"Mantle of Folly" is a phrase taken from an essay I read this morning: well, rather, it was part of one of those multi-serendipitous moments when the Lord is speaking something in layers--just to make sure one gets it. Sometimes He speaks over months, little droplets of meaning, and in a moment, a little torrent of drops that surprise, as when, after a rain, the wind plays with a tree and a small shower falls, seemingly out of nowhere. So this essay was part of a longer conversation.
A few months ago, I was still and quiet, looking out my window at the light falling through the trees, and I suddenly had a vision shown me; it wasn't a dream, or even a picture eclipsing the physical world around me; it was if my soul was directed elsewhere to see something. I was led into a very dark, gloomy room, as if in direct contrast to all the glorious physical light around me. It seemed a place bereft, and I could make out figures in the gloom, people in capes and hoods barely discernible from the surrounding darkness; I could see well enough, as I adjusted, to discern that their heads were bent over, each in his or her own area, as artists bent over some difficult and important part of their work. I could feel the concentration. At first I was frightened and thought I was staring at some coven; I recoiled a slight bit, and, as if my slight movement drew the attention of the figures, they all looked up and towards me in one movement, the way students in a classroom taking a test will all look up at the noisy entrance of a clueless stranger. As their faces became visible, it was like the rising of a golden moon on a warm summer night; their faces were glowing; their look was full of something--something beautiful.
I pondered. The word that kept coming to me was, "These are my hidden servants in the world." I didn't understand why I saw this, why it was given to me. I have learned (a little) to wait on the Lord, as He reveals Himself and what He wants of us in His own time, a time perfectly attuned not only to our person, but to the state of our character at the moment. I am often fearful and I need to ponder things slowly, and so He gives me little drops that gather until I am ready for His wind to shake the tree.
One of my besetting sins is an anxiety about not accomplishing enough; when I was young, it manifested itself as deep anger and frustration and envy: why wasn't I born this or that way? I felt helpless to accomplish anything great, though I felt called to it. Instead, I am largely, in the measure of the world, a failure, especially when I compare my potential and the gifts I was given. I am beginning to understand that my major failure has been a failure of humility, a lack of seeing, a blindness to how the Lord is and works. I have always been trying to fit Him to my expectations for myself. I was and am also highly sensitive; an old friend once said, "I don't think people like you belong in a world like this; you're too fragile." I knew that I was created in delicate, Venetian glass, but that I wanted to hold strength and greatness in this easily broken vessel. Thus part of the frustration. How can a small glass bottle be great?
My greatest gift, I've known for years, is to see and to listen and to counsel. How can one remain sensitive in a world like this? How can one remain sensitive in one's own soul full of chiaroscuro love and selfish violence? The greatest battlefield is my own soul, because I am Achilles and Penelope in one soul. I looked at this pitiful situation and I pondered failure and success, and Adrian Van Kaam's insights about "the vocation of failure" and St. Francis' desire to be "le jongeleur de Dieu," all of these ideas and images that have spoken to me over the years. St. Francis used his gifts for the glory of God, not men, and this is both the greatest fulfillment the human person can find and it scandalizes and annoys the world, flies against any ideas of dignity, success, or power. Christ was the model for St. Francis, and He also flew in the face of expectations of success.
Why? There is something about the work of God in this world that often defies human expectations. I am still trying to understand. As I continued to ponder, I began to look for those people in my vision: who were they? They would be hard to see at first, cloaked, their faces obscured in the darkness of this world; they would be concentrating, perhaps on something that could not be seen because of the gloom. I began to see the people in my life who fit this, whose success lay under a mantle of folly. Titles or not, education or not (sometimes especially those without, though this in itself is not enough), they quietly work for the Lord laden with littleness, even failure, in the eyes of the world. I visited one of these cloaked ones this summer: He and his wife, without anything beyond a high school education, have a glowing remnant of Eden in the mountains of Washington; when I woke up that first morning in their small farmhouse, I went outside and the grandeur of their surroundings matched the humble beauty and light of their garden, orchard, pastures, sheep, the photos of their ten children and twenty-one grandchildren, and a deep and humble wisdom imbued the house, the animals, and the land around them. This man also is the closest image of Socrates I know, and is the most educated man I know. He has worked for many years to help young people learn how to think, to find truth, and to love: he can do this because he knows how to think and to love. He has the clear sight of those who live, spiritually, in the mountains. Though every college and university should be clamouring to have him, none would give him a a look; due to his lack of formal education, he is not seen, and wears a mantle of folly in the eyes of the world. But if one looks into his soul, he glows like a golden moon.
I heard a second word; it was about being one of these cloaked figures, and it was about letting those whom God sends me to come, so that I might share in His healing of them. I don't know what this means exactly, but it feels like jumping in a river to my timid soul.
This morning, a little wind shook the tree and a torrent came. I found the story of Elijah going up in a chariot, and how, in the days before his departure, he tries to shake off his student Elisha; Elijah at first keeps telling Elisha to stay and that he, Elijah will go to the Jordan or to Jericho; each time, Elisha counters that he will stay and travel with Elijah. Prophets in these places seem to taunt Elisha; perhaps they are showing that human concern--knowing groups of experts as I do, I tend to think it a display of knowledge at the expense of the pitiful apprentice who is about to lose his master. This thought is confirmed for me when Elisha asks Elijah for "a double portion" of Elijah's spirit when he goes: Elisha will need it as his own small spirit is not enough to handle the mantle of being Elijah's successor. Elisha does indeed receive this double portion as Elijah departs, as he, given Elijah's cloak, uses it as did his master to part the waters of the Jordan. I have always loved Elijah and would want to follow him as Elisha does--he is a father to me. I love his explanation of the "small wind" and his sensitive spirit called to face the gloom of this world, coupled with his courage and absolute trust in the Lord to do what He says He will do.
I was curious about this passage on Elisha, though, and I found an essay, the essay from which I take the title of this blog. By James C. Howell, it is entitled "Mordor: 2 Kings 2: 1-12" and the author muses about whether Elijah is trying to spare Elisha by trying to shake him off before his departure. Woven into this is the somewhat analogous story (did Tolkien have Elijah and Elisha in mind) of Frodo and Sam's journey into Mordor, especially when Frodo tries to shake off Sam at the river across which Mordor lies: "Go back, Sam. I'm going to Mordor alone!" Sam responds: "Of course you are, and I'm going with you." Sam runs into the river not knowing how to swim and Frodo finally, won over, fishes him out and they go on together. What Sam and Frodo are doing seems like pure folly, and their cloaks of Lorien are humble, nondescript grey, but powerful veils against the eyes of the Enemy. To do their great task, Frodo and Sam must be cloaked, not only in literal cloaks, but cloaked by their littleness. The Enemy only looks for the assault of the great, not the little; a worshiper of power, he and his forces understand only power. The writer of the essay also includes the seeming folly of Gandalf to leave "the affairs of Middle Earth to the diminutive, fun-loving, timid Hobbits." Gandalf answers, "Despair, or folly? It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy."
Like Gandalf, and Sam, and Frodo, and even Aragorn, Elisha was clinging to someone, to the Lord and to his master, a servant of the Lord whose life was a poem of folly in the eyes of the magicians and powerful of the world they lived in as evidenced by the challenges they threw at him. The world clings to false hopes, to the hope of worldly honor and success and power, things those who believe in the survival of the fittest and the smartest believe to be the measure of being immortalized. Elisha, facing the taunts or the concern of those groups of prophets, asks for a double portion of Elijah's spirit and gets it; he puts on Elijah's mantle, his cloak, and walks on the hard road of being one of God's workers in the gloom. Frodo and Sam wear their grey cloaks and pass unseen through the gloom of the great.
Are we all called to be the hidden ones in the gloom? I don't know. Some seem to be called to more public positions, like Fulton Sheen or GK Chesterton; others are called, like St. Francis, to wear a colorful cloak of folly, a jester's cloak; others work more quietly, artists in their workshops. All, though, are called to humility, to work within God's will, to be His hands and feet and heart and voice in the gloom. Woe to those who try to have both worldly success and God as separate goals: success in one area, and God in another. The one will eat them alive and betray, the other will be shut out. Only one can be the master of one's soul.
I think the Hidden Ones are living a vocation. I think St. Therese speaks about it in her Little Way, and in their ways, many saints speak of it. There are religious orders with many Hidden Ones; what perhaps has not been as clearly seen, or perhaps it is for this age, is that even more hidden, perhaps, are those whose work in the world truly unknown, unnoticed, except by those with eyes to see. Do I have this vocation? Can I accept it if I do? Can I do it well, with my tendency to retreat and be frustrated, and my love for being 'onstage'? I think it is more about those who sow seeds; many sow seeds who do not get to reap. It looks, in a way, through human eyes, like a failure, or a wasted life. But God does not squander the gifts of His children; He did not let his own sowing, his Hidden life, to be squandered. But it was, in His lifetime as a man on earth, a seeming failure, a tiny mustard seed that later became a mustard tree for the birds to rest within.
