Joy Williams - 99 Stories of God

The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.

I do, He said. It explains so much.

What does it explain, Sir? someone asked.

On your last Fourth of July festivities, I was invited to observe an annual hot-dog-eating contest, the Lord said, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.

We were in the bar after golf and this acquaintance of mine says, “My gardener said the damnedest thing to me today.”

And I say, “Yeah, well, gardeners.”

“He’s from Czechoslovakia. He was somehow involved in the shooting of all those giraffes back in the seventies. Forty-nine giraffes. It was the largest captive herd in the world at the time.”

What can you possibly say in response to something like that? I said nothing.

“But he’s been my gardener for years, and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about lawns and trees. But he’s getting on. The crew he hires to help him are assholes.”

“I see,” I said.

“So he fires them almost as soon as he hires them, because they’re ignorant, they don’t want to work, but he works ceaselessly, he never stops moving. It makes me nervous just watching him sometimes.”

“Not good,” I say.

“So he’s working all by himself today, running around, going from one thing to another, and he tells me he feels God at his elbow. All morning he tries to ignore this feeling of God at his elbow, because he knew God had some questions, he knew God wanted to initiate a dialogue with him and he was frightened. But finally he stopped what he was doing and faced God and God said to him, I want to give you something .”

End of story.

“That’s the damnedest thing,” I said, wondering if it would turn out the old guy died on the spot or something.

The formation of dew begins soon after sunset. Evaporation of water vapor cools the surface of plants as they rapidly lose heat collected from the sun. As the surface of a plant or flower becomes cooler than the surrounding air, it causes the transpired water vapor to condense into droplets of dew.

Dew is made of tiny crystals that constantly form, dissolve, and collect energy.

Walking barefoot through dew assists one in acquiring energy from the magnetic earth.

Dew has long been a subject of interest.

You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.

“I want chiseled features,” she said. “I would be so happy.”

I didn’t know her. We were volunteers digging up fountain grass at the Ironwood Forest National Monument. Those were the first words she’d spoken. She was round and pale and not very tall either.

“You can get them,” I said.

“Really?”

“Plastic surgery. Sure.”

“They don’t call it plastic surgery anymore,” she said. “The Devil’s going to be on TV tonight at seven. KGUN. It’s not generally known but a fact nonetheless.”

“Excuse me,” I said. I moved away from her toward an old man chopping at a large clump of big, plump, vigorous adaptable fountain grass with a hoe. But I left him shortly as well, fearing he might have a heart attack in the heat. He would have been offended by my concern, I felt. He probably wanted to die in the desert anyway, helping the earth, one of those people who wanted to die a clean, hard death in the desert.

He didn’t look at all like my father, but I thought of my father, who was in Westerly, Rhode Island, living it up on dialysis. He wasn’t going anywhere. There was so much wrong with him, so many things, but “I want the dialysis,” he’d say. “Nobody’s shoving me into that next room.”

“Don’t you want to know as you are known, standing before the Father’s throne,” I’d tease him. It’s from a hymn called “Innocents.” He used to be a pastor. “Nope,” he’d say.

He’s changed. People change. Even I have changed, though not much. But if I watched KGUN at seven and saw the Devil there, I’d be a different person.

The Lord was invited to a gala. Beautiful women, beautiful men, beautiful flowers. Astonishing music from the moment’s finest string quartet. All that was served was champagne and mountains of Kamchatka caviar.

The hosts were somewhat nervous about the Lord’s reaction to the caviar.

After all, the lives of many thousands of female wild salmon were sacrificed for their eggs, and the renewable potential of their offspring lost forever.

But the Lord never showed up.

We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.

The Lord was trying out some material.

I AM WHO I AM, He said.

It didn’t sound right.

THAT’S WHO I AM. I AM.

It sounded ridiculous.

He didn’t favor definitions.

He’d always had the most frightful difficulties with them.

The Vandewaters were extremely beachy and boaty. Their den walls were lined with the tops of smashed champagne bottles mounted on plaques of teak denoting the many wooden sailboats they’d built to specification and launched.

Dick Vandewater was commodore of our little yacht club as well as being a deacon in the church. He was quite the sailor and preferred to make his trips solo. He claimed that once at night he saw God amidst the dark waters and God spoke to him but he couldn’t remember what he said.

We were at a garden party last week — it’s been a fantastic year for the hydrangeas — and there was an intense young man from the Merchant Marine Academy there. Dick was having a good time, recounting his adventures, and the boy said,

What is it you wish to say, perhaps you wish to tell us something.

Dick exclaimed, I remember! and at that very moment he was felled by a massive stroke, a shrimp on a toothpick still between his fingers.

His wife said that on two other occasions, Dick had recalled what this apparition had said but had been interrupted, once by a ringing telephone and once by a terrific crash in the streets, after which he could no longer remember. Of course these interruptions were not at all meaningful, not like this massive stroke, which proved for poor Dick to be fatal.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison:

“The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.

Before God and with God, we live without God.”

Temporal lobe epilepsy often causes changes in behavior and thinking even when the patient is not having seizures. These changes include hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy.

Dostoevsky often wrote of the rapture he felt during a seizure when he was in the frightful presence of the universal harmony.

A Carmelite nun whose visions during her epileptic seizures caused many to view her as a spiritual master feared that her gifts were symptoms of illness rather than grace and submitted to surgery, which was successful.

Life without epilepsy was quite dull, she discovered.

It was as though she had tumbled from a sacred mountain into a ruined village, she said.

Three strange beings called angels visit Abraham to tell him and his wife, Sarah, that they will have a child. They are both ninety years old.