WE ARE TRYING, FROM DOWN HERE, TO KNOW GOD
Trent England
We are trying, from down here, to know God, even going so far as to structure our sentences like poems. In the middle of the day and at odd times across the clock we are breaking down into gasps of prayer, sprinting outside and searching the sky or the lawn, or the front doorstep for any sign.
We are trying to know what God wants. Ever since the dogs began to show up, we knew that something special was aboard. Something, some message, was trying to be sent to us. After all, if it were not God Himself, then who themselves would be sending all the dogs, and who was striking them each dead when they arrived?
We are making the effort to create art in the image of man, and never in the image of God. We are working every day but one, toward finding His answers in the little things, like: should we capitalize He, or just leave it be, as in he?
In granules of sugar, we trace our blueprints.
We are seeking genetic patterns, asking why there is baseball in some of us, and in others green and white polka dots. There is the cute gene, we’ve discovered so far, so we can ask why there is the cute gene. There are dogs so we can ask, on our bruised knees: Why are there dogs?
Lewis took us to the city the other day, bragging that the police didn’t know about a particularly abandoned highway, and we told him we doubted it. He shrugged his shoulders as we drove through a leper district.
In the city we heard about a woman who practices an ancient form of martial arts in a remote village where no one can find her. Through passing conversations, we pieced together that if someone did find her, they didn’t survive to tell. We put our heads together and decided that this sounds like God. This sounds like the quest to know God fully, to find where he resides, to knock on his door and ask for a dinner of grace.
I know people who say God is on the earth. They sidestep every evil, allaying their deaths with stories of salvation and talking asses, unforgiven souls who blasphemed God. They say God is here, in this place, in each of us who have chosen him, but they won’t say who chose whom first. They can’t say why, when they’re choking, why those of us who are still searching provide them with water and pound their backs.
Tom told me that God can shift shapes. He said that God can take any form, that he can rattle up a creation no one can fathom if he chooses. If he so pleased to choose, he could sweep the cities before he judges us, Tom said.
Tom was no help.
It began with one. In the beginning, there was only one. We started counting the second week of finding the dogs, though we should have begun at day one. The first dog who gave up the ghost on our porch should have been what was once known as a red flag.
Then it happened in packs, in the twinkling of an eye, their mass passing. It stopped being hurtful once we assigned numbers. It stopped being something that could make us cry once we made it a thing of math and unexpected odds.
When the storms come through this area and we eke out one more floodless existence, a rainbow springs from the steamy ground. For as long as we’ve known, it’s always been a sign from God, and a way we might be able to know him. This is something on our list.
We are separating science from God, because it keeps us from cleaving to him. This is only what we’ve been told, from the literature left in the mailbox. On the other hand, the right hand, the more we cleave to God, the less science we need. There is the science faction and the God faction. The latter seeks to know who He is, troubled or not, and to bury themselves at the bottom of the issue at hand.
The issue at hand is article fifty-seven, which states: No living member shall ever live in denial, or live in a state of extra-denominational denial. This could be interpreted in a number of ways, so before you lose your lunch over this, before you start to raise your fist toward the sky, remember, he—God, that is—may not be there. He could be right next to you instead, waiting for a bus or lying on a table being x-rayed.
But there is no way God is in the x-ray machine. We would need more than just a lead apron.
We allowed our daughter to play baseball after the parent and teacher association had fought for coed sports. The girls didn’t want to play softball. They wanted to play baseball. They wanted the large diamond and the regulation stitching. One day she showed us bruises from being hit in the arm. She said all the girls were being walked, and no one was protesting because this is what happens in baseball.
After she went into her bedroom, we formed a huddle. We wanted to go and walk the parents of boys, hiding in their bushes and calling out their names, launching brick balls at their forearms and thighs. It had to be their own bushes, or, as they say in athletics, on their own turf. But we decided against retaliation. We decided to let a just and provisional God dole out this kind of pain the best way he knew how. And we are even the kind of parents who appreciate blood bursts of anger and passion, standing up for people we love, breaking prop chairs over prop backs.
Tom returned with new material. He played a movie where God takes the form of an angel and comes to earth. He sits down over coffee and lays out his plan for eternity and for civic engineering to a girl named Vicky. She builds highways and streets and oversees the construction of schools and public parks, melding her plans and ideas and oversight with God’s plan, with God’s words.
See, would this be so hard? We are down here, sweating ourselves silly over this issue. We just want the simple courtesy of knowing what to know, and knowing what not to know.
Our landlord comes by every week to collect money from the land and from what we sell at the market. All it yields is potatoes and rent, and we glean from it our own supply of potatoes for the week.
He asked this week about the animal rumors. He said he’d been fielding complaints about dogs disappearing to the property.
When we in return have questions of our own for him, when we ask about the crater in the roof, or when his redheaded nephew is going to come by and help us peel potatoes, his answers are always ambiguous. We don’t know if his simplicity is masking something complex, or if he truly has no answers.
We are trying, from down here, to understand the landlord and know what he wants.
It became clear to us to look into our own house. From conversations with Tom and Lewis, and between their value systems, and from snippets in the city, we knew we had to look inward if we were serious about finding God and knowing him.
The first thing we did was pull all the furniture away from the walls, looking behind the walls for mysterious marks, stains and strange holes.
We learned this from the pest man, who comes by in the late summer and early spring to spray our house. He said that if we looked deep into the house, under the carpet, behind paintings, in between mattresses, that the unexpected might surprise us. But how were we to know that he was talking about God? Because there have been many instances where neighbors and friends shared concerns of winterizing their homes and installing ceiling panels. And here we thought, all this time, that he was only whittling on about nests and eggs.
Then we pulled up the carpet. We began with corners, earnest about finding nothing but the divinity, pulling them up and looking for something unusual. Tom had told us that we would know God when we saw him. He said there was no specific handbook or guide or protocol for the finding of God, or the appearance of God.
We talked while we worked. We talked about the mammal brain and mammal heart. We inquired about the system of sending blood from here to there, or from there to here, and asked if it contained receptors for knowing God.
It was days before most of the house was uncovered, checking layers of the building, looking deep into the crawlspaces, exposing high-beam lights into the archaic laundry shoot. We paid a repairman to inspect the chute and vents and flue and to tell us if he saw God. It took time as he was initially convinced we were joking. But we were not: one thing we do not joke about is the Lord. We are his earnest seekers, looking to know him, but how can we, when he never makes the effort to tell us what he wants and in what order he wants it?
Then we began flipping through books, blowing dust off the old tapes we never watched. We shone our flashlights everywhere, spending extra time in the attic and basement. We even gave the guest room a visit, only to be disgusted at its godlessness.
We scraped off all the paint on the walls, the paint covering the doors, the doorways and trim. We padded down the paint chips, our faces and eyes protected with masks and glasses. We looked like Satanists come to raze the house.
Then the last thing for us to do was to look at the original blueprints of the house.
We unrolled them and held the prints to the table with pebbles from our garden. They showed all four floors, from basement to attic. There was an extra sheet, and it had been folded and creased, meant for a family Bible or a buried triangle.
It revealed another floor of the house. And when we read this, when we put it together that there was more, we were crippled with joy.
Before we went down, breaking land in our basement with shovels and diesel drills, a team of just the two of us, we allowed for a pause, and we asked about the dogs. In all the elation and the purpose-filled drudgery, we had forgotten to consider the dogs. We had grown weary of digging their graves and blocked that view of the porch, plumb diverting the search.
We stood with our chins rested atop still shovels, ruminating the way everyone in our county ruminates. From the deconstructed basement, we listened to cars passing our land, dusting our aimless road and off to faithless plots.
No one would have believed us even if we had come up from the underground, bearing God the way miners bear silver and coal, or maybe the way oilmen come up with oil all over them, stained and grinning like rascally boys.