Killing the Buddha Page 3
There’s no point asking Him, of course. Genesis shows another familiar guise of God—the Absentee. God makes the snake “subtil” (and perhaps not recognizably a snake—he goes on his belly only later, remember) and yet does nothing to prevent the inevitable, and frankly rather rapid, application of serpentine subtlety. God is elsewhere when Eve and Adam eat the fateful apple, likewise when Cain kills Abel. God somehow loses sight of Sarah’s maid Hagar when she is unjustly cast out and catches up with her only when she pauses by the well. This is the same God who has only heard of Sodom’s evil and has to send angels out on reconnaissance. God is not there when the innocent Joseph is attacked and sold into slavery—He is only “with him” once he’s unjustly imprisoned on the word of Potiphar’s wife.
We recognize this God. At Wounded Knee and in Auschwitz, Kanpur, Soweto, Srebrenica, Sabra-Shatila, Belfast, in every other killing field—we find ourselves asking, Where was God? What is more frightening—that God could be withdrawn from a part of His Creation, or that He would actually be there, unseen but looking on—a voluntarily powerless voyeur, while Pol Pot and Stalin, Kissinger and Papa Doc, Eichmann and Idi Amin and the rest of the bloody regiment were both undeniably monstrous and unmistakably human? The torturers, the murderers, the rapists, the wife beaters, the child molesters, the extortionists, the tax-avoiding city gents and self-serving politicians who impoverish and mutilate by proxy, all the fathers who terrify—the Lord God made them all.
Why? Why make us so vicious? Why abandon us in such savage lives? We reach up with unanswered words, not knowing if God has hidden from us or if we have turned from Him. We see humankind and its Maker first part ways in Genesis. But not before we’ve learned that we’re alike, that we’re in His own image—an image that includes “the terror of God.” This isn’t God the Father, yet, but there seems to be a family resemblance. Genesis describes a little of man’s terror, his small-scale misery, deceit, kidnapping, rape, and bloodshed. The epic havoc is left to the Destroyer God—the one we half admire and would wish more powerful yet, as long as He’s on our side. Because it scares us when God appears to stand on the sidelines, but it can be even more terrifying when He does intervene. Acts of God, after all, are the precursors of insurance claims and closed-casket funerals.
It’s that divine touch in our beginning, that bloodline—we see it in ruined cities, poisoned rivers, the ingenuity of bombs. We humans take after the Destroyer. It may not be what we want, but we can’t seem to help it. In the same way, I see my parents’ faults emerging in me—in my choice to try out my father’s temper, or my mother’s martyred love—that tendency toward brooding secrecy—and do I lie like my father, or only like myself? I can ask why it seems so difficult to emulate their finer qualities, their moments of nobility and dignity. I can ask why it seems so difficult to follow the gentler, more merciful God. Genesis offers a harsh answer—the path that mankind follows is frequently bloody, downward, dark: We find it difficult to create, we rarely recognize what is blessed. If this is meant as a warning, we have tended to use it as an alibi rather than take it to heart.
But there are degrees of wickedness. We don’t all fall, all the time. And as long as we try to be good, we hope that we may be protected, that the Destroyer will be on our side—appalling, but ours. Sodom and Gomorrah are annihilated because both cities contain not even ten pure souls. The Tower of Babel is never completed, because it is a sign of overweening arrogance, an attempt to touch Heaven punished by the removal of man’s common language, the word that was with us and made us strong. And, of course, there’s the ultimate intervention—the deluge. God looks out at the evil of men and simply decides to start again. It’s the story that captivates schoolchildren, that has counterparts in Babylonian, Greek, and Indian myths, and may well reflect a communal memory of an actual, cataclysmic flood. Whatever its historical basis, Genesis uses the story of Noah to reassure. God could do this again at any time, but He says He chooses not to. He seems almost apologetic—“I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake…. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” So we have that to rely on, at least. And from now on there will be the rainbow, reminding God (how can He forget?) of His promise not to kill us all. If God can be a monster, He can be with us, contained by His word.
And our goodness may be defended by our adherence to His word. The world of Genesis exists before the Commandments, but God is already commanding. He asks for flesh offerings, doesn’t think much of vegetables and fruit. Some animals are classified as clean and some are not. Bloodshed should be answered with bloodshed. The ark must be built and be built just so, the animals collected according to divine instruction. God tells His favorites where and how to live. Disobey and you lose Paradise, are blasted with brimstone, exiled, turned to salt.
But God may be moved by words—those prayers may be worthwhile. Cain the murderer haggles a mark of protection out of the Almighty, and his blood is not spilled to answer Abel’s slaughter. Abraham can bargain God down to a figure of only ten men to save Sodom—although there weren’t even ten, which perhaps God knew all along. And Lot asks God to save Zoar for him to live in when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed. God even consents to a particularly convoluted selection process to pick out Rebecca, the future wife of Isaac—although He must have had all the time in the universe, so why not? And God makes promises, too. He selects Abraham when nothing in particular recommends him and promises him land in perpetuity and the right to found a people. He promises the former black sheep Jacob much the same. Abraham, of course, has to pay for his privilege by circumcising all the males in his care—and he also must consent to a change of names for him and his wife—God gives you a name to make you His. He’ll do this again, turning Jacob to Israel. This is the God of mercy. He makes coats of skins for naked Eve and Adam. He catches Himself in thorns, descends as an angel, sets a ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac. Perhaps He does love us, after all.
Or perhaps we needed to write that He does. Certainly, some of His expressions of love can trouble us today. We all want to be chosen of God—the promise of land and dominion to His favorites in Genesis makes a simple, unequivocal bedrock for a number of fundamentalist claims. The Christian Crusades and the British Empire justified political agendas of massacre and theft with the help of declarations that God was with them. A story written by children of Israel, disingenuously promising them land in perpetuity, continues to bathe that land in blood. Even beyond the early political spin, Genesis shows that whatever God the Giver provides, the gift is ambivalent—the beautiful and fatal world, the tempting and condemning fruit—why would a promised land be any different? The ram in thorns God produces is necessary only because He has forced Abraham to the brink of killing the son he waited a hundred years to conceive—Isaac, his obsession and his future as a patriarch. The skin garments are handed over as the gates of Paradise are closing with Adam and Eve on the wrong side. Those clean and unclean animals aren’t actually specified, and sometimes their classifications seem not to matter at all. Circumcision makes a covenant for Abraham, but when the Hivites are circumcised, their menfolk are still slaughtered for the sake of Jacob’s daughter—even while Jacob’s camp contains “strange gods.” Cain gets away with murder.
In Genesis—as in the world—God can appear to make no sense. Sexual misconduct of all kinds seems to be accepted, unless it isn’t. Murder is fine, unless it’s not. Which is to say, God’s favorites can commit adultery and kill, sleep with handmaidens and relatives and be either only moderately chastised or entirely unpunished. Even amongst God’s chosen there is an arbitrary quality to God’s decisions, which is terrifying when combined with omnipotence. Abel the hunter is loved, Esau the hunter is not. Noah gets drunk, passes out in a state of undress, and his son, Ham, sees him naked by accident—still, Ham and his offspring, the children of Canaan, are cursed forever. Esau is swindled out of his birthrig
ht and even his father’s blessing by Jacob, who then goes on to steal an extra wife from Laban—a wife Jacob subsequently hates. Jacob’s punishment for this is service to Laban that only makes Jacob rich. And God shows Jacob “the gate of Heaven” and then forms an angel to wrestle him and touch him to the bone—“I have seen God face to face,” Jacob says, “and my life is preserved.” The brothers who founded the Twelve Tribes have their good points—“Naphtali is a hind let loose: He giveth goodly words.” And “Joseph is a fruitful bough.” But this is the same Joseph so soured by his early trials that he inflicts emotional torture even on his own father. His eleven brothers were the men who left him to the pit and the slavers. Simeon and Levi are murderers with “instruments of cruelty…in their habitations,” and Reuben has defiled his father’s bed and is “unstable as water,” while “Benjamin shall ravin as the wolf” and “Dan shall be a serpent by the way”—the book ending as it began, with the threat of a snake.
A believer could be forgiven for thinking that Calvin was right—that places in Heaven are reserved for the justified, however they transgress. God, it seems, commands but is not just. He kills my grandfather but not Pinochet. When I keep to His rules, I don’t benefit: When I break them, things go wrong. I have the capacity to love children and yet I have no child. I pray for the relief of solitude and I am alone. I see the good suffer and the guilty prosper and I pray to God the first anesthetist, the One who made Adam sleep while he lost his rib and feel no pain. I pray for the relief of pain. Genesis brings us the wonder of acknowledging God but also its despair. The more its authors try to describe God, the more we fear, the less we understand.
So it is hardly a surprise that the book’s only references to real companionship with God are elusive and brief. How Eve and Adam speak to God in the garden is a secret we have lost. And later, almost as an aside, we are told that Enoch “walked with God.” There is no mention of rituals or bargaining between them, no commandments or promises, only perhaps the thought of an amiable stroll, of companions who go forward, side by side, no words needed. Perhaps God isn’t so pleased by singing and praying, after all, perhaps it is silence He craves, the kind of relaxed stillness that grows between old companions. We are here, after all, and—should we choose to believe it—so is He and the world is as it is and we have free will to try to change what we don’t like. Perhaps God allows His favorites to sin because He is not so very interested in sin, because it has its own penalties and rewards, morality operating like evolution—something that is unavoidable but takes time. This is emotionally unsatisfying and calls for the patience of saints, but it may also be true.
From Australia, to Scotland, to 3:57 A.M., and without explanation, there I am. And my parents were themselves and no one else for reasons they could not fully grasp: the shouting, the moments of violence, the silences and crying: I would have liked to understand them, but I never truly will. And my own life: the love and fear of men I have from my father, the love and fear of tenderness I have from my mother; too old still to be single, too old still to be childless, an end to the bloodline; locked in a profession built of words—what sense that really makes is beyond me. Perhaps it is intended to be meaningless, or simply an encouragement to prayer, or to silence. I can’t tell.
The God of Genesis, a God I recognize, is inexplicable. I try to be glad for those dashes of unforeseen compromise and kindness—the times we don’t get what we deserve, but better. I never ask, for instance, why Mother Teresa is dead and I’m alive, why my friend Paul was killed by brain cancer, and although I am much less good and useful, I was not. Above all Genesis, not to mention reality, seems colored by the peculiar, magisterially dark sense of humor which a remarkable number of religions agree is wholly characteristic of God. He is, if not playing, then playful. Which, for example, allows me to call Him Him. Never the Father for me, but I still think of Him as male, because my nature inclines to the physical love of men. It makes sense for me that part of my longing for God would be flavored with the longing for a lover, the other half to complete the pair—the precise love it would seem God refuses to grant me. Naturally, He must actually encompass every possible sexual identity and the absolute absence of sex. It is absurd to address my Creator at all—we are too different—but if I must, I would rather do it with love, rather have it as a kind of private joke with the Almighty.
This kind of God—incomprehensible, distant, ludic—leaves us with the loneliness of adulthood and the responsibilities of a world where actions always bring reactions, often of an unforeseen kind. We can choose to pray, but prayer may not bring the desired results. Many religions agree that prayer alters the prayer, if not the prayed-to, or the world. Prayer may, in fact, operate according to natural laws, a closed system, God at one remove. Genesis offers tantalizing suggestions that it does still constitute some kind of communication, however unpredictable, with a God we can’t meet face-to-face but who is still willing to appear in dreams, in words. This may not be what we want, but it seems to be what we’ve got. Only Enoch, the quiet friend, gets a better deal, living 365 years and then “he was not; for God took him”—the one human in the whole of the Bible’s first book who gets to go home.
More redemption than this is hard to find in Genesis. Still, its closing verses do tell us to “fear not” and do attempt to explain that we are praying and dying, loving and murdering, hurting and joking, living within a Creation we are not made to understand. With every pain, every despair, we have to hope, as Joseph says, that “God meant it unto good” because we have very little choice, beyond the possible relief of self-destruction. Our position is, in itself, not unamusing, the darkest of black jokes. Such a high level of absurdity—a beguiling, lifelong trap constructed of freedoms: torture and joy if you love it, torture and joy if you don’t—this can really be bearable only if it’s funny, unless you can arrange to go insane. Creation is funny if there’s no God, no designer for the trap. And, naturally, it’s funnier still if there is God, if He’s been with us all along, since the beginning.
New York, New York
Peace be within your walls,
and security within your towers!
PSALM 122:6
THIS is how it started: We were under the city, moving from one side to another as if nothing had happened above. The hum and screech of metal wheels on metal tracks, the muted hiphop of other people’s headphones, all the sounds that push a soul inside itself, that make the subway an accidental temple underground, they opened our eyes and woke us up on a Sunday morning even as the sway of the car rocked and lulled. The night before, we’d been kept awake by the noise of a city still making sense of disaster. There was a Puerto Rican Pentecostal church two stories below where we were staying in Brooklyn, and for days then weeks after the crash they had preached and sung and screamed every night, gospel jazz beginning at sunset, pounding on through evening until the glow of buildings that were no longer there lit up the horizon. There was an electric piano; there were drums; there were cymbals. There were grandmas quaking and stomping and wailing, and fat little boys sucked from the street into the sanctuary, into a rumble of prayer as constant as the train’s. Next to the church stood a garage that was a nighttime refuge for an armada of ice cream trucks. There was no traffic, but had there been it would have been turned back because the trucks blocked the street, engines idling. Already October, the last days of ice cream, the season was ending badly. Some of the drivers moaned, some cursed, some polished prayer beads. All of them were men, many of them Pakistani, most of them Muslim. Bearded or clean-shaven, all were devout enough to decorate their trucks with the signs and symbols of folk religion: the double-thumbed gold hands of Fatima, and pairs of blue eyes crafted from glass to stare down the always-roaming Evil Eye. The trucks themselves were the most powerful totems of all: Mister Frostee, Mister Freeze, Mister Yum Yum!, decaled bumper to bell with red-white-and-blue bomb pops, glitter-studded green sparkle pops, dreamsicles in strawberry, chocolate, and orange. Their jingle
s never-ending so long as they idled, merry chimes and whistles rang over arguments in Urdu, Pashto, and English. The smoky sky was hurting business, but what could be done? It was not a time for sweet things. More and more ice cream trucks pulled up to join the debate, five, six, nine, each with its own treacly melody, loud enough to be heard in the farthest corners of housing projects, as the holy rolling jazz kept thumping into the night, tinny, surging, relentless.
The door at the far end of the subway car slid open and a man walked through with a plastic bag in one hand, a beat up Starbucks cup in the other. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? I understand after all that’s happening times are tough.” He moved from face to face, holding any eye that would have him. “But the homeless still homeless, so anything you can give would be much appreciated. Thank you, God bless. Thank you, God bless.” Then he began to sing, his voice thin and hard and aggressive, somewhere between supplication and threat. “What…a friend…we have in…Jesus…”
He stopped in front of us mid-song and said something, a mumble lost in the screech of the train pulling into a station. He reached into his plastic bag, digging deep for something he seemed to want to sell or give to us, but we each put a dollar in his cup before we could receive his offering. Then we went back to the surface, scene of the crime.
Manhattan: Even when the smoke cleared, the smell of it was everywhere, like something buried beneath the city, seeping up through the ground. It was a stink bad enough to make you fold up the paper on a Sunday morning, to force you from a good seat at a sidewalk café. Bad enough to make you look around for a place to escape the reek and to push you inside, even if the most convenient place was a church, a quaint little pile of red bricks shaded from the pale white sun by oak trees and surrounded by gardens, a chapel too far from the crater to be roped off by policemen but close enough for a northerly breeze to wrap it in the smell of everything still burning: plastic, concrete, ink, melted rivers of gold bullion, Pentium chips, bits of bone, scraps of leather, gabardine. The street was empty, the church was open. From within, the pipes of an organ promised distraction.