Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

7. Gad

69 7. Gad God is not a person. God is not an idea. God is the engine. God is the beat. We are distracted by the word God. It gets in the way of the beat. Forget the word. It’s only a word. It has a past; it comes from the ancient Hebrew word gad, which means to crowd upon or attack or invade or overcome. So the word we use today for the throb under and in and through all things is a verb. Sometimes we do things right. The ancient Jews got it right: they referred to God as HaShem, The Name. So many names through the centuries of human beings trying to sing along with the beat: gott, khoda, khooda, gheu, emu, div, thes, deva, dyaus, deus, theos, dia, el, ilu, ilah, so many words meaning the same thing: the center, the throb, the Heart. Forget the name of the Heart. Forget any and all images of the Heart, perceptions, conceptions, traditions, instructions. Cease to try to understand. Just listen. Just feel it humming hammering holy. * And we are distracted by the person of God: the young intense dusty confusing testy paradoxical devout prickly paranoiac thin tired relentless Christ. Whatever else he was he was a human being with a human heart, atria and septae, mitral and ventral valves, sixty beats a second perhaps, or maybe forty beats a second, he was a calm man quite sure of his work, he was about his Father’s the wet engine 70 business, or maybe ninety beats a second, he was terrified of what was to be, he lost his temper in the temple, he wept with fear in the garden at night, knowing he would be pierced and lanced, knowing he would be speared in the heart as he hung struggling to breathe, sour wine on his lips, the afternoon brooding and lowering over Golgotha, the Place of Skulls. He too was once a fertilized egg doubling and redoubling itself, forming endocardial heart tubes, myocardium and epicardium, the cells of what would be his heart miraculously migrating and fusing and dividing into the genius engineering of the four magic chambers, his amazing new heart beating beneath his amazing mother’s amazing heart after eight weeks, his mother the extraordinary teenage girl who said yes yes yes, as all mothers do, all their lives; and then mere moments later he is crying Eloi! Eloi! as he dies, he breathes his last, he yields up his spirit, his heart sludges to a halt on a cross on a bitter bleak afternoon; and then, three days later, in the oceanic black silence of the tomb in the garden, the tomb where no one had yet been laid, the tomb with the seal on the stone, the tomb redolent with myrrh and aloe and linen and spice, suddenly There’s a heartbeat, And another, And another, And another … * One of the most interesting men I ever met in this life is a tall craggy-faced cheerful man who travels the world collecting stories and talking to people. He is many things: husband, father, naturalist, writer, Zen priest. He has written books about cranes and sharks and fishermen and leopards and sandpipers and tigers and plovers and missionaries and Gad 71 thieves. Much else. A while ago we sat and talked for a long time about prayer and music and attentiveness and the shape and song of the heart. We talked about Zen meditation and Catholic mysticism and the wild holy songs of William Blake and the Hindu chants known as the Rigveda, the verses of wisdom and praise. In Hindu lore these chants have come down to us from the beginning of time, and are the cosmic reverberations of divine harmony; she or he who hears or speaks them hears or speaks, however tenuously or briefly, the music of God. Even the syllables of the Rigveda are holy and powerful, and the most potent of them all is om. As my friend remarked, when you chant and chant and chant om, again and again and again, your lips opening the o and kissing closed the m, to the point where you lose track of the time and the slight discomfort of your body in the chair and your pending and pressing duties and responsibilities and what time the grocery store closes and the sick child and the distant lover...