99 Stories of God (6 page)

“But he’s been my gardener for years, and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about lawns and trees. But he’s getting on. The crew he hires to help him are assholes.”

“I see,” I said.

“So he fires them almost as soon as he hires them, because they’re ignorant, they don’t want to work, but he works ceaselessly, he never stops moving. It makes me nervous just watching him sometimes.”

“Not good,” I say.

“So he’s working all by himself today, running around, going from one thing to another, and he tells me he feels God at his elbow. All morning he tries to ignore this feeling of God at his elbow, because he knew God had some questions, he knew God wanted to initiate a dialogue with him and he was frightened. But finally he stopped what he was doing and faced God and God said to him,
I want to give you something
.”

End of story.

“That’s the damnedest thing,” I said, wondering if it would turn out the old guy died on the spot or something.

The formation of dew begins soon after sunset. Evaporation of water vapor cools the surface of plants as they rapidly lose heat collected from the sun. As the surface of a plant or flower becomes cooler than the surrounding air, it causes the transpired water vapor to condense into droplets of dew.

Dew is made of tiny crystals that constantly form, dissolve, and collect energy.

Walking barefoot through dew assists one in acquiring energy from the magnetic earth.

Dew has long been a subject of interest.

You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.

“I want chiseled features,” she said. “I would be so happy.”

I didn’t know her. We were volunteers digging up fountain grass at the Ironwood Forest National Monument. Those were the first words she’d spoken. She was round and pale and not very tall either.

“You can get them,” I said.

“Really?”

“Plastic surgery. Sure.”

“They don’t call it plastic surgery anymore,” she said. “The Devil’s going to be on TV tonight at seven. KGUN. It’s not generally known but a fact nonetheless.”

“Excuse me,” I said. I moved away from her toward an old man chopping at a large clump of big, plump, vigorous adaptable fountain grass with a hoe. But I left him shortly as well, fearing he might have a heart attack in the heat. He would have been offended by my concern, I felt. He probably wanted to die in the desert anyway, helping the earth, one of those people who wanted to die a clean, hard death in the desert.

He didn’t look at all like my father, but I thought of my father, who was in Westerly, Rhode Island, living it up on dialysis. He wasn’t going anywhere. There was so much wrong with him, so many things, but “I want the dialysis,” he’d say. “Nobody’s shoving me into that next room.”

“Don’t you want to know as you are known, standing before the Father’s throne,” I’d tease him. It’s from a hymn called “Innocents.” He used to be a pastor. “Nope,” he’d say.

He’s changed. People change. Even I have changed, though not much. But if I watched KGUN at seven and saw the Devil there, I’d be a different person.

The Lord was invited to a gala. Beautiful women, beautiful men, beautiful flowers. Astonishing music from the moment’s finest string quartet. All that was served was champagne and mountains of Kamchatka caviar.

The hosts were somewhat nervous about the Lord’s reaction to the caviar.

After all, the lives of many thousands of female wild salmon were sacrificed for their eggs, and the renewable potential of their offspring lost forever.

But the Lord never showed up.

We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.

The Lord was trying out some material.

I AM WHO I AM, He said.

It didn’t sound right.

THAT’S WHO I AM. I AM.

It sounded ridiculous.

He didn’t favor definitions.

He’d always had the most frightful difficulties with them.

The Vandewaters were extremely beachy and boaty. Their den walls were lined with the tops of smashed champagne bottles mounted on plaques of teak denoting the many wooden sailboats they’d built to specification and launched.

Dick Vandewater was commodore of our little yacht club as well as being a deacon in the church. He was quite the sailor and preferred to make his trips solo. He claimed that once at night he saw God amidst the dark waters and God spoke to him but he couldn’t remember what he said.

We were at a garden party last week—it’s been a fantastic year for the hydrangeas—and there was an intense young man from the Merchant Marine Academy there. Dick was having a good time, recounting his adventures, and the boy said,

What is it you wish to say, perhaps you wish to tell us something.

Dick exclaimed, I remember! and at that very moment he was felled by a massive stroke, a shrimp on a toothpick still between his fingers.

His wife said that on two other occasions, Dick had recalled what this apparition had said but had been interrupted, once by a ringing telephone and once by a terrific crash in the streets, after which he could no longer remember. Of course these interruptions were not at all meaningful, not like this massive stroke, which proved for poor Dick to be fatal.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison:

“The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.

Before God and with God, we live without God.”

Temporal lobe epilepsy often causes changes in behavior and thinking even when the patient is not having seizures. These changes include hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy.

Dostoevsky often wrote of the rapture he felt during a seizure when he was in the frightful presence of the universal harmony.

A Carmelite nun whose visions during her epileptic seizures caused many to view her as a spiritual master feared that her gifts were symptoms of illness rather than grace and submitted to surgery, which was successful.

Life without epilepsy was quite dull, she discovered.

It was as though she had tumbled from a sacred mountain into a ruined village, she said.

Three strange beings called angels visit Abraham to tell him and his wife, Sarah, that they will have a child. They are both ninety years old.

Sarah laughs at the angels and then denies that she did and is not quite forgiven.

Nay, but thou didst laugh, one of the angels says to her.

Why was Sarah given the opportunity for understanding, for evolution and transformation, the chance to kick herself up to the next level, when she was so dim-witted? She thought they meant an actual child, a baby!

They did not mean an actual child, a baby.

Still, anyway, if you take it literally, as you might, as well as morally, allegorically and mystically, why did God want to exact that dreadful sacrifice once the child
was
born?

It was Abraham’s idea to make the poor, unsuspecting kid, Isaac—whose name may or may not mean laughter actually—carry wood, the very wood that would incinerate him, up to the altar. That was Abraham’s rather unnecessary contribution to the story, not God’s.

Finally, God stepped in and said, No, you don’t have to do it, and just in time.

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was poised to launch nuclear warheads—the Temple Weapons—rather than suffer defeat at the hands of the Arabs. At the time, Israel had at least thirteen twenty-kiloton atomic bombs—the Hiroshima bomb was sixteen kilotons. Armageddon was avoided only when the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, acting in the vacuum left by the travails of his “drunken friend,” President Richard Nixon, authorized an emergency resupply of high-tech, though conventional, weaponry to the Israelis.

Prime Minister Golda Meir said:

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Jakob Boehme was a German mystic to whom God revealed himself in a ray of light being reflected in a tin plate. Some describe it as a
pewter
plate, though after all
pewter
is merely a number of alloys, including lead, of which tin is the main component.

So it was light striking a tin plate and Boehme saw God. In an instant he experienced the total mystery of God.

This was the revelation upon which all his writings are based. For years he did nothing but painstakingly attempt to translate this vision’s shattering significance into language.

Boehme had a wife and six children and they lived in poverty. His wife was not terribly supportive of his fantasizing about God, preferring that he provide for his family and put food on the table. Fill those tin plates with food.

Perhaps it was the very fact that the plates were empty that allowed Boehme to witness God so clearly.

After his first book was published, a wealthy man, believing Boehme to be a genius, became his patron, taking care of all his financial difficulties, totally supporting all those children and the complaining wife.

This act of generosity destroyed Boehme. His later writings are full of resentments and puzzlements. They became dull, slack, and repetitive. He no longer had to struggle with the tedious outward realities that opposed his inner experience of a manifesting God.

On his tomb is an image of God expressed like this:

) (

which is sad, after all he strived to do.

The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot.

When His turn came, the pharmacist didn’t want to give it to Him.

This is not right, the pharmacist said.

In what way? the Lord inquired.

In so many ways, the pharmacist said. I scarcely know where to begin.

Just give it to him, a woman behind the Lord said. My ice cream’s melting.

It only works 60 to 70 percent of the time anyway, the pharmacist said.

Do you want to ask me some questions? the Lord said.

You’re not afraid of shingles, are you? It’s not so bad.

I am not afraid, the Lord said.

Just give Him the shot for Pete’s sake, the woman said.

Have you ever had chicken pox?

Of course, the Lord said.

How did you hear about us? the pharmacist said.

The Lord had always wanted to participate in a Demolition Derby. Year after year he would attend the one-day summer event on a particular small island where junked cars, gutted and refitted for the challenge, would compete. He studied the drivers’ techniques carefully. It was mayhem! Usually the drivers would prepare their wrecks themselves, but there was also a raffle where a neophyte could win the chance to drive a donated wreck. A hundred raffle tickets were available each summer. They cost ten dollars each.

Once the Lord bought ninety-nine tickets but his name wasn’t drawn. If He hadn’t been the Lord, He would have suspected someone was trying to tell Him something.

He persisted, however, and one year he won.

You should wear long pants and boots and a long-sleeved shirt, you got that stuff? He was asked.

I do, the Lord said.

A helmet’s always a good idea too, He was told.

The Lord’s vehicle was a pink Wagoneer. The Wagoneer recognized the Lord immediately and couldn’t fathom what this could possibly mean. In terms of herself, that is, the Wagoneer.

She had once had a happy life of dogs and children, surfboards and fishing rods. Oh the picnics! The driftwood fires! Then it had all been taken away.

And now this.

A child was walking with a lion through a great fog.

“I’ve experienced death many times,” the lion said.

“Impossible,” the child said.

“It’s true, my experience of death does not include my own.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’ve had near-death experiences, however.”

“Quite a different matter,” the child said.

“Shall I tell you what it felt like?”

The fog was so thick, the child could not see the lion. Still, the fog was pleasant, as was their ascent through it.

“I was possessed, overwhelmed, consumed, filled up by a blessed, utterly unknown presence,” the lion said.