The Irrational Season Page 7

  A decade ago I wasn’t getting enough writing done at my bedroom desk, what with children still at home and a husband apt to be around the house during the day, so I asked Canon Tallis if it was all right if I wrote in the then almost unused library at the Cathedral. My first few weeks there were marvelously productive, and just as I came to the point where I needed to get my penned pages onto the typewriter, the young librarian got called on jury duty, and was quite upset about abandoning his post. I looked longingly at his electric typewriter and told him I’d be glad to keep the place open for him as long as I could use the typewriter. I had a blissful two weeks, and when he came back it was only briefly, and I became librarian by default. I have no training whatsoever as a librarian, but I am very happy in the beautiful paneled room which is used far more now than it was, so that I need an assistant to do the library work while I get on with my writing. I’ve been prolific during my years there, and have made an extraordinary number of friends.

  My dog is welcome to come with me, and he stays dutifully under the desk, only his black nose showing. I have a little radio set for a classical music station, WNCN, and after the eleven o’clock news I call Hugh, briefly, just to check in. When I come home in the late afternoon I check in again, go over the mail, and then head for the piano for an hour and a half. After that we are together, and really together, for the evening, talking and having a drink while I get dinner. It is a free relationship, but it is built on promises. Like every other couple we break our promises one way or another, but we take the breaking of the promises seriously; the fact that the promise has been broken does not make us permissive about breaking it again; instead, we try to mend. We have used an extraordinary amount of glue.

  Written words about marriage inevitably come from the mind, from the sunside of Mercury; whereas I know, with nightside, with heart informing mind, that the largest part of marriage and love abides in the mediating zone, in the non-empirical area of our identities. With my conscious mind and with my body I can think about the freedom a promise brings, the joy an explosion of passion. But there’s more to it than that.

  Because you’re not what I would have you be

  I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

  Seeking mirage where desert blooms, I mar

  Your you. Love, I would like to see

  Past all delusion to reality.

  Then would I see God’s image in your face,

  His hand in yours, and in your eyes his grace.

  Because I’m not what I would have me be

  I idolize two Ones who are not any place,

  Not you, not me, and so they never touch.

  Reality would burn. I do not like it much.

  And yet in you, in me, I find a trace

  Of love which struggles to break through

  The hidden lovely truth of me, of you.

  My love for my husband and his for me is in that unknown, underwater area of ourselves where our separations become something new and strange, merge and penetrate like the drops of water in the sea. But we do not lose our solitudes, or our particularity, and we become more than we could alone. This is mystery. I cannot explain it. But I have learned that it makes up for our clashes, our differences in temperament, our angers, our withdrawals, our failures to understand.

  No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I’ve been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again—till next time. I’ve learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won’t stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.

  ON VALENTINE’S DAY, FOR A SAINT MOST MISUNDERSTOOD

  He was a strange old man

  given to solitude on the forest,

  eating acorns and locusts.

  When he saw a young virgin

  he ceased baying at the moon,

  lay down, and put his head in her lap.

  He helped the sun rise every morning

  and pulled the ocean high on the shore

  at each full moon. He knew that love

  is like a sword. He felt its pain.

  His blood fell on the snow and turned to roses

  and so he was, of all saints, most misunderstood.

  His eyes are flame, and their look sears.

  We pretend he’s someone else to avoid burning.

  I would go into the forest, silent and alone.

  If I find him, will he dry my tears?

  5 … Lion and Lamb

  Lent. Strange bleak season in the Church year; strange bleak season in the part of the world in which I live. February—how right the Romans were to make it the shortest month of the year. And March. In March I am ready for spring, and spring is not here. When I went to Smith College from Charleston, South Carolina, I could not understand why March was still winter; in Charleston, spring was at its height. In Northampton the sky was clamped whitely over a frozen earth. Ice crackled in the puddles along the paths; snow piled greyly in shady corners.

  I am too eager for spring. Around Crosswicks the sere fields need their blanket of snow to prepare the ground for growing. In my heart I am too eager for Easter. But, like the winter fields, my heart needs the snows of Lent. I used to make up lists as Lent approached, lists of small things to give up. But then it occurred to me that if what I was giving up was something bad, it should be given up once and for all, and not just for forty days and forty nights. There is a value to giving up something which is in itself good, as an offering of love. But now I feel that I want to do something positive, rather than something negative, for these wintry weeks. The horror of starvation all over the world makes a moderate diet obligatory at all seasons of the year.

  Perhaps what I am supposed to do about Lent is to think about some things I have put off thinking about. The Beatitudes, for instance. They have seemed to make demands on me that I’m not sure I want made. But I have a hunch that if I stop being afraid of the Beatitudes and consider them seriously, I may discover a way of life which will not only be simpler than life usually is in New York City in the late nineteen-seventies, but which will also be more free than life normally is for a middle-class American.

  As I glance superficially at these extraordinary directions they seem absurd when set against the United States of America at the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps they were more possible in the smaller and simpler world of two thousand years ago.

  But were Nineveh and Tyre that much different from Manhattan and Dallas? Or Sodom and Gomorrah from Chicago and Kansas City?

  The days grow longer, the cold grows stronger. According to the new liturgical year in my Church we no longer have the three weeks of preparation for Lent dividing the joy of the Epiphany season from the journey into the darkness of Lent, and I miss them because it appears out of step with the needs of the world, which seem to cry out for a return to the austere observance of Lent. It’s not that I want us to go in for breast beating and navel gazing, but I do find the lack of penitence in both the Roman Catholic and the Anglican proposed liturgies extraordinary. Here the world’s in the worst mess we’ve been in for generations, and we no longer get down on our knees and say, I’m sorry. Help!

  It’s not that I want us to get stuck in that position or to grovel. My mother used to want to say the General Confession from the Book of Common Prayer, and that was fine, but I didn’t want her to stop there. After the Confession I wanted her to go on to the Thanksgiving. But I agree with her that the Confes
sion must come before we can rejoice.

  Rejoice and be happy—what does it mean? Each one of the Beatitudes begins with Blessed, and translated from the Greek, blessed means happy. In my French Bible blessed is heureux. (Creed is symbole and I find this helpful too.) Sometimes I think that we have forgotten how to be truly happy, we are so conditioned to look for instant gratification. Thus we confuse happiness with transitory pleasures, with self-indulgence. How, in fact, can we live happily when we are surrounded on all sides by so much pain and misery? War and alarums of war, earthquake, flood, drought. Crime is rising; anger and frustration burst into violence, and violence itself becomes a perverse form of gratification. What is this blessedness, this promised happiness? What, if we follow the directions given us in the Beatitudes, is expected of us?—not a general ‘us,’ but each one of us in all our particularity.

  If it is worth being expected of, then something unique, something different, is asked of each of us.

  Jesus wanted the rich young man as a disciple; he probably wanted him as one of the twelve. He loved him, and so he asked everything of him. And the rich young man—as so often happens with the very rich—could not respond to the demand.

  With Zaccheus it was different. Zaccheus was a small man, so small that he couldn’t even see Jesus through the crowd until he climbed up into a tree. What Jesus asked of Zaccheus was what Zaccheus was capable of giving. Maybe it’s easier for those who have less, to give what they have, than for those who have much.

  Most of us, I suspect, fall somewhere between the rich young man and Zaccheus, and we have to find out for ourselves where we are.

  We live in a day of false expectations, false expectations of ourselves, of others. People I know who are professed non-Christians are horrified because their Christian friends behave in what they consider a non-Christian way. It strikes me as rather ironic coming from people who usually affirm their atheism, and who assert that man does not need God in this enlightened age of technocracy; man is perfectable of his own effort; give us enough education, enough technique, and we can cope with everything on our own; virtue and moral judgment are acquirable characteristics. So I am not quite sure what it is they are looking for in Christians, although they are right that most of us, most of the time, behave in a non-Christian way, in that our light too often burns dim and we are not recognized by our love for each other.

  I remember one night at the dinner table when two college students asked, rather condescendingly, if I really needed God in order to be happy (blessed). And I said, “Yes. I do. I cannot do it on my own.” Simply acknowledging my lack of ability to be in control of the vast technological complex in which my life is set helps free me from its steel net.

  Okay, they agreed. So we know we can’t control traffic jams and sanitation-department strikes and flu epidemics, but certainly you can’t believe in heaven, can you? All that pie-in-the-sky stuff?

  Certainly not pie-in-the-sky. Whoever dreamed that one up didn’t have much imagination. But the Beatitudes tell me that Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. That’s the very first one. I may hold off on heaven till the last of the Beatitudes because it’s going to take a steady look at all of them to get me ready. All I know for now is that wherever God is, heaven is, and if I don’t have glimpses of it here and now, I’m not going to know it anywhere else.

  But of course I have heaven dreams:

  Perhaps

  after death

  the strange timelessness, matterlessness,

  absolute differentness

  of eternity

  will be shot through

  like a starry night

  with islands of familiar and beautiful

  joys.

  For I should like

  to spend a star

  sitting beside Grandpa Bach

  at the organ, learning, at last, to play

  the C minor fugue as he, essentially,

  heard it burst into creation;

  and another star

  of moor and mist, and through the shadows

  the cold muzzle of the dog against my hand,

  and walk with Emily. We would not need

  to talk, nor ever go back to the damp

  of Haworth parsonage for tea;

  I should like to eat a golden meal

  with my brothers Gregory and Basil

  and my sister Macrina. We would raise

  our voices and laugh and be a little drunk

  with love and joy;

  I should like a theatre star

  and Will yelling, “No! No! That’s not

  how I wrote it! But perhaps ’tis better

  that way, ‘To be or not to be.’ All right,

  then, let it stand!”

  And I should like

  another table

  —yes, Plato, please come, and you, too,

  Socrates, for this is the essential table

  of which all other tables are only

  flickering shadows on the wall.

  This is the heavenly banquet

  (Oh, come)

  the eternal convivium

  the sky blazes with stars

  And you, my friends? Will you come, too?

  We cannot go alone,

  Perhaps, then, star-dazzled,

  we will understand that we have seen him

  and all the stars will burst with glory

  and we, too, in this ultimate explosion

  of matter

  and time

  will know what it is

  to be

  perhaps

  Relying on that glorious cloud of witnesses to attend to heaven, I want to concentrate on blessing, and on being poor in spirit. I’m coming to a wider understanding of blessing than the old one which implied that if you were virtuous and good, God would bless you by giving you an abundance of material things. Even in the Book of Job this attitude prevails, for Job ends up with more wives and more sons and more cattle than he had before.

  But the happiness offered us by the Beatitudes is not material; it is more spiritual than physical, internal than external; and there is an implication which I find very exciting that the circle of blessing is completed only when man blesses God, that God’s blessing does not return to him empty. This completing of the circle is difficult for adults to comprehend, but is understood intuitively by children. Our youngest child, when he was a little boy, used to have intimate, leisurely, and long conversations with God. Bedtime was my most special and privileged time with my children; we read aloud; we sang; and then we had prayers, and although I knew that the prayers were often extended to inordinate lengths in order to prolong bedtime, that was all right, too. It’s not a bad thing to extend conversation with God, no matter what the reason.

  This little boy’s conversations with God were spontaneous, loving, and sometimes dictatorial. Many of them I recorded in my journal, so that I would not forget them—such as the prayer one rainy autumn evening when he paused in his God-blesses and said, “O God, I love to listen to the rain; I love to listen to you talk.” Another evening he paused again and said severely, “And God: remember to be the Lord.” This was during one of the many times when the adults had huddled by the radio during a world crisis; but it took a four-year-old to remind me in my own praying that God is the Lord who is in charge of the universe no matter what we do to mess it up.

  And one night this little boy, when he had asked God to bless family and friends and animals, said, “And God! God bless you, too.”

  But we outgrow this spontaneity and forget the completeness of the circle of blessing. Once again we have come to think of happiness as material prosperity, as affluence. This is the consumer mentality, and is how Madison Avenue would have us think. When we have been turned into consumers we are lowered from being men and women, thinking human beings. Far too often we fall for the not-very-subtle temptation: the more we consume, the happier (more blessed) we will be: more cornflakes, Tang, Preparation-H, autom
obiles, washing machines, aspirin, Exedrin, Drano, Tide, Bufferin—but it gives us headaches, not happiness. Happiness comes to the poor in spirit.

  Who do I know who is poor in spirit? Have I ever, myself, been poor in spirit? What do I have that I can give up, in order to become poor in spirit?

  I once talked at length to a Roman Catholic nun about her vows, and the things these vows made her renounce, that she might be poor in spirit. She could understand, she said, her vow of poverty, giving up the material things of the world. She could even understand her vow of obedience, giving up her own will. But, she said, “if sex is good, why should we give it up? We used to be taught that sex is bad, and now we’re taught that sex is good, so why should we give it up?”

  She, an Irish Roman Catholic, was completely hung up on all our distortions of the Puritan ethic. In my marriage I am certainly not required to be celibate, but I am required to be chaste. Chaste love is participatory and knows, I am convinced, far greater physical joy than possessive, or unchaste love, where either or both partners are using the other.

  Chastity for a monastic does include celibacy, and my first understanding of celibacy as a positive, rather than a negative, quality came during the Second World War.

  It’s easy to be smug about what is going on in another country from the safe distance of one’s own, and, like everybody else, I found myself violently condemning the behavior of the Germans to the Jews. But even in the act of condemning I would stop short and ask myself, What would I do if I were an ordinary citizen living in Berlin instead of New York? How strong would my moral convictions be? How far would my courage carry me? If I knew everything that Hitler and his cohorts were doing to exterminate all Jews from the face of the earth, Would I have the poverty of spirit to continue being friendly with the Jewish professor in the next apartment?—knowing that this would probably send me to a concentration camp?