Desire

"...[may I] come a little nearer to the instant when [I] will really be the slave-faithfully waiting while the master is absent, watching and listening- ready to open the door to him as soon as he knocks. The master will then make his slave sit down and himself serve him with meat."

The great Jewish writer, Simone Weil, wrote these words. She was, in my opinion, a kind of martyr for the idea of desire for God- more explicitly, a martyr for the baptism of desire. Her writings run with the blood of longing, a longing for truth, and prayer, and beauty. And all this in the world in which we live, where hope is often near-extingushed by the weaknesses and vice of those closest to us: ourselves, our families, and those in the Body of Christ.

In The Republic, Socrates is in dialectic with young politicians over the question of the essence, or eidos, of virtues in the soul. Do they exist? Is there a real, existing good from which these virtues spring? Socrates, I believe, was really asking: does God exist? He asks this question not because he does not know the answer, but because he is one who comes out of the light into the darkness in which his students live and explains to them the things of the light. In reading the dialogues of this great man, one begins to see that, despite the fact that he did not have divine revelation in the same way the Israelites had it, he was given a great grace and gift: he was searching out of the darkness of pagan culture, and yet knew, in some mysterious respect, He who is Goodness. Socrates became the man coming out of the bright light back into the darkness of his culture, and he knew that he could not teach or persuade those in darkness by pulling them into the direct light, by his own efforts, but he must lead, using innate reason and the desire of the soul found in human nature. This is Simone Weil's desire, which comes to life in a watchful, humble, attention: a readiness given by God and nurtured and disciplined by ourselves.

The mission of Socrates, and later, Christian saints (who have the knowledge of faith and sometimes, vision-be it intellectual, spiritual or actual vision) is, in varied ways, to live out that desire for, as Weil puts it, "...the pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared, "I am the Truth.'" This Truth is always bound up with, in the person of Christ, agape and all virtue. The saint lives this out by living as St. Francis did, living to love rather than to be loved.

This way of life is life, true life.

No "but" can destroy this truth, but experiences which come with living in community and with ourselves can chip away at our hope, and faith, and even desire for this truth, and this life: experiences as profound as weaknesses and failures in ourselves, a hard marriage, or failures regarding our children; and things less intense, but nonetheless for a person of love and truth profound- like friendships and community life and our work. For instance, I see within myself always a mixed, an adulterated desire to love my friends, those far and near: I desire their good, but when I am hurt by them, or disappointed, or feel that my efforts on their behalf seem to come to nothing, I immediately sense that my love and efforts are much more tied up with my own ego. Sometimes the feeling of failure and discouragement becomes almost overwhelming. The temptation is to give up-which means that I stop believing in that true life of love and goodness, and beauty.

As Socrates spoke to his students about the education of those in darkness, he- as one who had lived long in the light-used the analogy of a man in a dust storm, who hides under the cover of a wall. He is in the midst of swirling, biting injustice, the violence of society all around, hitting him who is a stationary object in the restless, wind-blown fragments of confusion. Socrates says that he would like to stay under the wall and hope only not to enter into the fray and perhaps do injustice to another; for, to Socrates, doing injustice to another is the greatest evil into which one can fall, and so the temptation for those who understand and desire the life of Truth is to simply "check out"- because the ideal seems so hopeless.

But Socrates did not fall to this temptation, even to his last day, when his own city killed him because of the ludicrous charges brought against him of "corrupting the youth" and "impiety towards the gods". We see in the murder of Socrates an example of those who, lost in the dust storm, themselves became the storm; in other words, those who lived in darkness hated the light and quenched it, and would not be guided. Those who will not be guided out of darkness become a party to and source of darkness, and a terrible source of pain and discouragement to those who wish most of all to love them.

I am not a Socrates; I live in a different universe of intelligence and virtue (translation: I am a lot dumber than Socrates). However, I am, I hope, in my better moments, a working part of the Body of Christ. And Socrates was a kind of forerunner of Christ, who is the Good and the Source of that Truth Socrates was searching for and believed in. Now, because I am a daughter of God through grace, I too can intuit, and desire, like Socrates, to live in Truth. And like Socrates, like the saints, I desire to see both the order of love in my own soul, and to see order writ large on my community and writ in delicate, loving lines within those I know-and those I don't.

I do not see truth well, but I desire this. In this world, what follows this desire is the suffering(as it was for Socrates and anyone who desires love, and truth, and beauty), the burden, of seeing most often the opposite of these: selfishness, rationalization and banality. It seems that there is little truth and honor within the average community, and this is but mirrored in my own, often tepid and wicked soul. I cannot speak to my friends, my family, in a truly honest way; for most often, they cannot hear it, nor do they have the profound trust for me needed for hearing hard truth in my words, because they see the same hypocrisy in my life, and they will see this as long as my ego and my self are tied up in my efforts towards the true, good, and beautiful. Also, when do I hear the truth about myself? And if I do, what is my reaction? Most often, to rationalize it into oblivion, either to myself or to the unfortunate person who tried to speak the truth.

It often seems hopeless. One friend believes in Christ but lives a life centered around having the most pleasure possible with the least trouble, even to the point of hurting those who have placed their lives near to his; another will not hear that her children are cruel at times to other children because she feels the fear of being imperfect or ridiculous; in the academic community in which I live and work, there are those (me, too?) who think they are Christians but are living and behaving more as if they are in an intellectual and spiritual class above everyone else; and worst of all, are the times when I've let my own identity be squashed in the desire to maintain social ties- ties which, without love, and truth, mean nothing. And finally, the times when I've committed the worst evil: injustice towards the other, the most important Other being God. The worst sins we deal with in this life are our own, and they are the things we are least able to see, and the things we most refuse to acknowledge even if we do see them. We become our own prisons, and the potential for real evil increases, sometimes, in proportion to the intellectual, physical and spiritual gifts we are given.

We are all, it seems, the blind guides which Socrates warned his interlocutors about: the solution, perhaps, is a radical one. It seems to me that a true guide is one who follows St. Francis' prayer: May I seek more to love than to be loved; may I seek to understand rather than to be understood. This simple desire has a great and deep foundation: the death to oneself. Christ said it a different way: If you seek to save your life, you will lose it. The result of the death to self, the uprooting of self-absorbed, fearful 'love', is the beginning of humility. It is like when one must first dig a deep hole in order to then build a solid foundation. The hole must be there, and deep, and complete, before the virtue and grace of humility can be poured within it. Then on the rock of humility(personified in Christ), and no other, can a house of love, and truth, and beauty be built, a house fit for the Master to enter. And when He does enter, He serves his own servant. This is the way of love.

Only then, when the Master lives in our houses, can we become places of light in a dark cave, and strong bulwarks in the sand storm, and true guides for ourselves and others. Only then will we build true Christian communities, because we will provide a locus and source of grace, and light, and beauty around which a real community can be built. Of course there will always be suffering, and often these communities will in the end be destroyed by the trilogy of selfishness, rationalization and banality (the deflated desire for less than the best good). I think of the pain of St. Francis as he watched his order fracture into contentious camps of the more and the less worldly. But hope lives, because there is another world, the world which Socrates caught a glimpse of, and which we see everyday in the Mass; and as St. Francis knew, when he retreated into his mountain cave and received the wounds of Christ, it is in one's own soul that the light must first penetrate. Therein lies hope. In one's own soul, in that quiet place where the Master waits.

A last word from Simone Weil:

" To be sure in the realm of action we have to do all that is demanded of us, no matter what effort, weariness, and suffering it may cost, for he who disobeys does not love; but after that we are only unprofitable servants. Such service is a condition of love, but it is not enough. What forces the master to make himself the slave of his slave and to love him, has nothing to do with all that. Still less is it the result of a search the servant might have been bold enough to undertake on his own initiative. It is only watching, waiting, attention [desire- my sic]."

image: www.newcatholics.com/library/protestent/saints/francis.jpg

A Winter's Lament

My toes are blue near the ends

Blue, like the lapis shadows thrown by sagebrush in the snow

Water, like my blood, cannot make up its mind

swirling slowly, ineffectually

Will I ever wear open-toed shoes again?

Red and brown toes, like the stones with vines curling round them

Water in my blood, blue and purple

the sunlight holding each molecule tenderly

Are life and death like that?

Seasons of sage and snow, white and grey

Water, grace moving slowly, blocked

The soul breaking through, dying on a golden day

And then, those days of sandals and blue

and green, and each flower, each wave a lover

and I, I leap like a child again, clothes left in a wake

and I look for You, for you, and you.

Woman with a Hemorrhage

The day dawned hot; the very sky seemed feverish, swirling in hues of yellow, yellow above the yellow dust of the streets, and brown above the brown of houses and trees covered in a light sheen of that same dust. Miriam rose from her semi-recumbant position and looked briefly, carefully, as she always did, across the rooftops fellow to her own: she had slept up here, for the coolness. One of the good things about her illness was that she was largely left alone. Yet this was a bad thing, too, for Miriam was a bright light shining, a woman of deep prayer. She had been praying, but in that odd position of semi-recumbancy, because this position allowed her the least amount of pain.

She stretched as she stood, and then bent over and winced. She had not yet, in the two years since she started bleeding most days instead of just a few days between new moons, learnt to anticipate and avoid these sharp stabs. She tensed and held her position until the throbbing subsided, and then, seeing the sun more insistent in this curried sky, rolled up her pallet-taking more care to move smoothly-and picked her way down the stairs. Each step darkened a little more as she went down, and this always made her think of death, her death which she assumed was coming soon. Somehow, though, she did not fear death, but she did not want to die. She felt the loving, familiar shapes in relief on the stone and sand wall as she descended into the delightful grind of another day.

Miriam was smiling at this incongruency in her thoughts, when she met the eyes of her father looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs. His eyes were like sparkling onyx stones in a wrinkled and long face. Even though they were hard, and full of disappointment at her unclean state, at her returning in shame from her husband’s home, there was love-around the mouth. How she knew this, she could not tell, because he never spoke about it. But it came out also in his actions, for he would let her go out, go to the market attended by one of the children, let her be useful in public. As she came down into the main room of the house, he nodded his head in a silent greeting and left, disappearing out the door in a flash and glow of yellow light.

The other room of the home, the eating and cooking room, was full of light, for it had a smoke-hole in the roof and two windows to further let out the heat. And today these windows and the hole would be needed. Miriam thought of the huge, reed-woven fans of Egypt: one of the strange folk-memoriabilia to survive, along with the flesh-pots, thought Miriam wryly. Her older sister, a widow, was tending the baking of the cakes in the pitted oven and already she was pink and sweaty, for she had started too late this morning, and would have to suffer more heat than usual. She turned when she heard Miriam’s tentative scraping footsteps on the floor. “Miriam,” she quipped, but not unkindly, “wake that sleeper Ruth and go to the market for some beans-plus the usual things," and she sighed: “I have started too late again.” She turned back to the hot pit, and added, “Hurry- before it gets too crowded.” Miriam moved to apologize for not being able to help with the daily cooking, but stopped when she saw her sister’s methodical, kneading movements.

Ten minutes later, Miriam and Ruth, a ten-year old child of Miriam’s sister, walked, and Miriam held a small basket made by herself for her own use-no one else was allowed to touch it; their head-cloths were in place and their feet shod in simple, leather sandals. Miriam mused, as she moved down the street in companionable silence with the little girl, that although she was largely relegated now to silence and the company of children, this was in reality not a lower state. She was lonely sometimes, and sorrowed over the loss of having children herself; but she had learned silence, and the fullness of the Lord in silence. She, a woman! But the tall, stone fences around her, now that she was perpetually unclean, made her unsure as to whether the Lord would actually visit her at all, really. She wondered sometimes, and it brought the deepest swirl, ugly and dark, with putrid bits of real despair, of loneliness, when she thought that she might be cut away from God because the blood would not stop, and the pain grew worse, slowly, like a bite which gets infected and swollen.

A sound like the roar of an angry wind yanked her out of herself. Ruth, her little face blanched, had stopped in the middle of the quiet, gray street and was looking down towards the noises. They were in a narrow passageway between two houses, which would, if followed, open suddenly out into the glare and noise of the market. Miriam motioned to Ruth to follow, and they moved slowly against one wall, so as to be able to look round the corner before descending the two deep steps into the glare and the place of the crowded stalls. There was more than the roar: they could feel, inexplicably, the excitement, the almost desperation, of a roused crowd. This was always frightening, especially in these days of Roman anxiety; for the soldiers, under the recent instabilities in Rome, and the resulting fear of the Governor of Judea, had become more quick to arrest and even quietly murder those who disturbed the peace in their areas.

But when the two looked around the corner, there were no soldiers in sight. Perhaps they’d been drinking the night before and were sluggish in the already insistent and nagging heat. There was a crowd- but not the usual circling, orbiting, quiet crowd of a normal morning; this was a crowd like a clump of bees crawling on a hive, a hive just disturbed by the hand of a desert wanderer: agitated and buzzing, and calling out: “Rabboni! Rabboni!” There was shoving at the outer edges. The stalls were guarded only by women, normally non-descript figures who sat down behind the stalls, preparing the wares. Now they were standing, and staring at the crowd, which was moving now, following something or someone towards the well in the center.

Miraim and Ruth, deciding that there was no real danger but only some great interest which did not concern them, sped towards the stall of the beans. As Ruth picked out the things they needed, putting them in the household basket which she carried, poor little thing, and putting into Miriam’s basket the things she needed for her own meals, they moved from stall to stall and tried to ignore the noise of the crowd. Miriam, though, felt something strange welling up in her. She finally got the courage to ask one of the women at a stall about the disturbance. “Oh,” the woman said, “there is a Rabbi here, a teacher-“ and she bent a little closer, “and some say he heals. That he makes the blind to see, and the lame to walk…as they say,” she shrugged as she said the last words, as if to take herself back out of caring about this. But Miriam felt a shock go through her heart. She quickly motioned for Ruth to sit by the side of the stall and put her basket beside the girl, who obeyed quickly but who had gone now completely white. “Aunt,” Ruth whispered, “Aunt.”

“Wait here, Ruth. But if you do not see me return, run home. Leave my things. It does not matter.” And Miriam turned towards the crowd, which was moving again. It seemed to Miriam that someone new had entered the hive and there was the sound of a wail in the middle. The crowd surged away from the well, headed towards a main street leading away from the market, and this gave Miriam a chance to slip in amongst the followers. There were some other brave women in the crowd, but it was mostly men, with their carefully woven cloaks in blues and rusts and browns. The dust beat up unmercifully into her eyes and mouth. Miriam pulled her head covering close over her face, so that she would not be recognized, and with her adrenaline drowning out the stabs of pain, and despite the blood which she knew was flowing more freely now, she tried to move her way closer to the head of the heaving and hurried cloaks and sandals and past the rough movements of the men. Some pushed her away, and she thought with some sadness, that they did not know that they were touching an unfortunate: a woman, an unclean and useless woman. But she kept on.

At the head of the crowd, behind which all followed in greedy interest, she saw a man, a leader of the synagogue, in earnest conversation with another, shorter man in a poor, off-white cloak. Miriam knew of the leader of the synagogue, and so surmised that he could not be a healer, or she would have been told- it must be the other man. She got closer and closer, partly because of her size- and the agility she’d once used, as a girl, to climb anything and everything, in joyful expectation of a view above the swirling dirt. Now, she used what was left of this child-energy, which had laid hidden by the sorrow of the last two years, as if those two years had given it time to germinate and build up; or perhaps the sorrow and her outcast state had made her care less about the swirling dust and long for what lay beyond. Perhaps she had stopped caring so much what others thought.

She found herself looking at the cloak of the healer, the edge of it trailing just a few inches beyond her reach; no one had noticed her because they were all listening to the pleading conversation of the the synagogue leader and the soft answers of the healer- those listening in were insatiably eating up both the high man’s misfortune, and the wonder of him sharing it so desperately and publicly- and the ill one just a child, and a female child at that- the wonder of it. But Miriam had only grasped bits, for she began to reach out her hand, to touch the rough, off-white fibers which moved with their owner in a peaceful sway. In a long instant, her hand traveled out-just a touch- just-

…the roughness of the garment surprised her; she thought healing would feel like Eastern silk. She felt a fire go through her body, and instantly, her hand moved to her abdomen. She stopped suddenly, bent over, and was knocked side to side by those who were following- but just as Miriam thought she would surely be knocked to the ground, the crowd stopped. There was a silence. And then, a voice of quiet strength.

“Who touched me?” Heavier silence. Miriam felt the blood coursing deeply through her entire being, blood moved by embarrassment, and also, still, the fire. Again the voice rolled out above the crowd: “Who touched me?" Miriam wished that she could just back away quietly; as she began to go, a rumbling started in the crowd, an uncomfortable reaction to intolerable silence, and another voice, in some confusion and rattled tones cried,“Master- look at the crowd! It is pressing all around-“

Miriam stopped moving, because she realized that everyone was quite still, like the leaves on a tree in the silence before a storm, and that any escape on her part would be impossible. She looked around at the feet of those around her, and then pulled her head covering back a little, and straightened up. She dared a glance at the healer, to whom she was now a few yards away. She could only see the side of his head, a side of thick, common brown hair and a beard. Only an instant or so had passed since the last query, and as Miriam inched her way around the obstructing figure in front of her, so that she could get a better view of his face, his quiet voice, with a slight reluctance to it, broke in on the crowd again, and in answer to the other man’s logic: "I felt power go out of me.” The crowd sucked in a communal breath, and the healer said again, with gentleness, “Who touched me?”

At that instant, Miriam had got herself a place for a full view of his face, and when she looked up, she found herself looking into brown, earth-colored eyes, eyes with sorrow and joy woven , eyes that contained the very fire she felt still in her. She followed the gaze with her body and moved towards him, finally kneeling before him in the dust, the sounds of “I did” somehow escaping her lips. The crowd moved back, with more sucking of air, a sucking sound of petrified disdain. Miriam took this all in, but some thread in her stayed with that gaze and she looked at a face which seemed to reflect, and know, the pain of the unwanted.

Not only did the healer look at her, but breaking through a cold, invisible, stone wall put up over millenia, he kneeled in the dust in front of her, and took her hand in his. Quietly, with the softness only deep courage and profound, divine humility can produce, he said, "Your faith has healed you.”

Image: "Woman with a Hemorrhage" by Louis Glanzman