Bless The Name, Part Four: The Words We Were Using
For a while neither of us said anything. The lamp beside the tabernacle did its small red work in the dark. I let him sit with the end of the story, because a story like that one needs a little silence after it, the way a struck bell needs air.
He was the one who broke it, and he broke it exactly where I knew he would, because he was a thinker, the way you are a thinker, I could see it on him.
"But you never answered it," he said. "The priest came. I understand that, and I am glad. You were saved. But that is not the same thing. You stood in that kitchen and you asked God to explain why He let them die, and by your own account He never did. So it is a beautiful story. The question is still just sitting there on the table where it always was. Why did He let it happen at all."
I smiled at him, and I watched it bother him, the smiling, the same way it had bothered him when he first sat down beside me.
"No," I said. "He never answered it. And I am going to tell you something that took me years to understand, so take it slowly. He never answered it because for most of those years I was asking the wrong question, and a good father does not answer a wrong question. He waits. He lets you wear it out, until you are worn out enough to ask the right one."
"It is not a wrong question," he said. "It is the only question."
"I know it feels that way. It felt exactly that way to me with a bottle in my hand. So let me do the thing you actually came here for, even though it is not the thing that is going to save you, because you are the kind of man who cannot set a thing down until he has taken it apart, and I was the same man. You want the argument. Very well. I will give you the argument. But I will give it to you the only way it ever came clear to me, which was not out of a book. It came clear in my own kitchen, in the wreck, looking at a bottle."
"Start with the word evil," I said. "You have been using it all night like a stone you could pick up off the ground and set in my hand. Here is the evil, you keep saying. Here is this thing God allowed into His world. So answer me one thing, and be honest. When I fell, what did I reach for. Say it out loud."
He considered it. "Wine," he said.
"Wine. Not poison. Not some black thing with a skull on the label that God should have been ashamed to make. I reached for the very wine my wife poured on Sundays and blessed and cut with water for the boys. A good thing. His good thing. Do you see it yet. I want you to see it yourself before I say it for you."
He did not quite, so I said it.
"Evil is not a thing. There is no such thing anywhere as a thing that is evil, not in the whole of creation. Augustine was lost for years because he was sure there had to be one, some dark substance out there at war with the light, and the day he understood that there was no such substance was the day he finally came home. Everything that is, is good, because God made it and God makes nothing else. The wine was good. The wanting was good. Even the ache in me that reached for it, the longing for the quiet to stop, even that was good, it was made for Him. Evil was none of those things. Evil was what I did to them. It is a good thing loved in the wrong order, in the wrong hour, in the place where the Giver was meant to stand. It has no substance of its own at all. It is a bend. It is a wrongness in the relation between good things. It is real, make no mistake, as real as the ruin it made of me, but it is real the way a limp is real, not the way a leg is real. A limp is not a thing. It is a good thing, a leg, gone wrong."
He said nothing. I could see it doing its slow work in him.
"And here is the sentence the old writers kept for it, and I want you to carry this one out the door with you even if you forget every other thing I say tonight. The corruption of the best is the worst. That is why it was the wine, and not something squalid. That is why it was the Sunday table that became the dark kitchen. The higher and the holier the good, the more terrible the wreck when a man bends it. The best things make the worst evils. A cynic cannot fall the way a believing man falls. It takes a real height to have that far to go down."
"Now hold that," I said, "and look at your own father a moment, because you have been carrying his death like it was a thing too. Like it was some object God took down off a shelf and used on you." I said it as gently as I had anything that night. "It was not a thing either. There is no thing there to find. There is a good man and a good body and a whole world of good things in motion, and somewhere down in it a wrongness, a bend, a good knocked out of its right order. God did not forge an evil and aim it at your father. There was no evil there to forge. That is the first word you had wrong, and nearly everyone has it wrong, and until you have it right the whole question sits there misshapen in your hands, because you are demanding to know why a good God made a thing that He never once made."
He had the look of a man handed something heavier than he had braced for.
"That is one word," I said. "There are four more. And the next is the one you are already reaching for, I can see it in you, the one that says, fine, old man, God made no evil, but He made the man who could bend the good. He made me able to close my hand around that bottle. He made the other driver free to do whatever it was he did out on that road. So let us talk about that one now. Let us talk about why God ever made a creature that could break His own heart."
"An animal," I said, "is the sum of two things. What it was born with, and what the world did to it. Put those two together and you can predict a dog. You cannot predict a man. There is a third thing in us, and it is the thing that makes us dangerous and makes us worth making at all. We choose. Not out of nowhere, our blood and our history lean on us hard, but they do not decide us, the way the frame and the paint lean on a painting without ever painting it. There is a self in the middle that tips the balance, and God put it there on purpose."
"How do you know it is there," he said. "Maybe we are just complicated dogs."
"Because of what you did to me an hour ago," I said. "You blamed me. You have been quietly blaming me this whole time for reaching for that bottle, and you were right to, a little. And you would never blame a rock for falling on someone, or a dog for biting. We praise and we blame and we beg and we command each other all day long, and every bit of that is nonsense unless there is a self in there that could have done otherwise. You cannot scold a machine. The whole of how we speak to each other assumes the very thing the clever men say we do not have."
He had no answer for that, which is the right thing to have.
"So God made a creature that could choose. And the moment He did, He made a creature that could choose wrong. There is no third road. He could not make a thing that was free to love Him and not free to leave Him, any more than He could build a road that ran only one direction into a place a man was still free to decide to go. The freedom is one thing. The same hand that reached for Him at the altar is the hand that reached for the bottle in the dark. He could not give me the first reach and refuse me the second. They are the same reach."
"Then it is His fault," the young man said. "He made the hand."
"A father gives his son a will," I said. "The son commits a crime with it. Is the father in the dock. He gave the will. He did not commit the crime. God is off the hook for what I did, that was mine, I have never once been able to give it back. But you are right that He is on the hook for something. He is on the hook for the risk. He looked at a world full of real sons who could really leave Him, and He judged it worth more than a world full of gears that never could. And do not imagine for one second that the risk cost Him nothing. But that is the last thing I have to tell you, and I am not there yet."
"Then why not make us free and just make it so we could never actually do the wrong thing," he said. "He is supposed to be able to do anything."
I smiled, because that is exactly the place every mind goes, and it feels like the checkmate, and it is nothing of the kind.
"Anything," I said, "is not the same as nonsense. You have just asked why God did not make a square with no corners, or a friend who is not free to be anything but your friend, which is not a friend at all, it is a mirror. To be all-powerful is to be able to do everything that is a thing to do. A love that cannot say no is not a hard thing to do. It is not a thing at all. It is only noise you have set the word God in front of so it would sound like a real request. There is no world where the man could not reach for the bottle and could still reach for God, because it is the same hand, and you keep asking Him to cut it off and leave it on at once."
He sat with that a while. I let him. The lamp ticked in its glass.
"You keep speaking as though a good God would have kept me from ever being hurt," I went on, "because you own one word for happiness and it is the shallow one. It is the word that means luck. Good fortune. The dice landing your way, the day going well, the sun on your face. That is a real thing and a good thing and it is gone the instant the wind turns, and if that is what you mean by happy, then no, God does not promise to keep you happy, and thank Him for that, because a God who kept you comfortable would have to keep you shallow forever in order to manage it.
"There is another word underneath that one, an old one, and it is not a feeling at all. It is the state of a soul that has come right. A soul in the truth, in love, at home. And you can have it standing in the rubble of your whole life. You are looking at it. That is what the strange line means, the one about the ones who mourn being the blessed ones. It is not a riddle. It is the deep word and the shallow word laid down side by side in a single sentence so that you cannot possibly mistake them for the same thing. I am not happy in the shallow way today. I never will be again on the day I lost her. And I am the other thing, the deep thing, all the way to the bottom, and the two of them are sitting on my face at the very same time, and that is the smile you could not read."
"But why the hard way," he said, quieter now. "If the deep thing is what He is after, why could He not just give it to me. Gently."
"Because some things cannot be handed to you," I said. "They can only be made in you, and the making is fire. And hear this next part carefully, because this is exactly where people say a stupid and a cruel thing. God did not break me in order to improve me. The breaking was the crash and the driver and a bent world and my own two hands after it. He did not send it. But He is the kind of maker who can walk into the wreckage of a thing and build out of it something that could not have been built any other way, and what He built in me is real, and it is good, and it is the deep happiness, and it has room in it now for a joy that the comfortable man I used to be had no space anywhere to hold. Job never got his questions answered. He got hollowed out. And the hollow turned out to be the exact room the joy was going to need."
"Would you trade it," he said. "To have them back."
It was a cruel question and he did not mean it to be one, and I gave him the true answer, which comes in two halves that will not fit together and both of which are true.
"I would trade every last thing I own and everything I am to have them back at my table on a Sunday. And I would not give back one inch of what He has made in me in the losing of them. Both of those are true at the same time. I stopped, years ago, trying to force them to agree. That disagreement is simply what it is to be a man who has loved and lost and been found, and if you live long enough you will hold two true things exactly like that in your own two hands, and you will finally stop needing them to shake."
He was quiet for a long time.
"So," I said. "Look now at what has happened to your question while you were not watching it. You walked in here holding a very tidy little proof. God is real. God is good. God can do anything. And yet, here is evil. And any three of those, you were certain, kill the fourth. But watch. Evil is not a thing God made, so the fourth one is not the accusation you took it for. All-powerful never meant able to do nonsense, so the third one bends nothing. And good never meant keeps you comfortable, it meant is after the deepest possible you, even by the hard road, so the second one is left standing. Every word in your proof was the shallow word. You smuggled four shallow words into one sentence and were astonished to find they would not sit down with God. Deepen the four words, and the whole contradiction simply is not there. It does not get beaten. It comes untied, like a knot that was only ever a trick of the way you were holding the rope. God is real. God is good. God can do all things. And evil is as real as the bottle on my counter was. All four. All true. All at once. They were never once at war. The war was only ever between the small words you carried in with you, and I know for a fact they were the words you carried in, because they were the very same four I carried into that kitchen."
He looked, for the first time since he had sat down beside me, like a man who had been handed the thing he came for.
Which is precisely why I had to be honest with him about the next thing.
"And now," I said, "I have to tell you the truth. None of what I have just given you is going to save you."
He looked stricken, and he had earned the right to. He had worked hard for that argument, and it was a good argument and it was true, and I had just told him it would not save him.
"Do not mistake me," I said. "It is all true. Keep every word of it. You will need it the next time a clever man tries to tell you your faith is a child's blanket, and one of them will come. But it will not save you, and I owe you the reason why. The problem of evil in a book and the problem of evil in a life are two different animals wearing the one name. In a book it is a puzzle, and a puzzle is asking to be solved. In a life it is a wound, and a wound is not asking to be solved. A wound is asking for a person.
"You did not walk into this church tonight because four sentences would not sit together inside your head. You walked in because your father is in the ground, and you are frightened, and you needed to know whether there is anyone at all in this great dark house, or whether you have been talking the whole time to the walls. That is the real question. It was the real question all along. And I could pour arguments over you until the sun came up and not one of them would lay a finger on it, because that question is not answered by an argument. It is only ever answered by someone turning on a light and saying, I am here. I have been here the whole time."
"There is a crack in a man that being right will never close. It is not what the neighbors make of you, that is only shame, and shame runs sideways, between you and them. Underneath it runs the deeper one, the crack that goes straight up, between you and the One you were made for, and every wrong you have ever done and every wound you carry drains down into it. No argument reaches the bottom of that. No good feeling reaches it either. I know, because I spent years pouring wine down it a glass at a time, and it has no floor to it. Only the One on the far side of it can close it, and He does not close it with an explanation. He closes it with Himself."
"I never did get my answer. I told you that at the start and it is still true here at the end. God never once explained the crash to me, not in this life, and I have made my peace with the chance that He never will. But somewhere in the middle of it all I stopped needing the explanation, and I can tell you the very hour I stopped. It was the hour a tired man in a black coat knocked on the door of a drunk who had thrown him away, and came in, and sat down, and would not leave. That is not an argument. That is the whole of the Gospel carried across a city in one man's body. God did not answer the problem of evil by solving it on a page. He answered it by climbing down inside it. Down into the crash. Down into the market where I stood for sale. All the way down into the grave itself, so that there is no pit a man can fall into any more that does not already have His handprints on the walls. That is the only answer to your question that has ever held any weight in my two hands, and it is not a sentence. It is a body, on a cross, saying, I did not spare Myself either."
"So here is what I am going to do for you, and it is the only thing worth the doing. I am not going to send you home with my arguments, though you are welcome to carry them. I am going to do for you the one thing that was done for me. I am going to tell you, plainly, that you are not talking to the walls. That there is Someone here, in this quiet, behind that small red lamp, and He knows your father's name, and He knows yours, and He is not far off and clean and comfortable. He is already down in it with you. And then I am going to sit here beside you for as long as you would like to sit, because a man taught me once, without ever once saying it, that the way you answer a wound is you do not get up and leave."
For a long moment the young man did not say anything at all. He looked at the old man, and then at the small red lamp, and then at the photograph still resting in the old man's hands, the woman and the three boys, and something in his face was not healed, nothing was healed, but it had shifted, the way the first grey light shifts in a room a long while before anyone would dare to call it morning.
"I do not know how to do that yet," the young man said. "To thank Him. For any of it."
"I know," the old man said. "Neither did I, for the longest time. It cost me ten years and a great deal I would never wish on you. You do not have to do it tonight. Tonight you only have to not go home and decide the light is off." He moved the photograph gently into his other hand and made room on the kneeler beside him, the way you make room for someone you expect will stay a while. "Sit," he said. "The lamp is lit. We can start there."
And the two of them sat a while together in the small red light, the old man who had come out the far side of the long dark, and the young man just now walking down into it. And above them both, though neither one of them said it out loud yet, the Lord had given, and the Lord had taken away, and the name of the Lord was, even here, even in this, being quietly and impossibly blessed.
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