Opposite Contraries (13 page)

I think the most impressive moment of all is when after the little pause the clergyman says, “The peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds.” As a very tiny girl, those words always slipped something inside me. Something seemed to pass through the church, and then we got up and came out and the porch chatter began.

Clem Davies had a dawn service at Mount Tolmie, illuminated cross, piano accordion music, special streetcars and buses and whole paraphernalia of movie pictures, I suppose to break the solemnity, shoving their cameras through the crowd during prayers. It rained hard in the night so everyone would have cold wet feet and before they had time to rise above the wet feet and the cameramen, the prayers would be done. All the same it may mean a whole lot to many people. We don’t all want the same food cooked the same way. It’s what we can digest nourishes us. I wish I could worship with the unselfconsciousness of a dog absorbing the sunshine, without comment but with complete content, letting the warmth of it course right through his body unconsciously.

Everyone loves the griffons — these three are cute and friendly. They are “persons” of character with attractions added. But what a dog Koko was. What a heart so staunch and true. I wonder where he is now and the other faithful loving things I’ve had. Every creature I ever possessed had given so lavishly of its best, not keeping anything back, returning the love I gave over and over, adding interest and handing back an amazing sum. What becomes of all that accumulation? It can’t dissolve, fade away. Somehow, somehow, it’s a concrete thing building up — part of God’s endless plan that grows and grows and never gets stale or old but reaches out wider and higher and deeper.

[…]
For the second time we three met at Lizzie’s and after supper read from Father’s diary. That diary has given me a whole new slant on Father. Coming near the end of a big family, I only knew a cross, gouty, sexy old man who hurt and disgusted me. I resented his omnipotence and his selfishness and I was frightened of him. He knew he had hurt and frightened me, telling me things a happy innocent child should not hear and telling them in a low and blatant manner. When he saw the horror he had created in me he was bitter, probably more with himself than me. Then he was cruel and I hated him. I can feel the awful relief still when I stood by his grave and it was being filled up. Thud, thud, the clods fell on the box. They had closed the lid of the box shell with a clap. It sounded deep and hollow down in the open grave. We all stood around in deep black mourning. I was closest. I was peering down into the fast filling hole and in my heart there was
relief.
Nobody knew the sinking agonies of terror I had suffered when I had been alone with Father, because
before I’d been his favourite trotting after him like a dog. Now I was free, the first time for several years. The old family doctor came up and put his arms around me. “Come lassie,” he said, “this is no place for you.” But none of them knew, not one, what feelings were going on in me. I couldn’t forgive Father, I just couldn’t, for spoiling all the loveliness of life with that bestial brutalness of an explanation, filling me with horror instead of gently explaining the glorious beauty of reproduction, the holiness of it. Mother died two years before, it happened before [she died], but I never told her. I was too shy. How she would have grieved; perhaps she knew more than I thought. I have seen her look perplexed and worried when I begged not to have to go and meet Father in the evenings after business as had been my custom. Poor little Mother. Her life must have had some sad spots. I am sure Father loved her, but he loved himself more.

Now from this old diary of Father’s I can see he must have been a fine young man: strong and brave, honest and kindly and energetic. Plenty of perseverance and plenty of pluck. He seemed fond of his parents too. His experiences and impressions of the New World are most interesting, but he remained an Ultra English Englishman ’til he died. His heart was more than British, it belonged to England itself. [. . .]

[…]
Life gets more and more difficult, and dying seems to get harder and harder. No more gently turning a face to the wall and gently flitting from the flesh. Either people die a violent death or they seem to have one long awful battle at the end. So the new medicine methods make it easier — or harder — by taking drugs and undergoing operations. The torture is prolonged. What does
it mean, God? To suicide is hideously sinful, [but] is it by chance God giving them a final chance to prove their bravery?

Clem Davies says angels are graduate souls and all of us have one or more special angels near and helping us on in spiritual [ways], enough so we could feel their presence and take comfort in them.

When comfortably sleepy, you climb into a comfortable bed, hump your knees, plunk your soles on a red-hot water bottle, pile the pillows high at your back, put a little woollie round your shoulders and your specs on your nose and your book on your knees. There really seems little else to be desired, ’specially if you have one of those toffee blobs on a stick known as an allday-sucker to lick at and you have not done or said anything particularly beastly that day. So you can contentedly read a little, pray a little, sleep and perhaps dream some “splendid” halfpenny or go to some interesting place where the most incongruous things seem perfectly natural. In dreams the delight is that there is no sex, no size, no foolishness; you perform the most astounding feats without effort. You get without going, see without eyes and laugh without a mouth. You encounter people you’ve never seen and meet people you have. Everything is topsy-turvy yet more completely “right” than this world ever thought of being, so that when you are starting to wake you keep pushing yourself back again, hating to come into ordinariness again.

Dreams can hurt hard. I went, in the dream, to the station to meet Bess. She had returned my greeting in a cold abstract way, seeming in a violent hurry as if she had a train to connect with or someone to meet. She flashed up a stair and was gone.
It was my place, my town — sore, I wandered round the hotel a primitive affair with doors opening onto balconies. Looking up, I saw Bess dressing in a room. She came out onto the balcony with Tantrum and began pouring coal oil on him, rubbing it in. Oh, I thought, she did not even tell me she had Tantrum and she knew I loved him and would want to see him. It seemed she had got him from me in the East and I longed to see the little dog and touch him. And there through the open door I saw a wicker chair and over the back was Lawren’s suit and hat. So he was there too and had not even come to speak to me. They were done with me and excluding me. I turned away sore.

Dreams are foolish. It does not do to set store by them. Friendship? What is that but misunderstanding and disappointment?

[…]
Garland Anderson, negro playwright, philosopher and psychologist took the pulpit today. He spoke on the personality of Jesus. Jesus said, “Follow me,” not “Worship me.” He spoke with magical interpretation, a good bit. For example, a composer was in San Francisco and heard a player play his composition. The player did not know he was the composer. The composer asked him to play the thing again. “Thank you,” he said at the finish, “I wrote that. I did not know it was so beautiful; your interpretation added much to my thought.” So — to get a great piece of music, it must be gone over and over faithfully, each one adding to its beauty as it passes along, something worth while (if he has something worth while in himself) ’til the thing is beautiful and perfected. I thought much the same applied to painting. Some man has an idea; others build and build, adding riches to it.
We as selfish hearts wish to keep it
our own.
It is not. Nothing is ours. We are only permitted to play with the building blocks.

Went to hear Garland Anderson at the Empress Hotel. It is the same thing, nothing new. If one could only grasp it, this terrible doubting. How does one overcome that? One wants it above all (they think they do). Then they drift back and close up again and sleep and drift. The process of waking is very slow. The big hall was full, everybody wanting, longing for something; a thirsty lot but afraid to drink. Like when you come to a stream in the woods with thick growth to the water’s edge and you are afraid to let your feet down amongst it for fear of snakes and mud and wasps’ nests. But the tinkle of the water is so tantalizing and the shine of it through the long branches; and the first leg that goes down between the logs and branches gets the skin scraped and you squeal, pull it back and wish someone would reach out and hand it back to you in a cup. And if they did, it wouldn’t taste half so good as if you lay flat on a tippy log and lapped it for yourself.

Anderson started out, “Delight thyself in the Lord.” How marvellous to feel that ecstasy and delight. How can one? There we stand shivering at the dark underneaths of the growth instead of plunging and risking and reaching our drink, in spite of slime and wasps and snakes. Gee! We are a slumpy lot.

He spoke about “heart’s desire” and our desire being God’s desire for us. Suppose a man desired another man’s wife? What the man really desired was the love and joy that particular connection would bring him. God might grant his prayer but in another way, giving him his desire but not the other man’s
wife. So in praying for anything, think of the spiritual side, its bigger realization, the essence of the desire, not its material form. In answer to a question about the selling of real estate: know that somewhere what you have would be useful and acceptable to someone. Pray that the Father will bring that one to what he wants and that you may both, by the just and fair exchange, be satisfied. Want to give [to] the other man as well as to get yourself.

Use the God power within us. We are greater than our minds or wills because God power is within us. It is given to us to use. Christ used it and came to show us how to do so. Jesus did not think it wrong to use good things. The wine at the wedding was a luxury, not a necessity. He did not say to the people, “You are spiritual, you do not need wine,” or to the multitudes, “You are spiritual, you do not need food.” He produced it. When the tax money was due, he produced it from the fish’s mouth. He rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s and to God the things that were God’s. [. . .] In our minds are many thoughts. Among them will be one that will supply our need. It may not be our own selection. We think of our business, our house, our job as the only means of livelihood, but if we cast about among our thoughts we shall find as he found the fish.

Last night, Garland Anderson lecture. The hall was filled and interest keen. There were many questions answered at the end. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” “I accept it. It seems the logical thing but I do not know any more than anyone else.” Some people asked foolish questions about wives or husbands. He was courteous, dignified and kind, but he did not stoop to
foolery. Gee, how grand to live in the consciousness and attitude that he does, to rely solely on God to understand. He likened God to a great white light. He said that God was in us. We could have as much of God as we contacted and called forth. God did not impose himself on us, He gave us free choice, individuality. He only wanted for us to accept Him.

He said every question had its answer within us. The fact of our asking a question showed there was an answer. God — the God in us — put the question and God answered it. He spoke about trying too hard, using the mentality but holding ourselves open and quiet for God’s guidance. That God-given power is in us, was there waiting use. Jesus said, “Of myself, I can do nothing. The Father within me, He doeth the work.” Everyone can be that which they wish to become because God is in them, and if we use His power, it never fails. Delight thyself in the Lord and He shall give thee the desire of thy heart.

Garland Anderson’s subject was sense that was not common — uncommon sense he defined as that we know in our hearts, though maybe we could not prove it mathematically. Long ago common sense said wood floated and iron sank; to say that iron could float would have been called nonsense. By and by, when they discovered displacement and built steel ships that floated, nonsense turned to common sense. Everything was first a thought. The fact of the thought coming showed there was the answer behind it. Things that come to us by intuition are often uncommon sense. Common sense is of the intellect but uncommon sense works in the heart.

Later in the questions he was asked the difference between believing and knowing. You can know lots of things but ’til you believe them in your heart they are not true to you. The whole business is trusting, having faith in the God-given wisdom which is within yourself, being conscious of it so that it can be used by you. In answer to a question about crucifixion, he said the resurrection was far greater to him than the crucifixion. All the teaching in the world would not have proved that to us, only the resurrection after the crucifixion could do that. Asked about little petty troubles and frets, he said, “I look out and see a whole glorious landscape, space, sunshine, sea, land. If a little dog runs across the foreground and I occupy myself with it, allowing it to keep my attention, then my mind is off the big glorious scene and follows the little dog instead.”

If one looks beyond the little cares and frets, they see the big glory instead. Asked if ever he had doubts and fears himself, he said, “Surely I do. One cannot prevent their coming but one need not entertain them when they arrive. In wanting to obtain anything, to draw it to yourself, do not busy yourself with thoughts of what you can get, but think first of what you can give. Remember always that God has means of working that we do not know of. Don’t tell God how to do a thing, just trust that His wisdom which is in you will show you the thing to do.”