Bright Evening Star Read online

  But we firmly believed that love and permissiveness are not the same thing. We had to love our children enough to say no.

  Politeness for us was a form of loving, not formality, but courtesy. You don’t stop saying please and thank you when you are married.

  Jesus was not blandly permissive, with others, or with himself. His life was an example of the balance of action and rest. When he had healed many people of illnesses, he needed to be quiet and pray, pray that he might have the strength to be incarnate.

  When I get overbusy and overwrought I try to follow Jesus’ example and take time from all the unimportant little things that are making demands of me, and go off to be alone with God.

  Like many of us, I am impulsive, and often with the best will in the world. I want to make everything all right. Sometimes I am given instructions in dreams. I am told to stop running and rest. Told that many of us are too quick to respond to requests for healing. We are so eager to help that we rush in with our words, our hands, our touch. Wait! Jesus told me in a dream. Wait until you are certain that God has come into your hands before you place them on someone for healing. It must be God’s energy flowing through your hands, not your own. Wait. Wait. Until you are sure it is God.

  Yes.

  My dog, Doc, a golden retriever who was an affectionate, bouncy ball of love, used to come with me to the library of the cathedral and sit quietly under my desk, controlling her friskiness, lying at my feet without restlessness until it was time for a run in the yard.

  One day a young woman came into the library to ask me for prayer for the healing of terrible pain in the bones of her jaw. We sat, a foot or two from each other, and I tried to wait until I knew that God had come into my mouth and my hands.

  Doc quietly got out from under my desk, sat in front of Naomi, raised her paw, and put it gently on Naomi’s knee and kept it there. This is anything but typical behavior for a golden. Their love is usually ecstatically active: enthusiastic pawing for attention, wagging tail, eagerly licking tongue with little sympathetic kisses of love. But Doc sat there in front of Naomi, her paw steadily on Naomi’s knee, without moving, quietly and steadily looking up at Naomi. I think we slipped out of time. I don’t know how long Doc sat there before she finally dropped her paw and slid back under my desk.

  There was no question in either Naomi’s or my mind who had been chosen as the instrument of healing that afternoon. It filled me with an awed humility. We descendants of Adam and Eve tend to want credit for all such deeds, but God made all things, all creatures great and small, and all can be used for healing—or for destruction, if we are deep into pride and sin. What I felt was an amazed sense of gratitude for God’s love, and a humble joy that in witnessing it I had been part of God’s healing power.

  Isn’t it interesting that someone’s over-high blood pressure can literally be lowered by stroking a dog or a cat? The animal is not consciously acting to lower the blood pressure; nevertheless it has been statistically proven that this is what happens. My own relationship with my animals has taught me much about playing, loving, healing. My little white cat does not like to hear voices raised in anger. When my son, Bion, was young, our old collie would not let anyone strange or in any way threatening go near our little boy. Animals have a sensitivity that we have forgotten as we have fractured God’s love for all of creation in our greed, our grabbing for control, our prideful centering on the human creature as the only thing of importance in the created order.

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  Lately there has been a renewed interest in the power of prayer, in healing, in touch. We are learning to be patient, to understand that when we reach out to touch someone in prayer, our human hands do not possess the power but are momentarily given blessing by the Holy Spirit if we are willing and humble enough to be used.

  In several books on prayer I have read that we Westerners are often too quick, too demanding, unlike the Easterners who take more time with prayer, who are quieter, who have more peace and selfless tranquillity. In many ways this rings true; in the Western world we have become a very mechanistic society. But then I wonder: why is it that Easterners are so much more sophisticated in their torture than we are? I am old enough to remember my friends returning from the Western Theatre at the end of World War II, often physically wounded, angry, horrified at the blind and brutal killings of war, but still, somehow, recognizable as themselves. But those returning from the Eastern Theatre were often so shattered in spirit that they were no longer the people I had said good-bye to months or years before. Some were trembling, terrified shadows of themselves. Some had withdrawn their essences into a lost vacancy. I am old enough to remember this personally; what has not actually touched our spirit is more easily forgotten, or unrecognized.

  Why this difference of quiet depth in spirituality, and sophisticated brutality in torture?

  Is it that we Westerners, especially those of us from the New World, are still adolescent, that we have not had the time to refine torture? And was the horror of Oriental torture the other side of the coin of peace and prayer uniting with the infinite? There is much to learn here that I have not yet learned.

  A friend of mine, a beautiful and talented woman, was attacked from behind, thrown to the ground, and her face wildly and repeatedly smashed against the pavement. A woman unintentionally turning her car so that her headlights fell full on the victim caused the man to drop her and race for safety. He was, however, apprehended, and had committed other horrendous crimes, brutally mugging and in some cases killing young women. He admitted that this violence was what aroused him sexually. And yet there was found in his possession a book on Buddhist prayers of quiet which he claimed to be one of his deepest influences. How can this darkness and light go together? There is a skin-prickling obscenity about it, although I have been told that Oriental spirituality does put darkness and light together, seeing no contradiction.

  I have watched with awe my young friend valiantly refusing to be a victim, through many surgeries, inquisitions, pain of mind and spirit and body. She has taught many of us important lessons.

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  —

  Would there be as much violence on the streets if we paid more attention to the old values? I understand and share the concern of the religious right that we have tossed away our moral values, that there are no restrictions. Our devices and desires are like rivers in flood, losing their banks and roaring out of control. How can we set limits that are creative and not destructive?

  The moral and social boundaries that were still in place when I was growing up are gone, often replaced by destructive and ultimately self-destructive behavior. Self-fulfillment seems to be the ultimate aim, at no matter whose expense. Why is the divorce rate now well over 50 percent? Don’t we take marriage vows seriously anymore? Jesus came to free us from the rigidities of the law, but not from being responsible for our own actions.

  A friend of mine sent me a clipping from the Associated Press saying that Bishop James Stanton of Dallas is worried that the church is allowing itself to be reshaped by culture rather than the other way around. He brings up a legitimate question. Do our religious beliefs change culture, or does culture change what we believe? Or is it a combination of the two? Surely what we believe, individually, and in our institutions, is affected by what is going on in the world and by what we learn about the nature of the universe. Our understanding of God should be different now than it was when the church totally and solemnly believed that God had set planet earth in the sky as the center of all things, with the sun, the moon, and the stars circling docilely around us, and all for our benefit. We didn’t give up the centrality of planet earth in God’s concern for a long time. There are enough problems here to keep God busy. How can even the Creator keep in mind hundreds of billions of galaxies and all the possible solar systems and planets within them? It is more than we can even begin to comprehend, so muc
h more that the response of some people has been to drop the idea of God entirely; we are alone in a hostile universe.

  It is strange that the discovery of the enormity of the universe has produced less consternation among the religious leaders than Darwin and evolution. At least evolution was still centered on this one small planet. The idea of evolution would seem to contradict Genesis less than the enormity of the cosmos. The story is bigger than that of one planet with night and day, oceans and land, plants and trees, all creatures great and small. And yet doesn’t Genesis imply all of that, too? It is not Genesis that boggles our minds, but the idea that our one dearly loved home planet, such a tiny part of the great beginnings, is significant in God’s concern.

  What did Jesus think of all this? From the Gospels, he doesn’t seem to have been particularly concerned. Such concerns were not part of the culture in which he lived his human life. And didn’t he, as God, make it all? What mattered to him was what went on in our hearts. What mattered was that we be right with God. What mattered was forgiveness, God’s loving forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of each other. Jesus was not attracted by people who were more worried about other people’s sins (that mote in the eye, that stone in the hand) than their own love of God.

  Jesus wanted people’s hearts to change, but I don’t think he suspected how radically he was going to change them!

  The established church (of all denominations) does not like change. Change is frightening and tends to breed violence. In the early centuries of the Christian era people killed each other over the Arian heresy. In the Middle Ages people were burned at the stake because of the shocking idea that our planet might indeed be a planet circling a middle-aged sun among many suns in our galaxy. Then we had to gulp and accept that there are many galaxies. To the fundalits this may seem a heresy because it contradicts Creationism, earth made in six days, and no older now than the generations listed in Matthew and Luke would indicate. Count them, from Jesus to Abraham to Adam, and you know exactly how old the planet is! But is that the only mathematical equation? Is that all there is? How does God count, and why would it be in human numbers?

  Not so long ago the redeemed Hubble telescope detected fifty billion hitherto undiscovered galaxies in a slice of space no bigger than a grain of rice. Awesome!

  Someone asked me with a certain incredulity, “Do you mean those new galaxies actually enlarge your faith?”

  Yes, though I understand the question. It’s all too big and we’re too small. How can God possibly keep track of it all? In a universe with both the macrocosm and the microcosm too immense for us to conceive, how can we believe that God cares about each one of us, that the fall of the sparrow is noted, that even the hairs of our heads are counted?

  Those new galaxies promise me pattern and order and a Creator not only great enough to make it all but to keep track of it all. I need assurance because I am concerned by the valid question the Texas bishop asks. Are we dominated by our secular culture, or does our faith in God help us to see things as they are and, perhaps, as they ought to be? And is our secular culture with its chaos any worse than the fundalit culture tightening the tourniquet around our moral values so that the blood is cut off? The secular culture with its soft, self-centered permissiveness makes me shudder, but so does the rigid self-righteousness of those who spend more time looking for that mote in someone else’s eye than in helping to take it out and heal the eye. We all have motes, if not planks, in our eyes, and we need help and forgiveness instead of cold condemnation.

  I think again of the bishop and his concerns which are, indeed, my concerns. But his solution to it all was to try to start a heresy trial against a retired Episcopal bishop who, a good many years ago, ordained a homosexual to the diaconate. From what I could read and hear, the heresy trial came from self-righteous condemnation rather than love, or a desire to help, or even to understand. Hate, it appears to me, is the heresy. We’re still looking for the mote in the other person’s eye. We’re still ready to throw stones with the intent to kill.

  Do we want to have faith in Jesus, or do we want to have the faith of Jesus?

  And why this obsession, which has been creeping up on us, for what goes on below the waist? I want to know what is in the heart and mind. I want to know if a minister loves God, and cares about truth—not fact, truth. I want to know if the leaders of our churches are shepherds who will take care of the flock, who will be there for their people in all the tragedies and joys of life. I want to know by their actions rather than their words that our leaders love Jesus. I want them to affirm and love and be friends with the people Jesus chose. I want them to be able to laugh and rejoice and love with the whole of themselves—body, mind, and spirit.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile let us try to pray as lovingly as possible, clumsily but earnestly seeking God’s will. Even those who do not believe in God are tentative about prayer, sometimes even asking for it. It seems to be a matter of reasonable acceptance that people who are prayed for heal more quickly and completely than those who are not. I have been the beneficiary of many healing prayers and can witness to their efficacy. I have known of the prayers, but the amazing thing is that prayers are effective even when the person being prayed for is unaware of them.

  8

  DO YOU WANT TO BE MADE WHOLE?

  Two years ago my right knee, which had been painful and troublesome since I was a small child, finally had to be replaced. At least that was the opinion of several respectable doctors, and I was getting so painfully lame that it was apparent that something had to be done. I sailed through the surgery and the aftermath, resting confidently in the prayers which were sustaining me. All went well. My friend Marilyn came all the way from Niles, Michigan, to help care for me…not the first nor the last time she has come to the rescue. My friends from the cathedral came regularly through the snow to bring Communion to me. One of my glorious memories came on Palm Sunday when my friend Canon Susan Harriss came with Communion, and somehow or other (angelic instructions?) we found ourselves reading the entire long Palm Sunday liturgy, and we were part of all that went on during that terrible and holy day, and chronos became kairos and we were part of God’s time.

  All was well.

  * * *

  —

  The physiotherapist was delighted with my amazingly rapid progress. “You’re way ahead of schedule,” he announced triumphantly.

  And then, about six months later, something went wrong with my right foot, the foot on the leg with the knee replacement. Foot and ankle swelled up like a balloon, and were hot and feverish and painful. Tendonitis? Why?

  I went to the rheumatologist, who had the foot x-rayed. The x-ray was ambiguous, so she asked the surgeon to have a look at it. He was too busy. He couldn’t be bothered. He said, “Oh, her arch has just collapsed. Tell her to go to Dr. So and So and get an orthotic.”

  Obediently I did as he suggested, but the arch was not the problem. The problem was that the knee had been put in straight as an arrow, and my body is not that straight, and my foot could not support the very straightness of the new knee. The stressed foot began to get more and more out of shape, hurting more and more with every step. I limped around in misery for a year and a half, the problem increasingly painful and undiagnosed.

  Finally I went to an osteopath who had helped a friend and who helped me. He sent me to another surgeon who immediately ordered a battery of x-rays. It turned out that I had been walking around with a snapped tendon and two broken bones in my foot. No wonder I was in pain! I know exactly when the tendon snapped, a year earlier, because I heard it, though I did not know what I was hearing.

  The osteopath and the surgeon agreed that surgery was imperative.

  I knew I couldn’t continue on as I was, but I said, “I can’t do it for six months. I have to give people that much notice.”

  The surgeon said, “If you wai
t, it will be much worse. You need the surgery right now.”

  I asked, “Can I keep my commitments from a wheelchair?” And was told that I could.

  So on February 19, 1996, surrounded by prayer, I had the surgery.

  In our own small ways most of us have witnessed miracles of healing; sometimes they have been miracles of selflessness, when we have truly listened to someone else. Listening is one of the greatest of all healing instruments, not listening with self-consciousness, but with complete focus on whoever needs to unburden grief or sin or betrayal. And then, usually, we are exhausted and need to go for a quiet walk alone.

  I saw this after my foot surgery when my friend Marilyn once again came to stay with me and take care of me and, incidentally, take care of all the people who dropped in, including two who came to stay for several nights for reasons of weddings or meetings or whatever. I could see her getting more and more emotionally exhausted, and finally I would see her putting on her jacket and going out and walking until she was refilled enough to come back in.

  One of the many things I had to learn during the months I was limited by a heavy cast was to accept being dependent, to accept that there was very little I could do without help. I kept my commitments in a wheelchair, which made travel even more complicated than it is normally (and that has become complicated enough). Ten days after the surgery I flew to San Antonio, Texas, where I was met by my friend, Betty Anne, and her son, David. Madeleine, wheelchair, and luggage were too much for one person. In the “olden” days my friends’ care of me would have been called “acts of super abrogation.” I did not realize how much I was asking of people in my attempts to keep my commitments until I was in the middle of it all.