There is a deep understanding of life and the human psyche in the practice of a wake, assisting the soul on its way beyond natural life; the practice of which, I imagine goes back into the shadows of human communal memory. The Irish Catholic practice of waking the dead retains something of this pagan custom: but true to the Church, there is taken from the practice the slivers of truth and it is baptized into the life of the body of Christ.
I guess I’m not talking about getting drunk and making wobbly speeches on chairs: or am I? I am trying to get at the spirit of waking underneath there. Perhaps a muse will help…
A few days ago I sat on a log bench in the park near the lake, feeling the rough skin of the old pine tree seat as it echoed its younger brothers still standing tall- elegant, sweet-smelling skyscrapers of the green. I was having a nice respite beside the play structure at the edge of Cascade Lake, a few minutes wherein the kids are occupied with spinning, the gyrations somehow drawing them into a different plane of being.
The line of the trees drew me upwards, and the wind off the lake supported this movement; as I was drawn away from the present, into contemplation of the quiet tree-speech: slow-motion syllables of old-timers, living things who had, perhaps, been there when my ancestors came to this state: I saw my great-great-great grandfather planting flowers in La Conner, dreaming of his own store in the new country; and my grandfather swimming in a lake like this, a water-spraying lithe figure, before life and illness bowed his body into the underground.
As I looked to the top of one old tree long since hit by lightning or fire, it’s point now shaved to a venerable but disfigured flat-top, a terrible feeling of heartbreak and sadness took hold of me, like the slow chill one feels after being out in the rain too long. It was an old feeling, one of mine; but it seemed to emanate from that old tree, as if it had held this sadness for me all these years. Was it the tree holding it, or was the sight of it waking something from the past?
I thought back on all the summers I’d been here to this park, like snapshots of myself within the flow of time. I found one, an old one from ten or fifteen years ago, when I was a young woman; a girl, really, in a woman’s body. I was an awkward thing, arms crossed over my heart too often, from more than any chill or wind in the natural world. There was no peace in my brown eyes, just a look of someone who is ruminating on something, or someone who is out-of-reach. I must have spent my time there, so many years ago, looking at this tree.
And so I looked at it now, through two pairs of eyes, a double soul. I saw more clearly who the child of me was at that time, a brown girl drawn a bit out of a self-absorption towards this old tree. The tree seemed then, as now, to speak slowly of a longer view, a view of living simply in expectation of rain and sun, of not minding so much the price of life; the price being for it the cuts of fire and the indignity done to its grandeur by children skipping on its roots.
It seemed to have, indeed, pulled some of the pain from that young woman who I was and held it in expectation that I would see it again: or perhaps, this is how our human psyche works. Maybe we are, in conjunction with places made immanent and precious to us by either great pain or joy, meant to wake the past. But why? The clues must hide in that other soul, that younger tree and younger person that I was so many summers past.
It was a summer when I was about twenty-four. I had come to visit my parents, who were planning to build a home here. I was breaking out temporarily of a life I had made for myself outside of grace; a place wherein I could not relate to my family, or real friends, because of something within myself which was disordered. I was trying to love, I wanted to, but something in me could not do it right. I was riddled with confusion and guilt, and this shadowed, heated place is where I truly lived, where the outside world of well-meaning people could not penetrate. I had many strange and tortured ideas about how I was supposed to find solace in this place of fire; and I thought that the right person could rescue me- but in my disordered state, I did not know how to see right from wrong and so I placed on certain people in my life no meaning at all, and on others all meaning. God was not an option because He seemed to ask total trust, and I was too afraid of trusting.
My world was tilted, and I was constantly trying to grip hold of something I could control in order to stop the feeling of sliding into darkness. I remember now, that the tree I looked at so long that summer somehow seemed to have the right answers, because it was so straight and tall, so rooted, so patient, so trusting in some providence; it kept on growing its green leaves amidst the scars of fire. The tree remained in my memory as a symbol of grace, but lodged there initially as only an image, a small root amidst my soul’s blackened and rotting ground.
Now sitting in the same place, a woman of thirty-eight, I was waking the past with the tree of now and the tree of my memory; the sameness of that evergreen providing a bridge to a more immediate experience of who I was fourteen years ago. I faced myself and all the years between. Although my hips now hurt from childbearing and my eyelids are more wrinkled; although my hair has some grey in it and my face does not have that smooth and chiseled look it did then, this matters nothing next to the other change.
The person I met again through the tree was someone who wanted to love; but without grace, love cannot grow or bear fruit. I saw now who I was loving, and felt sorrow in the understanding now that without God, what tries to live as love becomes a destructive force. I saw clearly that the creation does indeed groan, for with the introduction of sin and disorder (sin is disorder) our relationships to each other and to the outside world become places of burning and rotting.
I mourn the loss of friends and loved ones to these disorders, and wonder now as still a young soul in an older, ever older body if these loves (albeit disordered still bearing some semblance to real love) are ever redeemed from the twisted junkyard in which they now reside. I am waking the past, perilously close to becoming again absorbed in the vale of ghosts.
No. For now, I am depending, like the tree, on providence and grace; I am growing in the soil which God has planted me, and although scarred and a little deformed, the leaves are yet growing and the world within me is straight. So I face the past, I wake it: and I rejoice in that God let me, at twenty-four, see myself as He would allow me to look at thirty-eight: a evergreen standing straight and tall, not minding the indignity of children tripping over my roots, with a certain lived-in look, interesting knarled bark, and a peace which only comes from Him.
I remember now the love He snuck in from around me through those of His flock; the love which granted me, finally, the grace to let go of my own conception of the good and to be open to His. I remember the long road back to theology and sanity; and the evergreen hope in heaven, that all good things will be bought back from the darkness and the past.
So I wake the past, and rejoice in its going to God, that it and I were always kept in His sight; I rejoice and freely sorrow for the loss of loved ones, in the hope that in heaven, they will be made as they should have ever been- relationships of eternal joy and vessels of glory to God: but most of all, I wake the past and rejoice that God rescued me from myself.
