A Crazy, Holy Grace

But I think that the price that one pays by dealing with your pain by forgetting it, by stuffing it aside, by not looking at it, is that some part of you doesn’t grow.

Sloth is getting through life on automatic pilot. Not really being alive. Not really making use of what happens to you. Burying what you might have made something out of. Playing it safe with your life.

If you bury your life—if you don’t face, among other things, your pain—your life shrinks. It is in a way diminished. It is in a way taken away.

And people sit around in a room—and the magic of those programs to me is nobody advises anybody, nobody lectures anybody, there’s no little homily—where everybody simply talks out of his or her own experience of somehow having not just survived their sad times,

Miracles happen because of the willingness to open the door into your pain. Open your ears and your eyes to the elusive, invisible, silent presence of healing, of the power of God to heal, which moves as quietly, as undramatically, as the wind moves.

Both were ministers, it turned out, who, by some grapevine, had heard of what was going on and just appeared out of nowhere. Like dreams. They offered no suffocating good advice or platitudinous explanations of why bad things happen to reasonably good people.

I’m talking now about what it means to trade with your pain, as the good and faithful servants traded with their talents. The help I got from those two people, and the help I got from God, was the help I was able to get because I knew so desperately I needed help. That was my part of the transaction. “Help me!” “All right,” they said, “here is some help.”

But pain also is treasure. And it seems to me so significant that we can come together in places where there is a sense of safety. And, as we come together and try to give each other the most precious thing we have to give because in some sense or another we love each other, what we give each other again and again is our pain. The most precious thing I have to tell you about is the sadness. You don’t have to talk about pain, but you have to live out of your pain. Speak out of your depths. Speak out of who you truly are.

The reward is not so much something that God gives them because they did it right, but that in trading with their lives, they truly lived their lives, and ultimately their reward, as the master says, “is to enter into the joy of your master.” Joy is the end of it. Through the gates of pain we enter into joy.

You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own. Surely that is why, in Jesus’s sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift.

to see better than I ever had earlier who it was that I was weeping for and who I was that was weeping. In that Never Never Land, that Oz of an island, where we had no roots, I found for the first time a sense of being rooted. In that land where as foreigners we could never really belong, I found a sense of belonging.

love is not merely a warmth to bask in the way the boatloads of honeymooners basked in the warmth of Coral Beach but a grave, fierce yearning and reaching out for Paradise itself, a losing and finding of the self in the Paradise of another.

My father’s death could have closed doors in me once and for all against the possibility of ever giving entrance to such love and thereby to such pain again. Instead, it opened up some door in me to the pain of others—not that I did much about the others,

The path of your dream winds now this way, now that—one scene fades into another, people come and go the way they do in dreams—and then suddenly, deep out of wherever it is that dreams come from, something rises up that shakes you to your foundations. The mystery of the dream suddenly lifts like fog, and for an instant it is as if you glimpse a truth truer than any you knew that you knew, if only a truth about yourself. It is too much truth for the dream to hold anyway, and the dream breaks.

The sense of peace that filled me in that room, the knowledge that I could return to it whenever I wanted to or needed to—that was where the healing and blessing came from. And the name of the room—that was where the mystery came from; that was at the heart of the healing, though I did not fully understand why. The name of the room was Remember. Why Remember? What was there about remembering that brought a peace so deep, a sense of well-being so complete and intense that it jolted me awake in my bed? It was a dream that seemed true not only for me, but true for everybody. What are we to remember—all of us? To what end and purpose are we to remember?

A scrap of some song that was popular years ago. A book we read as a child. A stretch of road we used to travel. An old photograph, an old letter. There is no telling what trivial thing may do it, and then suddenly there it all is—something that happened to us once—and it is there not just as a picture on the wall to stand back from and gaze at, but as a reality we are so much a part of still and that is still so much a part of us that we feel with something close to its original intensity and freshness what it felt like, say, to fall in love at the age of sixteen, or to smell the smells and hear the sounds of a house that has long since disappeared, or to laugh till the tears ran down our cheeks with somebody who died more years ago than we can easily count or for whom, in every way that matters, we might as well have died years ago ourselves. Old failures, old hurts. Times too beautiful to tell or too terrible. Memories

We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don’t like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.

We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface. And why not, after all? We get tired. We get confused.

gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding. The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose to, and the process of entering it is not unlike the process of praying, because praying too is a slow, grave journey—a search to find the truth of our own lives at their deepest and dearest, a search to understand, to hear and be heard.

Many times I have loved the people I love too much for either their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart, as the old prayer goes, yet often when my heart called out to me to be brave, to be kind, to be honest, I have not followed at all. To remember my life is to remember countless times when I might have given up, gone under, when humanly speaking I might have gotten lost beyond the power of any to find me. But I didn’t. I have not given up. And each of you, with all the memories you have and the tales you could tell, you also have not given up. You also are survivors and are here. And what does that tell us, our surviving? It tells us that weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far, at least to this day. Foolish as we are, a wisdom beyond our wisdom has flickered up just often enough to light us if not to the right path through the forest, at least to a path that leads forward, that is bearable. Faint of heart as we are, a love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. So in the room called Remember it is possible to find peace—the peace that comes from looking back and remembering to remember that though most of the time we failed to see it, we were never really alone.

Was it God? Is it God we have to thank, you and I, for having made it somehow to this day? Again each of us must speak for himself, for herself. We must, each one of us, remember our own lives. Someone died whom we loved and needed, and from somewhere something came to fill our emptiness and mend us where we were broken. Was it only time that mended, only the resurging busyness of life that filled our emptiness?

But out of somewhere forgiveness came, a bridge was rebuilt; or maybe forgiveness never came, and to this day we have found no bridge back. Is the human heart the only source of its own healing? Is it the human conscience only that whispers to us that in bitterness and estrangement is death? We listen to the evening news with its usual recital of shabbiness and horror, and God, if we believe in him at all, seems remote and powerless, a child’s dream. But there are other times—often the most unexpected, unlikely times—when strong as life itself comes the sense that there is a holiness deeper than shabbiness and horror and at the very heart of darkness a light unutterable. Is it only the unpredictable fluctuations of the human spirit that we have to thank? We must each of us answer for ourselves, remember for ourselves, preach to ourselves our own sermons.

that something we find to do with our lives will make some little difference for good somewhere; and that when our lives end we will be remembered a little while for the little good we did. That is our human hope. But in the room called Remember we find something beyond it. “Remember the wonderful works that he has done,” goes David’s song—remember what he has done in the lives of each of us; and beyond that remember what he has done in the life of the world; remember above all what he has done in Christ—remember those moments in our own lives when with only the dullest understanding but with the sharpest longing we have glimpsed that Christ’s kind of life is the only life that matters and that all other kinds of life are riddled with death; remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us, by the power of Christ alive within them. All that is the past. All that is what there is to remember. And because that is the past, because we remember, we have this high and holy hope: that what he has done, he will continue to do, that what he has begun in us and our world, he will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition.

Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.

She says, “When somebody once asked your Uncle Jim if some friend or other had passed away, he answered in his inimitable fashion by saying, ‘Passed away? Good God, he’s dead,’ and I know just how he felt. I always thought ‘passed away’ was a silly way of putting it, like calling the water closet a powder room—or calling it a water closet for that matter—and I am here to tell you that it is also very misleading.” She says, “It is the world that passes away,” and flutters one hand delicately through the air to show the manner of its passing. Her sapphire ring glitters in the sun.

First, I wrote her, I believed it because, if I were God and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done. Second, I said, I believed it, apart from any religious considerations, because I had a hunch it was true. I intuited it. I said that if the victims and the victimizers, the wise and the foolish, the good-hearted and the heartless all end up alike in the grave and that is the end of it, then life would be a black comedy, and to me, even at its worst, life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we experience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than as just the way the cookie crumbles because, in our own innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from.

The sadness of other people’s lives, even the people she loved, never seemed to touch her where she lived. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that she had a hard heart, I think—in many ways she was warm, sympathetic, generous—but that she had a heart that for one reason or another she kept permanently closed to other people’s suffering, as well as to the darkest corners of her own.

She had gotten a rise out of me. She had goaded me into demonstrating the very hate I had just finished denying. But then some good angel gave me pause. She was old. She was falling to pieces. Her world was falling to pieces. Maybe agony was closer to the truth of it than I supposed. So I went back after a few moments, and neither of us made any mention of what had just taken place. We talked for a while. Her tiny doctor appeared and bound up one arthritic knee swollen to the size of a melon. And then, as I was finally leaving, she said to me, “You have always been my hero.” “Why do you hate me?” and “You have always been my hero.” Those were the last two things I can remember her ever having said to me face to face.

“Why do you tell all these intimate things?” I hear her ask now. Her tone is not accusatory this time. It is hushed, intimate. “So I can forget them?” I say. “To put them on record so they will never be forgotten?” “You didn’t cry into your typewriter when you heard I’d died,” she says. “I cried when we buried your ashes.”

“Once you’ve stepped off the streetcar,” she says, “you don’t keep moving on in the same way. It’s more like moving in—not the dog going leg over leg to Dover anymore, but instead somebody like Mr. Edison moving closer and closer to some new discovery, some revelation that will open up a whole new world, a whole new way of understanding everything. Or so you hope. I’m sorry I make it sound so uninteresting. It is really very interesting indeed.”

But I do not ask Naya now to tell me whatever she can about where he is or how he is or who he is. And to bring him back now to this peaceful room full of books would be unthinkable. The reason, I think, is fear. It is fear that keeps me from bringing my mother back, and it is fear also, I think, that keeps me from bringing my father back, although a different kind of fear. I do not bring my mother back for fear that she will be too much for me. Maybe I do not bring my father back for fear that he will be too little. Or that I will be. I suppose one way to read my whole life—my religious faith, the books I have written, the friends I have made—is as a search for him. Maybe at its heart my fear is the fear of finding him.5

Even though it will cost my father his life at the age of thirty-eight, and even though it will mean my mother’s taking to her grave, just short of her ninety-second birthday, a burden of guilt and regret and self-condemnation that as far as I know she never spoke about to a living soul let alone to me. I would not have missed the shot at the world that their misalliance gave me. Can I make it up to them somehow—by treasuring away their youth and beauty in the gray boxes and telling about it, by honoring them as best I can for having been father and mother to me as best they could, by forgiving them and asking their forgiveness?6

But he did ask me if I would write a prayer for him that he could use, and David said that he had it there on the table beside him. “Dear Lord, bring me through darkness into light. Bring me through pain into peace. Bring me through death into life. Be with me wherever I go, and with everyone I love. In Christ’s name I ask it. Amen.”9 St. Paul, or whoever it was, wrote to the Ephesians that he always remembered them in his prayers, asking God, among other things, to give them “a spirit of revelation in the knowledge of him,” which is just about what you would expect him to ask. But then he added an explanatory phrase that I, for one, would not have expected and maybe for that reason never even noticed until it jumped off the page at me the other day—“having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.” The eyes of your heart, of course, is the phrase. “O altitudo!” as Sir Thomas Browne would have said—to find such words where I never found them before and just when I needed them. That day on the staircase when I met my first grandchild for the first time, what I saw with the eyes of my head was a very small boy with silvery gold hair and eyes the color of blue denim coming down toward me in his mother’s arms. What I saw with the eyes of my heart was a life that without a moment’s hesitation I would have given my life for. To look through those eyes is to see every kingdom as magic. “The hope to which he has called you” is what you will see with them, says Ephesians, and suddenly in this quiet, book-filled room where I sit with my feet up and a cup of tepid coffee at my elbow, everything I see with them speaks of that hope.

Or that one way or another it is, of course, no less than L. Frank Baum, the wizard himself, who will see to it that in the long run nothing, not even the Wicked Witch and her legions, will be able to destroy these creatures whom he loves, because they are his and because it is in him that they live and move and have their being. He cannot see all this with the eyes of his heart because, of course, the wizard has not yet given him a heart.