The intelligent design

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If there were a God, "how would we know?" the scientist asked. (American Scientist, Jan-Feb 2006, p, 4).

The answer might be that If I *didn't* know, then I *wouldn't* know. There is no way I "would" know unless I "did" know. In pretending the slate is bare the writer is starting from a fictional position and so will never come to the one awkward fact. It is more than pre-supposed. I would say that my "knowledge" of God was hard-wired in my being -- certainly deeper than a postulate. Whatever in me knows would come from this, or this would be what knew, or what did the knowing. You can't exactly dispute about a wiring nor can you, the wire, redo the wire. Nor prove, nor disprove. This is deeper territory than the flat hall of debate, unless you imagine a debate that you ride inside like a wild train and come out as a being changed and disclosed, maybe killed. That would not be very scientific.

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The landscape

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Had the landscape then been evil? She could not see it that way. Even the bugs being eaten were not in themselves suffering evil. Death was not an evil, it was something that occurred. Death gave life its shape.

Where then did evil come from, since it was so swarmingly there? Was the devil -- who was not a real entity on his own but more like a virus that could seize a distracted will and simulate existence -- so was his whole existence nothing but your own loss of focus?

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Suppose that suffering were something external that the will encountered as an object. Its final meaning might be what the will made of it. It might be like a weight whose lifting made you stronger. That was what it was as an object, not a subject. Why didn't it stay that way?

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Through some terrible metamorphosis, no, it was a literal invasion and a passing through the membrance, suffering became subject instead of object, it became you. The person suffering the pain became the pain. all sentience about anything became pain's mentation, a damned entity to be sure. There was evil. There was damage. You might say that when this happened, even the devil now had hands and feet of his own to flex. But how did it happen?

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Was it about focus? Did it happen because a human, knowing it had a goal, took its eyes off the goal?

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Was it about the periphery being allowed to seep in and take control?

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Was it when the creature, already full, felt its own fangs being sunk into food that it didn't even want? Then food rose into consciousness and began its ugly sobbing. And the sobbing was waste and about waste. Something now gone off track.

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The mud

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What was the mud? The mud was penance. The mud was made of penance, soul-building pain.

Her body was softer than a worm's, more vulnerable. She fell through this putty-like water and felt it reshape her. That was yieldedness. It was terrifying. An ana-baptism!

The process: you yielded to God (a yielding like death), you felt God knead you, and you then resurfaced into the world but it was now a different world. The world you left was a godless one, the world you re-entered was God's world. Here you were in no way alone.

And the filth made no difference.

And it didn't matter now how frail and damageable your own being was. You no longer brooded on that. God was in control.

And in that thought you submerged and were kneaded once again.

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Chapter 13: The invertebrate

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So Una gave herself to God to be kneaded -- a worm within the mud. The walls of the body were just about nothing -- they were liquid or putty. They were ready -- to be shaped into anything.

She fell off an invisible cliff without any purchase at all. The risk of death -- well, it was more than a risk. Was this nothing but the force of gravity? Was God really there?

As for gravity, that too was no more than a shape that God shaped.

All of the elements dissassembled and gave themselves to God.

I hate a world where all the creatures eat each other, she cried. But the cry, that was eaten too.

And the falling continued to fall. She felt her being continue to pull into pieces, softish ones. A poor shell-less invertebrate, what could it do but expose its own weakness in utter hope?

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Food

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Darwinian pit, abandoned by God but perhaps not by his son. They say that Jesus recognized that food had become the subject (subject not object) within our wicked hearts and that blood was tickling our souls with lust -- a forbidden engorging -- and so he came, broke into our vile fratty games and put his own breast in the path of the fang -- "I am the bread of life" -- so that through his own and voluntary breaking-open, food could be clean once again.

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Feeding

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A terrible truth about Darwin's land. When the ants there fed on a scorpion, and ingested her alive, it was not her stinger, her poison or her carapace that they relished, it was her resistance, that was what they fed on and what tasted so good to them.

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Chapter 11: Una's encounter

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They said that every encounter with God ran the risk of death. That was why so many even who called themselves religious shunned that encounter.

Are you orthodox? Are you orthodox? How can you be alone in the mud?

To most it seemed better to live in echoes of the encounter and to retell the old stories that concerned it, simply as stories. Good things to share with our children, they said. History, art, politics, anything but truth.

When a story ended it was like a curtain coming down on a play. Everyone stood up and went home. But an encounter was different from a story.

The people had curled themselves into a ball and hung immersed in the stream that burst the mud. A tadpole sewed through and pierced their sphere, and a demon looked down from a leaf overhead. Behind another leaf Una now hid. She was frightened of this world. Oh Darwinism is the land of God's abandonment. Now there was a membrane separating Una's realm from that land -- one quick movement would make it tear.

So she was smart enough to be afraid.

The creatures in the sphere made a village, a community. We are one, we are close. But some of them were tied and hung upside down. Others slithered along the bloodshot surface. They would nip each other and chew slowly. Sometimes a carapace would suddenly implode. Love was predation in Darwin's land. There was a pair of people each of whom was busy eating the other's haunch. They reached their extensors into each other's belly, pulling out pieces of meat.

It's all just natural, someone said, a budding ethicist, or a demon probably. It's just the way things are. Nothing beyond this. Accept it.

On the bank a group of peasants in yellow pajamas engaged in a tug of war but the thing being tugged was themselves and the flesh would be pulled back and forth until you couldn't recognize it. One of them grabbed her wrist to pull her into the healthful game.

She was now terrified enough to risk the encounter with God. The risk of instant death, that was why more people didn't do this. The kneading of your heart in God's hand, the potting that might kill you.

Conduct, sullen and inexpressive boy, held her other hand as if to encourage her -- or to keep her from running away.

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Surveying the landscape

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As she walked the devil hovered and became *there*. The Place of Poetry was one of his special lairs -- he loved to break in and tear it down. The tears of humans were a precious food. Were he but the bodily trappings of a disordered will, so be it. He revelled in a destitute existence, unlike any modern Christian. So the devil perched, between the bladder and the bowels, holding on tightly and flapping his horrible wings. Inside the body deeply.

A beetle crawled across his face in the mud, with a chemical sting at its nether opening, and the sting was slipping and sliding like a hose filled with poison. The devil grabbed the bug and wedged it into the mud, embedding the sting. Then he contentedly ate the front half still alive. Una walked through the slush without even looking back, actually she was praying her head off, and the devil not only got left behind but was miniaturized, diminished to a mote.

God lay ahead

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In the sludge

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I want to be good, she said, don't know how. The others reduce me, the others, my equals. Gravitational force of human stuckness, the sludge of dailiness. That sludge of dailiness itself grows daily. I pull away and then seem alone -- want to pull away but not be alone. Conduct -- the man she loved -- pulled away from her. His nature. Standing on the cliff above the gully, not a cliff, just a discontinuity. Because life is ringed by death and death is ringed by God -- and you want to move through it.

Don't hang on me, the man said. Don't be one of those girls you see at convenience stores, leaning on their man pathetically. Little Tammy, sweet Diane. The guy smokes her like a cigarette. She looks like someone who's given herself away -- entregada -- to nothing but a human! Treating a human as godlike -- godlike powers. But he too is distorted and weak. That guy is no god.

Your conduct has to be your own.

But here at college, the girls were having sex with the boys and didn't even want to. Didn't even want what they seemed to want. Didn't even know what they want. Sluggish like those not dead not alive. Sluggish being. Pull out pull away. And not be alone there. You are not alone.

If you are not alone, who are you with? God be with me even in this mud.

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She tripped and fell...

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into the water, yes, but he was there with her, the intentional one whose remoteness was a form of love.

She reached for the mud of the stream-edge and seemed to close her fingers upon a grub, too soft for a human hand.

She remembered the day she'd fasted to the point of exhaustion and fallen praying onto the vision of a grub. Some creature so thin it not only didn't have a shell but didn't have any protection at all. So that even touching it seemed to hurt it. And permanently. How could things so weak be thrust into the world, things born to die, how could God allow their life as nothing but carnage? Yes but inwardly this vulnerable image had been Jesus himself, the one who had opted to be without defenses, though the most powerful being in the world, gaping with softness, inexplicable. Sheer threads of hurting hanging down. Now remembering this image, she grabbed onto the poor creature and squeezed it with a practiced selfishness.

... was pulled back onto the shore. Where all the dead bugs lay. The losers in the battles, resting and decomposing.

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Chapter 8: The fear

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In the wheeling fields of storage and memory behind the campus, there was a complete forest at play. At prayer, at play. Free space between. All of it a form of memory. Of past and present and future. More comprehensive than mere time.

This was the domain of the One whom it was perilous to describe and at the same time imperative to try to try to try to understand. And then speak His name. Did God walk the earth or was the entire earth like a single footstep of God? To walk in wonder the playspace or prayerspace and then let its wind blow you through.

You don't know where it came from. You don't know where it's going. It fills your consciousness and rises.

There were large segments of protected space with trees pushing through it. All of it to be read only -- now listen, be quiet, ponder what you move through.

She wondered if a word could listen and not just pontificate. If a sentence could be filled with openness and questioning instead of this pressing demand to expound and to "know".

Then the wind reached and lifted her for a second, "bodily", over the threshhold of the muddy path that fenced off the cliff and led to the rushing water overhead, no: it was down below. A rushing sound that came from every direction.

What a magnificent fear this was!

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The breath

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So she let the breath breathe her.

Her own role small. The breath initiated. From where? To where?

Where are you? Who are you?

Twigs that shifted, dry brush breathing. As if sinking after exercise. Wind like a billowing towel. Can you talk? If you can talk, you are still within range. So go further? She sank down into recovery, let go. The thoughts between the thoughts were almost within grasp.

In the forest Una reached forward her hand and then a hand grasped her hand. Who are you?

Fear a great teacher. One's eyes wide like a horse's. Looking back, there are dorm windows, golden, swollen, people inside. Many miles away. Existent, remote.

But out here, the between that surrounded things was like a leaven. The place was growing.

The breathing was not hers.

What did she bring back? Not information, nothing but wonder.

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The wood of New Year

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New Year's Day. She stepped into the woods behind the dorm. No one there, no color beside wet black and softest white. Black of trees and thorns, very heavy the way it dipped. Moisture within and without.

Be with me there.

Between each thought the same substance as between each twig. Between the branches of the trees there stretched a "there" that was not space but something deeper and perhaps more frightening: the possibility of space. The fact of a space, the opening that as if condescendingly allowed space to be there.

The poetry of the place was the place itself. No, the place was a decal and beneath it what the mere shell of the colors covered.

Be with me there.

In the New Year and at any other time.

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The foot on Christmas day

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And so the yoga instructor held a class on Christmas day and the atmosphere was very strange. A special day, yes, but in what way exactly? Everything shut down and everyone withdrawn into a familial warmth, except for those without family. For them, all strange.

Was there joy? Merely strangeness?

The teacher went through a sun salutation but there was no sun anywhere. Then she stretched what would not stretch.

Do not force the muscle, treat it like a gentle beast -- it resists when you push hard but there is always a way to coax.

But first of course you must coax the thing that coaxes -- that is the will, the coaxer. It too resists prodding but responds to persuasion. An exasperating donkey of an organ. You must not push past without respect.

Bend the knee and, if you can, lift the foot. Lift it rather high and hold it in your arms, rock back and forth. Hold it with both hands.

Hold it like a baby. You are like a mother, holding this thing, this self, in loving arms, and rocking it with infinite tenderness. Not the self but something closer than the self. Try to love what you have.

So the day rocked within an enormous tenderness that no one quite understood. And you were its child.

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Kenosis

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She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.

As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.

There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".

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Lord Kelvin's casino

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Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.

But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.

And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?

What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.

You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.

The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!

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In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.

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Through death?

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Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.

Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.

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Dear Christian, imagine...

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Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....

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Chapter 6: Conduct imagined as a person

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There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.

Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.

His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.

For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.

Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.

You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.

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Like rain like drought

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Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.

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Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.

But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.

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