Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF GOD

It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain.

God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation. Now He is there, now there is less of Him, but sometimes He is not there at all, because God manifests Himself even in the fact that He is not there.

People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.

In the summer of 1939 God was in everything all around, so rare and unusual things happened.

At the beginning of time God created all possible things, but He Himself is the God of impossible things, things that either do not happen at all, or happen very rarely.

God appeared in blueberries the size of plums that ripened in the sun just below Cornspike’s house. Cornspike picked the ripest one, wiped the dark blue skin on her handkerchief, and saw another world reflected in it. The sky there was dark, almost black, the sun was hazy and distant, the forests looked like clusters of bare sticks driven into the earth, and the Earth, drunken and reeling, was suffering from holes. People were slipping off it into a black abyss. Cornspike ate the ominous blueberry and tasted its sour flavour on her tongue. She realised she must stock up for the winter, storing more food than ever before.

Now every morning Cornspike dragged Ruta from bed at dawn, and together they went to the forest and brought all sorts of riches home from it – baskets of mushrooms, churns of strawberries and blueberries, young hazelnuts, bilberries, dogwood, barberry, bird cherry, elderberry, hawthorn and sea-buckthorn. They spent days drying it all in the sun and the shade, and watched anxiously to see if the sun was still shining as before.

God also worried Cornspike physically. He was present within her breasts, which suddenly and miraculously filled with milk. When people found out about it, they secretly came to Cornspike and placed sick parts of their bodies under her nipples, and she squirted a white stream on them. The milk cured young Krasny’s eye infection, the warts on Franek Serafin’s hands, Florentynka’s ulcer, and a skin rash on a Jewish child from Jeszkotle.

Everyone who was cured was killed during the war. That is how God manifests Himself.