"What are gods?"

            “What are gods?”  The question came in an email from a student in my mythology class who was frustrated by discussions in which the word gets tossed around without a clear sense of what it signifies.  Cody’s message was quite long and full of wonderings, “Are gods just a placeholder for the unexplainable processes of a given phenomenon, like thunder, growth of wheat, etc.?”  At the center of such swirling suggestions was a question couched as a request for the teacher to address:  “I want to know more about what it’s like, in our (my) understanding, to “speak” with the gods, if they are the humanization of processes.”  I got the message late Wednesday afternoon.  I’d been teaching all day and was preparing to take my daughter and puppy to puppy training class, but Katya wanted spaghetti.  I printed off Cody’s email, and as we waited for our plates of spaghetti, while she played with her phone, I jotted ideas on the back of Cody’s message.  Duty bound, I went back to the text of Gilgamesh, as if I could find the answer by surveying the array of supernatural beings (gods of sky, earth, water, wisdom, cattle, serpent, sun).  I have no doubt that my anxious and hurriedly written email was confusing at best and incomprehensible at worst.  He said he didn’t need an exhaustive definition, but I could read his need between the lines.  When I surveyed the text, typed a reply, and pushed send, I was just being the good teacher.  But what I really felt awe—that this student trusted me enough to ask such a question.  I was really in awe of the question because it was honest and because it was also mine.  Every time I opened my email that weekend and saw that Cody had not responded, I knew that I had not given him what he needed.  What if he didn’t want a definition?  As we move from the mythologies of Mesopotamia to Greece and on to the stories of the Hebrew Bible, God becomes increasingly subjective and impossible to pin down—“I am what I am.”  Cody gave me a gift with that question.  Whether he knew it or not, he invited me to search my own experience for an answer.  “You always find reasons not to think of your own life.”  Maybe it is time to put down the books, return some of the stacks around my bed and desk to the library, and come out of the cramped room in which I spend the majority of my time.  Maybe we find the answer to such tremendous questions only when we dare to live.  

            Over that weekend, I got swept up in life—thanks to Katya.  Paul had gone away for the afternoon, and she and I took our new puppy out for a walk.  She was quieter than usual, and when I asked what was wrong, she said that she felt like Trevor (her “boyfriend”) was going to break up with her, and she wanted to do it “to just get it over with.”  When I began to probe, she explained that he had been “acting weird,” and had said “that his feelings were beginning to fade.”  Ever since the photo of her wearing a cheap engagement ring (which I purchased at Plato’s Closet for $3.00) hit SnapChat and circulated among the Valley School parents—Trevor’s crazy Mom saw it—she forbid him to see her.  That night as it was getting dark, I could see her legs—back and forth—she must be on her swing, but she was yelling at someone on the phone.  A few minutes later the back door slammed, and she pounded through the kitchen—“leave me alone”—and up the stairs slamming her bedroom door behind her.  A few minutes later, I went into her room.  I said something meaningless like “how are you?” or “how’d it go?”  She seemed to feel proud that she had done it, but she was still upset.  Then she came out with it:  “Mom, I kind of want to tell you something, but I’m afraid you won’t like me.”  I told her that whatever she could say would not change my love for her.  Then, she told me that in June, just after graduation, she asked me to drop her at the Mall so she could hang out with girlfriends.  That was the plan, and I believed her.  Trevor picked her up, took her back to his house, where they had sex.  Suddenly, I felt very small, very naïve, very ineffective—a failure.  Much stronger than my own feelings of failure was my sadness for her.  She was carrying that around all summer.  She accused me of thinking her a slut.  She had even expressed interest in going with me to confession.  Oh.  And how much harder the break-up must be given that she had been so intimate with him.  Oh.  My poor daughter.  I felt my virginity lost, taken, violently, felt it all over again.  I think I hugged her, but I do not really remember.  It hurt.  I was hurting with her.  Maybe that is all she needed. 

            The next morning, I woke her up to go to Church with me.  She went without an argument, and we made it to our old pew, unoccupied all summer while we both were going through our own different crises.  Barbara quietly slid in behind us, and at some point, complimented Katya on her hair (as she always does).  At the sign of peace, I hugged Katya and she began to sob.  I held her for a long time, and I felt a surge of maternal power and love.  She shook hands with all the usual people.  Stan, the man who has sat behind us for years, asked me if she was alright, and I indicated that it was boy trouble.  “Men are dogs,” he joked.  “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.  Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.”  During this prayer she stood with her head on my shoulder.  We knelt.  We processed to the altar, all unworthy but loved anyway, to receive the bread and body that mark our participation in Christ’s body—broken and whole—today, tomorrow, forever.  There is fullness.  There is love.  There is forgiveness.  Forgiveness is so often out of reach and even unimaginable for human beings, living within the limits of our judgmental natures.

            The next day was Monday, and in Greek mythology class, I opened discussion with Cody’s question.  Certain students were more sure-footed with their answers, giving lengthy anthropological explanations or stating matter-of-factly that gods were human projections.  I told the story of the weekend (omitting sensitive details) of heartbreak healed at Sunday Mass, when my daughter leaned on me.  I told about the powerful feelings of forgiveness and love.  I said that I didn’t think we could have gotten to that place of deep connection had we been standing in her room.  In church, our sins, our sadness, our forgiveness—green shoots in the wilderness—didn’t die in an otherwise parched landscape of closed doors, constant work, and YouTube videos.  Our small efforts were encased in a loving kindness that wrapped us up together in an embrace.  That is what it feels like to be in the presence of God.  It was an inkling of transcendence.  Seek the Lord while he may be found—when a daughter needs her mother to lean on and the mother (me!), for once, felt like she was there for both girls.  News flash:  we objectify or idolize God when we imagine him up or out there somewhere.  God happens where we love people, our neighbors. 

How a Christian can be a Wrestler

            I like to think things out by walking.  S---- called me peripatetic … like Socrates.  Whenever he would say things like that, I would try hard to shake off the flattery—water off a duck’s back.  “I am nothing.  I prefer to be nothing … like the characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear who embrace nothingness to be made new.  Today, I have just enough time for a short walk.  I pull in the driveway of ForMar, past turkeys grazing.  ForMar is an arboretum on the edge of Flint that was once a farm and is named for the married farmers who left their home to people far from home, people seeking peace.  I head straight for the highest point today—a hill at the back of the acreage—walk up into the sky and sit at the summit watching the clouds roll over me, enjoying the protection offered by high grass and weeds, facing the old oak below that is the axis of my mundi.  It is my sacred spot.  Usually I pray here—a strange mixture of Muslim prayer (prostration), pagan prayer (arms outstretched), and Christian prayer (kneeling and whispering Hail Marys).  Today I am Abraham on Mt. Moriah and Moses on Sinai:  “Here I am!”  Loins girded, pen in hand, I am ready to try the strength of my own religious tradition whose Son-God suffered, died, turned the other cheek.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about emblems:  the Reformer John Calvin chose an extended hand holding a burning heart with the motto, “promptly and sincerely in the service of God.”    

My emblem, if I could choose, would be a woman wrestling with angel or God.  In an essay I wrote on Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, the competition between Jew and Christians for chosen status gets figured by their competition over the biblical character of Jacob.  Christians identify with Jacob the trickster-thief who robbed elder brother, Esau, of his birthright, while Shylock, the Jew, identifies with Jacob who wrestles his way to atonement (with God and with brother).  I am a Christian who identifies with Jacob, who wonders if there is room for a feisty fighter, a woman who takes a stand, a woman who wants revolution and revelation in her life?  Pen in hand, I have come to this hilltop—waiting to take dictation from the God of my heroes.  Writing like Moses wrote and rolling like Moses rolled toward my own promised land.

            On Sundays since my one world ended leaving me dogpaddling in the welter and waste of original chaos, I sit in church, secluded in the side chapel.  I watch the congregation through glass.  I see my place vacant and imagine I’ve died.  In the beginning, I sat apart so no one would see me cry and so I could be close to Christ in the golden tabernacle.  The chapel is dark, and the space feels more intimate.  Sometimes I sit there and have the sensation I am laying my head on Jesus’ breast.  At other times, I feel like I’m in the belly of my own great fish, waiting to be spit out … but not before my own prayer emerges from my own depths.  The fish is patient.  Last Sunday, waiting for Mass to begin, I was praying when I felt the proximity of great gentleness.  It was Barbara—the old woman, dear woman—who has sat behind me (and sometimes me and my daughter) for years.  I felt the fingers on my shoulder, turned and saw her face, and instinctively hugged her.  “What happened?”  she asked, and I told her.  And what she said melted me.  What she said made me believe that I am redeemable.  “You are so soft.  It breaks my heart to think of that happening to you.”  Barbara said something so simple but true about me—I am a creature without a hard shell, a soft porous responsive being.  “I want to learn compassion for my husband.”  “I miss my Papa.”  “I love my students.”  I revealed such things to S----- straight up.  And I know that you, like him or anyone who spends any time with me can tell that I spend most of my days in the space of questions, in the passionate state of unknowing or never being certain about anything.  I read and walk, and let myself absorb my surroundings—a thinking sponge—which is why, since moving to Flint, I go to ForMar most days to call the flowers by name, to make the deer stand still—one day two deer approached me, to dance in the wind, and feel myself in the world.  I let myself think S---- was Boaz to my Ruth, Adam to my Eve, but he confessed that he only saw the world through my eyes.  “I never really paid much attention to flowers.”  How could he love me if he could not love the world?  And S----- had nothing but disdain for my essential softness:  “Christianity is a religion for weaklings,” said the confident Zionist, who I learned by the way is a gun-toting believer in the Republican party—“the party of Lincoln” and, much to his elitist chagrin, of Donald Trump.  He adored my softness only as long as it made me malleable and susceptible to his manipulations.  When I showed the least bit of chutzpa, he told me I was “hard as nails.”

            My task on this road of trials is to discover the strength of Christianity—not just its paradoxical strength in weakness but its unadulterated strength.  It must exist.  How else could seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionaries, like my hero John Milton, rise up to challenge King Charles and to justify (as a tenet of his faith) the peoples’ right to put him on trial and behead the pretender on a cold day in January for breaking his covenant with them?  “It sounds just like S-----,” said my husband when we were talking about the English revolution and how it fed the minds of the American revolutionaries.  I was explaining how the musical Hamilton had resurrected the American heroes in the same way Shakespeare’s wildly popular plays about English history resurrected important—because useful to the present—people and moments from the past.  The challenge to Charles was enabled by remembering the way the peers challenged Richard II in 1399.  The stories of history matter.  They are seeds of time that if nurtured turn into new ideas and avenues of action.  Stories matter.  Bible stories.  Historical stories.  Myths.  They help us to see moments of struggle and conflict in our own lives as the stuff of hero journeys, trials of character, ways that our life evokes our character, calling the best out of us.  Here and now—Here I am!—still wrestling with S----- and wrestling with my Christianity-induced guilt about standing up to him, permitting the reduction of my covenant to a legalistic contract, suing him for negligible therapy … not for the money, but because stories matter, ideas matter, and covenant has become a tenet of my faith.  I still remember a particularly painful exchange in an argument I had with him back in May.  “What about our covenant.  You said it would be immoral to break it.”  I had learned by then that the difference between covenant and contract is that covenants protect relationships while contracts protect interests, and covenants (at least those between God and human beings) are irrevocable.  “So you think you are little Miss Covenant,” he sneered.  Yes, as a matter of fact I do.  I embrace that identity and will show him just how seriously I take covenant.  S-----, if you are there, I want to tell you that I am not beheading you or ruining your life.  I really don’t want your money.  I have taken this step because the story matters.

            Over the summer, I decided it was high time I read the New Testament for myself.  Steeped in stories from the Hebrew Bible, it seemed fitting to begin with the Gospel of Matthew, which, as I understood, was written specifically for a Jewish audience.  The Jesus I encountered was anything but weak.  I was especially taken with Chapter 14 of Matthew’s narrative.  It begins with Jesus going into a desert place, presumably to mourn.  He has just heard of the beheading of John the Baptist.  So often in this gospel, Jesus is going into the desert or up a mountain to meditate, pray, to be with his Father.  On my own desert journey through the months of summer, I identified and was reminded of the Israelites in Numbers, struggling to trust even though they hungered for the fleshpots of Egypt.  Moses was the means by which God wrought food and water miracles for the people he loved:  so many quail that the meat stuck in their throats followed by the more delicate manna that they would collect—just enough for the day—every morning before the dew dissipated; and water flowed, miraculously, from the hot rocks.  Jesus, like Moses, seemed always to be feeding people in the desert and feeding his followers, who worried, understandably, when they found themselves deep in the wilderness without food. 

            When Jesus was mourning for John, the people followed him.  Their presence drew him out of meditation.  My Tyndale translation says that Jesus went forth and saw much people, “and his heart did melt upon them, and he healed of them those that were sick.”  When night falls in the desert, the disciples, in voices on the edge of panic, insist that Jesus send the people away so they may go into the towns and “buy victuals.”  But Jesus wanted them near.  Perhaps he needed them.  “They have no need to go away.”  Feed them.  He gave the command, but the anxious men had only five loaves and two fishes, and the crowd was thousands large.  Jesus took the food and “looked up to heaven” (I imagine him talking to God), and then he blessed and broke the bread and gave it to the disciples to distribute.  All the people ate, and there were baskets of leftovers.  The narrative does not begin to explain the miracle.  Nothing is impossible with God, and Jesus trusted God, asked God, talked to God, and, as I believe, remembered Moses.  During the Exodus, to satisfy the peoples’ thirst, God had told Moses to strike a rock to bring forth water.  But much later, at Meribah, in the Book of Numbers, the people were pressing Moses for water.  This time, God told Moses to talk to the rock, but Moses after speaking angrily to the “rebels,” struck the rock, perhaps venting his aggression, perhaps valuing force a bit too much, perhaps remembering his own past action, but not listening, not trusting God.  Water poured forth but so did the voice of God, telling Moses that because he did not trust him (broken trust equals broken covenant), he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land. 

            Jesus knew his Torah.  His actions in this desert place lead me to believe that he remembered the old stories, thought about them, and breathed new life into them by acting them out in his own ministry.  His strength lay in his absolute belief in what he told Satan when the trickster tempted him in the desert, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  To feed, to succeed, to obtain the grace we need every moment of every day, we cannot fall back on old habits or take God for granted, thinking that we know what to do or know Him.  Jesus didn’t imitate Moses, he learned from Moses’ mistake to go directly to God.  But that wasn’t the end of the teaching.  He went a step further, creating a situation in which he could effectively dramatize to his followers this message that the new covenant required absolute trust.  After the meal and after the crowd scatters, Jesus, in need of time alone, sends his disciples ahead of him across the lake in a boat.  He goes up to the mountain to pray.  Meanwhile, a storm has kicked up on the water and the disciples’ boat is floundering.  Jesus, ever the shepherd, walks on water to safeguard his flock.  Master, says Peter, if you are you and not a spirit, bid me to come to you.  “Come,” said Jesus, and Peter stepped out of the boat and onto the waves, but he was frightened badly by a wind, and his own fear caused him to falter, but Jesus reached out a hand to catch him, saying, “O, thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”  Although Peter falters, I think he is so beautiful for trying, really trying.

                Part of the reason why I wanted to read a gospel is that Jesus always seemed so distant—even scary—to me.  Son of man, son of Mary and Joseph, our brother, our shepherd—I had heard these things about Jesus all my life, but he seemed so out of reach. Here I am!  I have needed to reach out for the hem of his garment, reach out for his hand for so many years … all my life really.  He was there all along, but I didn’t take time to know him.  I am trying now, really trying, like Peter.  I know he is God, and therefore it is fitting that he is beyond me, but in order to love him, I had to make some kind of connection, and I found that bond in a shared skill—wrestling with stories and with coming up with ways to teach the heart and gut truths that stories contain.  Finally, this is what my complaint is about:  I am trying to be true to the covenant and even to S----- by continuing to wrestle with and revise the story we started.  Moses repeated the past when he struck the rock; Jesus learned from Moses’ mistake how to do something new by trusting and talking and believing that the answer would come even though it would not always satisfy his immediate desire.  On this hilltop in Genesee County Michigan, I offer up my heartbreak and my half of a broken covenant, and I will wait, Father, to accept the sustenance only You can provide.  Sitting on that green mound in ForMar, the clouds parted, and I knew at once that Jesus wants me to be and that He spent no time feeling guilty when he turned the tables on the moneychangers tables and chased them out of His Father’s house.