For the Time Being (22 page)

To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.

I S R A E L
      
       It was windy at the Western Wall—the Kotel—in Jerusalem. The wind was all but rending our garments for us, here where the Temple has been in ruins since Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E. A Hasidic Jew held his hat into the wind, and both sides of his long black
kapote
filled like sails.

Like other tolerated tourists, I prayed against and through the stones, forehead and fists to the grit, and stepped away. People have been praying against the wall for centuries, and stuffing written prayers between its stones. An angel, they say, collects these notes in a silk bag and delivers them. I saw one such note blow away. The wind carried a mite of red paper through the crowd and bounced it up the plaza steps. I followed, and caught it on the pavement.

Before I jammed it back in the wall, I opened the red paper. It was a wrapping like an envelope. Inside was a much-folded inch of white paper on which a tender hand had written the prayer

—Que le

garçon, don’t

j’ai rêvé, me

parle.

At the Wall in Jerusalem, Rabbi Abraham Halevi—a holy man of Safad, and a disciple of Luria’s—had a vision. He saw the Shekinah: the glory itself in exile, the presence of God. She revealed herself to him at the Western Wall, “departing from the Holy of Holies with her head disheveled … in great distress.” He fainted. When he woke up, the Shekinah “took his head between her knees and wiped the tears from his eyes.”

Jeremiah had, in his day, a similar vision. Walking toward Jerusalem and weeping just after angels of the Lord had torched the Temple, Jeremiah saw “at the top of a mountain a woman seated, clothed in black, her hair disheveled, crying and pleading for someone to comfort her.” “I am thy Mother Zion,” she told him, “the mother of seven.”

On May 4, 1995, I bought a
New York Times
in Israel and learned that a Hasid girl from Brooklyn was lost in a forest in northern Connecticut.

The missing girl, Suri Feldman, fourteen years old, had disappeared on a school field trip to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts. Teachers and students, 237 in all, had
stopped for a walk in the woods at Bigelow Hollow State Park, in Connecticut near the Massachusetts border. Suri Feldman separated from the group in the woods, and, when the school buses were ready to leave, no one could find her. Police from Connecticut and Massachusetts were searching the pines and laurel breaks. Who are we individuals?

E N C O U N T E R S
      
       Again I walked among others spread in an open landscape, this time on a rounded mountaintop at 12,929 feet. It was from Mount Tabor, back in 1125 B.C.E., that the fighter Barak led Deborah’s troops to swarm down on Sisera, captain of the Canaanites, and his nine hundred chariots of iron. Later three wandering ex-fishermen were standing on Mount Tabor’s peak—or Mount Hermon’s—when they saw light transfigure Jesus, and saw Moses and Elijah talk to him. The Roman general Placidus defeated the Jews at Mount Tabor in 67 C.E. Now I stood on a height and looked over the broad valley to the blue Sea of Galilee. Mount Hermon bulked north of the lake, and Jordan lay across the valley. The wind blew sand. One windswept raven passed tilting. To the west the Carmel range edged the Mediterranean. In every direction I saw hills red and gray, and buckling dry mountains.

Nearby, other people were doing as I was—squinting east
into the wind. We had all climbed most of the bare mountain’s height in cars, and then walked several flights of stone stairs to its peak. I moved to go.

When I started to descend the stairs, a warm hand slid into my hand and grasped it. I turned: An Israeli girl about sixteen years old, a Down’s syndrome girl, was holding my hand. I saw the familiar and endearing eyes, her thin hair, flattish head, her soft and protruding jaw. Worldwide, a Down’s syndrome baby arrives about every 730 births. She met my smile, and her unbound hair blew in the wind; her cheeks glowed. She held my hand in confidence the length of all the stone stairs. Then she let go and rejoined her group. I went on to the black and volcanic Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war and formally annexed in 1981. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.

Every human being sucks the living strength of God from a different place, said Rabbi Pinhas, and together they make up Man. Perhaps as humans deepen and widen their understanding of God, it takes more people to see the whole of him. Or it could be that there is a universal mind for whom we are all stringers.

At all times use whatever means expedient to preserve the power of concentration, as if you were taking care of a baby.
So advised Chan Buddhist master Cijiao of Chengdu, in eleventh-century China.

T H I N K E R
      
       By the time he was fifty, Teilhard said, he had awakened to the size of the earth and its lands. In only his first ten years there, he explored China at walking pace from the Pacific to Afghanistan, and from the Khingan Mountains northeast of Mongolia south to Vietnam. He had returned from the
Croisière Jaune
expedition, worked all spring in Peking, and traveled throughout the fall. It was then, in 1932, three years after he met her, that he began writing letters to the sculptor Lucile Swan with whom he had taken so much tea behind her red courtyard gate.

In his salutations, “Lucile, dear friend” quickly became “Lucile, dear” and then “Dearest.” She remained “Dearest” (sometimes he underlined it) for twenty-three years, until he died. Their published correspondence—hundreds of letters apiece—knocks one out, for of course she loved him, and he loved her. “I am so full of you, Lucile.—How to thank you for what you are for me! … I think that I have crossed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months,—with you…. My dream,” he wrote her, “is to make you gloriously happy.”

She translated his work. She molded for science a fleshed-out
head of Peking man. For her he sounded out his ideas. One idea he returned to quite often was his commitment to his vows. He told her, “I do not belong to myself.” In an essay he wrote, “Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation”—but in right passion, love will be, predictably, spiritual. “Joy and union,” he wrote her, “are in a continuous common discovery. Is that not true, dearest?” He never broke any of his vows. (Both men and women who live under religious vows agree that while communal living irritates them most, obedience is by far the toughest vow, and not, as secular people imagine, chastity. Not a monk, Teilhard never had to endure twenty-four-hour communal living; obedience chafed him sorely; and he confided later that to maintain chastity he had, quite naturally, “been through some difficult passages.”)

Lucile Swan wrote him, “It seems sometimes that I have to accept so
many
things.” In her private journal she wrote, “Friendship is no doubt the highest form of love—and also very difficult.” As the years passed, he lived in Peking but visited France for months on end; he traveled to South America, Burma, India, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Java. They both lived in Peking, for the most part, for twenty-two years after they met, until in 1941 she moved to the United States. Missing him sometimes by a few days, she traveled in those years and in the following fourteen years to France, Rome, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Siam, London, and India. In 1952, when he was
seventy-one years old, he moved to New York City, where she was living and exhibiting. They met frequently. “We still disturb each other,” he wrote her across town. Especially disturbing to her was his new and deep friendship with another woman—another American, a novelist.

Even three years later, after he had survived a heart attack, and after hundreds of their love letters had flown all over the world for decades, after hundreds of reunions and partings, and after hundreds of visits in New York, he wrote her that he hoped that “things” would “gradually settle emotionally.” There was not much “gradually” left, as he died eleven days later. A snapshot of Lucile Swan outdoors in her sixties shows a magnificent beauty. A dog holds one end of a towel in its teeth, she holds the other in her hand; the dog, looking at her face, is clearly waiting for her to do her part right. She lived ten years after Teilhard died.

“What is born between us is for ever: I know it,” he wrote her. One fervently hopes so. One also hopes—at least this one does—that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples, or, better yet, none at all.

The material world for Teilhard dissolves at the edges and grows translucent. The world is a Solutrean blade. It thins to an atom. As a young scientist, he held the usual view that the world is all material; from it spirit cannot derive. Soon he inverted the terms: The world is all spirit, from which matter
cannot derive save through Christ. “Christ spreads through the universe, dissolved at the edges.” This is the sort of idiosyncratic, brilliant lexicon that drives his theology-minded readers mad. Christ is chert, chert is Christ. The world is incandescent. Things are “innumerable prolongations of divine being.” Or, “Things retain their individuality but seem to be lighted from within and made of active, translucent flesh.”

Even the purest metaphysical Taoist thinkers, the Lungman Taoists, say that people “can assist in improving the divine handiwork”—or, as a modern Taoist puts it, people may “follow the Will of the Creator in guiding the world in its evolution towards the ultimate Reality.” Even Meister Eckhart said, “God needs man.” God needs man to disclose him, complete him, and fulfill him, Teilhard said. His friend Abbé Paul Grenet paraphrased his thinking about God: “His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will is done, but it is up to us to accomplish it.” “Little by little,” the paleontologist himself said, “the work is being done.”

E V I L
      
       May 5, 1995: The missing girl was a thin Lubavitcher Hasid; she was wearing a blue plaid shirt, a long
blue skirt, and a windbreaker. A few months earlier, a twelve-year-old named Holly Piirainen disappeared in the same forest, and searchers had eventually found her murdered body.