Cries from the Heart
Acclaim for the Author
The Houston Chronicle
Arnold is thought-provoking and soul-challenging…
He writes with an eye-opening simplicity that zings the heart.
Eugene Peterson, author
With so much junk spirituality on the market today,
it is positively refreshing to come upon Arnold’s books…
They are solid and mature, devoid of ego, embracing
of community and ambiguity and integrity.
Madeleine L’Engle, author
We recognize ourselves in Arnold’s poignant stories,
and our recognition helps us toward deeper understanding.
Peter Kreeft, author
Arnold is clear, compassionate, uncompromising…
he writes straight from (and to) the heart.
Publishers Weekly
Johann Christoph Arnold writes in a prayerful and simple way.
Lewis Smedes, author
Arnold’s writing is simple, transparent, and caring.
Benedict Groeschel, CFR, Archdiocese of New York
With their customary blend of Gospel faith and personal
sharing, Arnold’s books offer spiritual reading at its best.
Donna Schaper, author
Arnold’s writing embraces despair, but it also restores confidence.
Dick Staub, Host, The Dick Staub Show
Arnold’s stories are touching and honest…and model vital
themes in a profound way.
Jonathan Kozol, author
Arnold’s writing is unpretentious and transcendent.
Sam Hall, WQXR/New York
Arnold’s writing is wonderful, touching, and reassuring.
John Taylor Gatto, author
Even where we differ, I am glad to hear what this author has to
say – and I love the quiet authority of his words.
Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Arnold inspires each of us to seek truth within our own
hearts…His writing gives hope that we can find wholeness,
happiness, and harmony, which is after all the fulfillment
of God’s plan for humanity.
Richard John Neuhaus, First Things
Arnold’s message is demanding and exhilarating, which is what
disciples of Jesus should expect.
Thomas Howard, author
The candor, simplicity, and humanity of Arnold’s writing should
recommend it to an exceedingly wide reading public.
David Steindl-Rast, Mount Saviour Monastery
Arnold speaks out of a tradition of radical discipleship…
His writings are living water for gasping fish.
Alex J. Brunett, Archbishop of Seattle
Arnold offers readers wonderful insights into the meaning of
true Christianity…his anecdotal materials are sure to find an
echo in the hearts of readers, no matter where they are on the
spectrum of faith.
Joan Brown Campbell, National Council of Churches
Arnold’s approach is cogent, well-reasoned…some may disagree with this or that conclusion, but all will acknowledge his
sincerity.
Bernard Häring, author
Arnold’s writing is a convincing testimony to a truly ecumenical
spirit. Readers will be grateful for the depth and insights of this
outstanding author.
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Copyright © 2011 by Plough Publishing House Rifton, NY 12471 USA
Johann Christoph Arnold
Let each of us cry out to God
as if we were hanging by a hair,
and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven,
and we had almost no more time left to cry out.
For in truth,
we are always in danger in the world,
and there is no counsel and no refuge,
save to lift up our eyes and hearts,
and cry out to God.
Martin Buber
Since time began,
people have sought for meaning and purpose
in their lives, and even today, despite the rampant materialism of
our culture, this is so. Some of us look to science and technology,
others to religion and the supernatural; some of us look upward to
a higher power, others within.
Whatever our beliefs, all of us sense that somewhere there must
be answers to the age-old questions of suffering and death, life and
love. Sometimes we may stumble on these answers; at other times
they are yielded with learning, with experience, with the passing
of years. Sometimes they come only with intense struggle – with
cries from the heart.
In my work as counselor and pastor over twenty-five years, I have
met hundreds of people whose lives were enriched by their search
for life’s deepest answers. Though the particulars of their stories
may not be important, the pattern they reveal is. In its own way,
each shows that courage is rarely won without despair, that joy is
often yoked with pain, and that faith is seldom reached without
struggle and doubt.
There is hardly a story in this book that does not mention prayer,
and none that does not in some way refer to faith in God. But even
if you don’t count yourself religious, don’t be too quick to put it
down. No matter your background, I am confident that the wisdom
of the men and women in this book will give you something to take
away – at very least, new eyes to see the path your life is taking.
Rifton, New York
Robert Coles
In
the book you are about to read,
you will find a stirring collection of personal accounts compiled by a most thoughtful and
compassionate writer. Certainly, the men and women who divulge
them are ordinary people. Yet that is not a weakness, but a
strength. Even where we may not identify with their particulars,
we become, through hearing what they have to say, participants in
their ongoing search for wisdom, purpose, direction. As people
whose stories prompt recognition of our own bouts with aspiration
and despair, they invite our understanding as kindred souls, our
embrace as fellow travelers.
Thankfully, the anecdotes in
Cries from the Heart
are rendered
without contrivance: Arnold simply immerses the reader in them.
Then, modestly and naturally, he invests them with larger meaning
by using them to illustrate his theme: the universal human urge to
find worthy answers to the great riddle of existence.
No wonder, then, that the book is more than the sum of its stories, more than a didactic assemblage of experiences. An unusually
telling witness to the power of answered (or unanswered) yearning, it summons us to new hope and calls us to a reawakening of
the mind and heart.
Cambridge, Mass., USA
I was only seventeen when I first met Sibyl. A sophisticated, articulate New Yorker, she was unforgettable in her bright red dress and in her determination to prove there was no goodness in the world.
My story is a typical atheist’s story. We come into the world with
a preconceived idea. It’s as if we had a pre-birth memory of better days. By the time I was fourteen years old, I knew the place
was a mess. I was talking to God: “Look, I think I’ll live through
parental arguing even if I am an only child who has to carry it
alone on her shoulders. But those innocent children lying, flycovered, in gutters in India – I could do a better job!”
I was born in 1934, five years after the crash of 1929, and
maybe people were just gloomy in those days. Anyway, on my
fourth birthday I was presented with the ritual cake and told I
would get my wish should all the candles go out in one blow. I
took this as a guaranteed pipeline to that Person I seemed to
have known in pre-natal days. I instinctively knew you didn’t
have to pepper him with details so, after one successful blow, I
told him to “make it all better,” period.
Of course nothing got better. If anything, it got worse. At
four-and-a-half I attended my first Sunday-school class. Upon
being told where we were going, I thought, “At last, a chance to
meet God face to face.” A miserable Sibyl met her parents on
return. “How did you like Sunday school, dear?” “Awful. We cut
out white sheep and pasted them on green paper.” Organized,
institutional religion never recouped itself in my eyes.
From that point on life was just something to be endured.
There was nothing I or anyone else could do about it. As the only
child of educated parents, I lived in commandeered luxury. It
took only one “horror” a year to keep me shuddering at the
prospect of coming to terms with the immense philosophical
questions that plagued me. During my grade-school years, the
blood-covered face of a drunk who was staggering upright. (“It’s
all right, dear, he just bumped his head. He’s fine.”) Hearing
about new-born puppies on whom some boys were doing beebee gun practice. Running into a flasher after wandering away
from my mother in the supermarket. And ultimately, at eleven,
seeing “by mistake” the beginning frames of a newsreel showing American forces entering German concentration camps after World War II. My mother and I groaned and covered our eyes,
but I had already seen too much.
At fourteen, I had come to the end of my tether, inwardly.
My perpetual demand to God for an utterly perfect world had
gone unanswered. There was an overabundance of badness
and, worst of all, I was beginning to see that the goodness was
about ninety-five percent phony. Since the age of ten I had been
methodically reading all the books in our house. I started out
with
The Diary of a London Prostitute.
Other books I recall were
Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead,
Sloan Wilson’s
The Man in the
Grey Flannel Suit,
and
Black Boy,
by Richard Wright. If my parents were reading provocative stuff like this, they weren’t the
parents I thought they were. In fact, these books were in every
house in town. But they made no dent in anyone’s life. Or did
they?
I decided to give God one last chance. In California, a threeyear-old was trapped in a narrow drainpipe she had fallen into.
The entire nation prayed for her safe release, as men and machines tried to extract her without harming her in the process. It
was time for a showdown. This is it, God, your last chance. Get
her out alive, or we’re finished. Look, if it were left to me, I’d save
her without even being worshiped. The girl died in the pipe.
That did it. The last shreds of my regard for God were gone.
Now I knew we were only animated blobs of protoplasm.
Then there was the idiocy of human morality, which appeared to be deeply rooted in “what the neighbors would
think.” And what the neighbors thought depended on where
you lived. Morals, ethics, right and wrong – they were all purely
cultural phenomena. Everyone was playing the game. I opted
for nihilism and sensuality, and lived accordingly. Out with good
and evil, out with morality of any kind, out with accepted cultural customs. A line from a movie summed it up: “Live fast, die
young, and have a good-looking corpse.” So I proceeded to live
my beliefs, preaching them to any idiot who “believed.” I
smoked hard, drank hard, and lived hard. But I could not suppress a wrenching, clawing feeling that there might be a meaning to life, after all. In retrospect I see that I was so hungry, so
aching for God, that I was trying to taunt him out of the clouds.
I spent my last two years of high school at Emma Willard, a
private school for girls, where I had two close friends. One was a
suburban Republican WASP, so intelligent she later went mad.
The other was a Baltimore-born black of NAACP descent. Endlessly we discussed philosophy, read books, worked on the God
question, reaffirmed our atheism, and read C.S. Lewis so that,
just in case we should meet him, we’d be ready to “cut him
down.”
Chapel attendance was required at Emma Willard. I refused
to bow my head during prayers as a matter of conscience, but
was caught and admonished. My punishment? Banishment to
the back row, where I sat defiantly reading Freud.
Radcliffe seemed as phony as church, and I soon dropped
out and got married. Born in Madrid to a famous novelist, my
husband, Ramón, was orphaned as a small boy along with his
baby sister when Fascists executed their mother
during the Spanish Civil War. When the New York PEN Club
heard they needed rescuing, a well-to-do member
offered to take the children in. Ramón’s childhood was even
more luxurious than mine, but it meant just as little to him as
mine to me.
Both bent on escaping the stultifying atmosphere of dull
riches, we felt the kindred soul in each other when we met in
1951 or 52. In 1954 we dropped out of our colleges to marry.
Each of us was nineteen.
We very soon ran out of money. For two ex-rich kids it was
“an experience.” Wedding presents were pawned. It was sad,
but we had to admit that money must be acquired at times.
The first crack in my hardened heart occurred after the birth
of my daughter, Xaverie. She was so innocent – just like the hundred other babies in the maternity ward of the big New York City
hospital she was born in. I wept inwardly, thinking that in fifty
years half of them will be dying in the gutter, the other half rich
and miserable. Why are such pure beings put here on this terrible earth?
While nursing her at night, I steeped myself in Dostoyevsky.
Truths were coming at me, but I couldn’t have defined them
then. There wasn’t time for philosophical musings anyway. By
the time that baby girl, Xaverie, turned one, there was no father
in the house. Ramón was coming and going, and a powerful,
new force – the survival instinct called mother love – was taking
hold of me. Get a job, get a baby-sitter, pay the rent, find a new
husband. The baby-sitter plus rent left $10 a week for food and
transportation. Not that I let anyone feel sorry for “the poor
young mother.” I was a rotten wife who was reaping what she
had sown. I knew Ramón and I bore equal blame, and if I were
him, I would have left me too.
My life descended steadily into the swineherd’s berth.
Ramón and I were going through what I considered our final
separation. I was currently “in love” with another man, and I was
carrying his child, which he wanted me to abort. I kept hoping
he would change his mind at the last minute, but that never
happened. So I, tough atheist that I was, went through with the
most devastating ordeal of my life. Though still dedicated to the
proposition that there was no such thing as “right and wrong”
(no one had been able to persuade me otherwise), I was burdened with guilt beyond description.
There soon came a time when I was sure that short of my
own death (Xaverie was all that stood between suicide and me),
I had reached as close to the bottom as a person could get. It was
on a hot August night in 1957, in surroundings I will not describe, that I groaned to a Being I did not believe in: “Okay, if
there’s really another way, show me.”
Ramón startled me when he walked into my Manhattan office.
A year earlier, he had left me to join the Beat Generation – Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al. – in San Francisco, and we’d not
seen each other since. I was settled in Queens, across the street
from my parents, and was working as an editor for a glossy
magazine. I should have known Ramón could glide past the receptionist without question. No one in the office knew we were
estranged, no one knew that this was but the most recent in a
steady series of separations. He evoked no twinge of love in me.
Ramón launched into his story, the long and short of which
was that he had discovered a religious commune upstate, that
he felt drawn to it, and that he wanted me to visit it with him.
I couldn’t think of a worse idea. As a professional atheist, I
abhorred the religious. They were people whose faces froze in
disapproving grimaces, who worried about their reputation for
neatness and niceness, who never said, “C’mon in and have a
cup of coffee and a cigarette.” The religious were stiff and contrived and self-conscious. They seemed to be waiting for you to
notice how good they were. Aside from that, there was Ramón.
I wanted nothing more to do with him. He persisted. Eventually
I agreed.
I picked my traveling clothes carefully. My fire-engine red,
knit tube dress – that ought to ensure immediate rejection. All
the way up from the City, my venom brewed. Then we were suddenly there, rounding the last curve and stopping under huge
trees bearing swings for children. Xaverie made a beeline for
them. It was October, and the colors were breathtaking, like a
premonition of something good where I had hoped for something bad. I took twenty steps into the heart of the community
and my resolve crumbled. “What if there
is
a God, after all?”
I tried not to show it, hoped it would pass. A woman came
to meet me – peaceful, with loving eyes, a soft, makeup-less face.
She didn’t even notice that I was evil incarnate in a red dress.
Nothing was working. She greeted me as if we were long-parted
friends, seemed ready to be my sister for life. All this in a nanosecond.
But I wasn’t ready to leap into the burning bush, not me.
There was always hope that, in a minute, everything would reveal itself to be utterly phony.
The heavens and hells I lived through in the next forty-eight
hours were as several entire lifetimes. Half my being was moved
to tears; the other half scorned my reaction and reminded me
that I was probably surrounded by mindless adults – a sort of
spiritual schizophrenia.
On Sunday morning I looked forward to surcease in the
battle. Surely the worship service would cure me of the strange
leanings toward “goodness” I was feeling. It would be like every
other nonsensical religious powwow I’d been to. Empty.
Entering the meeting room, however – the same room in
which I’d already eaten three meals – I was struck dumb. Tables
were shoved back, the kitchen chairs arranged in a circle. People
were wearing their normal faded jeans and skirts, and there
wasn’t a shred of religious stuff to be seen. Someone was speaking, but it was just some guy in a farmer outfit. But then: Horrors! He wasn’t speaking. He was reading Dostoyevsky! It
couldn’t be! God, don’t do this to me, I said to myself; don’t hit
me in the literary solar plexus. It was
The Brothers Karamazov,
and Ivan the intellectual was telling Alyosha the believer that he,
Ivan, refuses to believe in a God who would countenance the
torment of even one innocent child. Worlds, galaxies collided; it
was my spiritual denouement. Quietly I accepted and then embraced a new question: Is it God who torments the innocent, or
is it Sibyl?