The Forgotten World of Children

I am a mom, with all the duties of daily life shooting at me like tennis balls from a serving machine; often, I am happily keeping up with each ball: dishes, wham! homeschooling, wham!dog-ate-paper-towel-roll clean-up, wham!

Sometimes, in life, a ball comes flying in from some other court and suddenly I am on my rear with tennis balls flying past me (the machine doesn't stop for surprises).

I found myself more solidly on my rear recently- this last surprise ball flew past, and I watched it like one would a shooting star across the sky; I didn't even notice the pummeling I was taking from the machine balls. I turned back to face the machine with little more than raw will. Kid with pink eye, dirty floors, disinfect bathrooms, dishes times fifty, dog eating furniture, messy yard, tutor, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham-wham. I must have looked like the Road Runner playing tennis. But mysteriously, the machine turned off- or it lost its verve. Because of that last, curving ball, I was left with a sense of silence and retreat, even as I continued parrying with the duties of my life.

From within that retreat, a place of struggle, I somehow was given the grace to begin to be grateful to God: but in simple things, like the swirl of a cloud, the spread of stars, a bird on top of a pine tree sticking out his breast- childlike things. I also noticed from this retreat little details like the repeatedly wet shoes I found on my porch: children's shoes; my childrens' shoes. In a normal time, these presented themselves as only tennis balls to hit and move on: now I stopped to wonder what they were doing. Could I be grateful for these wet shoes?

Thanksgiving Day, my nine-year-old daughter, Ana, started talking to me about Delos, Minith Tirith, and the journey across the river. I was listening more intently than usual, because I was in a retreat. At the mention of the river, seven-year-old Sophie joined in with, "It is so cold, Mom!"- and like a puzzle piece, the wet shoes on the porch fit. Aha, I thought; but I did not start with the usual questions about wet shoes, from my mom-laundry-mold problems perspective. I just listened. "Can you come with us today and see Delos?" asked Ana.

We got on our bikes and coats and gloves and hats- and started out on the commonplace road towards City Park. On the edge of the Popo Agie river, we parked our bikes. I was worried about the bikes getting stolen, but the girls just looked at me and shrugged, and I, because of the retreat in my heart, no longer cared. Instead, I looked down the hill towards the gently dancing water, and asked, "How do we get there?" I followed them down the hill, through bracken, reeds bowed by the last snow, and little mirrors of frozen water. We reached the shining beach of large river rocks, sunning themselves in their break from being the riverbed. The winter-river was not deep, but running and very cold. We were to get across by stepping on stones. I noticed, in my new observant and docile state, that Ana and Sophie were intent on getting across, and the coldness of the water did not bother them in the least. "That's cold", Sophie said, in the same manner as I would have said about a flower, "That's pretty."

We picked our way across, holding onto the grey, spindly branches of a tree which hung submissively over the river. I learned from the children that your feet actually stay warmer if you just get wet in your shoes and socks. I'd forgotten this short-sighted wisdom of a child in the throes of adventure. Climbing up the hill, I noticed bits of man-made cement holding back the dirt, and felt a sadness, like the breaking of a spell. We were yet in a land where the spirit lay fettered in practicalities and trash. But Sophie said, "Here's a good, flat rock to climb on- hey, lookit this wire in it! COOOL!". It was cool.

Ana had run ahead to a blackened-bark, old tree whose branches, never pruned, reached down heavily to the ground. It made a network of little rooms, and in one, the children had placed an old bell or something upside down as a decoration. It looked pathetic on one level, but through their eyes, it was the treasury of Minith Tirith. I was shown Neptune's frozen pond, and we journeyed further towards our goal, Delos. As we neared it, I could feel the childrens' excitement building. Ana, in her odd mixture of practicality and imagination, was our tour guide, showing us all the solid paths, and at the same time, saying things like, "I don't know if Apollo will be there. Maybe Artemis. She's usually around." We approached another un-pruned tree, branches bowed to the ground, but forming a huge space, the size of a small circus tent. A deer bounded out, and I could see that we'd disturbed her nesting space. At the entrance, Sophie and Ana picked their way into the center of Delos. I hung back, looking in. "Come in, Mommy"; "Yeah, Mom, come in! Do you like it? Do you?"

I still hung back, smiling, and remembering my Deloses from childhood. There was a branch with many spindly fingers reaching across the open space in the middle, with a strange, drippy green moss hanging from each digit. The sunlight filtering in made the green sparkle like emeralds; jewels of Artemis. I stared at this unexpected beauty for a moment, and I said, "I love it. But if I come in, I will break the spell of this place. I am admiring it, but I am a Big Person." Their eyes shone, because they knew somehow that I was affirming their world, by respecting it enough not to enter.

As we walked past the frozen pond, I noted that there was another pond completely unfrozen. Instead of thinking of what chemical quality of the different ponds made one freeze and the other stay fluid, I noted quite casually, "Perhaps the Ice Queen froze this pond because it gave her no fish, and the other one did." Four eyes shone brighter.

Deep in the spell now, we maneuvered our way back across the ferocious torrent by the log bridge, using a special balancing stick. No one noticed that I nearly broke the child's bridge, but I was roundly cheered upon my leaping to the other side, as if I'd got across the Amazon by swinging across on a vine. I was then treated to the super-duper hill in McManus Park, and I got the ultimate compliment: "Mrs. F- would never do this- we're lucky to have you as our mom."

On the way home in our wet shoes, toes frozen, we stopped to pet a cat.

Do not,in your sorrow or joy, not see the child's world for the balls, I told myself as I peddled home, looking at the massive mountains in the distance.

Image: near Delos, Greek island of mythology

Sacre Coeur

I just came back from Santa Barbara to Wyoming- like going from what Eden might have looked like to the mountains of the moon; winter is setting in here, that strange time of year when the skeletons hanging listlessly on doors in the wake of Halloween mirror the bony trees: trees slowly falling asleep in their wait for the gentle fingers of spring.

In a way, I am traveling that path also; now here in Wyoming in normal life from being in Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara! -cutting pepper tree and bougainvillea in the mountains above the city, sneaking around my old college campus in the estates of Montecito, weeping openly at Butterfly Beach (no one notices the tears because the wind, like the hand of the Lord, wipes them away to join the passion of the wind off the water): in short, plugging in very suddenly to an old life in which I was a passionate young woman- disturbed, at times, but passionate.

Standing along the beach wall on Sunday, saying goodbye before taking to the road north, I remembered that when I was living here in Santa Barbara, I was full of passion- but a passion alternately unfettered and unreasonable and then clamped by terrible fears of consequence and punishment. Now, as I watched the waves pound in, I remembered also that this kind of passion led me to be a slave of Thanatos:

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods." (Hesiod, Theogony 758 ff, trans. Evelyn-White, Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.)

Thanatos is the twin god of Sleep, twin children of Night and Darkness; and because I was a slave to my passion, I would, at times of destruction and fear, desire not to live, which is our modern understanding of Thanatos: a seizing, iron desire for final sleep. I loved deeply and passionately (I was not promiscuous, which by its nature cannot be passionate) as the Lord made me to do, but I did not know how to love with balance and without fear; thus, it was not a perfect love, for “perfect love casteth out fear”. I did not love the way the Lord would have us love, freedom within His will, His laws.

I left Santa Barbara once before, twelve years distant, completely dried out from tears; I could not cry anymore, so in the grip of Thanatos I was then: I do not know how I left, only that I was, in a way, slowly guided; a carrot here and there, and I was in graduate school in Annapolis; soon I was, girl-like, twirling on a wide campus lawn leading to the Severn River, alone in the gentle, falling snow at ten pm after a glorious class on Homer; I was in the Adoration Chapel at St. Mary’s at two am, laying on the floor and weeping again in the arms of the Lord, letting go my loss. I was slowly being released from the death-grip of that bronze demon.

I lived, then: drank deeply of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Euclid (who would have thought math could be passionate?), taught, loved my students, married, had three children, came out of my shell because of the deep love and friendship of a few holy people, and began to create. I began to understand deeply Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I understood this in terms of God loving and not myself, for I had bent with removers, the deepest of failures- bent to have love removed from fear, mostly, a fear of not living up to what I was expected to do and suffering because I did not understand what was written deeply inside me; nor, at the time of my life in Santa Barbara, had I the saving balance, reason and teaching of the Faith- and my love and other's for me had been destroyed. How does one live with that knowledge, with that depth of failure in the deepest parts of life?

In the years that I began living again, I understood how God loves us: He looks upon tempests and is never shaken: and He began to teach me how to love that way, through suffering and discipline, through times of poverty on many levels; through His gift of Himself in the Eucharist and His gifts of children and family. I was in a school of love, and I know enough now after all that the love of Sonnet 116 is impossible for me to attain, to live- to the edge of doom?- and that it cannot come from any power in me.

When I returned to Santa Barbara this time, rather innocently for my aunt’s wedding, I was looking forward only to time alone and a chance to meet old friends and family. I did all that, and it was blessed; but I did not know that I was to meet myself in a mysterious way again, to revisit that passionate young woman that I was, to look back on her decisions with some horror but mostly sympathy and a deep and unexpected sense of terrible loss and regret, and through the eyes of others who knew me inside and out, to love and appreciate who I was then, while yet taking into account my disorders. If I had known better how to love, if I had known better how to be balanced…this time I saw clearly the loss, because I understood better what love was and could have been, and have never felt pain like that before.

So I stood at Butterfly Beach on the day I was to leave, watching the surfers and remembering that time I’d sat on the beach, twenty-one or so, and had asked God why I couldn’t sit and talk with Him, face to face; and the next minute, a man came up to me and said, “Can I sit with you and talk?” Not knowing who this guy was, and being ripped from my reverie, I said, “No”. Even though this may have been some pick-up, there was a lesson in it for me, I knew. This was me in a nutshell- asking God for everything in my deep way, like jumping into the blue and purple ocean not caring that I couldn’t swim, and then shrinking back in fear from any decision I was supposed to make, and then rolling around in regret and uncertainty afterward.

I stood there, now forty, and remembered that because of this agony of uncertainty, there was a deep current of thanatos in me, which is the mark of the truly depressed, and a mark of deep self-absorption. I began to weep for the destruction and disorder this had caused; I wanted to ask forgiveness from everyone I’d hurt and disturbed, especially those whose lives had been most deeply affected by me, and yet felt helpless to ever repair it all. Thanatos came and stood there by my side, but I recognized him and stared him in the face. Then from somewhere inside me (yet from somewhere outside of me as well) I heard, in that deep language which has none of the boulder-heavy quality of the words we speak, but rather the honey-ness of deep realities: “I want to LIVE”.

I got in my car and pulled away from the beach and up 101 towards Santa Cruz, caught in the grip of that thought. I realized that although I had been schooled in the discipline of love, I had perhaps quashed some of that passion I’d had as a young woman- basically, in order to survive: but I wanted now, because of that school, to live- to live now without fear. To live truly is to love perfectly- and passionately.

I do not know how to do this, but I do know that it must come from Christ. That is all. I know now that I want to burn up in a fireball- not in the way of Thanatos, but in the consuming fire of the love of Christ. I love the Sacred Heart, the Sacre Coeur, because He is described as an ocean of love, or a consuming fire, two images which are fundamental to my life. I understood finally the deep desire for martyrdom, the desire for the greatest love: “for no man has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friend”. I realized that the passionate person that I was made to be, better schooled now that I am, can desire no less than a fireball of love. So now I want to die, not in the arms of Thanatos, but in the fire of Christ, without fear. I want to supernaturalize my loves, and may destruction and regret and loss be burned away and love restored.

However, I cannot do this. My nature wants it now, wants not to wait, like a woman in love cannot wait for marriage, admitting no impediment; but this kind of love, I now know, the best kind of love, is dependent on the will of God. I understand St. Therese of Liseux better, perhaps: I think her greatest pain was not to be immediately consumed in this fire- she was, like me, made to be passionate at a deep level. Instead, she was consumed by tuberculosis- on a natural level- but God supernaturalized it, and with Him, St. Therese supernaturalized every action of her life, from picking apples to dying of suffocation slowly. This IS the heroism of the saint, and yet I am, as she describes, a weak bird in a storm who is looking for the sun. I am no longer afraid, except of sin and of my own weakness: or perhaps I should not be afraid of this weakness, for does not God work most through our weaknesses? Perhaps the one thing of which I am afraid is to live a passionless life, buried in the humdrum of bills and cycles. St. Therese, in her Little Way, I pray will teach me.

I ask now to be consumed in His fire, like a meteor across the sky, but I know it must be in His way and not out of a selfish desire. This will, I think,be the next school for me.

Image: www.timboucher.com, "Sacred Heart Fractal".