MindSpinner

A long time ago, when I was a girl of fifteen, a professing Christian, duly dunked, certified saved, and a member of a small country Baptist Church in the South, I sensed that my prayers just bounced off the ceiling - of the church, of the Sunday School room, of my bedroom at night. Or if I was outside, perhaps they floated up a ways but then drifted down, like helium balloons when the buoyant gas leaks out. It was as if all our prayers were just coming back to us as echoes of ourselves, no better, no higher, revealing nothing divine. At best, they might make us better people, if we did not misguide ourselves in God’s name.

I remember the Ouija board I had as a child. It said what I wanted it to. I pushed, of course.

Where was God? Was it possible to reach God at all? There was little point in bouncing prayers off ceilings.

At a youth retreat one summer night, we sang “Just As I am,” and somehow, without any trigger whatsoever (we may as well have been singing “Ring Around the Rosies”), I found myself careening over an abyss which can only be described as “the absence of God” - certainly not a fear of hell or anything of that sort, just an incredible sense of a vast universe and all eternity and me alone in silence and dark. A boy from another youth group discerned my spiritual crisis and took me to talk with his minister, and I did, which proved no help, and when he walked me back to my cabin, he gave me my very first kiss, a chaste one, a kind of blessing. When I opened the door to a cabin full of people wondering where I was after curfew, I was visibly shaken by the sense of being utterly without God, and it is an amusing irony that certain of the adult chaperones decided that I had lost my virginity then and there that night, and that was why I was crying. I became a negative example for their daughters.

In my bed in my cabin, I prayed as I had never done before. I surrendered and I sought. I fell down into that abyss of all alone. If there was a God at all, I would fall until God caught me up out of the emptiness, and I would not grab for anything to keep me from that end, not one straw of will or reason.

It was long after midnight when utter emptiness and deepest desire were displaced in a moment. This is where words fail. Utterly. The spiritual presence which came to me was simply beyond anything I had known or was capable of conjuring or can find language to enword, then or now. Light is an apt metaphor. Love was essence. Tremendous reassurance. And revelation - of the essential goodness of being and of all things. An untying of every twisted little knot of pain or sorrow or angst in my soul. A certain knowledge that the perceived necessity of our living as twisted, knotted creatures was indeed an illusion, a lie that comes of living in a world in which the divine is partly and sometimes almost completely veiled. Knowledge that hate is superfluous and love is divine gift to be shared without limit or end.

What I needed to know of God in order to live a life came to me that night, as palpable presence and revelation. I haven’t always lived up to that revelation, year in and year out, and I am too fragmented and self-directed to dwell there wholly now, but there’s no question of me becoming an agnostic or an athiest, not ever. I can’t disbelieve what I encountered. It has helped to make me who I am.

And no, I have not also sighted UFOs or spoken in seances to the dead.

That encounter rendered superfluous some of the particularities of religions. God was not revealed as Baptist or Catholic or Buddhist or Hindu; there was nothing of doctrines and that damned religious game of who’s in and who’s out.

Perversions of faith still stand in dark, stark contrast against that light, and trivialities pale.

Leonard Cohen’s haunting anthem “Hallelujah ” always sounds notes of truth for me. He writes,

There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Mostly, we hear broken Hallelujahs. Our sermons, our songs, my words on this page, even scriptures (and I’m not thinking merely of the Bible) - all these are broken Hallelujahs, for we cannot piece words together that serve as adequate vessels to hold and pour out the divine. And whatever we do piece together is always, well, full of us. I loved Julia Sweeney’s monologue, “Letting Go of God,” broadcast recently on This American Life. Sweeney makes me laugh. She makes me ponder. She reminds us of just how broken human hallelujahs are, as recorded in scripture. The end of her journey through the Bible from cover to cover is her letting go of God. That gives me pause. My journey proceeds differently. I look for the blaze of a familiar light wherever it shines through, and see our own humanity in much of the rest, muddily reflected back at us.

In our time, Hallelujah has been corrupted for political campaign slogans by those who know how to harness religion for their own ends. Hallelujah has been enslaved to intolerance and injustice in the name of a righteousness that forgets the very nature of God. Hallelujah has been co-opted to serve the rich and fleece the poor, in an inversion of the beatitudes, and to exploit a creation (by whatever processes it came to be) that rightly inspires awe and reverent stewardship. None of this is new, and it makes us sometimes wonder if no religion would serve us better than religion if this is what religion comes to.

I long for a corrective. I appreciate Alessandro Camon’s essay Rescuing Jesus, posted a few weeks ago at Salon.com. He asserts that “Bush & Co. have hijacked Jesus, using him as the poster child for their callous worldview” and declares, “It’s time to rescue Christ from his kidnappers.” He sums up his case this way:

The American Christian right has hijacked Jesus Christ. It has made him into a brand, a logo, a bumper sticker. It celebrates his suffering on the cross, but largely neglects what he had to say. It prefers an Old Testament God, a “Jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.” It elevates success to proof of God’s favor, and washes its hands of responsibility for the poor. It combines a self-righteous vision of Americans as the chosen people with shrill intimations of imminent apocalypse, to justify indifference to the rest of the world and to the planet itself.

More than this, he goes on to correct our understanding of what Jesus actually did say, a project which matters to me because I recognize in the words of Jesus this blaze of light it was once given to me to glimpse.

I think of how much of God is missed in this muddied world because of our corrupted Hallelujahs. I think of what is empowered because Hallelujah is used deftly as a tool for the ends of the powerful. And I remember a short story by Langston Hughes - “On the Road.” Hughes’ protagonist, Sargeant, an African American man down on his luck on a winter day, tries to take refuge at a white church in the time of segregation. Sergeant is turned away, beaten, and, knocked unconscious, he dreams that he pulls the church down, like a Samson. When the church falls, the sculpted Christ is freed from his cross, and the two walk together:

“Yes,” said Christ, crunching his feet in the snow. “You had to pull the church down to get me off the cross.”

“You glad?” said Sargeant.

“I sure am,” said Christ.

They both laughed.

“I’m a hell of a fellow, ain’t I?” said Sargeant. “Done pulled the church down!”

“You did a good job,” said Christ. “They have kept me nailed on a cross for nearly two thousand years.”

It is time - perhaps this is perpetually so - for us to examine our broken Hallelujahs, to sort out our blazes of light from our flawed humanity, and from distortions we are led (far, far too passively) to accept as truth. Otherwise, we should not claim that we do the things that we do, or vote at the ballot box, in the name of Hallelujah.