The Shack

  Sarayu stood up from the table and looked directly at Mack. “Mackenzie,” she offered, “if you care to, I would like you to come and help me in the garden. There are things I need to do there before tomorrow’s celebration. We can continue relevant elements of this conversation there, please?”

  “Sure,” responded Mack and excused himself from the table.

  “One last comment,” he added, turning back. “I just can’t imagine any final outcome that would justify all this.”

  “Mackenzie.” Papa rose out of her chair and walked around the table to give him a big squeeze. “We’re not justifying it. We are redeeming it.”

  9 A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GARDEN FAR, FAR AWAY

  Even should we find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

  – Henry Van Dyke

  Mack followed Sarayu as best he could out the back door and down the walkway past the row of firs. To walk behind such a being was like tracking a sunbeam. Light seemed to radiate through her and then reflect her presence in multiple places at once. Her nature was rather ethereal, full of dynamic shades and hues of color and motion. “No wonder so many people are a little unnerved at relating to her,” Mack thought. “She obviously is not a being who is predictable.”

  Mack concentrated instead on staying to the walkway. As he rounded the trees, he saw for the first time a magnificent garden and orchard somehow contained within a plot of land hardly larger than an acre. For whatever reason, Mack had expected a perfectly manicured and ordered English garden. This was not that!

  It was chaos in color. His eyes tried unsuccessfully to find some order in this blatant disregard for certainty. Dazzling sprays of flowers were blasted through patches of randomly planted vegetables and herbs, vegetation the likes of which Mack had never seen. It was confusing, stunning, and incredibly beautiful.

  “From above it’s a fractal,” Sarayu said over her shoulder with an air of pleasure.

  “A what?” asked Mack absentmindedly, his mind still trying to grapple with and control the pandemonium of sight and the movements of hues and shades. Every step he took changed whatever patterns he for an instant thought he had seen, and nothing was like it had been.

  “A fractal… something considered simple and orderly that is actually composed of repeated patterns no matter how magnified. A fractal is almost infinitely complex. I love fractals, so I put them everywhere.”

  “Looks like a mess to me,” muttered Mack under his breath.

  Sarayu stopped and turned to Mack, her face glorious. “Mack! Thank you! What a wonderful compliment!” She looked around at the garden. “That is exactly what this is-a mess. But,” she looked back at Mack and beamed, “it’s still a fractal, too.”

  Sarayu walked straight to a certain herb plant, plucked some heads off it, and turned to Mack.

  “Here,” she said, her voice sounding more like music than anything else. “Papa wasn’t kidding at breakfast. You’d better chew on these greens for a few minutes. It will counteract the natural ‘movement’ of the ones you overindulged in earlier, if you know what I mean.”

  Mack chuckled as he accepted and carefully began to chew. “Yeah, but those greens tasted so good!” His stomach had begun to roll a little, and being kept off balance by the verdant wildness he had stepped into was not helping. The flavor of the herb was not distasteful: a hint of mint and some other spices he had probably smelled before but couldn’t identify. As they walked, the growling in his stomach slowly began to subside, and he relaxed what he hadn’t realized he had been clenching.

  Without speaking a word, he tried to follow Sarayu from place to place within the garden, but found himself easily distracted by the blends of colors; currant and vermillion reds, tangerine and chartreuse divided by platinum and fuchsia, as well as innumerable shades of greens and browns. It was all wonderfully bewildering and intoxicating.

  Sarayu seemed to be intently focused on a particular task. But like her name, she wafted about like a playful eddying wind and he never quite knew which way she was blowing. He found it rather difficult to keep up with her. It reminded him of trying to follow Nan in a mall.

  She moved through the garden snipping off various flowers and herbs and handing them to Mack to carry. The makeshift bouquet grew quite large, a pungent mass of perfume. The mixtures of aromatic spices were unlike anything he had ever smelled, and they were so strong he could almost taste them.

  They deposited the final bouquet inside the door of a small garden shop that Mack had not noticed before, buried as it was in a thicket of wild growth including vines and what Mack thought were weeds.

  “One task done,” Sarayu announced, “and one to go.” She handed Mack a shovel, rake, scythe, and pair of gloves and floated out and down a particularly overgrown path that seemed to go in the general direction of the far end of the garden. Along the way, she would occasionally slow to touch this plant or that flower, all the while humming the haunting tune that Mack had been captivated by the evening before. He followed obediently, carrying the tools he had been given and trying to keep her in sight while wondering at his surroundings.

  When she stopped, Mack almost ran into her, distracted as he was looking around. Somehow she had changed, now dressed in work clothes: jeans with wild designs, a work shirt, and gloves. They were in an area that could have been an orchard, but not really. Regardless, the place they stood was an open spot surrounded on three sides by peach and cherry trees, and in the middle was a cascade of purple and yellow flowered bushes that almost took his breath away.

  “Mackenzie,” she pointed directly at the incredible purple and yellow patch. “I would like your help clearing this entire plot of ground. There is something very special that I want to plant here tomorrow, and we need to get it ready.” She looked at Mack and reached for the scythe.

  “You can’t be serious? This is so gorgeous and in such a secluded spot.” But Sarayu didn’t seem to notice. Without further explanation, she turned and began destroying the artistic display of flowers. She cut cleanly, seemingly without any effort. Mack shrugged, donned his gloves, and began raking into piles the havoc she was wreaking. He struggled to keep up. It might not be a strain for her, but for him it was labor. Twenty minutes later the plants were all cut off at the roots, and the plot looked like a wound in the garden. Mack’s forearms were etched with cut marks from the branches he had piled in one spot. He was out of breath and sweating, glad to be finished. Sarayu stood over the plot, examining their handiwork.

  “Isn’t this exhilarating?” she asked.

  “I’ve been exhilarated in better ways,” Mack retorted sarcastically.

  “Oh, Mackenzie, if you only knew. It’s not the work, but the purpose that makes it special. And,” she smiled at him, “it’s the only kind I do.”

  Mack leaned on his rake and looked around the garden and then at the red welts on his arms. “Sarayu, I know you are the Creator, but did you make the poisonous plants, stinging nettles, and mosquitoes, too?”

  “Mackenzie,” responded Sarayu, seeming to move in tandem with the breezes, “A created being can only take what already exists and from it fashion something different.”

  “So, you are saying that you…”

  “… created everything that actually exists, including what you consider the bad stuff,” Sarayu completed his sentence. “But when I created it, it was only Good, because that is just the way I am.” She seemed to almost billow into a curtsy before resuming her task.

  “But,” Mack continued, not satisfied, “then why has so much of the ‘Good’ gone ‘bad’?”

  Now Sarayu paused before answering. “You humans, so little in your own eyes. You are truly blind to your own place in the Creation. Having chosen the ravaged path of independence, you don’t even comprehend that you are dragging the entire Creation along with you.” She shook her head and the wind sighed through the trees nearby. “So very sad, but it won’t be this way forever.”

&n
bsp; They enjoyed a few moments of silence as Mack looked back toward the various plants that he could see from where they were standing. “So, are there plants in this garden that are poisonous?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” exclaimed Sarayu. “They are some of my favorites. Some are even dangerous to the touch, like this one.” She reached for a nearby bush and snapped off something that looked like a dead stick with only a few tiny leaves budding from the stem. She handed it to Mack, who raised both hands to avoid touching it.

  Sarayu laughed. “I am here, Mack. There are times when it is safe to touch, and times when precautions must be taken. That is the wonder and adventure of exploration, a piece of what you call science-to discern and discover what we have hidden for you to find.”

  “So why did you hide it?” Mack inquired.

  “Why do children love to hide and seek? Ask any person who has a passion to explore and discover and create. The choice to hide so many wonders from you is an act of love that is a gift inside the process of life.”

  Mack gingerly reached out and took the poisonous twig. “If you had not told me this was safe to touch, would it have poisoned me?”

  “Of course! But if I direct you to touch, that is different. For any created being, autonomy is lunacy. Freedom involves trust and obedience inside a relationship of love. So, if you are not hearing my voice, it would be wise to take the time to understand the nature of the plant.”

  “So why create poisonous plants at all?” Mack queried, handing back the twig.

  “Your question presumes that poison is bad; that such creations have no purpose. Many of these so-called bad plants, like this one, contain incredible properties for healing or are necessary for some of the most magnificent wonders when combined with something else. Humans have a great capacity for declaring something good or evil, without truly knowing.”

  Obviously the short break, which had been for Mack’s sake, was over and Sarayu thrust a hand shovel at Mack, picking up the rake. “To prepare this ground, we must dig up the roots of all the wonderful growth that was here. It is hard work, but well worth it. If the roots are not here, then they cannot do what comes naturally and harm the seed we will plant.”

  “Okay,” Mack grunted as they both got down on their knees alongside the freshly cleared plot. Sarayu was somehow able to reach deep under the ground and find the ends of the roots, bringing them effortlessly to the surface. She left the shorter ones for Mack, who used the hand shovel to dig under and pull them up. They then shook the dirt from the roots and threw them onto one of the piles that Mack had earlier raked together.

  “I’ll burn those later,” she said.

  “You were talking earlier about humans declaring good and evil without knowledge?” Mack asked, shaking another root of its dirt.

  “Yes. I was specifically talking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil?” asked Mack.

  “Exactly!” she stated, seeming to almost expand and contract for emphasis while she worked. “And now, Mackenzie, you are beginning to see why eating the deadly fruit of that tree was so devastating to your race.”

  “I’ve never given it much thought, really,” said Mack, intrigued by the direction their chat was taking. “So was there really an actual garden? I mean, Eden and all that?”

  “Of course. I told you I have a thing for gardens.”

  “That’s going to bother some people. There are lots of people who think it was only a myth.”

  “Well, their mistake isn’t fatal. Rumors of glory are often hidden inside of what many consider myths and tales.”

  “Oh, I’ve got some friends who are not going to like this,” Mack observed, as he wrestled with a particularly stubborn root.

  “No matter. I myself am very fond of them.”

  “I’m so surprised,” Mack said a little sarcastically, and smiled in her direction. “Okay, then.” He drove his shovel into the dirt, grabbing the root above it with his hand. “So tell me about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  “This is what we were talking about at breakfast,” she responded. “Let me begin by asking you a question. When something happens to you, how do you determine whether it is good or evil?”

  Mack thought for a moment before answering. “Well, I haven’t really thought about that. I guess I would say that something is good when I like it-when it makes me feel good or gives me a sense of security. Conversely, I’d call something evil that causes me pain or costs me something I want.”

  “So it is pretty subjective then?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “And how confident are you in your ability to discern what indeed is good for you, or what is evil?”

  “To be honest,” said Mack, “I tend to sound justifiably angry when somebody is threatening my ‘good,’ you know, what I think I deserve. But I’m not really sure I have any logical ground for deciding what is actually good or evil, except how something or someone affects me.” He paused to rest and catch his breath a moment. “All seems quite self-serving and self-centered, I suppose. And my track record isn’t very encouraging either. Some things I initially thought were good turned out to be horribly destructive, and some things that I thought were evil, well, they turned out…”

  He hesitated before finishing his thought, but Sarayu interrupted. “Then it is you who determines good and evil. You become the judge. And to make things more confusing, that which you determine to be good will change over time and circumstance. And then beyond that and even worse, there are billions of you each determining what is good and what is evil. So when your good and evil clashes with your neighbor’s, fights and arguments ensue and even wars break out.”

  The colors moving within Sarayu were darkening as she spoke, blacks and grays merging and shadowing the rainbow hues. “And if there is no reality of good that is absolute, then you have lost any basis for judging. It is just language, and one might as well exchange the word good for the word evil.”

  “I can see where that might be a problem,” Mack agreed.

  “A problem?” Sarayu almost snapped as she stood up and faced him. She was disturbed, but he knew that it was not directed at him. “Indeed! The choice to eat of that tree tore the universe apart divorcing the spiritual from the physical. They died, expelling in the breath of their choice the very breath of God. I would say that is a problem!”

  In the intensity of her speaking, Sarayu had risen slowly off the ground, but now as she settled back, her voice came quiet but distinct. “That was a great sorrow day.”

  Neither of them spoke for almost ten minutes while they worked. As he continued digging up roots and throwing them into the pile, Mack’s mind busily worked to untangle the implications of what she had said. Finally he broke the silence.

  “I can see now,” confessed Mack, “that I spend most of my time and energy trying to acquire what I have determined to be good, whether it’s financial security or health or retirement or whatever. And I spend a huge amount of energy and worry fearing what I’ve determined to be evil” Mack sighed deeply.

  “Such truth in that,” said Sarayu gently. “Remember this.

  It allows you to play God in your independence. That’s why a part of you prefers not to see me. And you don’t need me at all to create your list of good and evil. But you do need me if you have any desire to stop such an insane lust for independence.”

  “So there is a way to fix it?” asked Mack.

  “You must give up your right to decide what is good and evil on your own terms. That is a hard pill to swallow; choosing to only live in me. To do that you must know me enough to trust me and learn to rest in my inherent goodness.”

  Sarayu turned toward Mack; at least that was his impression. “Mackenzie, evil is a word we use to describe the absence of Good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of Light or death to describe the absence of Life. Both evil and darkness can only be understood in
relation to Light and Good; they do not have any actual existence. I am Light and I am Good. I am Love and there is no darkness in me. Light and Good actually exist. So, removing yourself from me will plunge you into darkness. Declaring independence will result in evil because apart from me, you can only draw upon yourself. That is death because you have separated yourself from me: Life.”

  “Wow,” Mack exclaimed, sitting back for a moment. “That really helps. But, I can also see that giving up my independent right is not going to be an easy process. It could mean that…”

  Sarayu interrupted his sentence again. “… that in one instance, the good may be the presence of cancer or the loss of income-or even a life.”

  “Yeah, but tell that to the person with cancer or the father whose daughter is dead,” Mack postured, a little more sarcastically than he had intended.

  “Oh, Mackenzie,” reassured Sarayu. “Don’t you think we have them in mind as well? Each of them was the center of another story that is untold.”

  “But,” Mack could feel his control getting away as he drove his shovel in hard, “didn’t Missy have a right to be protected?”

  “No, Mack. A child is protected because she is loved, not because she has a right to be protected.”

  That stopped him. Somehow, what Sarayu had just been saying seemed to turn the whole world upside down, and he was struggling to find some footing. Surely there were some rights that he could legitimately hold on to.

  “But what about…”

  “Rights are where survivors go, so that they won’t have to work out relationships,” she cut in.

  “But, if I gave up…”

  “Then you would begin to know the wonder and adventure of living in me,” she interrupted him again.

  Mack was getting frustrated. He spoke louder, “But, don’t I have the right to…”

  “To complete a sentence without being interrupted? No, you don’t. Not in reality. But as long as you think you do, you will surely get ticked off when someone cuts you off, even if it is God.”

  He was stunned and stood up, staring at her, not knowing whether to rage or laugh. Sarayu smiled at him. “Mackenzie, Jesus didn’t hold on to any rights; he willingly became a servant and lives out of his relationship to Papa. He gave up everything, so that by his dependent life he opened a door that would allow you to live free enough to give up your rights.”

  At that moment, Papa emerged down the walkway carrying two paper sacks. She was smiling as she approached.

  “Well, you two having a good conversation I assume?” She winked at Mack.

  “The best!” exclaimed Sarayu. “And guess what? He called our garden a mess-isn’t that perfect?”

  They both beamed broadly at Mack, who still wasn’t absolutely sure he wasn’t being played with. His anger was subsiding but he could still feel the burning in his cheeks. The other two seemed to take no notice.

  Sarayu reached up and kissed Papa on the cheek. “As always, your timing is perfect. Everything that I needed Mackenzie to do here is finished.” She turned to him. “Mackenzie, you are such a delight! Thank you for all your hard work!”

  “I didn’t do that much, really,” he apologized. “I mean, look at this mess.” His gaze moved over the garden that surrounded them. “But it really is beautiful, and full of you, Sarayu. Even though it seems like lots of work still needs to be done, I feel strangely at home and comfortable here.”

  The two looked at each other and grinned.

  Sarayu stepped toward him until she had invaded his personal space. “And well you should, Mackenzie, because this garden is your soul. This mess is you! Together, you and I, we have been working with a purpose in your heart. And it is wild and beautiful and perfectly in process. To you it seems like a mess, but to me, I see a perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive-a living fractal.”

  The impact of her words almost crumbled all of Mack’s reserve. He looked again at their garden-his garden-and it really was a mess, but incredible and wonderful at the same time. And beyond that, Papa was here and Sarayu loved the mess. It was almost too much to comprehend and once again his carefully guarded emotions threatened to spill over.

  “Mackenzie, Jesus would like to take you for a walk, if you want to go. I packed you a picnic lunch in case you get a little hungry. It’ll tide you over till tea time.”

  As Mack turned to accept the lunch bags, he felt Sarayu slip by, kissing his cheek as she passed, but he didn’t see her go. Like the wind he thought he could see her path, the plants bending in turn as if in worship. When he turned back, Papa was also gone, so he headed toward the workshop to see if he could find Jesus. It seemed they had an appointment.

  10 WADE IN THE WATER

  New world-big horizon

  Open your eyes and see it’s true

  New world-across the frightening

  Waves of blue

  – David Wilcox

  Jesus finished sanding the last corner of what looked like a casket sitting on a table in the workshop. He ran his fingers along the smooth edge, nodded with satisfaction, and put the sandpaper down. He walked out the door brushing the