Axel's dream, part II

 Axel’s dream, part II 

I said to Axel [The conversation is continued from here, though there’s a delightful Confucian intermission; don’t skip it.] . . .
     I said to Axel, “There are a lot of people like your friend R. Aren’t there?”
     “I suppose.”
     “Who think they need to protect God from the world — there is no telling what he would do if he got loose in it with all his compassion. So they shut him up in the reserved sacrament box — what’s it called?”
     “The Tabernacle.”
     “Maybe. What’s an ambry?” Axel shrugged. “The tabernacle then,” I said. “They keep God in there. Or they zip him up in their Bibles. That’s why Bibles have zippers: if God is also spirit, he — she, it — might be able to escape from the open edges of the pages. Or they, like your friend R, warn their congregations in their sermons not to do what Jesus would do. ‘You’re not Jesus,’ they say. Besides, look what happened to him, they don’t say, but it’s implied.”
     Axel began to laugh but stifled it: it escaped from his throat to his mouth, but he closed his teeth on it — it made a half-growling, half-choking sound.
     “What?” I said.
     “I was thinking, ‘If God slipped out of a Bible from the edges of the pages — let’s say letter by letter then word by word then sentence by sentence — what would we find after we’d had the Bible for a week.’ Would the book of Nahum be missing, for example? After a month, would Revelation have followed it? And James, if Luther is sitting at God’s right ear. And all but a few letters of Leviticus. After a year, would there be any word left except fragments of sentences from the first letter of John. ‘God is love.’ Since he is, ‘we should love one another.’ ‘Anyone that claims to be in the light but hates his brother is . . . . love one another.’ The other 963 pages blank!”
     “A much shorter edition than Jefferson’s.”
     “And completely different. Jefferson didn’t think God needed protecting. The mechanic was far enough away from his machine to be safe from any sparks it might throw or the oil it might spew. God didn’t need protecting from us, we needed protecting from God. Or we might. If God cared.”
     I wondered — silently but then aloud — if we weren’t getting off the subject. “As usual,” Axel said. “But does it matter?” I shrugged: Did it?

You go down the stairs
to Dr. Feight’s office.

Later, I was telling Dr. Feight about the conversation and how it ended with a shrug; and he said “Hmmm,” meaning in this case why didn’t it matter?
     I said, “Because neither of us knew what he was talking about. And no one else was listening.”
     “God?” said Dr. Feight. I wanted to shrug, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to shrug. Instead,
     “If he was having a slow day,” I said. “Then, maybe.”

“I have a friend,” Axel had said another time, I am just remembering this, “a friend, a retired classics scholar, who wants desperately to be a mystic. But he can’t do it.” He paused. “I once had another friend, a Roman Catholic priest, who said he had known mystics and every day he thanked God he wasn’t one.
    “‘The mystic’s mistake,’ my friend said, ‘is that he thinks what he feels is God. Or if he can’t feel God, then what he doesn’t feel — that is God.’” But when he saw my Lutheran grin, he said: ‘Yes. But how is that different from the theologian’s mistake, when he thinks what he thinks about God is God?’”

I am looking out the window: The day is as gray as whites washed a hundred times without bleach. Only in one prickle of the NNW corner of the sky, just above the spine of the house kitty-corner across the street, is a switch of light fighting back. It has pushed Gray’s tongue back into its mouth, but it can’t push it any harder to make it vomit blue.
                                                                    01.18.23