The Feel of Steel (12 page)

During the months of first reading the Old Testament I saw
Lawrence of Arabia
again. Four hours of male codes, not a single woman character, and a vast absence of psychological insight. Those desert landscapes, though; the violent tribal life of war and travel . . . Around that time, sick in bed, reading Genesis, I came on this: ‘Jacob on the other hand was a quiet man, staying
at home among the tents
.' The marvellous visual flash this gives, of what their dwelling was, of how they lived. All these wanderers! Jealous, envious, lustful, cruel – lying, cheating, fucking the wrong people –
just like us
. And Abraham, when his wife dies, has to buy a piece of land to bury her in!

I shared a house in Melbourne, back in the eighties, with the Quick-Eze man, who had recently, as he put it, been ‘saved'. He was, at the time, one of the most maddening people I have ever known. When confronted by life's setbacks, he used to say in a way I heard as smug, ‘I've got a resource in these matters.' I feared he was determined to convert me. He carried a small black New Testament in his shirt pocket wherever he went, and kept the big fat Bible beside him on the dining room table while we ate. I hated this. The book seemed to radiate an ominous, reproachful righteousness. I knew he would have liked to say grace, so as soon as I put the food on the table I picked up my fork and started to eat, to deny him
the pleasure. Secretly I longed for grace – to hear it, say it, receive it – but I was too proud to admit to him that my heart was broken, that I was all smashed up inside. And I was damned if I would let him preach to me from his horrible black book.

In our loneliness, that year, the Quick-Eze man and I used to read aloud to each other. His mild suggestion, once, was the Acts of the Apostles. I stonewalled him, and insisted on Conrad or Henry James. That Easter we sat every day on the famous Oak Lawn in the Botanic Gardens and read
The Europeans
. It was good, but now I wish I hadn't been so dictatorial and defensive. Years later, when I was happier, I saw Fred Schepisi's movie
Evil Angels
, based on John Bryson's excellent book about the Azaria Chamberlain case. The scene where Meryl Streep and Sam Neill, as Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, lie in bed reading the Bible aloud together, for comfort, filled me with silent longing.

There was a time when it comforted me to see a daggy sign on the front of a fundamentalist church in Newtown: ‘G
OD LOVES YOU, WITH ALL YOUR TROUBLES
.' Even now there are days, as I go about my business along certain streets, when my past cruelties, my foolishnesses, my harsh egotisms hang around me like a fog – or, rather, when they haunt me like a pack of cards which offer themselves to my consciousness one by one and with
a clever appropriateness, as if a tormentor's mind were actively choosing and shuffling them, so that their juxtapositions are forever fresh, always bright and with a honed, unbearable edge. Because of this I understand and treasure the Bible's repeated imagery of water, of washing; and of the laying down or the handing over of burdens. I like the story of the woman at the well. First, she was a woman. She belonged to the wrong race. She had had five husbands and was living with a man she was not married to, but she was the one Jesus asked to draw water for him. She bandied words with him, but he told her about the other kind of water – the sort that never runs out – the water that he was offering.

The Quick-Eze man once said to me, and now I know what he meant, ‘Communion – I'd crawl over broken glass to get to it.' It's quite simple. You examine yourself, formally, in calm and serious words, together with everyone else in the building; you acknowledge that you have, well, basically stuffed things up again; in the name of Christ you are formally forgiven; and then they say to you, formally, ‘Come up here now, and we'll give you something to eat and drink.'

In Ingmar Bergman's memoir
The Magic Lantern
, he visits a church with his aged father, a clergyman. The pastor of the church announces that he is too ill to conduct the communion service.

‘Father started rising from the pew. He was upset. “I must speak to that creature. Let me pass.” He got out of the pew and limped into the sacristy, leaning heavily on his stick. A short and agitated conversation ensued. A few minutes later, the churchwarden appeared. He smiled in embarrassment and explained that there would be a communion service. An older colleague would assist the pastor.

‘The introductory hymn was sung by the organist and the few churchgoers. At the end of the second verse, Father came in, in white vestments and with his stick. When the hymn was over he turned to us and said in his calm free voice: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most high.”

‘Thus I was given the end of
Winter Light
and the codification of a rule I have always followed and was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything, you will hold your communion. It is important to the churchgoer, but even more important to you. We shall have to see if it is important to God. If there is no other God than your hope as such, it is important to that God too.'

Dorothy Sayers: ‘There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity.'

Well, that's a relief, anyway.

I told Tim Winton that the Holy Spirit was the only aspect of God that had any reality in my personal experience. He wrote to me: ‘How it works for me (which is all I can honestly go by) is that the stories work on me. That they seem true as stories, and that I believe them. Not just because I accept that their authors are reliable and their witnesses numerous and their repercussions beyond anything I know of in changes of human history . . ., but because they convince me emotionally, instinctively. As stories, as lives . . . They ring true to me . . . Probably a matter of imagination, for what else is belief mostly built on.'

Martin Buber, according to the editor of his book
The Way of Response
, in dealing with ‘the immense Hasidic literature, . . . disregarded its intricate theology and concentrated on the folk tales and legends where the heart speaks . . .' Buber himself, about someone reading the scriptures, wrote: ‘If he is really serious, he . . . can open up to this book and let its rays strike him where they will . . . He does not know which of its sayings and images will overwhelm him and mould him, from where the spirit will ferment and enter into him, to incorporate
itself anew in his body. But he holds himself open. He does not believe anything a priori; he does not disbelieve anything a priori. He reads aloud the words written in the book in front of him; he hears the word he utters and it reaches him.'

My second sister has a passionate hatred for the parable of the prodigal son. ‘It's so unfair! and such terrible child-rearing practice!' There's a novel in there somewhere . . . as there is in the Book of Tobit, from the Apocrypha. Ten years had passed between my reading of Tobit and my urging a Jewish friend to read it. He came back a week later pop-eyed: ‘Fabulous! And the way it ends with the destruction of Nineveh!'