Plan B (14 page)

 

T
hank God for the fall. Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot, and the light is unforgiving, and the days go on way too long. And this year, the war on Iraq was raging. I felt soul-sick this summer to discover the secret gladness in me that the war was going so badly. I hated it about myself. I felt addicted to the energy of scorning my president. I thought that if people like me stopped hating him, it would mean that he had won.

Then summer turned to autumn.

I headed out for church one Sunday filled with my usual mix of joy and profound anxiety about life. But church is my favorite place on earth, after the couch in my
living room. In church, we don't live from our minds—we live in community, which is to say, in shared loss and hope, singing, hanging out together. We don't sit huddled together, thinking.

I talked to more than one person before the service began, about the snap in the air. Everyone seemed glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season—too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises, and then cool blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled, and it makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much works at all.

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 how 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.