The Cup

continued

And if I refuse the Cup? If I will not make peace with the flawed person I am - what then?

Maybe, I think, carrying on in my head the conversation I never had with Henri Nouwen, it's not my flaws that stand between me and heaven. Maybe it's that ideal image of myself. That serene, loving, well-organized creature-that-never-was. The effort to be perfect, Nouwen's insight suggests, may be hell's biggest temptation.

My friend Lucia Ballantine gave me a verse by Leonard Cohen that I've taped to the side of my still heaped-up desk:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That is how the light gets in.

The gate of heaven is everywhere.

Thomas Merton

It was a regular midweek service in the side chapel at St. Mark's. I took a chair there, as I had perhaps a thousand times in the thirty-six years since Marc Hall laid his hand on John's head in that same chapel. Sunlight filtered through the Tiffany window onto the red-tile floor as a dozen or so of us waited for Father Ralph Peterson to enter.

The floor ... row on row of brick-colored tiles outlined in black. I'd never really looked at them, my eyes drawn instead to the white marble altar flanked with mosaic angels. Beneath my feet the regular squares advanced toward the altar rail. Like a ladder; I thought.

Why a ladder should have come to mind I don't know, but once it did, it was all I could see in the grid of the tile work. I'm sitting at the foot of a ladder; I thought, bemused. A ladder leading to where the angels live in heaven.

Father Ralph came in and the small congregation stood. He said the opening prayers, then looked around. "I guess our scheduled reader's not here," he said. He nodded at me.

"Tib, read the first lesson, will you?"

I stepped forward and took the Bible he held out. "Genesis twenty-eight, verses ten to seventeen," he said, pointing out the place on the page.

Jacob came to a certain place, I read aloud, ... and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven ...

I stared at the page. Seconds passed before I looked up to see puzzled faces regarding me. Hastily I read on … and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. .

I forced myself to finish. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it. ... This is the gate of heaven."

"You okay?" my friend Susan whispered as I sat back down.

I nodded, but my head was spinning. To see a ladder to heaven in a floor pattern and the next moment read about one ... One friend calls such coincidences "God-incidences" and believes they're intended to call our attention to something. At home I reread Genesis 28.

This is the gate of heaven...

I had recently reread John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress, that epic allegory of humankind's quest for heaven. But in Jacob's story it's heaven that does the questing. Could heaven be seeking us? I wondered. Longing for us to open our eyes and see the ladder thronged with angels rising right at our feet?

Once more I read the Genesis story Jacob at this point in his life is certainly no heaven-bent pilgrim. Quite the opposite - he's a fugitive from justice, running from the brother he has swindled. Preoccupied by his own fears, even after the vision of the ladder he makes no faith commitment. If God provides him with food and clothing, Jacob bargains, if God smoothes over the family feud, then Jacob will believe in him.

How like John's and my first visit in 1959 to the chapel with the red-tile floor. Frightened by the return of the cancer, running scared, not sure of what - if anything - we believed, we'd asked for prayer and stumbled onto the gate of heaven.

The healing of the cancer was a gate only, of course. Not the courts of heaven, far less the throne room. An entryway, a glimpse into a realm whose existence we hadn't suspected any more than fear-filled Jacob did when he lay down on the rocky ground with a stone for a pillow.