Selected Cronicas

FORGIVING GOD

I was strolling along the Avenida Copacabana and looking distractedly at buildings, a strip of sea, people on the pavement, thinking of nothing in particular. I still had not realized that I was not really distracted but effortlessly observing things. I was being something very rare: free. I was looking at everything and at my leisure. Little by little I began to realize I was perceiving things. My freedom became a little more intense without ceasing to be freedom. It was not a tour de propriétaire, nothing of what I perceived was mine nor did I covet it. Yet it seems to me that I felt deeply satisfied with what I saw.

Just then, I experienced a feeling which I had never heard of before. Out of sheer affection, I felt myself to be the mother of God Who was both earth and the world. Out of sheer affection, without any suggestion of arrogance or vanity, without the slightest hint of superiority or equality, I had become the Mother of all that exists. And I knew that if all this were what I really felt and not some false sentiment, then God would allow Himself to be loved by me without pride or pettiness and without any compromise. He would find the intimacy with which I loved Him acceptable. This feeling was new to me but unmistakable and, if it had not occurred to me before, that was simply because it could not be. I know that one loves what we call God with grave and solemn love, with respect, fear and reverence. Yet no one ever told me about loving Him as a Mother. And just as this maternal love does not diminish God but makes Him greater, so being the Mother of the World released my love.

Just at that moment I stepped on a dead rat. I bristled immediately with the terror of being alive; in a second I felt shattered by fear and panic, struggling to suppress the piercing scream inside me. Almost running, oblivious to everyone around me, I ended up leaning against a lamp-post, my eyes firmly closed and refusing to look any more. But the sight of that dead rat was engraved in my mind: a reddish-brown rat with an enormous tail, its claws crushed, as it lay there dead, silent, reddish-brown. My uncontrollable fear of rats.

Shivering from head to foot, I somehow managed to go on living. Totally bewildered, I walked on, the expression on my lips almost childish, such was my surprise. I tried to sever the connection between the two facts: what I had been feeling some moments earlier and then the rat. But it was useless. They were linked at least by their proximity. The two facts were illogically connected. It terrified me to think that a rat should harmonize with me. Repugnance suddenly overwhelmed me: was I unable to surrender to sudden love? What was God trying to tell me? I am not the sort of person who needs to be reminded that there is blood in everything! Far from ignoring that blood, I acknowledge and desire it. There is too much blood in me to allow me to forget blood. For me, words such as spiritual and earthly have no meaning. There was no need to confront me so brutally with a rat. Especially at such a moment, when I felt so exposed and vulnerable! You should have considered the terror that has haunted me since childhood; those rats have already persecuted and mocked me. From ancient times those rats have been devouring me with impatience and loathing! So, was it to be like this? My walking through life asking for nothing, wanting for nothing, loving with a pure and innocent love, and God confronting me with His rat. God’s cruelty wounded and outraged me. God was a brute. Walking with a heavy heart, my disappointment as inconsolable as those disappointments I suffered as a child. A child grown prematurely to escape the injustices of childhood. I carried on walking, trying to forget. All I could think of was revenge. But what revenge could I hope for against an Almighty God, against a God Who only needed a rat crushed to death in order to crush me? While all I had was my vulnerability as a mere mortal. In my thirst for revenge, I could not even confront Him. Nor did I know where to find Him or where He might be concealed. Looking with hatred at some thing, would I finally see Him? Perhaps in the rat? … in that window? … in the stones on the ground? For in me, He no longer existed! In me, He was no longer to be seen!

Then the revenge of the weak suddenly occurred to me: so this was what it was like? Very well, I shall break my silence and reveal everything. I know that it is ignoble to enter into someone’s confidence and then reveal their secret, but I am going to speak. Say nothing, for love’s sake, say nothing! Keep His shameful secrets to yourself! — but I am determined to speak … to explain what has happened to me. This time I shall not be silenced, I shall reveal what He has done to me. I shall destroy His reputation.

…Who knows … perhaps it was because the world is also a rat and I had thought myself prepared … because I imagined myself to be stronger, and converted love into a mathematical calculation which happened to be wrong. I foolishly believed that, by adding up points of understanding, I was expressing my love. I failed to recognize that it is only by adding up misunderstandings that one comes to love. Just because I felt affection, I thought love would be easy. I felt no desire for solemn love, failing to understand that solemnity makes a ritual of misunderstanding and transforms it into an offering. But I have always been difficult by nature and have always put up a fight. I have always tried to go my own way and still have not learned to give in. And because deep down I want to love what I would choose to love rather than what is there to love. For I am still not myself and my punishment is loving a world which is not itself. Also because I am easily offended. Perhaps I need to be told these things bluntly for I am very stubborn. I am also extremely possessive, which may explain why I was asked with some irony whether I also wanted the rat for myself. For I shall only be able to be the mother of things when I can pick up a dead rat in my hand. Yet I know that I shall never be able to pick up that dead rat without dying my worst death. So let me intone the Magnificat which blindly exalts what it can neither know nor see. Let me adopt the formalities which distance me, because formalities have not wounded my simplicity but rather my pride. For it is my pride at having been born that makes me feel so intimate with the world — this world which still draws a muffled cry from my heart. The rat exists just as I exist, but perhaps neither I nor the rat is capable of being seen by ourselves, for distance makes us equal. Perhaps I must first accept this nature of mine which seeks a rat’s death. Perhaps I consider myself much too delicate simply because I did not commit any crimes. Having suppressed them, I believe my love to be innocent. Perhaps I shall never be able to face the rat until I am able to look into this unruly soul of mine without turning pale. Perhaps I should call the world this habit of mine of being a little of everything. How can I love the world’s grandeur if I am unable to love the dimensions of my own nature? So long as I imagine that God is good simply because I am evil, I shall find myself loving nothing: it will simply be my way of accusing myself. Without even having examined all of myself, I have chosen to love my opposite, whom I wish to call God. I, who shall never get used to myself, have asked the world to spare me any distress. Having succeeded only in forcing myself to submit to myself (for I am so much more inexorable than myself), I hoped to compensate myself with an Earth less violent than myself.

For as long as I love God only because I do not love myself, I shall be a marked dice, and the game of my greater life will not be played. As long as I go on inventing God, He will never exist.