She wasn't good looking or young. She wasn't eloquent. For some reason, she did not socialize well with other members -- when she tried she was always a bit awkward. Her jokes were too hectic. Whenever she was asked to a house she wasn't asked back. There was no deep fault anyone could identify, just a sense of someone whose clumsiness seemed out of step with the grace and beauty that was still a cherished part of the worship service. She simply didn't fit in.

The "bad" Christian could easily have volunteered to perform some chore that others appreciated. She could have picked up the loose bulletins after the service. She could have tried to greet newcomers. She might have brought some cookies to hospitality. Nothing stopped her from giving a ride to a senior citizen. Something, anything. She could have tried to be "good".

But all she did was to come week after week. And though her spiritual aura was drab and uninspiring, you couldn't deny that she came. She apparently found something in the church that nourished her. So she was a "bad" Christian but a Christian all the same. You couldn't really say otherwise

The better Christians grew more and more frustrated and dissatisfied with their church, and some of them even stopped going. They took a sabbatical or began shopping around. Others just moved away. What do we do about this sorry place? the leaders asked. They would quote the old Ladies Home Journal cover: Can this marriage be saved? Then they would laugh self-consciously, uneasily. Because a church really was like a marriage -- changing a church was like undergoing a divorce. So you tried to stay as long as you could.

And the better Christians -- the ones that didn't move away -- prayed over their uneasiness, sought discernment, hesitated to make a move. But finally some of them decided to secede and form a house church. We will not compromise, we will not spend all our time on asking for money, we won't focus on building a building instead of serving our sisters and brothers, we will be a true church. We will be new. We will be available to the community as this sorrowful place no longer is.

What in the world is a house church? asked the "bad" Christian. She had never heard about this.

And being the person she was she didn't understand what it was when they told her. She didn't get the point.

So she was left behind. And the house church went on to have some experiences that were as filled with the very spirit they had worried was lost. There was movement in the hearts of members and movement in the community surrounding them. What they'd done was in general a good thing.

Yes it was, but there was the "bad" Christian sitting in the church they'd left. Soon that church sank even further and further without their inspiration and finally began experiencing perpetual budget crises, the scary kind that lead people to wonder whether it isn't just time to close down. Perhaps everyone should move on to a house church. But there was always the "bad" Christian who didn't understand house churches, didn't get the emerging stuff that was happening, always seemed a step or two behind whatever was new and interesting. There was the Christian left behind.

If people had decided to take her church away from her, it was because the church wasn't interesting and neither was she. But if that meant removing the wafer from her mouth -- removing the presence that kept her "badness" from imploding -- then someone was going to have to answer for this change. And they would have to answer to the same person they were trying so hard to draw nearer to!

*

(Interlude: Search for a new minister)

*

Meanwhile the parish was in the midst of its search for a new minister. It was a time of anxiety, of live spirits but anxiety. Some people said: what we need is a duplicate of Father Sam so we can retain our community, our vibrancy and... but others insisted that it was time for someone or something new.

What should he even look like? Sharlene asked. Are we even saying “he”? (Because there are talented women in ministry now). In any case, I will go out on a limb and say I go for someone as homely as possible. Downright ugly if we can only achieve it.

And the others cried: Sharlene!!! Why????

Not that a priest should be pretty? But why ugly, what’s the use of “the face that no one wants to look at”?

Well....

Well we as a society have had our fill and more so of the people who are good to look at. We have had so many ministers who look like newscasters and whose message seems somehow... oh, I’d say sweetened and made crisp by their newscaster looks. By their constant poise. By their never getting shaken up by anything anyone ever says. Insurance people, when what I want is not insurance but **risk**.

Oh, Sharlene.

I would like someone like Lincoln, only of course I don’t mean a politician. Someone whose pants roll up to his shins when he rides a horse, someone covered with dust, awkward and too tall or else heavy and squat with sweat going diagonal on his forehead. Someone not only easy to laugh at but who finds being laughed at easy also. Who are we not to be laughed at? I want to see the spirit move not so much in his Sunday words but in the way he moves through the other days, when the rest of us sit here biting each other’s heads off. Oh Sharlene.

Someone who doesn’t break a bruised reed, someone you don’t care about for the obvious reasons, someone who can take what is dished out by people like, well, like me. Oh Sharlene. Someone who knows what he wants and doesn’t get shaken off the one tree where he sees it growing. Someone I can follow, not just look at like I’m looking at you.

I want someone whose market value is nil and who doesn’t even care that much about raising money. He doesn’t have to worry about that, because if he exists, I’ll do the money raising for him. I want him to do the things I **can’t** do.

At that point the others laughed at her, shook the pool of resumes in front of her face and said: That’s all very well, dreamy girl. But this here pool is what we’ve got.

*

Story: The house church and the parable of the "bad" Christian (Part 1)

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Part 1: The house church

Maria: What bothers me is the way they talk about us as though we were witches.

Sharlene: Right. Anyone who isn't beautiful and sort of soft, like melting ice cream. Compliant. Probably blond. Soft of voice. Very few of us.

Maria: I feel I can't move when they are around. They're watching, judging, expecting favors, never helping. I don't care for them.

Mary Louise: Of course we have to forgive them. I guess this is forgive and forget.

But just imagine life without them.

*

It can be nice to have an aggressive macho gung ho guy around, when you need to be defended.

Yes but who do you need to be defended from? An aggressive macho gung ho guy. An assailant.

If the one wasn't around you wouldn't need the other. What if you didn't have either one?

*

The women began imagining a house church. The worship would be pure because those who sully its purity wouldn't be there in the first place.

The door would be locked but on the inside of the lock, one could call on God safely. In peace. In true Christian peace.

*

No more sermons that are disguised pleas for money.

Mary Louise: I could regain the peace I seem to have lost.

Elise: Girls, this is a very bad idea.

Picking your community. That's not how it's done. That's like being the kind of missionary Oswald Chambers says not to be. Running out and choosing your field instead of letting the Master "engineer your circumstances".

Yes but we're not missionaries. We're just girls trying to purify our lives a little bit.

Lots of people do house churches all over the country. It's part of, you know, the "emergence". It's connected to tomorrow. I think God wants us to do this.

That's when Elise tried to improvise The Parable of the Bad Christian, in a big hurry, a story that convinced nobody but nevertheless needs to be shared as a portion of Part 2.

*

Story: Like Meryl Streep's bad acting

*

Is bad luck that brings you to God really so bad? If it breaks your spirit, is it bad? Are you sure?

Is the guy who loses all his money and learns not to rely on it someone you would pity? Has the badness brought him to a better place? Is that new mountaintop good?

Is the pain such a terrible thing?

If life considered in cold blood would be a chutes and ladders game, with lots of small climbs and lots of sudden falls, then whad would your own cold blood tell you? Weren't falls often more beautiful than climbs? In God's judgment was it the case that down was up and upward down?

SPIRITUAL TEMPTATION TO SUICIDE?

When a guy stood looking down at Douglas Island -- suddenly created out of fog -- his soul leaped down the side of the mountain, sensing that God was there to receive him with open arms. But fortunately, as one hopes, his body had more sense and held him gripped onto the lookout high on the mountaintop, having forbidden him to jump but leaving him in fear. And this fear was in fact a gift.

*

Matt laughed at the height but Dave was afraid.

Dave's stepfather, an acrophobiac like himself, pinpointed the source of the fear: when you look down, you actually want to jump. A part of you does. The fear is a piece of you that you can't just tear off and discard.

It feels as though God is more there than here. the fear brings salvation present. The possibility, the reality. Then you feel God's love within your fear. Bless God for all creation including my sick racing heart. I will fall but I will also climb.

The lichen clung to the spruce and refused to look around. Something powerful was here. The fog only doubled whatever it was. The boats and refineries at the bottom of the vista looked like toys.

*

Over and over, Dave received evidence of what a bad Christian he was, or that he was not a Christian at all. Whereas his new buddy Matt just rested in his faith and didn't prod it much. After alll, brother, it's all about God, not about me, right?

There was an ambiance of trust around Matt that was too happy to move or change. Obese and alluring, he fit like a puzzle piece into the rich and heavy air of Alaska. But for Dave, happiness itself was problematic and difficult to identify or seize. Faith backed away from it. If he were to feel it, his first response would be to prod it and push it until it was no longer itself. No longer happy.

When he walked along he sidewalk and a stranger jostled him, his first impulse was always to haul off and punch the guy. Only a second later he remembered not only not to do it but not want to -- because you're walking with God, remember? But there was always that second filled with rage, to remind him of who he was. His decency was something hastily applied, on top, not really him.

*

It was like Meryl Streep's horrible acting. In a turkey like The Hours you could watch her react to the other character, you could see the wheels lifting the tram. She was saying: Now how shall I play the next line? Everything voulu, everything willed in isolation. You could watch the decision being made, you could see it form. Then came the vibrant and sincere acting, but it was too late, it came after a hesitation that told you how artificial the feeling was.

And Dave's Christianity was like that. There was a forced quality to his goodness that he himself couldn't stand. He would fall down the chute of anger or lust or greed, then pick himself up, climb up again to the distant regions blessed by God, but always wondering if the blessing could really be meant for him. Well, the climbing was painful and the pain was real. There was something to that. There was no bad acting there.

*

The cement-mixer

*

Is the faithful one like a drunkard on the steps? Like the avid connoisseur of drugs? If you were to judge by appearances is this what you would say?

God fills his follower's heart to the near exclusion of the world. The world lies underfoot but is hard to navigate, hard to negotiate because its solid floor lies at right angles to the other path, the better path, which is: this closeness to God. Buying food, getting to work and then working, those are side effects of this other, more intimate walk. So the God-drawn one has the hardest time putting his foot down before him. His attention is elsewhere.

Meanwhile, hard core "Christians" -- the ones who reduce faith to behavior control -- they watch the faithful one walking and grow disgusted. Her steps do not add up into a rational path. Her feet dance the drunkard's dance. The one who is pulling her off the path, that one is difficult to see.

What would a reassembled world look like to the one who is drunk with God? Since I am your average backyard sinner, I must be careful describing what I barely know. But I think the foreground and background of the picture might be changing places. Seen thru God's eyes.

A typical picture in our city: 2 well-dressed women walking into a store. A homeless man stands in front of the store. Cars rush by. But the drunken one cannot see the cars and the store is just a sort of black void that is receding from the picture and not really part of it. Whatever enters the store also disappears. Well then, is the homeless man at the center of the picture? Is the appalling smell that he gives off in reality an elixir concocted by God? Where is God in this landscape and where exactly are you? Disorientation is more or less your strongest clue.

*

And the pavement circles you like a cement mixer as you try to figure out just where you are.

*

Poem: The inward as the path to the outward

*

Walking slowly through and into sand,
nothing but sand that whips the face
and draws lines on the eyeballs, permanent
arabesques of sadness, sir,
holy sir, my melancholy sir,
where do you think you go? Away from "here"?
Do you think you've escaped this world, this "here"?

The sand lacks all nutrition, scorpions
are sculpted out of air and their despair
is indigestible -- even the birds
avoid all flights that happen to cross near
this destitution. Only God
cares to be present here -- yet where you meet
God, the earth lies trembling at your feet.

*

Dave's dream

*

After eating too much fatty gunk in the late hours, Dave tossed and kneaded himself through the night, making no headway on the twisting road to rest, because even rest had become painful.

When morning finally came, he tipped himself almost into wakefulness but couldn't make the last twist. At 7 he dreamed that he was in a restaurant facing a plate of chicken that still had a mouth attached -- it pecked his hand and face, it wouldn't lie still. His own food was eating him. The dream went on and on, even as its minutes should have thinned into the breathable air of daytime logic -- because none of this could ever possibly happen. They wouldn't take the plate away. He woke panting and late for the food closet where he would be volunteering.

When he told a client about the dream, the man understood it instantly, the way "ordinary" middle class people never do. You may have gotten a warning not to eat any more meat, the man said. There's a chance that maybe a thousand Christians all over the country had the same dream at the same time.

It was as though the man too had had the dream.

Prayer is no trouble at all, it happens completely naturally, whenever you are terrified.

*

Then he questions

*

"All sheep and oxen, *
even the wild beasts of the field,"

they are okay -- so why am not I?

*

Dave tries not to lie

*

Because only what you actually are can be saved -- not what you pretend to be -- nothing is more important than actually being that horrible appalling person that, so unfortunately, you in fact are. Be what you are, not somebody else, even if that somebody else is better. Because if you pretend to be well when you are ill, and then God rewards and saves the well image of you, what happens to the reality, the sick person you actually are? Who benefits when the the poster of the actress is blessed but the actress is not?

If nothing else, telling the truth at all times is imperative. Truth is not a luxury.

*

Now the man who had saved Dave from being abused every night in prison had also brought him to read Kierkegaard -- that impossible Danish philosopher & scold -- that awkward unglamorous *Christian*, of all things -- now reduced to sad somber dog-eared porridge in the prison library. Kierkegaard was the road to many a religious conversion in prison, because even the books' obscurity somehow pointed outward, which was enough.

When Dave didn't understand a word -- and he didn't understand very many or perhaps any -- he would simply use that word as a placeholder in his traversal of the sentence. He would read the words anyway. So a word like "ideality" -- and what the hell is that anyway? what could it be within a prison? -- he would simply hold like a precious jewel and lay it down carefully in the context of the paragraph. It seemed to rest on dark velvet. It was what he didn't have and what still existed anyway, austere and quite graspable. Over time "ideality" and "reduplication" took on some sort of meaning that was what they came to mean for him, which was something beyond freedom.

*

Now, today, on parole, free but not free, he would reread the books as intently as a man trying to re-find himself. "The strivings [of a businessman or professor] are worn like gaudy clothes -- but people reaching for the absolute seem to be walking around naked, they offend everybody, you can't help laughing."

The mouth that tells the truth is ugly, repulsive.

Yes, Dave said. But not to God.

*

Dave meditating in bed

*

And to tell the truth, now how do you do that? Telling the truth is a bigger high than any orgasm, more powerful than any drug. I want to wedge myself so deeply in truth that I give off the smell of truth, fair or foul, so when the truth is gritty I am nothing but grit and when the truth is shameful I am a walking cesspool of shame. If I can manage that humiliation, then later, when the truth turns into joy as we know it ultimately does, I can be rendered, be seen as joy. No no, not "be seen as" but "be". I want to be true, to a greater extent true even than good, given how "even when we are unfaithful God remains faithful, because he cannot deny himself" and "cannot lie".

Imagine going even 24 hours without telling even a single lie.

*

Dave crosses the threshhold into September

*

Most threshholds you can't even feel -- take the equator, you feel the same on either side. Long term something definitely changes, with a small fruit on top that signifies your eventual or sudden awareness that something has changed. There is not an objective "moment" of change, because change always includes subjectivity either within it or wrapped around it. There is a quasi-physical occurrence, and then there is the awareness of it. One of them may be sudden while the other takes centuries. Sometimes awareness is so quick that it comes like lightning before the "physical" thing it is aware of has even quite happened. Sometimes the other way around -- a split-second change wrapped in long years of response.

Take being well, being ill. A well person stops to ask himself how he feels and discovers he is ill. Too bad! And at the same moment an ill person, a person who has been ill for years, recovers and heals but the healing is not instantaneous. The crossing over is so subtle, so gradual. You cannot analyze this, you can only stand in it -- on one side or the other.

I would rather *be* well than *feel* well any day. Awareness is wonderful but what I really want is what it is aware of.

Idle thoughts? As my thoughts continue and give way to each other, suddenly, imperceptibly, August becomes September. But those who were ill in August are probably not suddenly well in September. God has tons of patience, and even the hour hand on a watch moves in a feverish hurry by comparison to this patience. I believe I will be well the day (or decade) when I am able to accept God's concept of time and live within it obediently. Things just don't move quickly -- except in those terrible "moments" when they do. And those tend to be "moments" that last forever.

What a ridiculously ornate way this is of saying that September will continue August's theme of "getting well". Speaking for myself, I have more recovery to do and maybe a little more time to do it in. How about you?

*

Story: The ex-con (Part 3). Playing the role of a Christian

*

"Playing the role". But what would it mean *not* to play the role?

Tattoos are of the skin and forever but you can still take them off. It costs money but what is money after all? Just something people pass around. Tattoos are of the skin. But Christianity is more, it is more inward. It is thus more bodily still. It is imprinted so deep that you can't peel it off.

Nor do you just pass it around to other humans as though it were fungible, moveable, a mere thing like money. It is worth too much to bandy around.

"True knights of faith can never teach but only witness." (Grafitti found in the head at Soren's cafe.)

*

Christianity is so deep that even if you sin (which may God prevent -- but then you are only a human, and sin is what humans do, by coercion, by choice, at work at play) okay, even if you sin somehow your sin is done as a Christian, which means among other things that it isn't all that much fun. That's another story, "the ex-con part 75". But meanwhile the need to sin goes very deep. But after all, Christianity goes even deeper than that. If it survives in you, it survives in your most molten core, a substance not an attribute. It cannot be peeled away, it is not a skin or of skin. You must remember this during sleepless nights when you thrash like a fish.

So what does it mean to "play the rol"e? It means anything else besides actually being a Christian. For instance, when your faith touches your core but you yourself do not. It consists of the slightest lie. Even maybe the white lie, where you say you're fine when you're not. Dave, the truth is that you are practically never "fine".

*

As the weeks passed, Dave watched Mary Louise lead "the prayers of the people", which were become the most spiritless part of their service. By this time he was virtually certain that she was a criminal, at least at church. She was robbing the till, embezzling without shame. And praying at the same time, in front of people, and he didn't see how.

Nor did he know how to respond to the sound of her voice at prayer. Of course, there was a large selection of Pharasaical responses available but as a broken person, an ex-con, a closeted queer, an aging friendless loser, he didn't feel righteousness was quite the thing, quite available, at least not for him. Not available, not appropriate. That would have been "playing the role" even more than he already was. When all he wanted was to be this thing -- "Christian" -- and not to play it like some actor on TV.

About the embezzlement, he had no right to speak and no right to be silent. So he had the choice between two different sins, which only meant that the way he'd lived up to now mus have been wrong, to have led him to this impasse. Sin had been a long term strategy, not just a single act. To become, not even a "good person" but simply passable and adequate, one saved through fire, well that was going to take more patience than he seemed to have. The first step was to stop playin the role.

*

So he said, Oh Elena, someone really ought to be double checking the church's books, don't you think, and she only answered: Oh don't worry, Mary Louise already does that. So we are safe, we don't have to worry. And he said, Oh Elena, and then she looked over at him with a certain discomfort, as they walked home together from some meeting. I bet she doesn't even want to be standing next to me, he thought.

It's not right, it's not a just thing, to put her or anybody in that role, Dave said. Think of the pressure. Then there is temptation. Even church money just reeks of wrongdoing, don't you think? Why, Elena, I never go near money unless I have a bodyguard with me to protect me, it's not even a friend, better yet to have someone who isn't even a friend. Someone upright and stiff like you.

You don't understand, Elena. Money stares at you and says, Go ahead and take me, I'm just money. I think a lot of thefts are initiated by the money itself, just sitting there being money, while some poor stupid robber stands over it and feels the influence.

*

Elise was a hard person to be with. She scrutinized him for some seconds. Looking into her eyes felt like looking into a mirror. Dave, babe, she finally said. Money has no power over a Christian. It buys things we're not even really supposed to want. Still, if you want to go over the account books yourself? And Dave said no no no. No no. Not that. As for that: no no no. I never said I wanted to do that

That was the night they ran into Don's cat, spine to navel, running around forlorn along the avenue.

*

Her howl

*

And the dog who sits at the front window howling for the master... that dog is smarter, knows more than the ones who are sure they are fine.

*

Story: The Ex-Con (Part 2)

*

One of the tricks used by a good white collar criminal is to cover his tracks with a layer of boredom. If he is cooking the books (and there's no reason why he is necessarily a "he") then the transactions are broken down in countless futile baby steps, in the hope that anyone examining them will soon get a headache and just give up. Well, life depends on trust, the inspector will say, closing the books with a sigh. Or: only God would have the patience to scrutinize this fully.

When Dave took a small part in a small capital campaign for the church, he glanced at the account books, then looked a bit harder. Something in the back of his head began to tingle, as he spotted the unnecessary breakings down of simple payments. It wasn't really anything, just a style that he noticed. He felt he recognized it. An attack of accountant's nausea swept over him. He said nothing and was quieter than before.

*

The church's bookkeeper was an outgoing woman named Mary Louise. She had no enemies, no one ever criticized her. She'd had some domestic sorrow that no one directly talked about so it hung undismissed as part of every incomplete conversation concerning her. Now she was a single mother with 2 small unruly kids. She had a couple of part-time unstable jobs. Somehow she managed o survive from month to month in a community where most people drove expensive cars and traveled to Europe. In that one way, she and the ex-con were similar.

*

They tended to regard each other with suspicion. What are you doing in this church? each of them seemed to be asking the other. Why aren't you out there explicitly among the broken? Who *invited* you?

*

Drop this whole thing, babe, Dave's sister said, rubbing her little brother's temples. Matt her boyfriend sat in the corner and whistled to himself. Matt was of course uninvolved.

Dave, whatever is happening over there is none of your business, Dinah said. *Your* business is to keep your nose out of, that is, never ever ever again, nunca, jamas, even *touch* an account book, baby. Picture those numbers as surrounded by an electric field. Mushrooms in the meadow with evil drooping gills. Please. You don't need that stuff.

Baby, for you, opening account books is the same as me walking into a casino.

Just

don't -- and then

that's solved.

*

Parable of the Nazi Kommandant's Wife

*

So the 3 of them in a restaurant, Elise, Scott, Mary Louise, sat discussing the parable of the Nazi Kommandant's wife. Have you heard it?

She was born a Christian, raised a Christian and, sometime soon after her all but compulsory marriage -- imposed without appeal by a dominating father -- she suffered a Christian conversion. From Christianity to deeper Christianity, and it almost killed her. For weeks she didn't eat. She lost her first child. Her husband's patience vaporized. Hours praying and talking to herself. Growing weaker and stronger at the same time. When the war got underway her husband was assigned to run a certain camp.

Did she know about the camp? Her mystical tendencies were like a fog obscuring certain realities. She had never in her life met a Jew, that she knew of. She had no interest in German patriotism, in politics at well. The faces on the coins she never cared to look at.

Vigils, fasts, she became one of those Christians that cannot hide their faith even when they don't evangelize.

A child came who loved her. She protected the young one from its father. Without a word of criticism. Without ever a word.

*

And there was smoke from the building at the other side of town, where one didn't go or couldn't go. And she never asked her husband anything about his work.

In some ways she was what I'd like to be, Mary Louise said. Scott stared at her, not sure if she was joking or if this was one of those things women said and only women understood.

*

There was smoke, Elise said. What do you suppose was burning, Mary Louise?

What? Are you saying it was one of *those* camps?

*

Well like most parables this one wandered slightly off the track of ordinary realism. There was a day when some sort of explosion occurred or a bomb fell -- or God's thunder from heaven -- and a fair number of civilians fell down without rising afterwards. The Kommandant's wife was one of them.

When she found herself tangentially grazing the beautiful soft sphere of heaven, soft and comfy as a giant fitball, she couldn't help smiling. I have wanted to be here for a long time.

The problem was that it was people that entered heaven -- that is, people, not individuals but entities with culture and a worship that bound them together. You didn't get in as a celebrity or as a localized believer.

So the guardians asked her not just about herself but about the place she'd occupied and changed or failed to change. I am not a Nazi, she said, I barely even know who they are.

*

Was this answer good enough? We can't answer, Elise said. Not only because we don't happen to have the answer but also because we don't have the right -- I mean, even to speculate from outside.

How many African babies do you suppose have starved to death since the time we sat down to this dinner?

*

Story: The ex-con (Part 1)

*

There was an ex-con in the church membership. Only a few people in the congregation, a very few, knew about the man's past in prison. Father Sam had been one of the few to know and he hadn't discussed it with anyone else. Nevertheless, when the man looked around at the other members he always had the feeling that they knew. And this was maybe just part of the man, part of his nature, part of what your nature becomes when you've been through that. On the other hand, maybe they did all somehow know.

*

During a desperate part of his first marriage, he had embezzled money from his employer, someone he loved, someone who trusted him. There had been an illness and absence on his part, then a check of the books, and then there had been the prison time. That was a time for abuse and reflection. That was a time when one tried to look at what happened from a distance and realized that any distance was unreal, unsustainable. Because I did do those things. They happened. What I am now is the effect of a cause I don't dare try to shake off. the story is about me, I am not just watching it. You are the man.

For anyone who has this kind of experience, what happens next is very strange: suddenly every story is about you, you hear yourself in them. The paragraphs point at you. You don't like at all what you hear but this "don't like" is very important because it is the key to your recovery.

*

The ex-con's name was Dave but not many people called him by his name. That was the kind of person he was. If you needed his help and he was standing in the next room you didn't call him, although he would have come. He would have come but this was never tested. He just wasn't a person you would call.

If he had wanted to be called, that would have had to be one of those wants and desires to be given up like a Lenten sweet. Because a person calls only what is somehow already his own, what somehow belongs to him. But if darkness surrounds you, you do not try to call it, unless you are already so fully in it that the darkness is all there is to call.

[END OF PART 1]

*

Myth of wellness

*

Today the Pharisee is the person who is well. He (perhaps she) looks over at her mentally ill neighbor and says, Thank God I'm not like that person over there (while all the mentally ill person can manage is the scriptural plea: Jesus, please rescue me).

The well person, the Pharisee, looks over at his ill brother and sees no resemblance, missing the fact that the ill person's condition is also his own.

*

Story: The 2 churches

*

An “inward anthropologist” – one lost in study of her sect and self – might have discerned 2 churches co-existing in one building, one time and space, even one creed more or less, yet the 2 churches clearly had little in common.

There was first of all the church that was functioning properly and that met for a short period every Sunday. Well dressed families would drive up to the building, socialize quietly, worship in due order, socialize a bit more then drive away. All was well both with them and the institution that served them. The moms who were the driving force in this effort definitely saw themselves (and I am in no position to say “saw themselves wrongly”) as good Christians whose lives in general harmonized with the hour they gave to the gospel every week. There was no conflict there. The rest of the week consisted in working and raising children. Church neither helped them nor hindered them in these other activities nor did they seem to expect it to help or hinder. It was simply church. They did not make a big deal of it, make a big deal of going, they didn’t pretend to be profoundly moved. But they did attend, as often as they could.

*

The other church was more ragtag. It was harder to see because its members tried to avoid any display, not out of humility, more as a matter of low self-esteem or shame or just the unwillingness to be "seen". This was the church of the broken. In some communities it consisted of one person, in some communities none at all. In some places it might be the broken who filled all the pews. there were even some communities in which the true congregation was the one that stood outside, afraid to come in, unsure if invited, unsure if welcome.

Some of this 2nd church's members had never in fact been inside the church. Or not for a very long time

Of the collection of the broken there were some who had tried to step outside but hadn't quite been able. Matt the carpenter had once been absurdly eager for communion. Tasting Jesus was more powerful than any form of sex, it was like the joy of unwrapping an endless present. It got him through the week. But one Sunday morning after he'd had to work on an emergency job, he got to church just as people were homing in on the rail, and plunged in without waiting. He was dirty and smelled like the worker he was. The children stared at him and a young matron took the trouble to speak with him after the sacrament. That was the day he discovered which church he was really a member of. And after that, the taste of God was filtered through a mixture of resentment and shame. You couldn't pretend it didn't matter who was standing next to you.

*

So that it turned out that for the church of the broken everything about the church was also broken. When hymns were intense the broken needed them to be more intense still. When the music was bland they twisted with pain. When the theology was strict they felt constricted, when beliefs grew loose they felt themselves cast loose. Nothing was allowed to just fit and be fitting. It was as though a God that was critical of them was the only God they could have. And there was no amount of God that could have possibly been enough for them. As things were, they seemed unable to be happy. Their incomes were low, their clothes rather out of date. Their presence tended to be ignored in capital campaigns. The kiss of peace somehow slipped off their faces. Even the most generous moms found themselves backing away. It's not personal, they insisted, yet were inwardly certain that it was.

*

In America, everywhere that you looked for the Body of Christ you would find it torn into several pieces, yet this couldn't be the final truth, or even the semi-final one. Nobody wished it to be this way. No Christian actively sought schism.

Yet things held in their dysfunctional patter as if indefinitely. People rarely crossed the aisle or straddled a doorway. If there was relief it was only that -- as Elise noticed -- now and then a mom would cross the room, drop to her knees, cross herself and quickly pray. Perhaps for an hour without stopping. Often it was a "newborn" single mom whose guy had just given into the urge not to be married anymore. He became as if dead to the community and the wife's eyes swollen with hectic tears. She had joined the church of the broken without a shiver of hesitation, while her children watched in astonishment. She would begin praying and doing good works as though there were no tomorrow. The flock of the abandoned would stand around her timidly, hoping to absorb from her proximity the secret of how to become this entity they had longed to be for ever so many years and with such limited success: an honest to God practicing Christian.

*

Story: The rabbit hole

*

So she was sick, but she was cranky and impossible to be with. When they passed a secluded chapel she asked her husband to stop the car. How efficient and precise, how athletic, how staccato each step she made. She pulled the door open and disappeared as into a rabbit hole. He sat in the car and felt terrible.

Be brief, my love. Get the job done and then say: that's that. Let us not get bogged down.

In the chapel was nothing. No seat, no altar, no decorations but the ghosts of decorations. She saw a spot on the wall where there had been a cross -- there was now a sort of fungal outline. In the center there was a piece of rusted iron sticking out like a hazard. She touched it and her hand buzzed. Later she found blood on the ball of her thumb, but not now.

What do I want? Why am I here? She closed her eyes and moved in a circle -- her posture became more malleable. You could hear a tiny snap. That was the initial resistance breaking.

I have no purpose being here. I would like just for once to have no plan. No structure, no furtive intent.

Make me available.

The chapel was vaguely circular and when she opened her eyes she wasn't sure which door was the one she'd used before. And she liked not being sure. She leaned on one of them -- not the same one, it couldn't have been -- and tried to wedge it open. Why did it resist so much?

There was a gravel path and many dying trees. The ground was curved and yet it went on forever. Her shoes were totally wrong for the ground.

She found herself further advanced on the path without having the memory of walking. That wasn't fair, wasn't right. She wanted to do the walking properly, that is, consciously -- otherwise how could she be positive she had really arrived?

There was no place to sit anywhere. She felt certain that if she just kept walking she would find a place to sit. The ground simply repelled one but it wasn't clear why.

Why am I always trying to be the tough guy? Well in part because when I act otherwise it doesn't seem to be me. The person I would wish God to shower with mercy is not my worldly persona or my lookalike, proud of all her earnest striving, but instead is simply me. And who might that be really? She found that the path went continually uphill. When she reached the landmark of a stunted oak she was sure that the path would now curve back to the chapel. It would surely be downhill. But no. It continued to rise instead.

This was not like some teenage thrill ride where kids stepped onto the ride, got scared, and then returned to earth as exactly the people they had been before the ride.

Traveling this felt equivalent to changing, it was a form of change. Up ahead she heard the sound of trickling water. There was an old man holding an old green hose and watering a bare pot of ground. He was wasting all the water. His face showed considerable irritation at her presence.

You are supposed to be here, he said. But not now. Not yet.

Hearing him the woman felt an old panic rise from her bowels to her throat. First it was the panic of recognition or rather of being recognized but soon enough it changed into an even less acceptable form, a sort of panic made out of panic itself and therefore needing no cause. She turned to go back the way she came but it was uphill too!

When she turned to look at the old man his eyes had softened. Maybe you will remember at least some small piece of this later, he said.

As if without moving he stood next to her with his hand on her shoulder. Close your eyes. It was as if he spun her and then she found herself back in the chapel, more or less facing the two doors. When one of them resisted her pushing she gave up quickly (that was not like her!) and transferred her attention to the other door. It led her right back to the car where her partner sat waiting. How was it? he asked and she didn't know what to say.

Later she asked him how long she'd been in the chapel. Less than a minute, he answered.

*

Sonnet: A faithful lover

*

He betrayed those he loved, he always had.
And God was one of those
whom he "adored" and "treated bad".
God was like an abused and trampled rose.

I didn't mean to do it, so he said,
not once but several times -- repetitive,
mechanical, and then would plead
sheer weakness and of course God would forgive,

again, again. God didn't seem to learn
how hollow this man was, and what a sham
this man's impassioned promise to return
to the last faithful one who'd stuck with him,

when all the others (and that would include
the man himself) had given up and fled.

*

A story that is nothing but questions

*

Don? Are you still there? Don? Are you still listening for God? Don? Is there a person stirring inside there still? Are you lost in yourself, lying there on your bed, flooding the couch with lachrymose fluids? Are your ears still open, puppy dog? Those 2 foolish flaps of flesh that don't know how to keep sound out, are they still functioning the way they used to? Don? Don? Do you still hear?

*

Have you pondered this, little Christian? Have you stopped and thought about your brokenness, or are you just groveling in it? And how long will that go on? When do you stop and think about what being broken might be *for*?

Were you better before you were broken? Don? Are you pondering this with honesty? Were you really better, imagining yourself as a strong Christian, a hairy-chested Pelagian guiding others like some sort of mini-God of sanctity? That was better???? Oh honey, wasn't that just a fantasy? Weren't you always a great deal weaker than you pretended to be?

Remember the time when..... and how she cried?

Isn't it better to know you are weak when the fact is that you are? Isn't brokenness more than the crack in a teacup? Doesn't it lead somewhere? Doesn't the fissure make an avenue of its own like a path to hike, isn't there a lane leading through there, don't people travel through here? Haven't you watched them pass, haven't you looked down on them?

*

Isn't there a possibility that this is good? And if it is good, or might be good, why do you flinch and refuse to go the way your own weakness points you to go? Are you acting wisely or refusing to be wise? Is a young girl helped by your breaking down?

Don? Are you listening? Or is your refusal to listen somehow secretly listening? Are you going to just let time, with its undiscriminating destructive power, take care of this for you? Are you not going to look for the truth that is everywhere so also must be here? Are you never going to listen? Does never mean never?

*

Is it some macho thing of yours then to roll around in your own sickness, to feed upon it, to refuse to study it and learn? Is this an important part of your manhood, to refuse to get well? Is refusal a part of you? An intimate part? And if you refuse to listen -- if you ultimately refuse -- ask yourself then, just who is it that you are refusing?

*

Story frag: Role model

*

Oh you crazy guy, why do you leave church at exactly the moment when you need church the most??? Is it because because because the church can only take your joy (which you don't have) and has no use for your sorrow?

Has it rejected you and spit you out?

*

The congregation said, Oh where is Don? And Mary Louise (the bookkeeper, whom you will meet soon) said: He really elevated the spiritual tone, you know. And Dave the hardened criminal (you will meet him too) felt a big hole in his heart, a hole that oddly had exactly the shape of... Don. It was as though a brother had run away.

*

"Create in me a clean heart -- renew me...." The choir sang Psalm 51 but sounded all wrong because Don was missing. The music director fumed. That guy should feel terrible for ruining our harmony.

*

And Dave the criminal brooded in his apartment. Not being great with doctrine, he had been looking for an actual model of the Christian walk, a man whose steps he could follow in his clumsy way. And now that model had just about skulked away and this was the same as not to model anything at all.

*

The Art of Getting Well

*

As for the art of getting well, they say Step 1 is recognizing the sickness, *really* recognizing it, so that your recognition is like a competent person performing diagnosis. Be careful that the recognition is itself not part of the sickness, do not let the recognition get sick or else it will miss an important symptom and even become an important symptom. Step 2? What is Step 2? Step 2 is not letting go of Step 1 when self-loathing detonates like a home-made explosive. So Step 2 is Step 1 en serio. Si, hablo en serio. This is the real thing and the hardest part. Step 3, they say, is to take care that when you explode, as you will, you make sure it is in God's hands that this happens. Do not ever trust a mere human to make you well. Do not ever be alone with another human without God also being in that room.

*

Step 4 is a piece of advice that cannot be given to you as you are now but only to you as you will become: the pulsing body in God's hands that you now fear to become yet cannot honestly avoid being. And being and being.

So the steps are roughly these: first recognize, second do not flinch, third take shelter and then fourth -- Step 4, which you will recognize at the time that it comes.

*

Don, we are praying for you.

*

The Story of the Lamb (Part 2)

*

He lay in his apartment at night, knowing that his life as a teacher was over. Not because of anything physical that had happened (because indeed nothing had). What had happened was in that wider, supposedly "mythical" space where things were truer than true and events that hadn't happened were still written down in the record books merely because they had been thought about.

The space that had separated his arm and her breast had turned out to be nothing but denial. He was in love with someone he was not allowed to love and this love was nothing new. The only new part was the large eraser slash down the middle of the negation. Denial had been denied. He was not a spectator, "he was the man".

*

You pass through a story like a tourist and discover its power is such that you are going to have to reside there for the rest of your life! Here is your new home.

*

In their sister church, one that belonged to the same denomination and city but (through some quirk) was part of a different diocese, there had recently been a scandal. One of the youth workers had been investigated for something or other, and the authorities had found child porn on his home computer. The story made the papers, the children were interviewed, the land of story began to bleed into the world of verifiable truth, and meanwhile the sister church next door tried not to watch but couldn't take its eyes away. This is horrible, the mothers said. This is horrible, the youth workers said. This is so horrible that -- it is too horrible for words and too horrible to think about, Don said. I can't believe it happened, I can't believe that there are no controls, that just where you are sure there are controls, you suddenly find --. Yet you could see them, you felt safe before.

*

And he went on and on.. And when even the parents turned to other thoughts, he continued to brood, had no choice. Because the lamb he had stolen -- had not really stolen -- had stolen in the land of "truer than true" where stories resided -- that lamb walked through all of his dreams and now lay down, heavy mournful thing, in the very center of his bed.

End of Part 2 of "The Story of the Lamb"

*

The Story of the Lamb (Part 1)

*

The story of the lamb -- of the man who stole a lamb -- is about the man named Don, but it will take me a long while to get there. I hope you will be patient.

*

I have to tell you that I don't understand reality enough to describe it to my own satisfaction. But I do have a sense that our little domain of true and false -- of the verified and the refuted -- makes a very small sub-domain inside the much more vital domain of what's fully real. By which I only mean that most of what surrounds us, though very clear to God's eyes, is mere speculation for our own eyes. As for what surrounds our little human world of "true" and "false", the rationalists and cogitators can call it a land of myth or of hypothesis -- my only point is how far it extends, not merely around us but within us as well. We don't know much aside from this one immense thing.

*

In the wide domain of mythology (?) that surrounds us, we ourselves, without God's help, could never figure out what is true and what is false. We are like that poor monkey typing Shakespeare. Scientific trials seem to have the same feeling of blindness as that animal typing.

*

As for the story, the use of the story. Whenever pain destabilizes me, I panic and reach for the pain relief that is the spirit gazing over the pain at something else more edifying. What I mean is that when my soul hurts, I need a story, quickly. Entering the story releases some small part of the pressure on me of forever inhabiting this one particular self with its pain and panic. Sometimes the otherness of the story looks back from a place without pain. Now does the story have to be true in order to work this magic? Well, the characters do not need to have entries in the phone book. But there is a certain kind of truth that the story must have or else it is useless and relieves nothing. I am so tired of hearing literary critics and Sunday school teachers tell me that the truth of a story is irrelevant. When I need it, the story's truth matters immensely and persistently. When it is not literally true then sometimes it becomes truer than true. When you need a story, you will feel this too. You will be glad that the story becomes as true as it can.

*

Take the famous story from Second Samuel of the man who stole the lamb. He was a rich man but he stole his poor neighbor's lamb, his only lamb. Did this man, this thief, exist and does he exist now? Did this crime happen, did it perhaps happen many times? Today. people don't own animals in that way, they don't depend for their life on its ownership, not in America anyway. Yet oddly enough, the story seems even more deeply true without its original locale. It does seem truer than true, if I'm allowed to say that. It is like the bare outline of a person that had been drawn upon a transparency but that you step into without warning and then suddenly it's really you. In its current state it can be lain over anyone (and oddly seems to fit nearly anyone). You say this thing is like a decal, then you try to take it off. But it won't come off. "You are the man!" Now its truth can be seen to be true for you too. Yet they said it was only a story. Only.

*

Who has stolen what lamb from whom? Oh, there are so many crimes! In the novel Lolita, the molester narrator hears the sound of children playing and realizes that his crime has been to steal a little girl from the space where that sound is made. But in a way that space doesn't have a locale. We have all heard that sound at many different times in many different places. It is hyper-localized, its place is bigger than place (the delimited one that we know) and it lives in a wider place than our physical space, where it becomes truer than true. Not less true but more. So that is what I mean about my difficulty in placing a reality, in pinning it down. The truth is that I neither can nor ever would describe reality "to my own satisfaction" because in the end reality isn't mine, after all. But that is still not enough to say.

*

But now to move on to Don, the protagonist of this story, the man who (almost) stole a lamb.

*

To Don the other teachers had seemed so indifferent to the people they taught, so involved were they in their own intermural games of precedence (always in the context of the general unhappiness that came from the low pay and low respect they received). The big issue was always who got the copier first and who was the poor soul who had to replace the paper. Don, on the other hand, was proud of his "good works", of how dedicated he felt and was, of how much good he did for la communidad in general. People at church on Sundays would stand near him as if to bask in the warmth of his good feeling. He felt he had finally learned how to walk the Christian walk.

*

Then one day as he reached forward to correct some homework submitted by Luisa, his best student, his hand accidentally grazed her breast. It was a very slight contact, it hardly happened, and he didn't talk about it, she didn't talk about it, it seemed not to have happened at all, really; nevertheless, the movement of his arm had been like someone wiping the condensation from a window so that you could suddenly see what was on the far side. You could see whether you wanted to or not, you could see things that really you didn't want to see at all.

Nothing had happened and yet the whole notion of "good works" had disappeared in an instant and could not be retrieved.

It turned out that "he was the man!"

*

Story fragment: The bottles

*

Don, a much loved local teacher, was in bad shape, serious trouble. There were empty beer bottles all over his apartment, an indicator of distress but of what aspect was this indicator: that the bottles made a mess? no, that didn't matter. That the bottles had contained beer? No. But that there were so many of them, that was the indicator of distress.

*

They made the outline of a state of mind. They were the shape of a problem that wasn't being faced but you couldn't just look at them and know what the problem was.

Scott looked around the tiny living room and thought to himself: My best friend has a drinking problem but at least he's not hiding it, he's leaving it exposed. But is there something else he's hiding?

*

Then Don came back from the bathroom, opened the refrigerator and took out 2 beers. No thank you, Scott said. I'm feeling too unhappy to have a beer, whatever that means.

To change the subject Scott asked: How is that student of yours doing? The Latino girl that was learning English so quickly....

Aghast he watched as the expression on his friend's face fell onto the floor and tried, pushed hard, but was simply unable to pick itself back up.

*

There are some things you don't want to see even once in your life -- but if you see them once, then you say to yourself: I never want to see that a second time.

*

Elise and Don

*

When Elise went to talk to Don, one of the "pillars" of their church -- well, it was their attempt at a church -- well, the sort of church to which everyone brought their joy but no one ever brought their sorrow -- or dared to consider it -- well, the sort of church which its own members considered largely powerless for helping a person get well (since that was a task for clinics and counselors and cocaine) -- well, then, when Elise went to talk to Don, he took one quick look at her and turned white as a glass of milk.

*

Sick? Sick? O Elise, you really think of me as sick???

*

And Elise thought to herself: I didn't before but now I certainly do.

*

The basic task of getting well

*

Elise thought of the month of August as the month of getting well.

It seemed to her that all the other months were too busy for this core topic. Everyone had work to do -- gaining a living, resting from the gaining, bringing up kids who would go on to raise more kids, meanwhile teaching skills to them that they would spend the rest of their days teaching to others, in one huge etc.... everyone lives like this without reflecting on what their skills were ultimately for -- or against -- in other words, everybody was busy pursuing the means to the means to the means to the means to some end that they had meanwhile forgotten, if only because they were so tired! But let August be different! Let us get out of this "eternal recurrence" and its endless wash-cycle, let us reflect on what we are doing all of this *for*.

Scott listened to her patiently, then said: Oh Elise, you need a vacation badly! That's what *you* need.

*

Need? need? O reason not the need, white boy.

*

Story: Compulsion

*

On the subject of compulsion Father Sam, our beloved Father Sam, talked to us just a week or 2 before his departure from our church.

*

On the subject of compulsion I am painfully well informed (he said). Most compulsions are private and even secret, now why is that? Is it that even as children we feel ashamed to be in the grip of such a thing? How do we decide to be ashamed? And do we think we can hide it, even though probably everyone, except most likely ourselves, can see it plainly?

*

And then when we do see it, we maybe talk about it to our dearest friend and that friend says: Just step out of it. The friend doesn’t understand that if we could just step out, it wouldn’t be compulsion. In that case we would have shucked it off a long time ago.

*

On the subject of compulsion. On the subject of compulsion. The urge to break out (until perhaps you finally do) can feel like just one extra step in the endless cycle that compulsion follows. And this is your nightmare.

*

There was once a would-be believer who asked his buddy: how do I take the final step and believe? And the buddy said: just trust Jesus. So the would-be believer said, Yes but how do I learn to do that? And the buddy said: well, first of all, you just trust Jesus. In the same way the compulsive one, during his darkest days, sees the breaking into freedom as itself a small enclosed circle that he can’t seem to penetrate. But faith is not like that and neither is freedom.

The break is a miracle, right? One that we hope to repeat every day after it first happens.

*

On this subject that compels me.... I remember walking the sidewalk as a little child. It seemed to me so important to balance everything out. I don’t know why but I had to equalize the most trivial things. If I stepped on a crack with my left foot, I had to hurry and step on one with my right foot as well, in order that the number in heaven would be equal.

As to what divine tragedy my feet were averting, I didn’t have time to think about that, I had to focus all my energy on walking. This was not a fun disease.

If I trapped a shadow under my right foot, I had to hurry hurry, find a “rhyme” with it using my left foot. Every shadow had to balance. And when I disturbed the equilibrium I would be in absurd pain. I sought to relieve this pain, to lessen it somehow.

To lessen, to relieve, I was compelled and felt compelled. I would say to myself: if only I can find a shadow quickly with my other foot, I will be all right. And these thoughts excluded everything else until one day I asked myself: wouldn’t the true relief of the pain be to stop playing this miserable game? The relief would be not to step on the shadow but not to care whether I did or not.

From that day I was cured. Well, sort of. But you all know how that is.

*

You all know how the cure is relentless and how you can never let it go.

You all know how the disease continues to reside in its timeless space, ready at any moment to become embodied in one’s life once again. It is never vanquished in a way that lets us boast and rest. Our weakness is always latent. And God has give us this mysterious gift: that we can never quite relax.

So that every moment in our life is like a step upon that dangerous sidewalk, filled with cracks and shadows. In other words, our compulsions do represent, to our terror, something that in its way is true.

*

You all know that the Internet porn or the bright smiling casino or the opened bottle – they all remain waiting for us in the outer demonspace we have renounced. We can’t destroy that space on our own. We just pray to be protected from ever going there again.

How? Just pray. How? Just pray. How? Just pray. And the poor person says: oh, there must be something more I can do to protect the world from me.

*

After that week, Father Sam left us to go dry out and get well again, even though (as he did know though pretended not to) his presence and perhaps even his sickness had been for us like a gift from God. manna from heaven, quails, water, honey.

Our recovery group never recovered from his leaving and now why is that? If healing comes from God, why were we so dependent on a single given person? Was it that we’d fallen in love with him? And had our recovery been a form of sin?

*

*

I can tell this is going to be agony -- the mere topic of "getting well", which is no topic without the reality of health behind it, like blood held just barely from flowing behind the scab. Can I write about something I don't yet have??? And who will bother to cut through the dense mat of words that will be necessary, in order to get one second's glimpse of the beautiful clearing behind?

The issue here is that getting well requires God's intervention. What to say to an atheist? I guess I would say that the God an atheist is fleeing is really some devil in disguise, and not God at all -- remembering that a devil's "existence" or "non-existence" is something like a virus that can only come to life when it infests a human will. (I say this so that people don't waste their time disputing about the existence of the devil.) In this spirit the pseudo-God that an atheist attacks is, God help us, most likely a demonic non-existence that only thrashes within human delusion like a giant parasite. That is not God. God is other and real and wholly worth one's love and worship.

Some rabbi (I think his name was Lawrence Hoffman?) said that he used to talk to atheistic Jews he knew by asking them to describe the God they didn't believe in. When they were finished he would say to them "I don't believe in *that* God either." It really matters that you first get a glimpse of the God you reject -- that is, the real God, not the demon who tries to impersonate him -- before you reject the one whom, if you really *do* glimpse him, you will not be able to reject. The God of reason who is kicked around in the debating halls of humans is not the God who heals, unless only insofar as being kicked around is a sort of pathway into his utter kindness and splendor.

What a huge digression! I only wanted to say that if healing is into God's safe place it can only be done by God, ultimately. (And if ultimately, then also immediately.) Otherwise, you have this picture of let's say a rapist being cured of cancer so that he is able to go out and rape again, which is as far from health as it is possible to go. What are you healed into? What are you healed to do?

Is an addict "healed" of his withdrawal agony by being given the drug? What is health, what is it truly? Where is health? This simple person, a disgusting creature, a sinner, wants to know where it is, how to find it.

I haven't even gotten near my August subject, which was to be the story of a church's search for its own healing. Perhaps my inability to get to my own topic is another indication that I am unwell. Or maybe the digression pulls me into its space for a reason. A good reason, as good as the Maker of reasons.

*

Getting well: back to the Body

*

The great Hamann said that original sin had/has to do not w/sex but w/reason. You know, the sick kind. He describes it, he felt it.

*

On the other hand, some great scholars let their own reason devour them alive and not because they didn't feel it. When Thucydides described the decay of his "country" into calculated self-interest and hardness of heart, he found the world that he looked at looking back at him and that look infected him. So that his own spirit seems almost unwillingly cold and hard, as though the subject matter gave him no choice, as though it gave him no place else to go. This is what I fear too -- that in describing a hardened world, my own writing will become hard and cynical. Whenever you look at the world you see it looking back at you and its looking wants to change you into itself, unless you can look *from* some vantage point that makes you secure -- such as "the rock that is higher than I" in the psalm. Thucydides didn't have a second "country" to flee into. There was no safe place for his reason to hide. Likewise Tacitus was wedged into the evil he so wittily retails. Many others too.

*

What the hell am I talking about here? This isn't what I set out to say.

*

I wanted to talk about health. All I know is that words about health have to embody in themselves what health is seeking to be, where it wants to go. The words look at sickness across a plain whose emptiness pulls like electromagnetism or like gravity -- with a curing force if the words pull in the right direction, but the words die if they themselves get pulled. Every sentence becomes a battleground littered with bodies. I think I still don't know fully what I'm talking about. I am not pretending to be well myself. I know that I am profoundly sick, so sick that the word "know" is also sick.

God can only heal the person I am, never the person I pretend to be, even if the pretend person is "better". You first have to be real before you can be helped, because the unreal person you are pretending to be may be helped and healed but only in that unreal world where it exists in the first place. So watch out re turning faith into nothing but a story, be careful, watch your language, get well, get real.

*

"More than just okay"

*

Getting well. How does God help you get well? Your want, your want is desperate, you desperately want to get well, so that there is “you” and there is this want, like a piece of wood you cling to. Or a giant worm of sorrow burrowing inside you. How is God helping? Well, he has given you this want, this desperate want like a gracious gift. You didn’t think it was yours, did you?

Your want is going to save you (if you let it), your want will bring you to health. Where do you imagine it came from?

The important part is not so much the “you” that is wanting but what the want itself is and is itself wanting – the far side of the want, the place where want is satisfied. Do you feel that as well? What want itself wants you can feel pulsing and breathing like a new birth inside you. The exercise, the incantation imposed on you is to want it. Then want it more. Think health, something like that. No one ever said it wouldn't involve pain.

Health –- green field of joy -- you are so much more than simply feeling okay. “More than just okay”.

Now once you have imagined it, can you bring other people there too?

*

The Philosophy of getting well

*

“Getting well” and “telling the truth” have much in common, which is to hazard the faith that health and truth are both members of God’s family, brother and sister. They “get along”. They play together quietly.

Pilate asks Jesus: “What is truth?” The question for him seems to be more a form of chitchat than honest aporia. That was his choice. The word “truth” can appear in a sentence devoid of truth. But how do you tell?

An analytical philospher might offer the idea of a carefully constructed logical sentence with attributes as if organically expressed in the form of its construction. For instance, the attribute of being true. But this is a backward idea of truth. We know truth is not a meagre attribute that clings to a sentence because that gets the relative scale backwards. Truth is immense, unimaginably large, it pulls into its orbit everything that is true. It is a complete world from which anything even slightly untrue has been banished. It is not a tiny thing applied to a sentence but an immense, incomprehensible “thing” to which the sentence is helplessly drawn or in which the sentence (if untrue) is chewed up, swallowed and destroyed.

Comprising awareness as well, truth is not really a “thing”. There is intention (which I am scared to describe, as though one could even do so in these clinical antiseptic terms).

You can make a factually correct statement but if it does not survive the encounter with the hugeness that is truth, then that sentence is somehow fundamentally untrue, its role within experience to become untruth – and what’s more people do not realize how many of their factual statements unroll in isolation from truth and can hardly count as true. E.g., a putdown of some person (true as far as it goes) that doesn’t envision what that person could or should become. It is also the case that a person whose tongue is untrue becomes himself untrue.

And now for “getting well”. People chat about this without being able to imagine a convincing health, a health of conviction, which is not the single heartbeat, not the being able to walk around the block or have sex in middle age – but something a judgment can look at and recognize as health without changing its mind a second later. What would this health be outside God’s hands? What could it be, separated from truth?

Picture a person in grave denial about a grave illness – let the illness be partly of the spirit, with denial a symptom of that part. As this person grows in recognition her sudden sense of being sick is a step toward getting well. She feels infinitely worse than before – is that health? Was the denial health? It depends on whether there actually is a context for her that is called “health”, whether it truly still exists – which is about truth, not just health. If the context – God’s hands – does not hold her own recognition and denial, then there was no point in her recognizing what can’t be cured. But if those hands are there, then her former comfort wasn’t health but delusion. What her health consists in depends completely on what kind of world ultimately holds her. The underlying hands (there or not) are not a passing detail but the key to every detail.

Without a God to get well for, why get well? What would getting well even be?

So that’s the context that lets you admit and confront your pain, your dread, the rest of it. A context of safety, a pair of hands. Truth needs a safe place in order to *be* true.

*