Walking on Water (5 page)

There are some elegant sentences in the new translation (“I myself will awaken the dawn”), but some verses aren't much better than a French translation of
Hamlet,
in which the famous words Hamlet utters when he first sees the ghost of his father, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” are rendered, “Tiens, qu'est que c'est que ça?” And surely Shakespeare's words prove his familiarity with Scripture, for they are reminiscent of Saul's encounter with the ghost of Samuel.

Pelican in the wilderness
has now become
vulture.
Praise him, dragons and all deeps,
has become
sea monsters,
which lacks alliteration, to put it mildly. I have been using the new
Book
for—approximately ten years, I think. It is now thoroughly familiar. In the old language I read, “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” That is a lot more potent theology than “For the Lord himself has made us and we are his.” True. But we also need to be reminded in this do-it-yourself age that it is indeed God who has made us and not we ourselves. We are human and humble and of the earth, and we cannot create until we acknowledge our createdness.

In the old language I read, “O God, make clean our hearts within us, and take not thy Holy Spirit from us.” In the new version it is, “Create clean hearts within us, O Lord, and comfort us with your Holy Spirit.” All very well, but we need to know that if we turn from God, if we are rebellious and stiff-necked we deeply offend the Holy Spirit; we may not take him for granted; he indwells us on his own conditions, not ours. We cannot simply ingest him when we feel like it, like an aspirin.

Although
Holy Ghost
has been rendered as
Holy Spirit
throughout, there seems to be considerable fear of the word
Spirit
and all its implications:

To “The Lord be with you,” we used to reply, “And with thy spirit.”

Now it goes, “The Lord be with you.” “And also with you.”

To which the only suitable response is, “Likewise, I'm sure.”

We're told that the new
Prayer Book
is meant to be in “the language of the people.” But which people? And in language which is left after a century of war, all dwindled and shrivelled? Are we supposed to bring our language down to the lowest common denominator in order to be “meaningful”? And, if we want to make the language contemporary, why not just cut out the
thy
and say, “And with your spirit?” Why are we afraid of the word
spirit
? Does it remind us of baffling and incomprehensible and fearful things like the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and the Passover, those mighty acts of God which we forget how to understand because our childlike creativity has been corrupted and diminished?

Perhaps the old
Prayer Book
dwelt too much on penitence, but there was also excellent psychology in confessing, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,”
before
“We have done those things which we ought not to have done.” In the new confession we confess our sins of commission before our sins of omission. But I have noticed that when someone dies, those who are left are apt to cry out, “Oh, if I had only taken her on that picnic!” or, “If only I'd gone to see him last Wednesday.” It is the things I have left undone which haunt me far more than the things which I have done.

In restricting the language in the new translations we have lost that depth and breadth which can give us the kind of
knowing
which is our heritage. This loss has permeated our literature and our prayers, not necessarily in that order. College students of the future will miss many allusions in their surveys of English literature because the language of the great seventeenth-century translators is no longer in their blood stream. I like to read the new translations of the Bible and
Prayer Book
for new insights, for shocks of discovery and humour, but I don't want to discard the old, as though it were as transitory as last year's fashions.

Nor do I want to be stuck in the vague androidism which has resulted from the attempts to avoid the masculine pronoun. We are in a state of intense sexual confusion, both in life and language, but the social manipulation is not working. Language is a living thing; it does not stay the same; it is hard for me to read the language of
Piers Plowman,
for instance, so radical have the changes been. But language is its own creature. It evolves on its own. It follows the language of its great artists, such as Chaucer. It does not do well when suffering from arbitrary control. Our attempts to change the words which have long been part of a society dominated by males have not been successful; instead of making language less sexist they have made it more so.

Indeed we are in a bind. For thousands of years we have lived in a paternalistic society, where women have allowed men to make God over in their own masculine image. But that's anthropomorphism. To think of God in terms of sex at all is a dead end.

To substitute
person
for
man
has ruined what used to be a good theological word, calling up the glory of God's image within us. Now, at best, it's a joke. There's something humiliating and embarrassing about being a chairperson. Or a chair. A group of earnest women have put together a volume of desexed hymns, and one of my old favourites now begins:

“Dear Mother-Father of personkind…”

No. It won't do. This is not equality. Perhaps we should drop the word
woman
altogether and use man, recognizing that we need both male and female to be whole. And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees. For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

A friend of mine at a denominational college reported sadly that one of his students came to complain to him about a visiting professor. This professor was having the students read some twentieth-century fiction, and the student was upset at both the language of this fiction and the amount of what she considered to be immoral sex.

My friend, knowing the visiting professor to be a person of both intelligence and integrity, urged the student to go and talk with him about these concerns.

“Oh, I couldn't do that,” the student said. “He isn't a Christian.”

“He” is a Roman Catholic.

If we fall into Satan's trap of assuming that other people are not Christians because they do not belong to our own particular brand of Christianity, no wonder we become incapable of understanding the works of art produced by so-called non-Christians, whether they be atheists, Jews, Buddhists, or anything else outside a frame of reference we have made into a closed rather than an open door.

If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the
St. Matthew Passion,
the words of a sermon by John Donne.

One of the most profoundly moving moments at Ayia Napa came for me when Jesse, a student from Zimbabwe, told me, “I am a good Seventh Day Adventist, but you have shown me God.” Jesse will continue to be a good Seventh Day Adventist as he returns to Africa to his family; I will struggle with my own way of belief; neither of us felt the need or desire to change the other's Christian frame of reference. For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.

I happen to love spinach, but my husband, Hugh, does not; he prefers beets, which I don't much care for—except the greens. Neither of us thinks less of the other because of this difference in taste. Both spinach and beets are vegetables; both are good for us. We do not have to enjoy precisely the same form of balanced meal.

We also approach God in rather different ways, but it is the same God we are seeking, just as Jesse and I, in our totally different disciplines, worship the same Lord.

Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

God asked Adam to name all the animals, which was asking Adam to help in the creation of their wholeness. When we name each other, we are sharing in the joy and privilege of incarnation, and all great works of art are icons of Naming.

When we look at a painting or hear a symphony or read a book and feel more Named, then, for us, that work is a work of Christian art. But to look at a work of art and then to make a judgment as to whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is Christian, is presumptuous. It is something we cannot know in any conclusive way. We can know only if it speaks within our own hearts and leads us to living more deeply with Christ in God.

One of my professors, Dr. Caroline Gordon, a deeply Christian woman, told our class, “We do not judge great art. It judges us.” And that very judgment may enable us to change our lives and to renew our commitment to the Lord of Creation.

But how difficult it is for us not to judge; to make what, in the current jargon, is called “a value judgment”! And here we blunder into paradox again. Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” And yet daily we must make decisions which involve judgments:

Zeal for thine house hath eaten me up.

But Bertrand Russell says, “Zeal is a bad mark for a cause. Nobody has any zeal about arithmetic. It is not the vaccinationists but the antivaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.”

It is hard for us to believe now that there were antivaccinationists, when vaccinations have succeeded in wiping smallpox from the planet. It is hard for us to believe that Dr. Semmelweis was almost torn to pieces when he suggested that physicians should wash their hands before delivering babies in order to help prevent the septicemia or puerperal fever which killed so many women after childbirth. It is hard for us to believe that Bach was considered heretical when he put the thumb under instead of over the fingers on the keyboard. It is hard for us to believe that Shakespeare was considered a trivial playwright because he was too popular. But great negative zeal was expended in all of these cases.

We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even change that which we so zealously think we know.

My non-Christian friends and acquaintances are zealous in what they “know” about Christianity, which bears little or no relationship to anything I believe.

A friend of mine, Betty Beckwith, in her book,
If I Had the Wings of the Morning,
writes about taking her brain-damaged child to a Jewish doctor. He said, “You people think of us as the people who killed your Christ.” Spontaneously she replied, “Oh, no. We think of you as the people who gave him to us.”

In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.

How many of us really want life, life more abundant, life which does not promise any fringe benefits or early retirement plans? Life which does not promise the absence of pain, or love which is not vulnerable and open to hurt? The number of people who attempt to withdraw from life through the abuse of alcohol, tranquilizers, barbiturates is statistically shocking.

How many of us dare to open ourselves to that truth which would make us free? Free to talk to Roman Catholics or charismatics or Jews, as Jesus was free to talk to tax collectors or publicans or Samaritans. Free to feast at the Lord's table with those whose understanding of the Body and Blood may be a little different from ours. Free to listen to angels. Free to run across the lake when we are called.

What is a true icon of God to one person may be blasphemy to another. And it is not possible for us flawed human beings to make absolute zealous judgments as to what is and what is not religious art. I know what is religious art for me. You know what is religious art for you. And they are not necessarily the same. Not everybody feels pulled up to heavenly heights in listening to the pellucid, mathematically precise structure of a Bach fugue. The smarmy picture of Jesus which I find nauseating may be for someone else a true icon.