Shakespeare's Truth

A BRITISH FILM that came out of World War II has a scene in it showing a couple of air-raid wardens sitting out on the roof of a building in London during the blitz. It is night and enemy planes are overhead. Bombs are falling and much of the city is in flames. There are the sounds of antiaircraft guns and sirens. Then, during a lull, one of the men turns to the other and recites a speech of Caliban's out of The Tempest:

Be not afear'd: this isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not:

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,

That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,

I cried to dream again.

[3.2.144-55]

At the close of his career, after the period of the great tragedies, Shakespeare turned to something much closer to true fairy tales. He wrote Cymbeline, where innocence is vindicated and old enemies reconciled, and The Winter's Tale, where the dead queen turns out not to be dead at all, the lost child, Perdita, restored to those who love her. And he wrote The Tempest itself, where the same great storm of the world that drowned the Franciscan nuns aboard the Deutschland and lashed old Lear to madness and stung Job in his despair is stilled by Prospero's magic; and justice is done, and lovers reunited, and the kingdom restored to its rightful king so that in a way it is the beautiful dream of Caliban that turns out to be real and the storm of the world with all its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces and solemn temples that turns out to be the insubstantial pageant that fades into thin air and leaves not a rack behind.

-Originally published in Telling the Truth

Our Search

WE DO OUR TWENTY minutes of meditation a day in the hope that, properly stilled, our minds will stop just reflecting back to us the confusion and multiplicity of our world but will turn to a silvery mist like Alice's looking glass that we can step through into a world where the beauty that sleeps in us will come awake at last. We send scientific expeditions to Loch Ness because if the dark and monstrous side of fairy tales can be proved to exist, who can be sure that the blessed side doesn't exist, too? I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general—with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark—is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beatific, and we are like the knight in Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal, who tells the young witch about to be burned at the stake that he wants to meet the devil her master, and when she asks him why, he says, "I want to ask him about God. He, if anyone, must know." 

-Originally published in Telling the Truth

Memory

THERE ARE TWO WAYS of remembering. One is to make an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. The old sock remembers how things used to be when you and I were young, Maggie. The faraway look in his eyes is partly the beer and partly that he's really far away. 

The other way is to summon the dead past back into the living present. The young widow remembers her husband, and he is there beside her. 

When Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me," (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking

Tobias

TOBIAS WAS A YOUNG man when he ran into the angel Raphael, and not knowing that he was an angel at all, let alone one of seven great ones who stand and enter before the glory of the Lord, Tobias hired him at a drachma a day to be his traveling companion. Accompanied by Tobias's dog, they had a series of adventures that were nothing less than extraordinary. 

Tobias almost lost his foot to a great fish. He discovered a cure for his father's blindness. He picked up a large sum of money that his father had left with a friend. And after first curing a young woman named Sarah of a demon who had caused her first seven husbands to perish on their wedding nights, he not only married her himself but lived to tell the tale. 

But the best part of the story is the short, no-nonsense prayer with which he married her. "And now I take not this my sister for lust, but in truth," he said. "Command that I and she may find mercy and grow old together. Amen" (Tobit 8:8-9). 

Never has the knot been more securely or simply or eloquently tied, and it's small wonder that it lasted them through a long and happy marriage that did not come to an end until Tobias died in peace at the age of one hundred and seventeen. 

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures

Preaching the Gospel

SWITCHING ON THE lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed be he. The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn't see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn't see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. Let the preacher preach the Gospel of their preposterous meeting as the high, unbidden, hilarious thing it is. 

-Originally published in Telling the Truth