The Rock That Is Higher Page 6
So when Luci Shaw returned from Europe, learned about my accident, called me from San Francisco, and told me that she wanted to come to San Diego and be with me, I didn’t do my usual Anglican protestations of “Oh, I’m all right; don’t bother.” Instead, I said, “Please come.”
And I remembered that Jesus did not carry his own cross all the way. He stumbled and fell under the burden of the cross, and Simon of Cyrene carried it for him. It is all right to ask for help. We do not have to do it alone.
It was wonderful having Luci with me to be friend, nurse, encourager, to read the Psalms to me—I was still not strong enough to read for myself. Luci and I have been friends for many years. We have shared the grief of our husbands’ illnesses and death; Luci’s husband, Harold, died of cancer in January of the same year that my husband died of cancer in the autumn. We have been in the depths and the heights together. But this time in the hospital was extraordinary in the way it deepened an already deep friendship. I was almost completely helpless physically and Luci gave me the tenderest of care, helping me with the almost impossible task of walking a few yards out in the hall, buying ginger ale for me to drink, since it was one thing I could keep down, and all the hospital provided was Sprite (a little surprising, since ginger ale has long been known as helpful for nausea).
Luci was patient with me, understanding that I was not refusing to eat because I was being ornery, but because I truly could not eat. We talked about our childhoods, about our spiritual journeys, about how we were comfortable in very much the same spiritual home, though we have come to it from very different directions, Luci from a classically evangelical background, I from an equally classical Episcopalian one—a spiritual oneness Luci’s “new” husband, John, had mentioned only a few weeks earlier when we were all together in Oxford. Luci and I talked about how God was coming into this seemingly irrational accident, how nothing, ultimately, is irrational when God has entered into it.
And I learned yet another lesson. Luci needed to get back to San Francisco for various pressing obligations. When she asked me if I wanted—needed—her to stay another night until our mutual friend Marilyn was able to come, I tried to be Anglican and brave. But finally I said, “Luci, please stay.” And she did.
After Luci left, Marilyn came. She, like Luci, is a graduate of Wheaton, and had, in fact, grown up there. We three have known each other for a long time. A year ago Marilyn had been bumped from a plane and was given free transportation to and from any destination in the continental United States. So she used it to fly from Niles, Michigan, to San Diego, California, just to be with me. What I would have done without these two friends I do not know, because Lura was right: I should not be alone.
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Marilyn and I talked about Certain Women, because not only had she read this long manuscript in various versions, she had come up with the title for me. I had started out calling the book The Company of Women, from the Coverdale translation of the Psalms, and discovered that this title had already been used. When Marilyn looked through her Bible she found, in Luke’s Gospel, Certain women made us astonished, and I added, from Nik’s play, King David’s saying to his beloved wife, Abigail, “You sound so certain.” To which Abigail replies, “I am.” So Certain Women is a title with a double meaning.
We talked about David, only a youngster when his story begins, out in the hills with his sheep and his harp. All through Scripture sheep are important, and when we are referred to as sheep it is not a compliment. Sheep are among the most stupid of animals! Indeed, all we, like sheep, have gone astray.
And the Good Shepherd goes out into the rain to find us and bring us home.
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It is no coincidence that David comes into his story as a shepherd. It is difficult for us today to understand all the connotations that the word shepherd had for people in David’s world—and in Jesus’ world. We don’t have a contemporary equivalent. One friend suggested the school traffic-crossing guard, the man or woman carefully making sure that the children get across the street safely. It’s a good metaphor, but not really adequate.
There’s a true story I love about a house party in one of the big English country houses. Often after dinner at these parties people give recitations, sing, and use whatever talent they have to entertain the company. One year a famous actor was among the guests. I’ve been told he might have been Charles Laughton. When it came his turn to perform, he recited the Twenty-third Psalm, perhaps the most beloved psalm in the Psalter. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. His rendition was magnificent, and there was much applause. At the end of the evening someone noticed a little old great-aunt dozing in the corner. She was deaf as a post and had missed most of what was going on, but she was urged to get up and recite something. In those days people used to memorize a lot of poetry! So she stood up, and in her quavery old voice she started, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and went on to the end of the psalm. When she had finished there were tears in many eyes. Later one of the guests approached the famous actor. “You recited that psalm absolutely superbly. It was incomparable. So why were we so moved by that funny, little old lady?”
He replied, “I know the psalm. She knows the shepherd.”
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David was a shepherd, the youngest son of Jesse. He was ruddy, with a fine appearance and handsome features, but he was alone in the hills with his songs as he cared for his sheep. When a lion came, and a bear, and took lambs from his flock, he went after the marauding beasts and killed them, saving the lambs.
Meanwhile, Samuel was furious with Saul for having spared Agag and some of the animals. Yes, I have trouble with this. So does Emma, the protagonist of Certain Women, and so does Nik, the playwright. Even Grandpa Bowman, Emma’s beloved preacher grandfather, cannot quite explain the violence of what he calls “the tribal god.” Towards the end of Numbers, in chapter 33, God commands Moses,
Speak to the Israelites and say to them: “When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you….Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess….But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you live. And then I will do to you what I plan to do to them.”
Such exhortations to kill all the enemies and take their land—and there are not a few—have been used as excuses (reasons) to take land away from other people, as we, ourselves, did with the land that belonged to the Indians. Hadn’t God given the land to us? Didn’t the psalmist (was it David?) say in the Forty-fourth Psalm,
With your hand you drove out the nations….It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory….Through you we push back our enemies; through your name we trample our foes.
Did the British take this literally when they spread their empire across the world, considering the heathen of the other lands to be “the white man’s burden”?
But hasn’t this always been the way of the world, the taking of other peoples’ land when “we,” whoever we are, run out of land, or are driven from our own, or for one reason or other need expansion? Or simply lust for power, like the emperors of the Roman Empire? This is the world’s way. Is it God’s way?
The slaughtering, tribal god has always bothered me. First of all, it implies that “our” god is only one god among many, perhaps stronger, better, but still one god in a pantheon of gods. Indeed, throughout the Old Testament there is much evidence of polytheism, side by side with a worship of the One True Creator of the Universe. I have been told that when the Jews were slaves in Egypt, when they left they took with them Ikhnaton’s vision of One God. But the One God seems to me to go right back to the first verses of Genesis, to be affirmed in the God who took Abraham out at
night to count the stars—if he could—and made mighty promises that Abraham’s descendants would be a blessing to all nations of the earth. The two visions of God are side by side through much of Scripture, as they often are for us—for when we worship church buildings, or the number of people in the congregation, or our denomination over other denominations, or the conservatives over the liberals, or the other way around, we are losing sight of the God of love, the Abba that Jesus showed us, who knows all the stars by name and counts the very hairs of our head.
The God of war has troubled me all my life because I have lived in a century of war, and I don’t think that war is ever right. I don’t know whether or not Desert Storm was necessary or not; it may have been. But it is not right to glorify it, to make heroes out of those who ordered more killing than was needed. When we kill civilians, women and children and old people, it may be because they were simply victims of bombs that were intended not for them but for the ending of the war, but it must never be glorified. And we have tended to do that, because if we can bask in glory it can obscure the fact that we killed, maimed, destroyed. We do what we have to do, prayerfully, and then we need to repent of the evil that has been done through us, not glorify it.
This is hard thinking. I don’t like it. I talked a little about it with both Luci and Marilyn, and we prayed together—and how good it was to have someone to pray with, to lead me back into prayer.
With both Luci and Marilyn I talked of my deliverance from death, and what it meant. For my seventy-two-year-old body to have survived all the trauma it did was enough to make me ask why God had spared me. Certainly my life was not saved so that I could turn away from the hard thoughts and relax into the easy ones. Certainly my life was not saved so that I could armor myself with self-protection and avoid controversial subjects that might antagonize some people if those subjects are ones which I believe God wants me to address. It’s often said that Americans want to be loved and are upset when people of other nations resent and even hate us, and I guess I’m American that way, too: I want to be loved. And I am loved, and how marvelous that is! But those who love me trust me to try to seek the truth and speak the truth as much as I am able.
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The basic truth for me, the freeing truth, is God’s love, God’s total, unequivocal love. That love is evident throughout Scripture. Psalm 139, one of my favorites, says in verse 14: I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
Paul, in his first epistle to the people of Thessalonica, tells us that he has no need to write to us about how we are to love one another, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. God made us in love, and he expects us to reflect that love (and how wondrously I saw that love reflected by Luci and Marilyn). We are to love one another even when we disagree with each other. I did not always agree with my husband, but I always loved him. We are to love one another even when we are angry with each other. I am sometimes angry with my friends, but that doesn’t stop me from loving them.
In his letter to the people of Rome Paul tells us that all things work together for good to them that love God, and he concludes this magnificent passage by assuring us that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. John says that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, just to show us how much we are loved.
In chapter five of Romans Paul assures us that God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us—our Trinitarian God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all there since the beginning, all here, all now, loving us.
In John’s first epistle he commands us, Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another….If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. And John tells us not just to say that we love, but to show our love in all that we do. Yes, because God loves us, we are to love each other, and we can love, as long as we are certain of God’s love for each one of us. It is much easier for me to love someone who is being difficult when I remember that God loves me even when I am at my worst, at my most unlovable.
In Paul’s letter to the people of Ephesus he asks us to walk in love, just as Christ has loved us. What is it about loving that we find so hard, so that Scripture has to remind us to love over and over again? In his letter to the people of Colosse, Paul tells us that our hearts should be knit together in love and that it is love that helps us attain the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
I could go on and on picking out passages of God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, but all I needed in the hospital in San Diego was to remember some of my favorites. I knew that I was alive because of God’s love. I knew that God would show me why my life had been spared and would let me know what I was supposed to do. One thing I never lost was faith in God’s love.
A friend of mine was viciously and terribly mugged, and while she was in the hospital one of the nurses said to her, “What horrible thing have you done that God is punishing you this way?”
Neither her accident nor mine were punishments. That is perhaps the human way, but it is not God’s way. That attitude causes child abuse and battered women and all kinds of perverse ugliness. It is not how God works. My accident happened because a truck driver went through a red light in his brand-new truck. Because we had a witness who was willing to come forward, the truck driver had to assume responsibility, as far as insurance was concerned, for what he had done. If he feels badly about what he did (which, alas, doesn’t seem likely), that is surely his punishment.
Punishment can far too easily be misunderstood, misconstrued, turned into vengeance or retribution. Let me tell the only funny story I know of a New York mugging: mine. All muggings are unpleasant, many are horrible, and most are not at all funny. Mine was. I was on the way from my apartment to teach a writers’ workshop at St. Hilda’s House, half a mile uptown, when a man came out of the shadows of the November evening and grabbed the small bag that was around my neck. Fortunately the strap broke, and he ran off with it. Like an idiot, I ran after him, shouting, “God will not like this!” He ran down the street, across Riverside Drive, grabbed another woman’s bag, and jumped over a stone wall. What he did not know was that on the other side of the wall was a twenty-foot drop. He fell and broke his leg, just as a policeman was walking by. Immediate retribution (if not punishment!). My earnest hope was that he remembered the words I had called after him.
But my San Diego injuries were not a punishment, and God came into them immediately in the overwhelming response of love and prayer. That is what loving each other is like, a wondrous network of love and prayer that is greater than each individual who is part of it. I know that is why my recovery has astonished many people, though it has seemed incredibly slow to me. But then, God has been trying for seventy-two years (now seventy-three) to teach me patience.
I am concerned that the nurse who thought my friend was being punished is not alone in her idea of a punitive, forensic God. That is not the God of Scripture! Certainly there are a few angry passages, and surely we stiff-necked people have given God good cause to be angry with us. But if we read Scripture from the first verse of Genesis through to the last line of John’s Revelation with a big pad, and set down the angry passages on one side, and the loving and forgiving passages on the other, the love and forgiveness far outweigh the anger. Over and over God calls us to say, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I want to come home,” and then the door is flung open.
I have been asked, and many times, “But can’t we choose to exclude ourselves?” Of course. Haven’t we, as children, haven’t our own children flung out of the room in anger? And haven’t we waited for them to come back? We have not slammed the door in their faces. We have welcomed them home. Jesus said,
“If you…know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”
A couple of summers ago I was asked to teach a two-week writers’ workshop at a well-known Bible college in Canada. I was given their statement of faith to sign. I read it, found it unscriptural, and pushed it aside. There was no way I could sign it.
They called me. “Where’s the statement of faith?”
I spoke to the dean of this Bible college. “It’s unscriptural. I’m sorry. I can’t sign it.”
I read him point three, which was one of the two points out of six that I could not sign. “Because of the Fall we are in such a state of sin and depravity that we are justly under God’s wrath and condemnation.” Point four said that the only way God could forgive us for all this sin and depravity was for Jesus to come and get crucified. “What this is saying,” I told the dean, “is that Jesus had to come save us from God the Father. I don’t believe that Jesus had to come save us from God the Father. Scripture says, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. The birth of Jesus showed God’s love, not God’s anger. This is what the Bible says, and this is what I believe.”
I was allowed to come to the college anyhow, and I said to one of my students, “I don’t think they’ve looked at that statement of faith since it was penned in Queen Victoria’s day,” and he replied sadly, “Oh no, Madeleine, that is what they are taught and that is what they believe.”
I, too, am sad. But grateful that I was not taught a God of anger and vengeance, but a God of love. I am grateful that I was not taught that I had to earn lots and lots of merit badges in order to receive God’s love. I was taught that God’s love is so great that it cannot possibly be earned. It is the infinitely wonderful gift of our Maker. We are loved, just as we are, each one of us unique, unlike anybody else, loved by God, because this is how God made us. We are, as Paul reminds us, the temple of the Holy Spirit, and we must honor this temple in the way we live. We also bear within us God’s image, and we are to honor that image.