Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

  There has been less light as the colors begin to change, and the world has grown more desperate.

  Day 1 of this story begins one Sunday morning before church. It was overcast, and cold. I started cleaning out drawers, for no particular reason except that I had half an hour until I had to leave for church. In the back of one drawer, I found a horribly tangled gold chain. I took it outside and sat down on the front step in the cool morning, and tugged on it. Tugging is what you always try first with a tangled chain of slinky filament. It makes things worse, but it’s what you do.

  I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration, but as with much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone’s advantage.

  My mother might find a thin gold chain in a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia and India, to the great weight of the world; yet they were light as a feather.

  Sometimes I would put the chain on a table and work it gently, letting the slink slip itself out of the knot, but other times I had to use a needle to loosen the worst of it, poking lightly so I wouldn’t break any of the links.

  Now, though, after a few minutes on the front step, I went inside and put the chain back in the drawer, and sat down to read the paper. This was a big mistake. Lately our pastor had been urging us to act more like Martin Luther King, Jr., which I feel gives an unfair advantage to the more decent and humane people. The rage returned in me.

  I’ve known for years that resentments don’t hurt the person we resent, but that they do hurt and even sometimes kill us. I’d been asking myself, Am I willing to try to give up a bit of this hatred?

  Yeah; finally; theoretically. And that was a start.

  I wondered whether I could try to love my president, as Jesus or Dr. King would, without having to want to have him over for lunch. But if you refused even to entertain the idea of eating lunch with the person in the distant future, would Jesus consider that you had really forgiven him?

  Jesus ate with sinners—but of course, they ended up killing him. So there’s that.

  Still, I know he would eat with my president, even if he knew that the White House would probably call the police or the Justice Department on him later for his radical positions. He’d do it, because he is available to everyone. His love and mercy fall equally upon us all. This is so deeply not me. I know the world is loved by God, as are all of its people, but it is much easier to believe that God hates or disapproves of or punishes the same people I do, because these thoughts are what is going on inside me much of the time.

  While singing in church that day, and while sitting in silent prayer and confession, I decided to experiment with change itself, as summer was turning to fall.

  Unfortunately, change and forgiveness do not come easily for me, but any willingness to let go inevitably comes from pain; and the desire to change changes you, and jiggles the spirit, gets to it somehow, to the deepest, hardest, most ruined parts. And then Spirit expands, because that is its nature, and it drags along the body, and finally, the mind.

  So when the seasons change, buckle up.

  Everything was sweet at church, the singing, the kindness, and then the pastor had to go and ruin it all by giving a sermon on loving our enemies.

  It was like being in the Twilight Zone.

  It was clear that Veronica was speaking directly to me. She said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, and we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justice, equality, mercy, and then we despise people who are also created in God’s image, who are Her children, too. Veronica said that if the president had been the only person on earth, Jesus would still have loved him so much that he would have come down and died for him.

  This drives me crazy, that God seems to have no taste, and no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.

  I sat there in church, working this through in my mind, tugging at it, yet hunkered down on the inside to protect myself from having to take it in, and then Veronica said one of the most stunning things I’ve heard her say: “When someone is acting butt-ugly, God loves them just the same as God loves the innocent. They are still just as loved by God.” I was shocked. Boy, I thought, are you going to get it when Mom finds out that you said “butt” in church. I thought she was talking about the White House, but then she kept on about Jesus, and Dr. King, and—if you read between the lines—the people in our church. All of us—and there are some exquisitely good people in this church. It was outrageous. Veronica said you don’t have to support people’s political agendas, but you do have to love them, if you want to follow Jesus. She said you could tell if people were following Jesus, instead of following the people who follow Jesus, because they were feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to help everyone get medical insurance.

  In my head I saw the president, marching on an aircraft carrier, with his little squinched-up Yertle the Turtle mouth, like a five-year-old whose dad owns the ship. Which his dad probably does. Then I saw him in a photo op, signing papers, and something made me stop. I wasn’t thinking about his legislation or his tax cuts for the wealthy—I just experimented with the idea that God loves him just as much as God loves my niece Clara, that God looks at him in the same way my brother looks at baby Clara. How could this be? It didn’t seem right. But I stuck with it. And after a while I could feel the tiniest of spaces in the knot, the lightest breath between tangled links. In that space, I saw the face of a boy I used to know superimposed on the president’s face, a boy named John who liked the smartest girl in first grade. When she wrote at her desk, she squinched up her face fiercely, intently, and John thought that expression was what helped her to be so smart. So he squinched up his face, too, when he read, for the entire year.

  For a few seconds, I imagined my president doing this in first grade as well. Actually, I remembered him doing this, about a week before, in the Oval Office. But then I imagined him as one of the people in my own family, who failed at school or in life, who got lost or bitchy or drunk, all that innate beauty getting fucked up. As mine did.

  To be honest, I am never going to get anywhere with this president. But Jesus kept harping on forgiveness and loving one’s enemies, so I decided to try. Why couldn’t Jesus command us to obsess about everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey’s Kisses in bed?

  Maybe in some translations, he does.

  The sermon ended; people were crying. Veronica asked if anyone wanted to come forward for special prayer. Apparently no one did. I struggled to keep in my seat, but I found myself standing, then lurching forward stiffly. Veronica asked me quietly what I needed, and I whispered that I was so angry with and afraid of the right wing in this country that it was making me mentally ill. She put her arm around me, and the church prayed for me, although they did not know what was wrong.

  I felt a shift inside, the conviction that love was having its way with me, softening me, changing my cold stone heart. The feeling grew stronger and stronger, until, unfortunately, church was over.

  Driving home, I tried to hold on to what I’d heard that day: that loving your enemies was nonnegotiable. It meant trying to respect them, it meant identifying with their humanity and weaknesses. It didn’t mean unconditional acceptance of their crazy behavior. They were still accountable for the atrocities they’d perpetrated, as you were accountable for yours. But you worked at doing better, at loving them, for the profoundest spiritual reason: You were trying not to make things worse.

  Day 1 went pretty well. All things considered.

  I e-mailed Veronica that night, and I said that I’d heard her, way deep down. I didn’t know ho
w it would change my behavior, but I had heard. She answered that this was a powerful beginning, to hear the truth, and to tell the truth. We don’t transform ourselves, she said, but when we finally hear, the Spirit has access to our hearts, and that is what changes us.

  I lay in the dark and thought about this brief but amazing moment in church. It had felt almost like the moment when I converted, and later when I got sober, a baby sense of hope, a chance of release from the constant knots in my stomach. I had poked a needle into another knot that day, tugged, let go, and finally felt some give. It was more tenuous than with a metal chain, with which, if you stay with it, you have something to show at the end—gold! And as with any chain, when you get anywhere, you should hang it up or put it on immediately, instead of letting it lie around, because the tangle is waiting to happen again. So I sang silent songs to myself until I fell asleep.

  I have to admit it, though: Day 2 was a bit of a disappointment.

  It began well enough, with a molten autumn sunrise, and ended with a silver moon. But the hours in between did not go nearly as well as I had been hoping. I was fine, until I heard the latest bad news from Iraq, and my hostilities flared up again. It continues to be a struggle. I know that God is in the struggle with us. And that trying to love the people in this White House is the single most subversive position I could take.

  I got the chain out of the drawer and gave it another try, but I didn’t have any patience. It crossed my mind to take a hammer to the miserable thing and bust it into pieces. Trying to unravel it was a waste of time. I didn’t need it. But something inside me got back to work. Maybe I would find the perfect person to give it to—someone who was down in the dumps, who’d lost all hope of change, whose spirits would be lifted by a little present. So, tug tug, poke poke: I have to believe that if I do this, it will cause change—there will be more give, and give means there is more light between the links. You never know exactly where the knot is going to release, but usually, if you keep working with it, it will.

  eighteen

  scattering the present

  Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to abandon all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother. She was a mix of wrathful Old Testament opinion, terrified politeness and befuddled English arrogance—Hermione Gingold meets the dark Hindu goddess Kali. And God, she was annoying. I mean this objectively. You can ask my brothers, or her sister. I used to develop tics in her presence. Yet most of who I have become is the result of having had her as a foil, and having her inside me: as DNA, as memory; as all the weird lessons she taught, and the beautiful lessons, too—and they are the same.

  While she was alive, I spent my life like a bitter bellhop, helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life became much easier. For a long while, I did not miss her at all, and did not forgive her a thing. I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also one of the most devoted. My brothers and I gave away most of her things—clothes, books, broken junk. One thing was left behind, and this was the plastic crematory box, with her misspelled name, that held her ashes. We couldn’t figure out how to pry it open. In the many months it had taken me to retrieve the box from the closet, I discovered that I had forgiven her for a number of things, although for none of the big-ticket items—like having existed at all, for instance, and then having lived so long. Still, the mosaic chips of forgiveness I felt that day were a start. After I carried the box of ashes from the closet, wrapped it in pretty paper, and placed it on a shelf in my living room, a few more months passed before I felt like doing anything further. This is what happened next:

  Around that time, Veronica gave a sermon about how, with the war raging in Iraq, now was not the time to figure everything out—for instance who was to blame. It was not the time to get a new plan together and try to push it through. It was time to be still, to center ourselves, to trust what we’d always trusted in: friendship, kindness, helping the poor, feeding the hungry. Having felt scattered for much of the past two years, I took Veronica’s words to heart, and began to get quiet whenever possible, to take longer walks, to sit in beggy prayer and fretful meditation. My mind kept thinking its harsh thinky thoughts, but I would distract myself from them gently and say, “Those are not the truth, those are not trustworthy, those are for entertainment purposes only.” Eventually I had quieter thoughts about my mother, to see her through what the theologian Howard Thurman called “quiet eyes.” Not totally quiet eyes, in my case. But quiet for me, and then quieter still.

  Gerald May wrote, “Grace threatens all my normalities.” I tell you. It had taken two years for me to bring her out of the dark closet. Now I felt it was time to scatter her ashes with the family, to honor her. The problem was, I didn’t honor her. I meant to, but all I really felt was sorry for how hard her life had been, and glad that she had finally passed. This is what the elders of our church call dying—passing, as in acing her exams, or turning down the offer to renew her lease. “Oh, yeah, she passed,” they reassure you, and theologically, I believe, they are right on both counts.

  That was where I was when Veronica urged us to be still. And when I did, I found out once again how flexible and wily the human spirit is. It will sneak out from behind the bushes like a cartoon cat and ambush you if you’re not careful, trick you into giving up a teaspoon of resentment, get you to take one step back from the frozen ground. Mine was lying in wait for me the day I found a photograph of my mother when she was sixty, and while my heart didn’t leap, it hopped, awkwardly, as if its shoelaces were tied together.

  In the photo, she is wearing her usual heavy makeup, which I have always believed was a way of maintaining both disguise and surface tension; it always humiliated me. But in this one picture, instead of feeling humiliated, I could finally see what she was shooting for: to appear beautiful, and worthy, a vigorous woman on this earth. She is posing in front of a vase of flowers, clasping one wrist with her hand, as if trying to take her own pulse. She had been divorced for eight years or so by then. One of her eyebrows is arched, archly, as if one of her children had once again uttered something dubious or socially unacceptable. One-third of her is in darkness, two-thirds in light, which pretty much says it.

  You can see what a brave little engine she was, even though she’d lost everything over the years—her husband, her career, her health. But she still had her friends and family, and she stayed fiercely loyal to liberal causes, and to underdogs. And I thought, Well, I honor that, so we’ll start there.

  The next thing I knew, I had called my relatives, most of whom still live in the Bay Area, where we all grew up, and had invited them to dinner on my mom and her twin’s birthday, to scatter her ashes. Those ashes of hers were up against a lot—our lives were better since her death—but I believed that if we released her, this would release us, and she could release herself. Or I would have a complete breakdown and start to drink again, and Sam and I would have to go live at the rescue mission. I knew only that scattering her ashes was the next right thing.

  Two weeks later, three aunts, an uncle, half a dozen cousins, my brother and sister-in-law, a six-year-old second cousin, and a friend came to dinner at my house. I adore these people. I have also had fights with some of them over the years, have said terrible things, have been accused by one of great wrongs, and told I would never be forgiven. We’ve had the usual problems: failed marriages, rehab, old resentments, miserable lumpy family secrets, harshness and intensity. But we have loved and cared for one another over the years. We’re just another motley American family, enduring. As my friend Neshama’s father-in-law used to say, looking around on holidays and shaking his head, “We are a bum outfit.”

  After dinner, we hiked up the hill to the open space near the house. One of my aunts, who says to say she is fifty-four, totters when she walks now, and needs arms to hold on to. Dallas, my six-year-old cousin,
glommed on to Sam, who dragged him along like carry-on luggage, rolling his eyes but pleased. The wind was blowing, and the sun was starting to go down. Sam and Dallas tore to the top of the hill, while the rest of us, blown and buffeted by the wind, took one another’s arms, and walked in an unsteady procession the rest of the way.

  The sun was setting behind a ghost cloud, illuminating it, imposing a circle of light over it, like a cookie cutter. Eucalyptus trees circled around us, at the edge of the grass, as if holding down the earth, bricks on a picnic tablecloth in the wind. The trees were the only things between us and the horizon. We could see 360 degrees above fleecy trees, golden hillsides, towns. The wind made us feel more exposed than usual: it was so gritty that it flayed us—but lucky us, someone pointed out, with bodies to be assailed.

  Dallas tore around the periphery having goof attacks, flirting with Sam. “Does anyone want to see my fireworks?” he kept calling out. “Will anyone come and see them?”

  “When we’re done,” his mother told him sternly. “Now leave us alone.”

  We stood in a circle for a few minutes. “I knew that if I asked you to come tonight, you would,” I said. We all cried a little. My cousins had really loved my mother. She had a sweet voice, one of them said, and was always kind to them. My aunt Gertrud said, “The nature of life is harsh, and Nikki got some terrible breaks. It wasn’t fair how things turned out for her. But she did a lot of good in her life, and we will always miss her.”

  “Yes, we will,” a couple of people responded, the way we do at church. My heart was heavy with missing her, even as I felt the old familiar despair that she had been my mother. I just tried to breathe.

  The reason I never give up hope is that everything is basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything—the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the holes in the heart of our families, the animal confusion within us. When you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it’s not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it may float forth and open like those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood, or chosen; at church, for me; at peace marches.