The Way of the Wolf

I would regularly make office appointments to confer with the priest at our church and to wrestle with the various theological questions that weighed heavily on me as an eight-year-old:

Why does God let us make wars against other countries if war is bad?

Why doesn’t anyone take care of poor people even though Jesus tells them to?

Is the Exorcist real?

If prejudice is bad why are there no Black people at our church?

Does God love the Devil? Is he going to forgive him one day?

What about bad men like Nixon and Hitler?

I tend to organize my memories by the books that my moral and religious development was centered on at the time.

Books that I read so closely that it was as if I was uncovering a secret code that had been imprinted in my own heart. The books that parented me when no one else did. The books that gave me a crystalline sentence or two to hang on to, to organize myself around, that released something in me that had felt flat and constricted before. The books that I chewed, swallowed, and digested. The books that spoke my mind for me.

There have been many over the years. Books of poetry and theory, books on psychoanalysis, books of philosophy, scriptures, and sutras and fairy tales, memoirs, some fiction here and there.  

Many of them, too many probably, by old white men (I have my Daddy issues after all.) I pieced myself together with these texts, found myself reflected, uncovered something clear and true inside myself no matter how broken or messy the authors were. I was surround by broken and messy adults, and I was used to panning through the muck to find small specks of gold.

This is the story of how I met one such book, the first one really, that I experienced this strange psycho-spiritual intimacy with, that I took all the way into my core. A simple book, written for grown-ups, that was placed in my hands when I was eight or nine. The first book I encountered that identified and undermined the norms and hypocrisies that surrounded me, that slapped the faulty premises my family and community ascribed to right out of my hands and taught me that a sentence had the power to free me from a world that felt stifling, deceitful, and dead.

What struck a nine-year-old as earth-shattering and profound in 1973 may not hold up to a close reading a half a century later, but when I was in the thick of cancer treatment, I had a yearning to reach back toward this book that I had never forgotten, but hadn’t seen since childhood. It was still in print – it had been an “inspirational” best seller in its era, and I have since re-read it a time or two. Some of it is bound by its time and context but more of it than you might expect, still holds up, at least for me.

And stranger still, to crack open a book fifty years later and to realize how deeply it sunk into my core. To read a paragraph and to say to myself: "Oh, that’s where I got that from!”  To recognize its rhythms and cadences in my own writing, and to understand that seeds planted so long ago in a child’s psyche eventually grew into mature values.

My first encounter with the book wasn’t a book at all, but a vinyl record album of spoken word and storytelling brought to the house one winter's night by the priest (who would in a few years’ time become my defrocked stepfather) to play on the stereo for my parents.  After he blew on the needle and started the turntable, Father reached in his bag and gave me a copy of the book that went with the album.  The stories were written and read by an Episcopalian priest who was also a private investigator- and had a pulpit while he also ran a free private investigation agency for people who could not afford to hire an investigator.  A priest and a private eye like the shows my parents watched on TV? Taking photos of affairs, finding murderers, missing people, and a priest? How could you be both? How could you be a man that looked at scary and dangerous things, that carried a gun and be a priest?

Some parts of the book, Father said, might be a little grown up for me, but he said it talked about some of the same questions that I worried about, but in a different way - and that if a part was too hard to understand, I could listen to the record and maybe that would help it make more sense to me. The book was called The Way of the Wolf, and the priest/private eye was named Martin Bell.

I thanked him and ran straight to my room with the book, while Father sat with Mom and Dad and Mom’s best friend Ann (who would in a few years’ time become my stepmother) and listened to the record in the family room and drank wine. The first story wasn’t hard, it was written for little kids, and I was in the third grade reading at an eleventh-grade level my teachers said. It was hard to find books that weren’t about grownups doing boring things, or baby books that were too easy.  My favorite books were C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra and Narnia books, all the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, any of Madeline L’Engle’s books and a couple of others.  I’d read them all repeatedly.

“Once upon a time in a large forest there lived a very furry bunny..." The first story in this book just a kid’s story about a bunny, who sees a great silver wolf, “with terrible eyes” sort of scary and kind at the same time - like Aslan in the Narnia books but much more distant - that no other animals in the forest can see. And the bunny died in a blizzard on Christmas Eve while protecting a baby field mouse who got lost in the snow. He kept the mouse warm with his body - and everyone was so happy the babies were saved, they forgot about the bunny. Except for the silver wolf, who comes and stands by the bunny’s frozen body.

It didn’t seem like a hard book to me: Barrington Bunny was supposed to be like Jesus who died for other people. And the wolf was God the Father I guessed. And the animals who made fun of Barrington and left his body in the snow were like people who had forgotten God’s sacrifice. I thought it seemed kind of stupid and didn’t have anything to do with the questions I was thinking about.  I had been excited for a hard, interesting grown-up book, and maybe even a book that felt “just right.” I guessed the rest of the stories were children’s stories just as disappointing and that Father had underestimated me like most grown-ups.  I went back downstairs planning to thank Father again - and pretend that it was interesting.

When I walked into the family room - the bunny story was just finishing on the record player. Father was already standing near the stereo ready to lift the needle.  I heard the author Martin Bell’s voice, trying to sound a little spooky and sad reading the last words of the story:

But the wolf did come.

And he stood there.

Without moving or saying a word.

All Christmas Day.

Until it was night.

And then he disappeared into the forest.

Ann and Mom and Father were drinking wine, and Ann and mom were crying.  Ann was wiping at her eyes and trying to reapply a false eyelash that had come loose. Mom’s eyes were all wet and her nose was red, but she was pretending she wasn’t crying. This all seemed ridiculous and disturbing to me. The Christ story was so much more upsetting and terrifying and heart breaking than this dumb bunny parable. We heard that every week in church. That story was vast and mysterious and strange and confusing and excruciating. But this silly story had somehow made them cry? I teased my mom: “Are you really crying Mom? About a bunny?”

“Oh, stop” she said wiping her face with her arm.

I could see that Father was pleased it had worked on them. “I thought you might like the next one Martha.”

It wasn’t a story. It was Martin Bell talking about lots of different things that somehow all still fit together. He talked about the chosen-ness and the brokenness of the people of Israel and also all other people in the world who had been persecuted.

Enslaved by the Egyptians.

Crushed by the Assyrians

Broken by the Babylonians

Desecrated by the Greeks

Tyrannized by the Romans

Exterminated by the Germans

The chosen people of God.

The elect.

Next Martin Bell talked about a baby born on a downtown sidewalk, while a mother screamed for help, while no one responded and everyone walked past her, and an unnoticed star appeared in the sky over Oklahoma City.

He told a story, in a serious and somber tone, about an astronaut that sees the face of God and the astronaut comes back to earth and everyone asks what God looks like, and the astronaut said: “God?...  She’s black.”  I’d heard my Dad and his friends tell this story as a joke, but the way Martin Bell told it, it was no joke, and I could hear that the way my dad and other men told it was sinful. God was absolutely manifest in the face of a black woman, even especially.  God was present wherever there is suffering, wherever there is oppression.  God comes to the persecuted first.

My mother and Ann began to gather up plates and carry them off to the kitchen, while my Dad, looking a little annoyed, stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray.  I saw Father give a small knowing nod and I took note of his pleasure at my dad’s discomfort. He’d hoped for this.

As for me, there was something about this story - or was it a sermon -  that made my heart pound and the sky open wide and the universe turn itself upside down in a good way.

And then God manifested himself– revealed himself

As an outlaw.

A fugitive from justice.

He was masked.

No one. No one!

Knew who he was.

My dad stood up slowly with hands on the coffee table to protect his damaged back and waddled his duck-footed walk off to the kitchen to grab another Coke.  Father and I sat and listened. He sat sideways on the orange couch, his arm draped around the back. I sat to the side, on a big floor pillow, with my back against the built-in stereo speaker. I could fell Martin Bell’s voice vibrating up and down my spine.

And these are the signs by which you will recognize him…

He will not look like God.

He will be masked.

There will be no room for him in the world.

“You like it? Do you see…” Father whispered to me during a pause. I nodded, listening intently, not wanting to miss a word.

Only very wise men and children will ever recognize him.

And he is here today. Because

You

Are the Christ.

The chosen one.

The broken one.

The one who is ripped apart and torn into

      shreds

      and scattered

      and dispersed

      and despised

      and chained….

This made more sense to me than anything I had ever heard or read about God, than anything I had heard in Sunday school. I didn’t know why it made sense to me, but it did. This was the only way I could understand the impossible questions that the Bible activated in me, the feelings that came with the sound of this man’s voice on the record, reading these strange and haunting words.

Father smiled and nodded. “I thought this might be just the right book for you” he said.

This is your mask.

Surprised? You should be.

Unbelieving? Naturally.

Frightened? I should hope so.

Later in my room, I read all the mysterious haunting chapters that had been hidden behind the Barrington Bunny essay, like they were a secret gift just for me. These words felt like they unlocked something in the center of my brain, something old and something I had always known but couldn’t find words to explain to anyone - but it had to do with a picture of God that wasn’t only “love” - unless “love” meant something wilder and more elemental than what most people seemed to mean when they said it. It was about trying to conceive of an impossible God, who saves no one from anything, a god with many faces that cancelled themselves out and contradicted each other, whose love was terrifying and liberating, and violent and relieving all at once.

This was better than an answer to my question. This was an introduction to someone who was wrestling with the same questions I was, and proof that I was not the only one who did not hope for a God who would make life any easier.

There was a story of a boy, named Thajir, who the wind chose especially, to whisper all its secrets to, that no adults would ever hear:

Regardless of what anyone else may ever tell you, regardless even of what your own experience may lead you to believe, you are everyone who ever was and everyone who ever will be… Anything that hurts anyone, hurts you. Anything that helps anyone, helps you. It is not possible to gain from another’s loss or to lose from another’s gain. Your life is immensely important. Thajir do you understand this, or is it too difficult?

I understood. It was not too difficult. There were other stories that were written for grown-ups, and I understood them too. Stories about doing what is right for other people, no matter what it cost, no matter if it killed you. Stories about how following God can tear your life to pieces.  A story about how Jesus cured ten lepers, and only one returned to thank him, and how it is too easy it is to blame the ones who did not:

That condemnation is easier than investigation– that if we take time to investigate the reason why people act as they do, we would find that they have to act the way they do, and that such action in the light of circumstances is quite understandable and totally forgivable and even completely reasonable and just as it should be?

You already knew that.

I did.  There was a story about Easter that started like this:

Something like an eternity ago, human beings got all caught up in the illusion that being human is a relatively unimportant proposition… What is more tragic, of course, is that in the wake of that basic error there quickly followed the idea that human beings are expendable, which easily degenerated into the idea that some human beings are expendable. Certain human beings are expendable. Really bad guys are expendable. Guys with low I.Q.’S are expendable. Anyone who disagrees with me is expendable.

These were the kinds of arguments that spun around in my head at night. These were the kinds of queries  that would rise out of my belly, and turn in spirals  before I could reach a peaceful spot and drift off to sleep. This was why I made all those appointments with Father in his office.

If God was in us all, wasn’t the Devil was in everyone too? Wasn’t every person I met also the bunny and the boy called Thajir and the wolf and the pregnant lady and the people who walked past her, and the grown-ups that made racist jokes and the astronaut and the still small voice that parents didn’t listen to, and the lepers that forgot and the one that remembered.

These questions were so different from the ones we were asked and answered at school. These questions were alive, like living words. Answers that stepped for a moment into plain sight and then disappeared if you looked away for a split second.

All security is illusion. It is a demon that bids you follow this bright path.

One afternoon when my parents took my brothers to the doctor’s office, Father said he could stay with me for an hour or so and brought another a record for me to listen to. It was Jesus Christ Superstar- which I had heard some of before on the radio and at my friend Katie’s house. Father and I listened, and he explained which characters were singing so I could follow the story.

“This is Judas before turning Jesus in – and listen now - he says he doesn’t even want the silver - he just thinks Jesus is making dangerous political decisions - And Jesus tells Judas “do what you have to do” and we see that Judas doesn’t even have a choice - it is the part in the story that he is destined to play.  And listen to the music - Jesus isn’t mad at him, it sounds like he forgives him before Judas even understands what he has done… And here, this - this is Judas hangs himself in remorse - He is destroyed, horrified to find out what they have done to Jesus…. Hear how this chord sounds like a scream? It is as if Judas was a sacrifice too. Hanging from a different tree. One is condemned for all time. The other is the Savior.”

A long time ago, human beings got all caught up in the illusion that being human is a relatively unimportant sort of proposition.

Well, that’s not true. It’s wrong. All wrong. From the creation of the heavens and the earth, it has been – wrong. There is nothing more important than being human. Our lives have eternal significance. And no one – absolutely no one – is expendable.

And these were the worries I had whenever people talked about hell or descending into hell. And I understood as we listened that Father had such questions stuffed inside his head too and not too many people who wondered about them with him. I understood that giving me books and sharing these stories with all these flickering appearing and disappearing answers in them was relieving for him too.

Actually it shouldn’t be all that frightening. Everyone has to die anyway. Its not as if there was some other option. Each of us must die. That ‘s a given. That’s just the way it is. What is not part of the given is the how or the why or the what for of your death. What you are going to die for is not a given. What your death is going to be about is up to you.

How strange to find the themes and through-lines I have wrestled with my whole life embedded in a 1970’s inspirational best-seller that I read when I was in elementary school.

Books can be like that. They can find you. They can embed themselves in you. They can take root and remind you of what you know even if you don’t know that you know it.

A large silver wolf, standing statue-like in the shadows, fire eyes smouldering.