Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.
When I was eleven years old I had a paper route, a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.
The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.
In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.
I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.
But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before Satan snuck in to my heart and revealed to me the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak with impunity. Everybody else who tried would be instantly fried to a crisp.
I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.
It’s been a long time—fifty-six years, in fact—since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, for disbelief, for interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.
Now that I think of it, fifty-six years isn’t very long. (It may seem longer to some of you than to others.) I can talk more, and more articulately, about my confusion now than I could then. My grammar is both better and worse. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m as often as not inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.
When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.
There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.
“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]