EXCERPT
FROM THE BOOK
“Harriet
and I”
My
childhood friend Harriet used to take me into the woods in the
early spring. We'd go belly down into the snow-soaked leaves of
maple and oak, and we'd wait.
Harriet
was better at it than I. "What
are we waiting for this time?" I'd ask her. "Sh-h-h.
I don't know yet."
And
with that admission my spirits would sink. It was likely we'd
be there a long time.
"Are
you sure you don't know?"
"I
won't know until I see it."
"Oh."
And
then, there it would be, in front of our eyes. Maybe just sitting
there for the longest time before we could see it. Before we could
do whatever it was that was required of us - slow ourselves down,
be silent, pay attention, wait, trust.
Maybe
the young shoot of a Western Pennsylvania Narcissus or a Daffodil.
Maybe a sluggish beetle coming to life on a warm March afternoon.
Or a spider crawling up a new blade of grass. A mushroom. A puff
ball. Or a robin, bringing a flash of color to the still drab
woods.
"Just
wait," Harriet would tell me. We were never disappointed.
Never.
And
the subjects of our discovery became our teachers. They instructed
us in God. Instructed us in God's world. Our teachers made us
laugh. An orange fuzzy caterpillar swimming its way over pine
needles and soggy maple leaves, on his way to some clandestine
and mysterious ritual, deep into the heart of the forest. Our
teachers would have us hold our breaths in the face of their splendor.
An eight point buck rubbing his velvet antlers against an ancient
and gnarled apple tree. They'd have us run away. A Pennsylvania
black snake, gentle as she was, could do it every time. We lived
in our own timelessness, Harriet and I. Not even our stomachs
betrayed us.
“Surprise”
The
Spirits of children are like that, surprise after surprise, springing
up from their inexhaustible soil. Teaching. Cajoling. Inspiring.
Transforming. "Just wait," Harriet would tell me. "We'll
know it when we see it."
I
said to the children of Holy Family Church, "There's a special
day coming. Who can tell me what it is?"
"EASTER!"
"What
about Easter?"
"EASTER
BUNNIES!"
"EASTER EGGS!"
"EASTER BASKETS WITH LOTS OF JELLYBEANS!"
And then I got lucky. "JESUS!!!"
Easter
Bunnies and Easter eggs, jelly beans and Jesus. It's as good a
theology as any we come by. Because in those things are contained
all of life...life in all its paradox. Its exhilaration and its
terror. It's death and rebirth. The losses. The surprises. The
sweetness and the laughter, the joys, the sorrows. And always
the promise. The bittersweet promise of change and transformation.
A
five year old named John explained to me that Jesus didn't die
from being nailed to the cross. He died from a heart attack. Nicole
disagreed. "It was the nails," she said. "There was
poison in the nails."
Grown-ups
get squirmy listening to these things. Especially parents. "O-my-God,
my child said the wrong thing. I'm a terrible parent. Everybody's
going to know it." Or else we say, "How cute."
But
Jesus dying from a heart attack is neither wrong nor cute. This
child's father had had a heart attack. And everything this child
knows about pain and death and loss and fear is set within the
context of that heart attack. It makes great sense to talk of
the pain and death and loss of Jesus in terms of a heart attack.
And
the poison nails? Nicole told me that nails weren't bad in themselves.
There were nails in the walls of her house and nails in her swing
set. It wasn't the nails that were bad; it was the poison in them.
Nicole won't talk to you about sin and she won't talk to you about
the evil that we do to one another. But she'll talk at great length
about poison. The poison in the nails that killed Jesus.
The
world in which Harriet and I found ourselves was limitless in
its possibilities. Maybe it was an acre beneath our knees and
our hands and our bellies, maybe a hundred acres. It didn't matter.
We were explorers and full participants in the world of tall grasses,
bugs, mud, water, trees, rocks and the creatures under the rocks.
Skunks and opossums and bobtail cats. Nothing was out of bounds.
No shout of joy or surprise, no scream, no laughter, no ceiling
of any kind did we put on our discovery.
"Just
wait," Harriet tells me. "We'll know it when we see
it." The world in which Harriet and I found ourselves was
limitless in its possibilities. It was a world in which metaphor
was reality. We were not constrained by the boundaries we have
come to know as adults. Perhaps at that time we were closer to
the Kingdom. That's a scary thought.
