Bright Evening Star Read online

  Suddenly we were on a small ship sailing for Europe. The apartment where I had spent my first twelve years had been emptied, the furniture put in storage.

  And so was I.

  My father’s health deteriorated. Places like Saranac, hospitals for people with sick lungs, were too expensive. What were my parents to do with a twelve-year-old girl while they were struggling to find a place they could afford where the air was clear enough for my father to breathe without pain? I was put in boarding school in Switzerland where I felt so alienated that I nearly lost Jesus completely. What I was being taught at school had nothing to do with what my parents had taught me at home. I knew that Jesus calls us all by name, but I could not hear the call in this cold school, English, and Anglican. We were taught good manners, moral rectitude, and strict obedience. Nobody mentioned Jesus. An Anglican clergyman came to the school and talked about the world of Jesus’ day, but not about Jesus.

  Where was Jesus?

  Not in storage.

  Sometimes I felt his presence when I had time (we were not allowed unscheduled time) and could look out the windows to Lake Geneva and the mountains of France. Jesus could walk on water. Like Peter I felt that I was drowning. Pull me up!

  Sometimes I felt a small nudge. I thought I could hear Jesus whisper, I am still here.

  * * *

  —

  After two years we came back to the States, to north Florida and my maternal grandmother, and her death.

  And I woke up.

  Storage had, in a way, been safe. But being alive was better, even though it hurt. I asked questions again. I knew that my grandmother was dead. Death had happened. And to my absolute surprise the world went on, ignoring this momentous event. We drove into town and through the crowded streets, and people just went about their business. Nobody knew that my grandmother was dead. Nobody noticed. I skipped her name that night in my prayers. In a pained voice my mother told me to keep her in. She was still alive, in Jesus’ love. Jesus promised that our lives matter. Our deaths matter. Sometimes we forget. My mother taught me then to pray for the dead. I have never stopped.

  Why should we pray for the dead when in Christ they have everything they need? I pray because my love of parents, husband, is still alive. Why should I stop praying for those I love? They are still part of my love in Christ. I prayed for my husband for the forty years of my marriage. Why should I stop now, as though our time together did not matter?

  After my grandmother’s death I was sent to another boarding school, but one where I was happy. I made friends. My teachers liked what I wrote. At the dinner table we sometimes talked about the various theories of the beginning of the universe—depending on which teacher sat at our table. Some of them were nervous about cosmic questions. Others were willing to discuss anything.

  We were given great treasures outside the regular school curriculum. Every December we did three plays from the Chester Cycle, one of those great medieval dramas first played in the cathedrals in England. Because I was tall and spoke reasonably well I was usually cast as one of the shepherds or one of the wise men, while the girls with the best singing voices were the Red Choir, and the rest of the school dressed as peasants going to church on Christmas Eve. It was during these productions that I first heard Bach’s beautiful “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

  In the spring we performed a Shakespeare play out in the gardens, again living with great language and singing the beautiful madrigals of Shakespeare’s day. One year the play was Much Ado About Nothing. I was cast as the monk/priest who helps untangle the complicated plot. Beatrice, one of Shakespeare’s most delightful and witty heroines, spars verbally with Benedict, who will ultimately be her husband. She has a friend, Hero, who is engaged to Claudio, one of Benedict’s friends. The villain of the play stages a horrid trick on his friends. He has one of the chambermaids dress up in Hero’s clothes and come out onto the balcony at night, so that it looks as though Hero is having an assignation with someone other than Claudio. Claudio swallows the accusation without question, and his response is devastating. He allows the marriage ceremony to start as though all is well, and then he stops the proceedings and humiliates Hero in the most brutal way possible. At the end of the play, as usually happens in comedies, the trick is discovered. Hero is vindicated, and Claudio has forgiven her—for what she has not done—and the wedding continues.

  One day after rehearsal I sputtered, “How could she marry that loathsome toad?”

  That night in bed I suddenly thought of Joseph, and his tender love of Mary, even when he discovered that Mary was pregnant, and not by him. Claudio’s reaction of unquestioning and outraged belief in Hero’s infidelity is the opposite of Joseph’s compassion. And I wondered whose reaction would be more likely today, Joseph’s or Claudio’s?

  Two stories. Each one illuminates the other.

  3

  THE DIVINE INTERFERENCE

  During the holidays I was able to talk with my parents. I wasn’t afraid that what I was learning in the world of science in any way contradicted the Bible. No! It opened it up. My father said that despite the constant quarreling between science and religion, the religious establishment tended to live in whatever universe the scientists showed them. For a long time it was planet-centered, the rest of the heavenly bodies reverently circling us. Having our planet home displaced as the center of the universe was a terrible blow to the church but ultimately it had to be faced that we live on a little blue planet revolving around a middle-aged sun on the outskirts of one of billions of spiral galaxies.

  My parents had been married nearly twenty years before I was born, and so they had been through the crisis of evolution, and it didn’t seem to have bothered them much. I couldn’t see why having Creation on a divine rather than a human timetable was so terrifying. Didn’t God make time? Why did Darwin’s theories create such religious panic? Why would a threat to a theory be a threat to God? Did Darwin threaten the Bible, or only literalism? Doesn’t the Bible say that God’s time and earth time are different?

  * * *

  —

  My father explained that his faith was not reasonable because it wasn’t for reason but for love that Jesus came, and whether God took a few days or a few billennia to make the universe didn’t matter very much.

  Why does it shake us so when something new and seemingly contradictory is discovered? How can we go on believing this if that is true? Our understanding of God changes and sometimes we forget that it is only our understanding that changes, not God.

  Too often we try to fit what we believe about God into what we believe about Creation. For a long time the establishment tried to hold on to an omnipotent God who had created a predetermined universe where he (God was definitely a he) knew when a hen was going to cross the road, when someone in Greece was going to sneeze, when a snake was going to shed its skin, when Aunt Gwen in Maine was going to make apple jelly. God had written and completed the story. When it was believed that everything was already predetermined, from the beginning to the end, free will was more of an empty phrase than a challenging possibility.

  If God didn’t know everything, then God had lost power. No, no, not lost power, given power away in a loving act of grace. God is lavish with power, not grasping it, as we do, but joyfully giving it away. When God dared to make creatures with free will, God made us real instead of puppets manipulated by a potentate, and God’s love was made greater than ever. And here we have another magnificent paradox: human free will and God’s plan. God’s loving plan for Creation will ultimately be fulfilled, God’s will and ours working together.

  How can we have both? God’s plan and pattern and our free will?

  The only analogy that makes sense to me is the writing of a book.

  When I start a book I know what I want to say, where I want to go, what my theme is. I think about my characters, what they are like, inside and o
ut. But, as creator of the book, I give my characters free will. They surprise me by saying things I didn’t expect them to say, rather than what I had planned for them to say. They are frequently far better or far worse than I had thought they were going to be. Sometimes they make radical changes in the plot. But in the end the book is far more mine than if I had insisted on knowing everything ahead of time, keeping control of every little action.

  So God does not lose control of the divine plan by giving us free will or by coming as Jesus to show us what that free will is really like. When Calvin’s misinterpreters talked about predestination, they took away any idea that we might be made in the image of God, for surely the Maker is free! I still shudder for the little children who lived in terror because they were afraid they had already been damned to hell, even before they were born. What kind of a God would predamn or presave people? Was it something to do with divine omniscience—that there wasn’t anything that God didn’t already know?

  “I believe that God knows all the possibilities,” my editor said, “everything you or I could possibly decide or choose. Thus, every way we would choose would be within God’s knowledge, but it is not determined.”

  That’s a good way of putting it.

  (Years later, my friend Luci told me that when she was a child she often lay in bed at night trembling with terror in case the Rapture came and her parents were taken but she wasn’t found worthy.

  Worthy?

  Who is worthy?

  What kind of a frightening God measures the worth of a small child and finds it wanting and offers no grace?)

  There are a lot of Calvinists on my family tree, but I am not a Calvinist. And Calvin’s theology might have been expressed very differently if he had known about Einstein’s discoveries or Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle or the world of particle physics!

  The struggle to understand continues. How much are we predetermined by our DNA? How much free will do we have? Psychologists argue about nature and nurture, and they both play a part in our development.

  * * *

  —

  God’s giving us free will does not mean indifference or impotence. When I listened to my father cough and was helpless to relieve his pain, I knew that he was dying and that his last few years in a drafty cottage on a beautiful beach far from any intellectual stimulation were darkly lonely, but I knew that God was not indifferent.

  When Father talked about God he was looking at his own pain, his own mortality. The universe is so enormous and may be only one of many universes; how can we insignificant, stiff-necked people be a matter of divine concern?

  But we are. Alone on the dunes at night I cried out in passion that we are. What else does the Incarnation, the divine interference, mean?

  Wherever there is love, there is Jesus. Known or unknown, named or not named. Are there planets where people have grown up loving God and Creation and each other? Where religion binds people together instead of tearing them apart?

  Despite all our present knowledge, how little we know. Recent astronomical discoveries indicate that there are galaxies older than our universe, and since that’s astronomically impossible, then the universe must be older than it is, or older than we think it is, and that Word which spoke the universe into being is older than it all, and no age at all, since the Word was before time and spoke time into being for us.

  Joy!

  Christ, in being born as Jesus, broke into time for us, so that time will never be the same again.

  My father understood that, even as he walked along the beach breathing the damp, salty air, trying to find healing for his burned lungs.

  * * *

  —

  And then my father died. It was not a surprise. That the burned lungs would finally give out was inevitable, and they could not withstand that final attack of pneumonia.

  I knew that for my father death was a release, and yet I knew that at age fifty-seven he was not ready to die. There was still a residue of the old joie de vivre, even when we talked about serious things.

  I did not understand death.

  Where was the church?

  Not there. No help. There was a funeral, a burial. But no vital affirmation of resurrection.

  “At least he’s out of pain.”

  “At least he’s not suffering anymore.”

  “At least he’s happy now.”

  Happy? Where?

  No pink clouds for my father, thank you, no golden harps. No red and burning hell, either, with little devils with pitchforks.

  God.

  Jesus.

  I went through the last months of high school in a limbo of nonfeeling. Went to college. No one had told me anything I could believe about what went on after death. Were we still, even if in a different way, alive? Would the God who had come to us as Jesus abandon us when we died? Would we truly be put into the ground as a seed and, according to Paul, come up as something quite different?

  I asked questions which were not addressed in any of my classes. I enjoyed my friends and teachers and tried not to let them see that I was deeply, darkly depressed. At last and unexpectedly I fell in love and finally wept. With the tears the depression dissolved and was replaced by a kind of faith which questioned but received few answers. Nevertheless, it survived, fragile, but there.

  * * *

  —

  I wanted to understand. I wanted God. My mind balked at the stupendousness of it all; only with my heart could I accept the infinite God becoming incarnate, enfleshed, human and divine. That’s the tough one, human and divine. Both. Simultaneously. But that is the foundation of our faith. Christ has come to us as Jesus. Jesus was fully human and Jesus was fully God. Like Mary, I say, “How can this be?”

  I don’t know how this can be, but on it hangs the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus’ divinity comes from God and his humanity comes from his mother. If Mary and Joseph could believe the angel, why can’t we? Does it offend our reason? Of course. It is totally unreasonable.

  It is not that in believing the story of Jesus we skip reason, but that sometimes we have to go beyond it, take leaps with our imaginations, push our brains further than the normally used parts of them are used to going.

  I majored in English literature with a smattering of the great French and Russian writers, and I had some superb professors. I wrote short stories, finally drawing on my own experience, mostly about a man and woman and their adolescent daughter wandering through Europe. I wrote more deeply about my parents than I knew. I started what was to become my first novel. I was through with the religious establishment, but occasionally my roommate and I would go to a small, French-speaking Catholic church because there, in that musical language, we found some mystery.

  In the middle of the rational world of academe, I needed the scandal of particularity, God come to live with us, despite all our warring and sinning and refusal to understand.

  I graduated and went “home” to New York and shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with three other young women and continued my search. There was an Episcopal church at the corner of my street, and often I would drop in, late at night, just to be quiet, and perhaps to try to pray. I did not go to a church service. I walked the streets of the Village with my dog. I returned to my little apartment and read. I lay in bed at night and read my great-grandmother’s prayer book and understood that I had to let go all my prejudices and demands for proof and open myself to the wonder of love.

  I read Schweitzer’s The Search for the Historical Jesus and learned much from it: the reverence for all life; the uncomfortable fact that often we must make choices where there is no right choice to be made, and we must prayerfully make the choice we believe to be the least wrong, never forgetting that it is still wrong. But I learned very few facts about the historical Jesus. Schweitzer tells me more about Jesus in his recordings of Bach’s work than he do
es in his writings, and I play those recordings frequently.

  Throughout the years I have dutifully read many other searches for the historical Jesus. Sometimes the researchers have missed the point. They have forgotten the story. They have forgotten that story is true.

  But we have the story as it has been told for nearly two thousand years, the story of a man who changed history in a way we have hardly begun to comprehend. When we have held true to the story it has been a life-giving one. When we have tried to control or manipulate or legalize it, it has been the cause of mayhem and murder. We do not own stories, and when we try to limit them, squeeze the life out of them, lose the love that gave them to us and fall back into that fatal human flaw, pride, hubris, we’re right back to Adam and Eve who listened to the power of the snake instead of the creativity of God.

  * * *

  —

  My friends and I sat on the floor of our little apartment to eat—for a long time we had no table—and discussed Pearl Harbor and evil and self-sacrifice and theatre and art and God and Jesus. We had graduated from college; we were in the world of grown-ups; we said sober good-byes to some of our friends who were being sent overseas with the army or the navy or the air force. I earned enough with odd jobs to pay my share of rent and food and worked on my first novel. In the evenings we gathered together to eat and discuss. Despite the war, we felt excited and alive. I quoted my father’s belief that despite the constant bickering between science and religion, the church’s understanding of God is usually in the context of science’s understanding of the universe. There were few scientists in the world of Abraham and Sarah, though there were sophisticated astronomers in Egypt and had been for millennia in other parts of the planet.