WE...THE GUILTY

It had become almost a daily routine now that when Ahnna finished at the Greenery she would drive over to the mill and spend the evening with Alistair. More often than not, she brought some groceries and would cook dinner for him. His ineptness in the kitchen was just another aspect of him that endeared him to her. Often during the day, he would show up at the greenhouse on the pretext of needing more plants for his garden. Indeed, his garden now nearly rivaled Joimus' own in the scope of its plantings. He found that receiving a plant from her hands then taking it home and making it a part of the beauty of the millyard, engendered in him such a sense of belonging of becoming a part of something worthwhile and lovely. During the times when Ahnna was not present, he tended the garden, quite happily on his knees, pouring his heart out to God. It all went together...the garden, God, Ahnna, and him.

Some part of him was a bit surprised at just how content he had become there in the Glen. His time at Coffs had not been like that. Grief was fresh and everything Australian was new and unaccustomed. God had been there, though, in Coffs. There was for Alistair
no place that God was not.  Still, he had had a certain sense of loneliness. Jenny had filled his tangible world with her presence and her love and the sudden loss of that simply took some time to adjust to, even for him.

Trowel in hand, he sat back on the lawn, smiling now in the late afternoon at the nodding heads of a patch of Shirley poppies he'd just finished weeding. He liked them for their sheer delicateness, for the transparency of their petals, the ferny slenderness of their
long stems.
 

He'd stretched out his hand and was lightly running a fingertip along the edge of  a rose-colored bloom when Ahnna's car pulled up. He stayed where he was as she walked across the lawn toward him, holding out a hand to her. Taking it, she settled beside him, and he turned a beaming smile toward her.

Her heart quickened at the sight. He was often so quietly serious that when his smile came forth, it was sudden sunlight from behind a cloud and so beautiful to her that sometimes she thought it might be more than she could bear. Sudden beauty was always like that for her, catching away her breath completely.

"The poppies are happy today," he said, tipping his head down just a bit and looking up at her through his lashes. "I am happy today."

"You look happy," she returned. "I'm glad."

Everything was still so new between them and neither could quite yet believe the presence of the other. It was all so...unexpected...and all the more precious for it. Alistair, too, was very aware of her struggle with the car crash. She seemed much better about it since he'd told her that story on Australia Day, but he knew such depth of guilt did not simply wash away quite so easily. It had been the defining part of who she'd been for some time now and she'd hugged it to herself in that way people have when there is nothing left but guilt.

"You make me happy, Ahnna," he continued, his voice low, very soft.

"I didn't think," she said, looking intently up at a small cloud, "that I would ever do that for anyone, not ever again."

"It's there inside you, Ahnna. You have much of it to give."

"It's only there," she inhaled deeply, "because of you."

His lips curved again into a small smile. "I'm glad you've found it again, that happy part of you."

She pulled up a blade of grass, her fingers fiddling with it distractedly. "It was gone, you know, completely gone, for so long."

"I know," he said, touching her knee. "I know."

"I...I'm not sure...sometimes I'm not sure it's all right."

"What, Ahnna?"

"To let go of the guilt. I sometimes think I should hold on to it." She split the grass blade and let the pieces fall to her lap. "It's not like I didn't do it, you know, that I didn't cause the crash. It's my fault. It will always be my fault. I can't get away from that, not ever. The guilt is mine."

"Guilt is an interesting thing, Ahnna," Alistair said, touching a poppy again. "God especially finds it so."

"God has to deal with guilt?"

"All the time, Ahnna, constantly. Humanity is quite fond of it."

"What do you mean? I don't understand."

"From the very beginning, Ahnna, it's been the main thing that, in the mind of man, separates him from God. It is, ultimately, why Jesus needed to come."

"Because of guilt?"

"Because of mankind's need for guilt, yes. Something had to be done about that."  He turned his eyes from the poppy to her. "It's what happens to our relationship with Him when we feel guilty. It's how it changes the way we feel toward Him."

"I never thought about it changing the way people feel toward Him."

"He has. What is guilt, Ahnna?"

"What is...? I suppose it's the feeling people get when they've done something wrong, when something bad is their fault."

"That's pretty much it, yes. It's the sense of failing another or others, the, well, the failure of love, and it creates a sense of...of unworthiness which we transpose into dislike of the other. For instance, if I steal my brother's inheritance but yet I must see him every day, I soon begin to dislike him because of the guilt I feel when I am around him. I stop wanting to be around him, begin keeping my distance so I don't have to encounter him, encounter the guilt that rises in me when I see him."

"That makes sense," she nodded.

"It's what we do to God. When we have guilt because we have sinned against Him, and all sin is ultimately against Him, we try to cure it by making God look ugly or angry or somehow fearsome."  He picked up the two pieces of the grass blade, folding his hand around them. "Sin, in its essence, is the closing up of the self, an inner decision to be absolutely myself for myself alone. It is a willed isolation, though seldom discerned as such."

The sun was getting lower in the sky and a slight evening breeze made the poppy heads nod as though they, too, were listening to his soft voice. "To forgive sin, truly to dissolve its guilt, is to enable the sinner to come out of his willed isolation into love. It is the other, become lovable again, who dissolves guilt and forgives the injury."  He watched the poppies a long moment as Ahnna studied his face. It was possibly more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. It seemed to her he wasn't really watching the poppies at all, but was looking inward to some place of deepness and wisdom and...communion.

"Jesus was the only living Being ever completely free from guilt, the only One Who had a total, unimpeded intimacy with God, free from self-unworth and aware of being God's beloved."  He closed his eyes. "If only we took the time to understand, truly to understand, the significance of His death to man's understanding of God." 

Eyes still closed, he lay back on the grass, stretching his arms above his head, the broken blade still in one hand. "It's so simple," he murmured, "so very, very simple that we can't see it for its very simplicity."  She leaned back on one elbow, watching him as he continued to speak. She'd never really heard anything like he had to say, not even in church, and she waited quietly, opening herself so that his words might drop into her heart.

"Man's relationship with God has ever been draped, covered, burdened by the trappings of all the traditions we heap atop it. All He's ever wanted is to be intimate with us and yet when He offered to come and dwell among them there in Sinai, they shut Him away behind the thick curtain in the tabernacle. We always, always shut Him away somewhere, wanting Him to keep His distance so we can protect ourselves from His presence. Then Jesus came, God in flesh, and the God His followers experienced was incomparably more real, more present, than the God of traditional religion. It was as though they saw through the hallowed symbols and rituals to the burning reality itself. If THIS God fails, if Jesus fails, if this movement piles up against the stone wall of the world, then God is finished. The only God now believable would have proved powerless and there simply would not, could not be any going back to the traditional God."

He smiled, a wry little smile. "There is, you know, in all religiousness the lurking suspicion that we invented the story that God loves us. The unique thing about the Christian belief in God's love is that it arose only after the execution of Jesus had produced in His followers a total disillusionment with all religion. God had involved Himself so much in the life and movement of Jesus that the failure of the movement was much more like the death of God than His mere absence." His smile changed, broadened, then settled into some sort of deep introspection. "With the death of God, something deep in the soul and very difficult to recognize and acknowledge, also comes to an end. It's what is aroused in the soul of man by the thought of God's huge power compared with our weakness. Envy, resentment, guilt...all these are woven into human religion and have been since the beginning. The metaphysical inequality between the creature and the Creator translates in our emotions into the master/slave inequality."

He wiped his empty hand across his chin, looking straight up at the evening sky where the first stars were dimly twinkling into view. "With God dead, with God...powerless, God no longer God, this movement of the soul also ceases. This created a totally new possibility in these people, the possibility of hearing a new message from the Mystery. The one obstacle to hearing the words, 'I simply love you and want you with Me forever,' has been removed, so the words could be heard...if there were a God to speak them. Just as Jesus 'buried' God for them, so Jesus made God alive again. Psychologically there was a...a displacement, yes, of divinity from the old God Whom guilt kept remote and overpowering, into Jesus. This was their first experience of what it felt like for their God to be alive again, and alive as never before. You couldn't go through the experience of investing everything in a man during His lifetime, of being robbed by Him of all your old concepts of religion, of being reawakened by Him as though from a sound sleep, and still keep the old God in place with Jesus merely as one of His prophets."

He rolled onto his stomach and she lay fully back, her eyes never leaving his face. "The old God," he smiled, "the God shadowed by guilt, is much more congenial to the powers which rule this world. The Jesus revolution threatens those powers in opening up to us a freedom beyond this world. While a person is still in guilt, God is TO HIM the jealous, all-dominating One, the threat to a man's fragile existence. For the disciples of Jesus, this 'God' dies with the collapse of the Jesus movement." He let the split grass blade fall, then plucked another, holding it out to her. "The 'God' they next encounter is Jesus as a power greater than death. As the meaning of this sinks in, they are able to experience the original God not as jealous or domineering, but as loving, as bringing us into His own immortal life. Only that God could be experienced as dead who had been experienced, beyond all belief, as living...and being with Jesus had been like that, like stepping through the ancient words and images into the thing itself. It was not a case of believing something different; it was a case of believing something MORE."

He looked at Ahnna and when he saw that she was following, continued. "Of believing more because now they saw, as they could not when Jesus was still alive. It was the virgin soul, never touched by religiousness, that opened puppy eyes to see what they saw...God IS this Man. This Man had come to epitomize all their hope...then when He was in the grave...all their emptiness...and when that space became alive, God became alive. After Easter, when God is not only alive again, but alive for the astonished soul as it were for the first time, then and only then is the meaning of His having died understood. It is the behavior of the Lover." His eyes locked tightly on hers, holding them fast. "Human guilt, since the beginning of human time, has conceived the infinite as infinite power over against human weakness. This is the great projection which permeates human society. It is so strong, it enters so deeply into and reshapes the very conviction of God's reality, that only the surrender, the death, the...the non-self-insistence of God Himself can break it."

He clasped his hand over the one of hers that held the whole grass blade. "At that crucial moment when human psychology is floundering in a new and bewildering experience of God's weakness, infinite Love capitalizes on that experience and confirms it as an encounter with Himself as the surrendering Lover. Only after the resurrection can this death of God be understood as the act of the Lover. Only before the resurrection can this death of God find its entry into the soul. The bewilderment of Golgotha is its necessary climate. No instruction, Ahnna, no intuition, no vision even, can dislodge guilt from its central position in the human soul, from where it directs the soul's perception of God. Nothing short of catastrophe can do that. When the catastrophe has done its work, and left the soul in pieces, no longer holding itself together under the dreaded infinite power, then...at last...the Absolute can be encountered not as power...but as Love."

Alistair moved himself more closely to her, his intensity a tangible thing. "Ahnna, this is the simplicity of it all, the sum of not less than everything. Jesus is humanity's first sight of Who God REALLY IS after God, as humanity saw Him, has died."  He looked through her eyes to the depths of her soul, needing to see her understanding of that.

Her hand had gone to her mouth as she blinked back tears. In that moment it was for her as though Jesus Himself were there beside her, needing her to know, and the flood of pain and guilt that had remained inside her welled up and burst through her eyes as she began to shake in deep sobs. "Oh, my God," was all she was able to murmur and Alistair wrapped her in his arms and pulled her to him.