For the Time Being Part 5

Time had stuffed Peking man, and all his pomps and works, down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian. Fossils crammed the red fissure. The team called the skull's first owner Peking man. His species was h.o.m.o erectus.

The team originally found the Zhoukoudian cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many old folk in China drink suspended fossil-bone powders as elixirs-so-called dragon's teeth; consequently, paleontologists for two generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, "Where did these bones come from?" Shopping for fossils, a specialist recognized an ancient human tooth. His inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian-Dragon Bone Hill.

Teilhard hauled his camp cot from Peking, lived with Chinese villagers, and directed the dig. Over the years he sorted and eventually named the fissures' animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas, and "a large and a small bear." Ultimately, and spectacularly, he was able to date Peking man in the Pleistocene. He established the date by many methods, one of which was interesting: Among the bits of debris under, around, and above various layers of Peking man's bones and tools were skulls, whole or in fragments, of mole rats. He undertook his own study of the mole rats' evolving skulls, dated them, and so helped confirm Peking man's dates.

The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major life's work.

During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office-the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic (and Anglican and Episcopal) church. A British historian who knew him described his "kindly and ironic grace," his "sharp and yet benevolent refinement."

In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for the discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty and exasperation: "Heads," he said, "practically nothing but heads." Paleontologists from all over the world are again-seventy years later, after several decades' chaos halted the work-finding hominid bones, and choppers and stone flakes, in the Zhoukoudian caves.

Peking man and his people walked upright: with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. That land was jungly then. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers, and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes and the Florida peninsula lifted from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed in North America. They lived before two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, as well as the British Isles, northern Germany, and the northern United States: they lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is extinct, like the Neanderthals'.

Most paleontologists believe that we-we humans in the form of h.o.m.o erectus-left Africa ninety thousand years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley's end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent, much older erectus finds in Java, China, and the Republic of Georgia seem to show, however, that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier-unless humans arose in Asia. The new ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect would be accustomed to this sort of thing by now-this repeated knocking out the back wall, this eerie old light on the peopled landscape.

Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then seriatim into China, j.a.pan, and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. There, on a rock shelter, we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. People-including erectus-plied Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.

"However far back we look into the past," Teilhard said, "we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam."

During the violence and famine the j.a.panese invasion of China caused, that first Peking man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized and drank it. There is a plaster cast of this skull, as there is of every bit of bone and tooth-forty people's remains-that the team found by working the site for all those years. The plaster casts proved handy, since every single one of the Peking man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in World War II. Scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine doctor, who tried to carry them back as luggage. The j.a.panese caught him. Before he went to prison he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. He left prison four years later, when the war ended; the crates had disappeared. Recent searches draw blanks.

The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking man. And of Christianity he said, "We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out."

C H I N A When Emperor Qin was thirty-one years old, a rival prince sent him an envoy bearing routine regal gifts: a severed head and a map. The envoy also bore a poisoned dagger in his sleeve. The comedy played itself out: When the a.s.sa.s.sin grabbed the emperor's sleeve and drew the dagger, the sleeve tore off. The emperor found his dress sword too long to draw. He dashed behind a pillar. His courtiers gaped. The court doctor beaned the a.s.sailant with a medicine bag. The emperor ran around and around the pillar. Someone yelled to the emperor that he could draw his sword if he tilted its length behind him. He tried that, and it worked; he slashed the a.s.sa.s.sin's thigh. The a.s.sa.s.sin threw his dagger; it hit the pillar. The emperor and his courtiers finished him off.

Seven years later, someone tried to kill the emperor with a lead-filled harp. The next year someone tried to ambush his carriage; the hapless a.s.sa.s.sin attacked the wrong carriage.

Emperor Qin was almost forty by then, and getting nervous. Surely power and wealth could secure immortality? At that time, intelligence held that immortality, while elusive like a treasure or a bird, could enter some people's hands if they sought it mightily and used all means. The emperor sacrificed to mountains and rivers; he walked beaches, looking for immortals. He sent scholars to search for a famous Taoist master who had foiled death by eating a flower. No one could find him.

Taoist monks, then and now, run medical laboratories. The emperor ordered the monks to brew a batch of immortality elixir, under pain of death. Consequently, they took those pains. Again, it was common knowledge that immortal people lived on three Pacific islands, where they drank a concoction that proofed their bodies against time. The emperor sent a fleet of ships to find the islands and fetch the philter. Many months later, the expedition's captain returned. He knew he faced death for failing. He told the emperor he had actually met an immortal, who, alas, would not release the philter without the gift of many young people and craftsmen. The emperor complied. Away sailed the same canny captain with many ships bearing three thousand skilled and comely young people. They never returned. A widely known Chinese legend claims they colonized j.a.pan.

Foiled, the emperor concluded that a court enemy must be jinxing his immortality project. He purged the court and concealed his movements. He owned 270 palaces; now he built secret tunnels, routes, and walkways among them; he crept about under heavy guard. He killed informers and all their families. Once, a meteorite fell in a far-flung area of his empire. A local wag whose sense of occasion was poor wrote on the meteorite the witty taunt, "After Qin Shih-huang-ti's death the land will be divided." Emperor Qin easily pounded the stone to powder; it took longer to kill all that region's inhabitants.

He had already spared some thought for death's big blank by the time he was thirteen. It was then that he drafted seven hundred thousand men to start building his mausoleum, an underground palace he hoped to illuminate like the colorful earth above, using long-burning whale-oil lamps. Workers dug through three underground streams and carved a wide vault, in which they formed and painted a miniature world. On the ceiling above the emperor's ready copper coffin, they painted the heavens and set constellations. The Milky Way, the source of the Yellow River, they daubed in dots. From the stars the Yellow River fell. Quicksilver in rivulets mimicked the Yellow and all the realm's great rivers; the liquid actually flowed, mechanically, and emptied into a model of the gleaming ocean. Artists built palaces and towers to scale. They rigged automatic crossbows to shoot grave robbers. They pasted jewels over everything.

Many years later, Emperor Qin died. During his funeral, while his pallbearers threaded the maze of the tomb to the hidden sepulchre, soldiers outside sealed the great jade door. They buried the pallbearers alive because they alone (who had possibly lost a civil service lottery) knew a way into the tomb's depths. They heaped dirt over the whole mausoleum, jade door and all. Then they planted a gra.s.sy orchard so the tumulus looked like a hill.

You do not find the dead emperor of China something of a clown, do you, because he liked it here and wanted to stay? Because he loved, say, the loam but did not care to join it?

The dying generations, Yeats called the human array, the very large array. We turn faster than disks on a harrow, than blades on a reaper. Time: You can't chock the wheels. We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the people is gra.s.s. We lay us out in rows; hay rakes gather us in. Chinese peasants sow and reap over the emperor's tomb-generations of them, those Chinese peasants! I saw them, far away. The plow turns under the Chinese peasants where they stand in the field like stalks. Any traveler to any land remarks it: They live like that endlessly, over there. Generation after generation of them lives and dies, over there.

Digging last week in the backyard of our house-in the fresh gra.s.s at the cutting edge of the present in a changed wind, under that morning's clouds-a worker and I surprised two toy soldiers eight feet down.

The early Amish in this country used to roll their community's dead bodies in wraps of sod before they buried them. We are food, like rolled sandwiches, for the Greek G.o.d Chronos, time, who eats his children.

Albert Goldbarth: "Let the Earth stir her dead."

The Scotch-Irish in the Appalachians once buried their dead with a platter of salt on their stomachs, signifying the soul's immortality. A rich and long-gone people, I read once, buried their dead after lifting their tongues and dropping jewels into the hollows. The reason for this is unknown.

Mao Tse-tung took novocaine injections to prolong life and virility. His wife, the notorious Jiang Qing, similarly took blood transfusions from-according to Mao's doctor-"healthy young soldiers." Like Emperor Qin, Mao believed that the best immortality elixir was the secretion of women's bodies. The more he dipped into this wellspring, the longer he would live, so he dipped.

As his fears grew, Mao kept moving-within his secret palace and all over the country. When he hopped a train, all traffic on that line halted; his pa.s.sage fouled rail schedules for a week. Soldiers cleared all the stations, and security guards dressed up to pose as vendors. When Mao slept, the train stopped. He was addicted to barbiturates. He thought someone poisoned one of his swimming pools. He thought someone else poisoned a Nanchang guesthouse where he stayed.

"Jade water," the Aztecs called human blood. They fed it-hundreds of living sacrifices a day-to the sun. This, the only nourishment the sun G.o.d would take, helped him battle the stars. Daily, blood worked its magic: Daily, morning overcame night. The Aztecs likely knew, as the old Chinese knew, the unrelated oddity that dissolving bodies stain jade; jade absorbs bodies' fluids in rusty, b.l.o.o.d.y-looking spots.

On the day of the dead, according to Ovid, the Romans sacrificed to a G.o.ddess who was mute: Tacitas. She was a fish with its mouth sewn shut.

C L O U D S One day in January, 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, men and women in Athens saw from the base of the Acropolis an "immense structure of c.u.mulus cloud rising out of the Peloponnese." To the east lay "an undercloud, floating like a detached lining." Does it matter to you, or to the world of time, which of the two you feel yourself to resemble, the "immense structure" or the "undercloud"?

"The world is G.o.d's body," Teilhard said. "G.o.d draws it ever upwards."

How to live? "The only worthwhile joy," Teilhard wrote in one of his thoughtful, outrageous p.r.o.nouncements, is "to release some infinitesimal quant.i.ty of the absolute, to free one fragment of being, forever." Living well is "cooperating as one individual atom in the final establishment of a world: and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me." Is either-releasing a bit of the absolute, or cooperating to establish a world-preferable, or enough, or too much?

On the northeastern coast of Trinidad, during an afternoon in the 1950s, Archie Carr, the green-turtle biologist, lay in a hammock and watched "little round wind clouds" over the Caribbean Sea and "towering pearly land clouds" over Tobago.

N U M B E R S Another dated wave: In northeast j.a.pan, a seismic sea wave killed 27,000 people on June 15, 1896. Do not fail to distinguish this infamous day from April 30, 1991, when typhoon waves drowned 138,000 Bangladeshi.

On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people-likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus-walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago-before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three's steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. "A remote ancestor," Leakey said, "experienced a moment of doubt." Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.

After archaeologists studied this long strip of ground for several years, they buried it to save it. Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again.

After these three hominids walked in the rain, an interval of decades, centuries, thousands of years, and millions of years pa.s.sed before Peking man and other erectus people lived on earth. That stretch of time lasted eight times longer than the few hundred thousand years between Peking man's time and ours. Exactly halfway into the interval (1.8 million years ago), recent and controversial dating puts h.o.m.o erectus in Java.

Jeremiah, walking toward Jerusalem, saw the smoke from the Temple's blaze. He wept; he saw the blood of the slain. "He put his face close to the ground and saw the footprints of sucklings and infants who were walking into captivity" in Babylon. He kissed the footprints.

Who were these individuals? Who were the three who walked together and left footprints in the rain? Who was the gilled baby-the one with the waggly tail? Who was the Baal Shem Tov, who taught, danced, and dug clay? He survived among the children of exiles whose footprints on the bare earth Jeremiah kissed. Centuries later, Emperor Hadrian destroyed another such son of exile, Rabbi Akiva, in Rome. Russian Christians and European Christians alike tried to wipe all those survivors of children of exile from the ground of the earth as a man wipes a plate-survivors of exiles whose footprints on the ground we might well kiss, and whose feet.

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others. A newborn slept in a sh.e.l.l of aluminum foil; a Dutchman watched a crab in the desert; a punch-drunk airport skycap joined me for a cigarette. And you? To what end were we billions of oddb.a.l.l.s born?

Which of all these people are still alive? You are alive; that is certain. We living men and women address one another confident that we share membership in the same elite minority club and cohort, the now-living. As I write this I am still alive, but of course I might well have died before you read it. The Dutch traveler has likely not yet died his death, nor the porter. The baked-potato baby is probably not yet pushing up daisies. The one you love?

The Chinese soldiers who breathed air posing for their seven thousand individual clay portraits must have thought it a wonderful difference, that workers buried only their simulacra then, so their sons could bury their flesh a bit later. One wonders what they did in the months or years they gained. One wonders what one is, oneself, up to these days.

Was it wisdom Mao Tse-tung attained when-like Ted Bundy, who defended himself by pointing out that there are "so many people"-he awakened to the long view?

"China has many people," Mao told Nehru in 1954. "The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of.... The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of." A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: He boasted that he was "willing to lose 300 million people"-then, in 1957, half of China's population.

An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: "Either life is always and in all circ.u.mstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account: it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other."

I S R A E L In St. Anne's Basilica in Jerusalem, the plain stones magnified hymns in every tongue, all day, every day. Four people faltering at song sounded like choirs of all the dead souls on earth exalted.

Often in a church I have thought that while there is scant hope for me, I can ask G.o.d to strengthen the holiness of all these good people here-that man, that woman, that child ... and I do so. In St. Anne's Basilica it struck me in the middle of a white-robed priest's French service that possibly everybody in that stone chamber, and possibly everybody in every other house of prayer on earth, thinks this way. What if we are all praying for one another in the hope that the others are holy, when we are not? Of course this must be the case. Then-again possibly-surely it adds up to something or other?

E N C O U N T E R S In Cana lived a Palestinian merchant who gave wine to all comers. "Wine for everyone," he cried into the street. "On the house." He wore an open jacket and a blue shirt b.u.t.toned to the top. He brandished a silver tray full of tiny winegla.s.ses. My friends would not enter his shop. They thought it was a trick. It was a trick: Put a man through life for sixty years and he is generous to strangers. I took a gla.s.s of red wine from the silver tray and drank it down. In my ordinary life, I don't drink wine. Fine: This man was supposed to be selling souvenirs to tourists, which he was not doing, either. We ignored his merchandise. Leaning in his open doorway, we talked; we traded cigarettes and smoked.

Across the steep street we saw the church at Cana, built where John's gospel says Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. Then, in the late 1990s, he was one of 130,000 Palestinian Christians in the Galilee. Those I met were a highly educated bunch. Now almost all have fled into exile.

The shopkeeper had no beard; white strands lighted the black hair at his temples. He was content to look me in the eye and converse about the world-a trait one finds among the world's most sophisticated people, like this shopkeeper, and also among the world's most unsophisticated people. Tribal Yemenis reaping barley in their high mountain villages understand faces too, and caboclo men and women killing chickens in the Ecuadoran Oriente along the Rio Napo, Nicaraguans fishing over the Costa Rican border, Inuit shooting geese at the edge of the Bering Sea, and Marquesas Islanders eating breadfruit in the Pacific. People whose parents were perhaps illiterate read strangers' eyes-you can watch them read yours-and learn what they need to know. It does not take long. They understand that grand coincidence brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering generation of human life on this durable planet-common language or not, sale or no sale-and therefore to mark the occasion we might as well have a little cigarette.

They settle in comfortably to talk, despite any outlandish appearance. This happens among people who have never clapped eyes on a tall woman, or a bareheaded woman, or a barefaced woman, or a pale-haired woman, or a woman wearing pants, or a woman walking alone; these wise men and women discard all that in a glance, and go for the eyes.

A Roman Catholic priest pa.s.sed, and the shopkeeper called out, "Come sta?" They conversed in Italian. Why Italian? I asked later. "Oh, we all speak many languages here. Actually, that priest is from Holland."

Do you think I don't know cigarettes are fatal?

T H I N K E R The paleontologist Teilhard, according to his biographer Robert Speaight, "was not very much bothered by 'who moved the stone.'"

"We are Christians," he wrote deadpan in a 1936 letter, "in a somewhat renovated manner." A modern abbot, Abbe Paul Grenet, quoted this in a 1965 biography-Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur-which describes Teilhard as always faithful to his calling and to the Order of Jesuits.

In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil, that connoisseur of affliction, lists four "evidences of divine mercy here below": The experience of G.o.d is one; the radiance and compa.s.sion of some who know G.o.d are another; the beauty of the world makes a third. "The fourth evidence"-nice and dry, this-"is the complete absence of mercy here below." This introduction of startling last-minute evidence requires two takes from the reader and one footnote from the writer: "NOTE: It is precisely in this ant.i.thesis, this rending of our souls, between the effects of grace within us and the beauty of the world around us, on the one hand, and the implacable necessity which rules the universe on the other, that we discern G.o.d as both present to man and as absolutely beyond all human measurement."

Life's cruelty joins the world's beauty and our sense of G.o.d's presence to demonstrate who we're dealing with, if dealing we are: G.o.d immanent and transcendent, G.o.d discernible but unknowable, G.o.d beside us and wholly alien. How this proves his mercy I don't understand.

Some writers have given describing Being a shot. Hisham ibn Hakim, a Muslim theologian of a minority school, wrote: "Allah has a body, defined, broad, high and long, of equal dimensions, radiating with light... in a place beyond place, like a bar of pure metal."

What does indestructible "Buddha-nature" look like? "Like the orb of the sun, its body luminous, round and full, vasty and boundless." So said seventh-century Chan master Hongren, in his Treatise on the Supreme Vehicle. (He added, as if Platonically, that it resides in the bodies of all beings, "but because it is covered by the dark clouds of the five cl.u.s.ters, it cannot shine, like a lamp inside a pitcher.") Hegel wrote a letter to Goethe in which he referred to the "oyster-like, gray, or quite black Absolute."

E V I L Who is dead? The Newtonian G.o.d, some call that tasking and antiquated figure who haunts children and repels strays, who sits on the throne of judgment frowning and figuring, and who with the strength of his arm dishes out human fates, in the form of cancer or cash, to 5.9 billion people-to teach, dazzle, rebuke, or try us, one by one, and to punish or reward us, day by day, for our thoughts, words, and deeds.

"The great Neolithic proprietor," the paleontologist called him, the G.o.d of the old cosmos, who was not yet known as the soul of the world but as its mage. History, then, was a fix.

And G.o.d was a Lego lord. People once held a "Deuteronomic" idea of G.o.d, says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. G.o.d intervened in human affairs "without human agency." (In Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, one character wonderfully accuses another of replacing "the G.o.d of the Dominicans, who was a butcher, with the G.o.d of the Romantics, who is an upholsterer.") The first theological task, Paul Tillich said fifty years ago, by which time it was already commonplace, is to remove absurdities in interpretation.

It is an old idea, that G.o.d is not omnipotent. Seven centuries have pa.s.sed since Aquinas wrote that G.o.d has power to effect only what is in the nature of things. Leibniz also implied it; working within the "possible world" limits G.o.d's doings. Now the notion of G.o.d the Semipotent has trickled down to the theologian in the street. The paleontologist in his day called the belief that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent G.o.d "fatal," remember, and indicated only one escape: to recognize that if G.o.d allows us both to suffer and to sin, it is "because he cannot here and now cure us and show himself to us"-because we ourselves have not yet evolved enough. Paul Tillich said in the 1940s that "omnipotence" symbolizes Being's power to overcome finitude and anxiety in the long run, while never being able to eliminate them. (Some theologians-Whitehead's school-rescue the old deductive idea of G.o.d by a.s.serting that G.o.d possesses all good qualities to an absolute degree, therefore he must be absolutely sensitive, and so absolutely vulnerable. They could not have known then that this made G.o.d sound like a sensitive new-age guy. At any rate, subjecting our partial knowledge of G.o.d to the rigors of philosophical inquiry is, I think, an absurd, if well-meaning, exercise.) G.o.d is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or ch.o.r.eographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. G.o.d is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men-or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome-than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which G.o.d might be responsible are what insurers call "acts of G.o.d."

Then what, if anything, does he do? If G.o.d does not cause everything that happens, does G.o.d cause anything that happens? Is G.o.d completely out of the loop?

Sometimes G.o.d moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. G.o.d is, oddly, personal; this G.o.d knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. "Later on," a Hasid master said, you don't see these things anymore." (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn-for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable-to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor.) Mostly, G.o.d is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that G.o.d's hands are tied. To create, G.o.d did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he intervenes only "under certain conditions."

Does G.o.d stick a finger in, if only now and then? Does G.o.d budge, nudge, hear, twitch, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is praying eudaemonistically-praying for things and events, for rain and healing-delusional? Physicians agree that prayer for healing can work what they routinely call miracles, but of course the mechanism could be autosuggestion. Paul Tillich devoted only two paragraphs in his three-volume systematic theology to prayer. Those two startling paragraphs suggest, without describing, another mechanism. To entreat and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. G.o.d partic.i.p.ates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to G.o.d; that willing surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which G.o.d can use. Since G.o.d works in and through existing conditions, I take this to mean that when the situation is close, when your friend might die or might live, then your prayer's surrender can add enough power-mechanism unknown-to tilt the balance. Though it won't still earthquakes or halt troops, it might quiet cancer or quell pneumonia. For Tillich, G.o.d's activity is by no means interference, but instead divine creativity-the ongoing creation of life with all its greatness and danger. I don't know. I don't know beans about G.o.d.

Nature works out its complexities. G.o.d suffers the world's necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed.

N O W "Spiritual path" is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape: they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it awhile, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life's fine, impossible goal justifies the term "spiritual." Nothing, however, can justify the term "path" for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage-except one thing: They don't quit. They stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in front of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark.

The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling: constellations shift without anyone's gaining ground. They are presenting themselves to the unseen gaze of emptiness. Why do they want to do this? They hope to learn how to be useful.

Their feet catch in nets: they untangle them when they notice, and keep moving. They hope to learn where they came from. "The soul teaches incessantly," said Rabbi Pinhas, "but it never repeats." Decade after decade they see no progress. But they do notice, if they look, that they have left doubt behind. Decades ago, they left behind doubt about this or that doctrine, abandoning the issues as unimportant. Now, I mean, they have left behind the early doubt that this f.e.c.kless prospecting in the dark for the unseen is a reasonable way to pa.s.s one's life.

"Plunge into matter," Teilhard said-and at another time, "Plunge into G.o.d." And he said this fine thing: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine a.s.sails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."

Here is how adept people conduct themselves, according to Son Master Chinul: "In everything they are like empty boats riding the waves ... buoyantly going along with nature today, going along with nature buoyantly tomorrow." Was he describing people now extinct?

"Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself-even to make of oneself a righteous person." Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the n.a.z.is hanged him for resisting n.a.z.ism and plotting to a.s.sa.s.sinate Hitler.

"I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath," said Teilhard, who by no means stopped for breath. But what distinguishes living "completely in the world" (Bonhoeffer) or throwing oneself "into the thick of human endeavor" (Teilhard), as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker's life, a shoe salesman's life, a mechanic's, a writer's, a farmer's? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hoboes, nuns, and monks. Were these two men especially dense, that they spent years learning what every kid already knows, that life here is all there is? Authorities in Rome or the Gestapo forbade them each to teach (as secular Rome had forbidden Rabbi Akiva to teach). One of them in his density went to prison and died on a scaffold. The other in his density kept his vows despite Rome's stubborn ignorance and righteous cruelty and despite the importunings of a woman he loved. No.

We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious-the people, events, and things of the day-to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels an individual soul to undertake to divinize, transform, and complete the world, to-as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter and spirit-"subject a little more matter to spirit," to "lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned," to "establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence," to "work for the redemption of the world," to "extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost," to "help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of creation in which we are living," to "mend the shattered unity of the divine worlds," to "force the gates of the spirit, and cry, 'Let me come by.'"

When one of his Hasids complained of G.o.d's hiddenness, Rabbi Pinhas said, "It ceases to be a hiding, if you know it is hiding." But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circ.u.mstance, for anyone.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

B I R T H Our lives come free; they're on the house to all comers, like the shopkeeper's wine. G.o.d decants the universe of time in a stream, and our best hope is, by our own awareness, to step into the stream and serve, empty as flumes, to keep it moving.

The birds were mating all over Galilee. I saw swifts mate in midair. At Kibbutz Lavi, in the wide-open hills above the Sea of Galilee, three hundred feet above me under the sky, the two swifts flew together in swoops, falling and catching. These alpine swifts were large, white below. How do birds mate in midair? They start high. Their beating wings tilt them awkwardly sometimes and part those tiny places where they join; often one of the pair stops flying and they lose alt.i.tude. They separate, rest in a tree for a minute, and fly again. Alone they rise fast, tensely, until you see only motes that chase, meet-you, there, here, out of all this air!-and spiral down; breaks your heart. At dusk, I learned later, they climb so high that at night they actually sleep in the air.

Birds mated in dust, on fences and roads, on limbs of trees. Many of these birds migrated from Africa; like humans, they fed their pa.s.sage north by following the fertile Rift Valley. I saw a huge-headed hoopoe fly from a eucalyptus to flounce on a fence. Excited, it flashed and dropped its crest over and over, as a child might fiddle with a folding fan. Another hoopoe flitted in a chaste tree nearby. They looked bizarre: pinkish, with striking black-and-white wings and tails, their heads heavy with ornament. Leviticus 11:19 forbids Israel to eat hoopoes, along with storks, herons, and bats.

Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chern.o.byl: "All being itself is derived from G.o.d and the presence of the Creator is in each created thing." This double notion is pan-entheism-a word to which I add a hyphen to emphasize its difference from pantheism. Pan-entheism, according to David Tracy, theologian at the University of Chicago, is the private view of most Christian intellectuals today. Not only is G.o.d immanent in everything, as plain pantheists hold, but more profoundly everything is simultaneously in G.o.d, within G.o.d the transcendent. There is a divine, not just bushes.

I saw doves mate on sand. It was early morning. The male dove trod the female on a hilltop path. Beyond them in blue haze lay the Sea of Galilee, and to the north Mount Meron and the town of Safad traversing the mountain Jebel Kan'an. Other doves were calling from nearby snags. To writer Florida Scott Maxwell, doves say, "Too true, dear love, too true." But to poet Margaret Gibson, doves in Mexico say, "No hope, no hope." An observant Jew recites a grateful prayer at seeing landscape-mountains, hills, seas, rivers, and deserts, which are, one would have thought, pretty much unavoidable sights. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our G.o.d, King of the Universe, THE MAKER OF ALL CREATION." One utters this blessing also at meeting the sea again-at seeing the Mediterranean Sea, say, after an interval of thirty days.

Later, in an afternoon drizzle, I watched snails mate on a wet stone under leaves. During the first hour the male knocked the female's soft head with his, over and over. Some snails have a p.e.n.i.s on the right side of the head. Her two tentacles recoiled. To b.u.mp heads, he had sprawled from his sh.e.l.l and encircled her. At first she, too, extended herself a bit, leaning his way, and on impact they looked as if they were kissing. Over the course of the second hour she withdrew her head completely, but not her foot, and he seemed to be sticking his head inside her sh.e.l.l as if to inquire if she still wanted to knock heads. I quit watching. All the religions of Abraham deny that the world, the colorful array that surrounds and grips us, is illusion, even though from time to time anyone may see the vivid veil part. But no one can deny that G.o.d per se is wholly invisible, or deny that his voice is very still, very small, or explain why.

That night there was a full moon. I saw it rise over a caperbush, a still grove of terebinths, and a myrtle. According to the Talmud, when a person is afraid to walk at night, a burning torch is worth two companions, and a full moon is worth three. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our G.o.d, creator of the universe, who brings on evening; whose power and might fill the world; who did a miracle for me in this place; WHO HAS KEPT US IN LIFE AND BROUGHT US TO THIS TIME.

The next morning, it was tiger swallowtails. He carried her around in the air. Her wings folded and joined over her back. Flying for two, he nevertheless moved not a bit awkwardly. He lighted on a sunny spot on a spruce branch seven feet up. His abdomen bent sharply to clasp hers.

Lively spot, that kibbutz. Sun split the ground and rain cracked the buds. Wild mustard sprang from fields with speedwell and hard-eyed daisies; bees fumbled in mallows at ditches. Checking on the snails, I found under the soil a wet batch of eggs that looked like silver. Some snails bear live young: fully formed, extremely small snails. How many of these offspring-hoopoes, doves, snails, and swallowtails-would develop normally? It is a percentage in the high nineties, normality is. Of course, most offspring get eaten right quick.

S A N D During the Roman a.s.sault on Syracuse, Archimedes, oblivious to the tumult around him, traced parabolas in the sand. When a soldier found him and tried to drag him to the Roman general, Archimedes said, "Pray, do not disturb my circles." And he told the soldier, "Wait until I finish my proof." Unwilling to wait, evidently, the soldier killed him on the spot.

Near the end of Jesus' life, legal scholars brought to him a woman caught in adultery: they stood her before him as he taught by the Temple. The law required stoning her to death. What did he say to this?

But Jesus stooped down and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

When they continued asking him, he lifted himself up, and said to them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

Then they left, possibly convicted by their consciences, starting with the eldest and ending with the youngest. "And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus lifted up himself, he saw none but the woman." He sent her on her way.

I saw a barefoot woman drawing a bare tree: she wore a blue scarf and drew in sand with a eucalyptus branch. I saw a Palestinian child duck behind his camel's legs and pee his name in the sand. (Arabic script lends itself, at least comparatively, to this feat.) Under the camel a runnel moved over the dust like an adder. Later, the child, whose name was Esau, asked me for a cigarette and, failing that, for my lighter. What would he do with a lighter? He would make coffee. He liked coffee? "Yes," Esau said. "I am Bedu boy!"

One of the best stories of the early Christian desert hermits goes like this: "Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence: and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: Now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?"

C H I N A Early spring, 1930: Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard garden of his new friend, an American woman, Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed on a bamboo chair at a rattan table, laughing and talking. We have a snapshot. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way: she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants: it was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.