ROUGH DRAFT—NOT FOR CITATION

Unpublished Essay for Writing Contest

“Pray It Ain’t So”

Thomas E. Phillips

Colorado Christian University

(Power of Purpose--Fiction Entry)

 

            I used to like slumber; I used to like Niebuhr; now, I like neither.  My aversion to slumber and Niebuhr began like this.  A while back, on some placid Tuesday, I planned to spend a tranquil afternoon reading Niebuhr.  However, the tranquility of my afternoon was disrupted when Niebuhr, the need for slumber, and a series of disturbing possibilities combined to dismantle my customary nonchalance.

            As I pondered the good doctor’s musings about good, evil and God, I found my reflections punctuated by intermittent lapses of consciousness.  My desire for knowledge caromed into the barrier of human fatigue.  Try as I might, I could not penetrate the wall of fog.  In surrender to the encroaching haze, I laid my head down on my desk.  Almost immediately, yawns, nods and jarring awakenings gave way to a most remarkable slumber—and perhaps a most remarkable dream.  At least I prefer to think that it was a dream.

            Under Niebuhr’s tutelage, my waning consciousness had pondered both the presence and absence of divine love in our world.   In the dream that followed, I met God.  This god was neither the thundering bully of my youth nor the kindly old gentlemen of my adolescence.  The god of my previous imaginings had delighted in shouted “amens” and heartily sung “hallelujahs;” the god of this vision showed little interest in the praises of the heavenly throngs.  To my surprise, the divinity within these heavenly realms appeared fixated upon the sufferings of the human masses below.  I supposed that Neibuhr had been right about the redemptive pathos of God.

            This god, though unfamiliar, was friendly; he engaged me in civil conversation.  Although I had secretly half-hoped for a Sinai-like theophany, I was strangely warmed to hear a provocatively whispered, “Ya, wantta see something neat?”  Although I sometimes fancy myself to possess the spirit of the prophets, their “speak, for your servant listens” seemed entirely ill-suited to the occasion of this divine query.  So, in my perplexity, I uttered an ill-considered, “sure.”

            I have often wondered how things would be different if I had possessed the good sense to reject this divine offer.  Alas, however, I had no such wisdom.  I accepted the offer with all its unforeseen strings. 

            As I moved forward, God drew my attention to a woman sitting alone in a quiet room.  She was weeping with the slow anguished tears that pour from the fracture of a mother’s heart.  God and I watched her for a few minutes in silence.  A tear rolled down my cheek.  In the silent reverence of the moment, I feared even to inquire about the source of her pain.  In seeming empathy for my curiosity, God moved my attention to another location where a young girl sat in an equally quiet room.  An empty syringe laid beside her. 

            Somehow, but without words, God made me aware that this mother ached to help a daughter in the claws of addiction.  I too wanted to help but when the mother’s pain became overwhelming, I averted my gaze.  God recaptured my attention and again redirected it, this time beyond the sobbing mother to a window behind her left shoulder.  Children across the street were hunting Easter eggs.

            In the darkened room, the phone rang.  Unfazed, the mother gave no evidence of concern over the phone’s repeated cries for attention.  On the fourth ring, the answering machine picked up.  “Mom, are you there?   Anyway, it’s Lisa.  I was just calling to say ‘Merry Christmas.’  I’m okay, really.  I’ll call again some other time.”

            Frantically, the mother lunged toward phone.  “My God!  That was Lisa.  Oh God, please don’t let her hang up.”  In the midst of her prayer, she heard a click followed by an excruciating silence.  Her daughter was alive, but where and in what condition?  Did she need help?  The cacophony of her emotions burst forth in intermingled fits of tears and laughter.  Lisa was alive—and perhaps even well, but she had missed talking to her daughter by a few agonizing milliseconds.

            God cleared his throat, choking back his own emotions I supposed.  Then, in a confident voice, God said, “I convinced Lisa to make that call.”  I nodded.  Clearly, my divine dialogue partner was sharing the mother’s pain.  Clearly, God wanted to alleviate that pain.

            I asked, “Is there anything else that you could do?” 

            God’s reply—“That’s enough for now”—struck me as curious.  I had expected God to initiate a speech on human freedom as a limiting influence on divine action, but instead God simply suggested that enough had been done.  Enough?  What did that mean?

             I was perplexed and God’s seeming disregard for my incomprehension only added to my confusion.  I struggled to formulate an appropriate question, but after a few fruitless minutes, I blurred out, “enough of what?”

            God ignored my question.  Being impatient by nature, I was miffed.  However, prudence demanded my deference to divine wisdom.  God knew what God was doing, and God would, I trusted, make matters clear to me within some kind of divine timeframe.  I wondered when I would be ready to hear the answer.

            “It’s a troubled world, isn’t it?”

            “Yes, Lord, it is.”   My response wasn’t very profound, but the question didn’t seem to call for much more than an acknowledgement of the obvious.  As for me, I had never doubted the presence of evil in our world.  In fact, before this dream began, I had been contemplating Niebuhr’s alternatives for the locus of evil—individual human decisions or the systems that humans create.  I had never decided whether evil originates in the individual human heart or whether evil is impressed upon individuals by outside forces.  Are individuals essentially immoral and society a moralizing influence or are individuals basically moral and culture the corrupting influence?

            Such questions had long fascinated and frightened me.  Now, these questions had entered my dreams.  

            God again gained my attention and drew my gaze to another scene.  At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.  I could discern arms extended chaotically above a sea of human flesh.  Then I realized that the flailing arms were thin and gaunt.  Those arms were protruding from a compacted mass of human desperation.  These people were begging for food.  Two aid workers stood atop a truck in the center of the emaciated mob.  They were tossing out skimpy food packs. 

            I had seen similar scenes on television many times, but this was different.  Because I was in their presence and in the presence of God at the same time, I could feel their hunger pangs.  My soul boiled with the starved cravings of their physical bodies.  They shed no tears, but I heaved with sobs.  I, unlike these pathetic skeletons before me, could still afford the luxury of tears.  Hardship had only ago muted the voices of their emotions.  They knew only the raw power of unfulfilled needs.

            “You see that couple handing out food?”

            “Yes, Lord, I do.”

            “I compelled them to help.  They serve in my name.”

            Even while in the midst of my dream, I began to sense the reason for this dream.  God wished me to join in the redemption of the world.  Though evil and suffering were pervasive, God was calling me to participate in the demise of evil.  I volunteered, “Lord, I will also serve in your name.”  Then, in a moment of excessive piety, I echoed Isaiah and added, “Here am I, send me.” 

            God smiled.  Had I gone over the top with my allusion to Isaiah?  Had I trivialized the horrors before me by spouting off like an overeager adolescent?  Was my response sophomoric?  Teen-campish?  For the first time since encountering God, I became uncomfortable. 

            Curiously, throughout these several minutes of elapsed dream time, I had hardly been aware of the divine presence.  Of course, I had stood beside God and had allowed God to focus and refocus my attention, but God himself had never been the focus of my attention.  I had focused on the human scenes beneath us—until now.  With that divine smile, I suddenly became very self-conscious about being in the presence of God.  Should I kneel?  Should I bow my head when I speak?  A few moments ago I had pledged myself to divine service, but what should I do right now while I wait for an answer? 

            I bowed my head, half-hoping that God would strike me dead and end my discomfort.  I wanted to speak, but I had no idea what to say.  In the awkwardness of the moment, I fell on my face and muttered, “You are so good.  I love you.”

             “You don’t get it, do you?”  God had finally spoken, but I found his comment baffling, almost demeaning.  I knew that I should feel shamed by such a rebuke, but I didn’t.  I almost felt angry.  Sure, I was human and God was divine.  Sure, God knew what was best and, of course, my understanding was limited and faltering.  Still, I didn’t see any need for God to insult me—after all, I was trying.  I wanted to do the right thing.  I was only human.  Couldn’t God at least give me a break for trying?

            God chuckled and, suddenly, the pious sentiments of a few moments ago died and were replaced by stone cold disgust.  This god was becoming very irritating.  Not even God had a right to be smug, did he?  

            “You think that I brought you here to recruit you or something?”

            Of course, that’s what I thought, but I wasn’t about to give God the satisfaction of admitting it.  Instead, I looked God in the eye—all reverence was now gone—and spit out, “Why else?”

            Interestingly, even as I spoke, I became aware that I was now watching myself talk with God.  It was as if I had returned to the same observation post where I had earlier watched aid workers, addicts and mothers going about their lives in peaceful oblivion to my prying eyes.  I was now watching myself have a dream.  Was I waking up?

            “I brought you here to show you something neat, remember?”

            Perhaps I had been too hasty.  Maybe this dream wasn’t about me at all.  Maybe it was about God.  Perhaps I was supposed to learn something about God and divine love in the world.  These thoughts rekindled a sense of shame in me.  I had assumed that this dream was all about me.  How egoistical!  This world doesn’t revolve around me.  Why do I always assume that everything is about me?  Why was I so quick to judge and so slow to learn?  I had made a fool out of myself, but how should I respond to God’s question?  What was the point of such observations? 

            Shame and curiosity gripped me with equal strength.  I again struggled to formulate an appropriate response.  God had invited me only to observe, and I had forgotten that.  But surely, observation was not an end unto itself.  I decided to chart a middle course between acknowledgement and contrition. 

            “I remember, now.”

            “Why do you think I wanted you to see these things?”

            I had no good answer.  In desperate honesty, I said, “I’m not sure.”

            “You’re right.  You probably shouldn’t have an answer to that question yet.  A more simple question: Why do think that I do such things?”

            I was now completely lost.  Now God was asking me to speculate on God’s motives?  And this was supposed to be an easier question! 

            “I suppose that you give dreams like this in order to teach us something.”  I was deliberately vague.  I no longer had any clear idea what God was trying to teach me. 

            “No, no, no!  I don’t mean why I am showing you these things.  I mean why do you think that I had Lisa call her mother and that couple feeding those people?”

            I had never really been sure why God worked through human intermediaries.  I had always assumed that the answer had something to do with the community of grace, but this was no time to engage in idle theological speculation.  “Is that the only way you work—through human beings—or do you sometimes intervene directly in the world?”

            “You still don’t get it.  I’m not talking how I do what I do, but rather why I do what I do.  Do you know why I feed the starving and offer hope to the desperate?”

            How could I have been so dense?  This entire exercise was about the love of God.  “You help us because you love us.  God is love!” I said confidently.

            “I like people to think that.”

            “What?”

            “I like for people to believe that I love them.”

            God had to be aware of my confusion.  Why was God being so indirect?  Why speak only in terms of people’s thoughts and beliefs?  Why not just simply that God loves people? 

            That smug smile was returning to God’s face and I was growing very weary of this, so weary that I nearly wanted to wake up.  I now had little regard left for either reverence or shame.  With dull insincerity, I offered a concluding moral to the story: “So God loves us.”

            “No.  That’s not what I said.”

            I was tired of verbal games.  If God wanted me to learn something from this experience, God would have to speak in plain English.  I stood silently, trying not to look too concerned.

            “I offer people hope.”

            “Because you love them,” I added.

            “Because they need it,” God corrected.

            I couldn’t believe that I was being drawn back into the fray.  Nonetheless, I combined our statements and countered, “You fulfill their needs because you love them.”  I spoke with a triumphalism that again made me a spectator of my own actions.  However, I was no longer uncomfortable with that detachment, so I watched myself watching for God’s answer.  Both the “me” of the dream and the “me” watching the dream folded their arms to see how God would handle this one.

            “What would happen if I didn’t give people hope?” God inquired.

            I wasn’t expecting this question, but the answer seemed obvious.  “They would become desperate.”

            “And then?”

            “What do you mean ‘and then’?  They would become more and more desperate.”

            “Until?”

            As I look back on it, I have to hand to him, God had a way of sucking me back into the conversation.  A few minutes earlier, I was tired of this discussion.  I had wanted to wake up.  Now, I was watching myself swing away at God with both fists.  As if offering my best right cross, I shouted, “until they give up, that’s what!”

            “Exactly,” God said, “until they give up and I don’t want them to give up.”

            “So you care about people too much to see them give up?”  I wasn’t sure if I had drawn a conclusion or an inference.  Perhaps I was just trying to get the last word in.  Whatever my motives for this particular comment, my larger motives were now clear.  I was arguing merely for the sake of arguing.  Since I thought that I had probably won this debate, I began to smirk in exactly the way that God had earlier smirked at me.

            With none of the defiance that I expected, God said, “I see no value in people who have given up the struggle.”

            “So you only love people who struggle?”

            “I show no favoritism between people.”

            “So you love all people,” I said.

            My energy was again waning.  The debate was returning to familiar platitudes.  Although I was no longer sure what purpose this conversation had served, I was again hoping that I would awaken soon.

            “I love no one,” God asserted.

            “What?  You just told me that you give people hope!” I shouted in amazement.

            “I give people hope, because without hope, they would give up,” God explained.

            “So you don’t give a rip about people, you only care about their struggles?” I said, fully expecting to be corrected.

            “Yes, that’s right.”

            God was toying with me again.  I wouldn’t stand for it.  I protested, “That doesn’t make any sense.  Why care about people’s struggles if you don’t care about people?”

             “Where do you think their struggles come from anyway?” God quizzed.

            God had really caught me off guard with this one.  Like a rabbit caught in the fox’s den, I had no place to go.  I was again looking down on myself from that detached observation post.  This time, I stood with shoulders drooped and head hung low. 

            God now clearly had me on the defensive and so he pressed the attack.  “I create them,” God calmly explained.

            “Yeah, right.  You send hardship and suffering into people’s lives?” I asked.

            “Sure do,” God affirmed.

            I had heard people teach such things for years and I had never bought it. God wouldn’t afflict people with suffering for any reason.   Nonetheless, I followed the logic and belched out the next line, “So people can learn from them or grow by the experience, right?”

            “Not at all,” God insisted.  “I have no interest in human learning or growth.  I care only about their struggles.”

            In an effort to reduce God’s argument to absurdity, I added “so you send suffering and evil into people’s lives for your sake and not for theirs?”

            “I suppose so,” God replied.

            That made no sense.  “But wait a minute,” I protested.  “What about all the good things that happen in people’s lives?”

            “They need hope,” God explained.

            “Or else they would give up,” I sarcastically chimed in.

            “Now you seem to understand,” God noted.

            “Understand? Understand what? That you’re a sociopath who tortures people just so you can watch them struggle?  That, that you enjoy watching people suffer?  That, you’re totally malevolent!”

            “I prefer devious, rather than malevolent,” God quipped.

            “Surely, this is a test or something,” I reasoned.  God is not evil.  God wouldn’t make human beings suffer and die just to entertain himself.  I had to think of some way to discredit what I was hearing. 

            “No test,” God answered.

            “That wasn’t a question, only a comment!” I bellowed.  “I know… if you were entertained by suffering, why would we be able to cure so many diseases, and…and… help so many people?”  I was struggling for words and half-fearing God was enjoying my struggle.  I couldn’t think of any other good examples, but still I figured that I had God on this one.  An evil god would allow humans no relief from evil!

            “I wouldn’t want people to give up hope.  They need incentive to continue the struggle,” God explained.  Of course, God had already told me this.  I continued looking at God in disbelief.  He continued, “Without hope, people wouldn’t struggle.  I give them just enough hope to keep them going.  In the end, however, they all die.  Don’t they?”

            “Yeah, but…” I trailed off.  God had me on this one and we both knew it.  I was desperate for a good argument.  Then, it came to me.  “If you were ‘devious’—as you say—then why would you tell me all this?”

            God laughed out loud.  “You really don’t learn very quick, do you?  I can let you in on the secret because it doesn’t matter.  No one will ever believe you.  Besides, you won’t even know whether to believe it yourself or not.  After all, this may all just be a dream.”  God was now roaring with laughter.

            God laughed so hard that I woke up.

            When I recount this harrowing vision to friends, they often ask if I ever suspect that it wasn’t a dream.  I have to admit that when I first woke up—in the moments before I could clearly discern where the dream ended and reality began—I was scared.  I feared that maybe God was either hostile or indifferent to human concerns and that maybe our struggle against evil and suffering was futile.  I struggled with the possibility that my mid-afternoon dream was the nightmare of our lives. 

            Fortunately, such fears were short-lived.  In their place, though, arose a more menacing fear, a fear that I could live as if my dream had been true and as if compassion was no better than indifference.  I fear a life lived in defiance of the unrelenting optimism that grace, love and goodness matter.  Perhaps the real legacy of that afternoon’s slumber, however, has been more of a habit than a fear—the habit of watching myself.  I now often revisit that detached observation post and watch myself live.  I enjoying watching myself living as if the universe is not ruled the god of my dream, but by one who ensures an ultimate purpose to love, goodness and grace.