The Face Of God

When I was ten my family moved to a town in central Florida where my stepfather had gotten a job teaching at a community college. We rented, at first, a small asbestos-shingled house on a road near the college in a nice little neighborhood and I had a room of my own for the first time in my life. My brother slept in a sort of breezeway out to the garage and that was fine for him and I think I may have been excited to have my own room. I can't remember.

I don't remember a great deal from that time but what I do remember is hard.

Even before we moved into that house, which was probably about a year or so after my mother remarried, my stepfather had been abusing me. It was as much psychological abuse as it was sexual. He never did anything that would leave any physical evidence. It was mostly fondling but it shifted my world from merely miserable (I was a plump, unhappy child) to nightmarish.
He would come into my room every night to "tell me goodnight" and my mother thought he was being fatherly, sweet and she was so proud that he had taken on his role as daddy so well.
I remember those goodnight visits so well. Those I do remember. I remember him sitting on the bed and me laying there in my pajamas, trying so hard to protect myself from what I knew was going to happen but what tools did I have for that?
None.
I was just a little girl in her baby doll pajamas in her own twin bed, in her very own room with the milk glass shade light beside me on the bedside table, the old radio with the Bakelite dial sitting beside the lamp. And a book. I always had a book. It was at about this age that I took it upon myself to read the entire Bible, which I did. Yes, I really did. Ten years old, maybe eleven, I read the Bible, cover to cover, every begat, every verse, every chapter, every book.
I wonder now if I didn't have that Bible beside of me in bed every night not only to read, but to try and protect myself from this man. Who could do those things to a child who had a Bible in the bed beside her?
Ah lah.
He could.
And I discovered that Lot had "lain" with his daughters after they had gotten him drunk in order to get themselves pregnant. I knew what that meant. And to say that it only confused me more to discover that one of the holiest of the old testament had had sex with his own daughters is putting it mildly.
The Bible, for those who have not read it, is filled with all sorts of stories of God's favorites doing outrageously immoral things. Check out David and Bathsheba. And perhaps it's not the wisest thing for an eleven year old to read the Bible. Or, perhaps it is. I learned that the belly could be like a heap of wheat surrounded by lilies, that breasts could be like two young roes (what are roes?) that are twins. Who knew?

Well, I knew a lot after I read the Bible and I wondered at a lot of it. Revelations was the most mysterious. Horses and riders and much trouble upon the land.
And now, when people quote me the Bible to prove this or that I can say, "But what about...?" and quote them something back which says the opposite.
And that Bible did not protect me. That man, my stepfather, still did what he did and when I turned fifteen, he gave me a charm for my charm bracelet of a tiny book which contained the Ten Commandments which you could actually read and he said something like, "Because I know you're a good girl."

No wonder religion holds no charm for me at all.

But I had still a life beyond those moments (those eternally long moments) when my stepfather was in my room. I had books other than the Bible. I had that radio which played the Rolling Stones and the Beatles late at night for me, just for me. I had friends, I had Girl Scouts, I had slumber parties and camping trips and I had school which I did very well in.

And I also had two tiny vases, like toy vases and I am not sure where they came from. I think perhaps they had been my mother's. And one day, when I was outside, I realized that some of the weeds in our yard had tiny flowers on them which, when viewed very closely, were incredibly beautiful. Miniature daisies and orchids they were, fairy-like and delicate. And I began to pick those tiny weed-flowers and make miniature arrangements of them in those tiny vases.
I don't know why, but those incredibly small flower arrangements made me happy in a way that nothing else did. It seemed to me that I had discovered something that no one else knew- that there was beauty in the smallest weed and that I could pick this beauty and bring it into the house, into my room, where I set the arrangements on a wooden bookshelf that my grandfather had made. A bookshelf I still own and which is in my kitchen now, holding my cookbooks.

My eyes are still open to the tiniest of flowers and when I weed, I notice them. I picked a miniature bouquet today and brought it in and filled up an old bottle, so small it must have held paregoric or something like that. I have somehow lost those vases of my childhood and that makes me sad but they were merely things, no matter how much I loved them and I love this bottle now, which I found in the driveway of my yard and which stands testament to some other lives lived here long ago. You can see the picture above.
But to give it perspective, here is a picture of that miniature bouquet along with a small vase with two Pink Perfection camellias in it. Not such a good picture, but it will do. It will do.


They are both so beautiful to me: the camellias which have been bred and propagated for their shape and petal configuration for centuries and the tiny wildflowers which we pull as weeds and toss to the chickens for them to scratch through and eat. As I weeded today, Miss Carol scratched along beside me. I think she believes I am part of her flock now, which is fine with me. I would be proud to take on that title.

I think of that little girl I was, back in those old, old days, clutching my Bible quite literally to my breast and how it did not protect me or bring me any sort of joy or understanding. I think of myself then, going out and finding those wee little flowers and how much joy they did bring me, my own tiny discovery, that beauty could be found in a patch of weeds.

I think this explains much in my life, this story. It explains why The Word Of God is something I can easily dismiss as literature, some of it great, some of it bad, none of it sacred to me, while at the same time, I find the smallest gifts of this life to be the most profound and beautiful, if you just set your eyes to that level, slow down and look to find them. If you bother to get on your knees in the dirt, to put your fingers there too, to dig and to pull, to tug the hair-like roots so that you can plant your lettuces, your squashes, your peppers, your camellias.

I believe in the dirt and I believe in the sanctity of it. Take dirt and water and sun and you can grow beauty. Or it can grow without any effort on your part at all, except for the effort to find it.
From the huge magnolia blossoms to the flowers so small that it would take three of them to cover your little fingernail- they, to me, are holy. They bring me peace. They bring me joy. They are there as the chicken scratches beside me in the warm, black dirt. They are there when the lights go out. When the sun sets they may fold tight within themselves but when it rises again, they open.

Listen- children search for God. That is the truth. And children search for truth and there is something in their hearts which tells them what is true and what is not. I wasn't just trying to protect myself with that Bible. I was looking for God, make no mistake about it. I was looking for a way to make sense of what was happening to me and I did not find it in that white zippered Bible with the full-colored pictures of Jesus and the lambs.

I didn't find god at all, but I found what I believe in. It was as tiny as the spark of hope in my heart that someday my life would not be like it was then.

And here I am. Growing flowers and finding flowers to put in tiny found bottles. I just listened to The Rolling Stones playing "She's Like A Rainbow" and that tinkling piano intro took me right back there to those old days but not to the fearsome part. To the part where there was color and music, even if the color was not as big as a small dog's eye, even if the music had to be muted.

I don't know why I am so intent upon writing about religion this week. Well, it was probably the baptism. And I swear to you- if you have a faith and it brings you comfort and joy, well then believe. Because I know what I believe but it may not be at all what you believe and what I believe is that each of us has a heart which yearns for that which whispers truth.

The important thing is that we all find it because we need it whether we are ten or whether we are fifty-five. One of the things I read in the Bible was this:
Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.
I can't claim my heart to be pure but I think it was when I was eleven. And if I saw God, it was in the face of the smallest flower and yes, it was in the trill of a piano riff.

And I am not forgetting that. Not for one second. I was as wise then as I could ever hope to be. Maybe not as learned, but as wise.

It is not thy rod and thy staff which comforted me. It was the face of the smallest flower. And that is still who I am, still that which I worship.