A Letter to Tim

My dear brother,

All these years, I have carried my encounters with you in the center of my being: pale light falling on your face in San Francisco General Hospital's cafeteria; the redness of your cheeks and nose with their pockmarks, signs to me of what your battle-scarred heart looked like; the watering of your pale blue eyes that was sometimes from the heart and sometimes from the body struggling; the mellow, quiet tones of your voice; your hands gently moving the salt and pepper shakers around, first having made them symbols of the people I loved, your reaching into my pain so expertly because you knew to first let me into yours.

Tim, I don't know where you are now. I can't feel if you are still alive, but I think I can feel your soul still, because you were part of my re-birth back into life. A part of you at least, lives: You are: in me. I hope and pray that means you are alive in God, wherever you are. I hope you are somewhere safe.

You were so alive then, though I don't think you really knew this; you felt, I think, like an anorexic trying on clothes alone in a department store full of over-life-size pictures of anorexic models. You thought you were obese and unwanted, but you were so, so much more than that narrow slice of your existence.

You spoke to me about the world of the gay man, that kaleidoscope of sex, bars, bathhouses; the long days at the chaplaincy where hurt and saddened and angry friends and lovers gathered in the AIDS ward on the fourth floor and watched each other burn to death, slowly, and disintegrate. Most of them looked at me across the table with hard eyes like diamonds, flashing the question: Why are you here? I must have looked like a naive pain-voyeur to many of them.

Your eyes were never diamonds; they were great pools of dark water, with lights deep in the center. You lived in that world, but as a person who deeply wanted to be loved. You wanted permanence, because you had a permanent heart open to others: you wanted real love because you really loved--even a rich girl from Santa Barbara, a sheltered girl. I know I looked like a person for whom there was no excuse for wounding; I was straight in a straight world; I was pretty, I was educated, I was in San Francisco on an internship in the attitude one would have at space camp.

You, though, looked past the appearances in me, though you could not in your own case. You saw the ugly wounds in me through the pretty veneer, but you knew, in your world, that no one was seeing past your ugly veneer into the beauty that you were. You told me that you were too ugly to find love.

And Tim, you were physically ugly. You reminded me of the Walrus in Lewis Carroll's poem; your large movements were bumbling and awkward; but, Tim, you didn't see yourself meta-morph from a catapillar when you were exercising the great gift God gave you, when you sat across from me in that horrible cafeteria, that place full of the pain of those who must feed themselves while those they love suffer away in little white rooms above or below. Tim, when you were allowed to exercise your gift of counsel, your skin turned inside out and revealed the beauty within, and made the cafeteria into a cathedral. When I think of you now, after almost thirty years, I think of light shining through water. You lived always in "I-Thou" mode and this was also the source of your pain. How could you be honest, be yourself, exercise your gifts, when that self was partly bound up with a kind of chimera that promised love but really had nothing to do with it, when that self had the deepest, hardest cross possible for a human being?

I did not understand then what 'gay' really was--I knew the fundamentals, but it was a phenomenon 'out there.'  I didn't think of 'gay people' as individuals, and then I came to San Francisco General Hospital to assist the chaplaincy. I was an assistant counselor and I went into patients' rooms, all kinds, and offered my heart, my ear, my assistance in the smallest of things. I was an advocate, a counselor, a spiritual sewer pipe.

After visits with the suffering, most truly poor people I have ever met, I would, exhausted, overwhelmed by my own inadequacy to face the tsunamis of pain and disorder and confusion, crawl behind the altar in the hospital chapel and lay on the floor, weeping. I thought the tears might send it all to God, and that He'd pay attention because I was a too-small sewer pipe for Him.

Tim, you were somehow assigned to me; perhaps you saw me crawling into the chapel one day. But you took me under your wing and met with me often to help me learn how to be a sewer pipe without drowning in the tsunami of waste. You introduced me to the concept of the wounded healer, who is--all healers, following the example of Christ healing from the Cross. You didn't tell me about; it,somehow, you were a walking liturgy for me, a living drama. You see, Tim, I listened to your words and read the Henri Nouwen book you gave me, but what really went into my soul was who you were--this tremendously beautiful man who was searching in the dustbins for real food.

What would have happened in your life had you been told, shown, loved into knowing the beauty that you really were, had you understood that the sin was not your identity, that the overwhelming percentage of you was beautiful? What would have happened had you understood that the hurt within your very being had somehow made you one of the most powerful wounded healers I have ever known? That you were in one sense, a walking miracle? What if you had really understood that the chaste life is a kind of radical pruning that cuts away anything purely natural, anything self-absorbed, and gives you the choice that makes you free, makes you a saint? It is the choice that happens when all that is left is the will, without any dross-attraction to lower things, to creatures, and asks us to love without return, without ego, without consolation...and then, oh Tim, the glorious turn: storge, philia, even eros, yes, the eros you thought was what you needed from a man, sheds its caterpillar skin, is pruned away, and shows itself for what it truly could be, is: the Eternal Youth, the source of springs, leaping down like a golden lion from the high mountains to both kill you and embrace you, and transform you, making you through your hard-won chastity a power-house of love, shooting out across the desert plain like water first pressed through a narrow pipe.

Did you, though, Tim, in your great wounding of always being a kind of outcast, a pariah, a warped tree, did you truly have it in you to make that great saint-choice? Were you rather determined by your very real internal perceptions and feelings and identity, no matter how it came about?

Did I have that choice then? I was selfish, green, spoiled, in love with my own feelings. We sat there, in that pale, weak city day-light, past lunchtime in an empty cafeteria, loving each other, fellow mis-guided believers, in small trickles and great rushes, but without answers. The most important answer you gave me, an answer that only flowered later like a cornflower in the high desert, was that sometimes the desire to be truly loving is not enough, though it is essential. It is the larger piece of the puzzle of what it means to be truly happy, to be truly good, to finally live and be supernatural love, in God.

The other, missing piece was the recognition of God who is both Love and Truth, Beauty and Woundedness, Justice and Mercy, the recognition of Reality rising like the great mountains of Afghanistan, rising like a great cathedral beyond the changing, deciduous aspens and the sulfur-blue lakes and green fields of the Kabul valleys of my infancy.

Did you, or I, have that view? Even if we saw glimpses of the mountains through the driving rain of our needs and wounds and bad choices, did we have the strength to reach even the foothills, or to understand the mountains' relationship with the merciful valleys? Had anyone taught us? Did our needs, our fears, our weaknesses, make us think we had no choice: I in my selfishness, you weeping in your dust-bins?

Partly because of the light I saw in you, Tim, amidst the darkness, hope was born in me--hope that a God who would make such beauty that still lived, that would deign to live in the rubbish heap that was both our souls, would, somehow also be merciful enough to show us the way if we desired it.

Now, it is thirty years away for me. For you, it may be the eternal present, or you may be an old man now. I have learned, Tim, more about those mountains--I have climbed some of them and have stood in the crystal air above the mists; I have seen the beauty of the valleys from the heights, and sometimes I can begin to see how they need each other, justice and mercy, truth and love, and how our very woundedness allows us to see their connection, if our hearts are desiring One above all else. I know now, Tim, that the pure of heart, the chaste hearts, see God, those who desire Him above all things, and that they are set free to love beyond the disorders, the woundedness, the tsunamis of waste that come from us all.

I have also fallen down deep crevasses, Tim. I have become hard, I have forgotten about the ever-crawling worm of pride within me; I have forgot that my ropes are not strong enough and that we must not trust to them but rather let go and fly like eagles on God's wind, a wind that takes us down to the valleys, and back to the mountains while we wait for the time that "justice and mercy shall kiss" within ourselves, and in the tortured human story of this world.

Tim, I wish at the last that you could have seen how God saw you. Maybe, if you have died, you do see it. I pray always, then, that at the moment of your meeting with God that you were able to drop yourself and run, fly, to Him for his mercy and because, finally, you understood the great eros in His justice.

Tim, if you found final forgiveness and are now on the heights planting aspens, be again my mentor.

With you in Christ on the Cross,

Tami

Ode to Chaucer's Prologue

When spring swirls like sweet liquour in the mouth of the poet,
when the West Wind has taken his Psyche,
then that child of nature, Eros,
is at apparent odds 

with all the saints stood for—

Yet the passion of the folk for April pilgrimage,
that human longing, double-minded, imperfect,
becomes—
within the divine mercy encompassing
warring nature and super-nature—
a fruitful polarity, oppositional unity, 

Beauty.

*indebted to the ideas of Arthur W. Hoffman

Iphigenia

I

The ships at Aulis lie, beached,
blackened hulls heaving in heat-waves,
tar disintegrating, rotting flesh slicing through
the wafts of salt, nutty shore reeds, baked marble.

Men scream, chant, bellow 
each night by torchlight, living choral masks;
Agamemnon paces full-armored,
overlayed by a single sheet of gold:
pantomiming Ares, frozen in the expression
of a lion looking up from his kill.

Iphigenia

travels towards Aulis
to be married to the knife,
to lose her maidenhead to the lust of an army,
to a pantheon of demons 
in a game of balance.

II

Hellas

Have you left your early morning olive trees,
your marbled hillsides,
simple cries of crickets,
careful meditation of smoothing white cheese,
joy and leisure of hearth and philosophy,
to chase Helen, to die at Troy,
to placate the irrational, faceless, cruel gods?

Have you forgot those gods of gold are the gods 

without law are the gods 

of finance softly speaking about sacrifice,

smelling with delight the odors of the funeral games,

the games bellowing on screens everywhere?

And I see, her, Iphigenia, throat sliced open,
in the faces of the old, the simple, the poor,
and the children who have lost their patrimony:
their cathedral of beauty, 

their shards of pottery for voting,
their mesimeri scoffed, 

their slavery to the wage.

Diagram in the Dust

St. Augustine confessed, "Scarce understanding came 

even with many learned masters 

not merely lecturing,
but making many diagrams in the dust."

Only four hundred years after Christ,
this drawing diagrams in the dust must
have been custom:
if modeling, mashals, exhortations, lessons
did not sink in, did not convert overtly,
then the master kneeling
in a last resort to draw a picture, meant
that truly the truth had escaped,
bounced off a blindness, an ignorance 

too rooted 

to be easily uprooted.

For the Jews, words were signs, multi-layered,
not our banalized, horizontal, shallow things
floating in unreal space, lighter and more meaningless
than clouds shaping and re-shaping with the wind;
their word
could have been both substance
and diagram,
a perfect Euclidean sphere-word
bearing eternal perfection,
a real child of the
One.

Thereby One in the flesh, writing a Word,

leapt over 

the myths, histories, laws, schools, masters:

He made a diagram in the dust;
perhaps something so simple,
perfect,
that all not distributed in it faded into mere chaos,
Being Himself 

drawing a diagram
for a bit of marred flesh

The Wedding Story...or Don't Judge a Book by It's Cover

On December 27, 1964, 50 years ago, it was snowing heavy and 40 degrees below zero in Spokane; the Winter Festival Queen of Whitworth College and the poor boy from Olympia, WA, were getting married in Spokane. It was the worst winter in decades, and not many could get out, or in; it would be a wedding in the bleak midwinter, indeed, but immediate family got there.

The groom, unbeknownst to the bride, suddenly came down with the flu the day of the ceremony, the ultimate trick provided by his best man. Making his way through everyone wrapped in silk and tulle, he willed himself to the front of the church to wait for his Snow Queen.

She came, a lovely, petite woman in a simple, heavy satin gown. She wondered why he wasn't looking at her, and then realized he was "as white as a sheet." The college roommates in the back of the church thought in scorn, "He's awfully emotional."

The bride's father was the minister, and when he realized that the groom wasn't well, immediately got them to kneel down and the ceremony continued. The minister then realized that kneeling wasn't going to stop what was just going to happen, and held out his shoe so the groom could throw up in it. The guys in the back thought, "Okay. That's out of bounds...he's way too emotional."

Meanwhile, the groom's brother, standing on the steps leading to the altar, suddenly went white and fell like a tree, hitting his head with a sound like a cannon going off; happily, a non-fatal, glancing blow. The mother of these two young men stood up and started screaming, the ambulance came, and the bride quietly asked her father, "Should we just do this another time?"

"No, no," said the intrepid father, "let's just get through this."

No one in the audience knew the extent of the groom's damage until the new couple, "Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Wrye" was announced and the couple turned around. Then, a collective gasp.

The reception was full of gentle pity and quiet exits, and the honeymoon was spent playing Yahtzee  with the groom's new in-laws.

How has the marriage been spent?

1. A move to Afghanistan to serve as missionaries three years later, with a child on the way. Courage or rashness? Answer: Both.

2. Another move to Afghanistan after a long furlough, with two daughters. Adventure or madness? Both.

3. A move to Greece in 1974 (smart).

4. Back to California.

5. A doctorate.

6. Another move to Russia, during the fall of the Soviet Union. Exciting.

7. Denmark. Cute.

8. United Nations International School NYC, for 11 years. Cool.

9. Retirement. Doing it well.

What's in between the lines? Their marriage ceremony was, in a way, the cover to a very different book, one of adventure and of mostly blessed health; but in a deeper way, it is emblematic of the values and virtues they have passed on, most effectively, by modeling, by living.

My father has always seen my mother as a queen, and my mother has always believed enough in my father to continue walking down the aisle, through sickness and health, for better and for worse.

Their health was spent in simple and sincere service, all over the world; they helped, together, re-order and put onto good foundations, a number of schools, my father a fair, just, humble leader and my mother a strict but inspiring teacher to countless elementary students. They used each gift they had to the greatest extent they felt prudent and charitable.

Their times of sickness showed their deep love for each other. When my mother had a brain tumor removed, I had to take my father in charge and make him eat, and stop him from buying her a Steinway (a bribe to stay with him?). I held him as he wept at the thought of her death. My mother told me once, "We have a commitment to commitment, because we know this honors God. This gets us through the bleak times." This is the foundation from which a great love was built.

Their adventures have been many: they have seen so much in a life together--coups in Afghanistan, the beauties of Greece, the struggle of politics, the crash and deep beauties of Russia, and 9-11 in New York, when dust-covered parents ran straight from the Financial District, forty blocks, to the school to be with their children, my father out front to comfort them and quell the panic.

But the real adventures have been, I think, the small hours in the darkness, when the sorrows and stresses were too deep to speak about, the regrets, when they had to watch each other be crucified in the way it happens through out life; they have tried to face failures and sorrow together, as a team, and never turn on each other in suffering, standing below each other's crosses faithfully. They pick each other up and consult with each other on the way of God, the way of Christ, of charity, of Christ's Mother, as best they can with their imperfections.

They get sick, have baggage, drive each other crazy sometimes. Their fights are long, silent, symbolic, gentle, almost courteous battles that usually end up as jokes, like the time in Denmark when the husband wanted the kitchen shade up, and the wife wanted it down. One knew when one or the other was home based on the position of the shade. The husband wanted the light, and the wife didn't want to see the guy across the courtyard taking a shower behind a full-length window. Sometimes I just wanted a good old Italian fight, instead of English reserve, but mostly I appreciated not being put in the middle, ever.

I've learned lots of things from them about which I said to myself, "I think I'll do that differently." It is also the privilege of my children to learn valuable lessons in the negative from me, and yet still try to love me. As my parents have got older together, they've become more open, more honest with themselves.

They love to laugh and they love to help. If one could pick one word for them, it is 'service.' I have learned about this, about humility, about honoring the good, and loving yet what is not perfect from them; mostly, though, I have learned about perseverance.

They are not famous and many dreams, expectations of theirs have been truncated by life.  But the dream, the accomplishment of a successful marriage has been theirs, through 'commitment to commitment and honoring God.' They know that the dream wedding is not one which meets the outside expectations; rather it reflects what Cicero says in De Amici, paraphrased: "Only two people intent upon virtue can be friends or have true unity."

Thus, they have loved each other through disappointment (beginning on the wedding day), danger, adventure, sickness, unexpected joy and prosperity, goods they have received as gifts and not as rights. Their love has been made deeper and more precious because they have not tried to grasp 'happy' but instead gained it through the practice of virtue. They have not hunted for beauty, but have become beautiful through humility, the humility that comes from trusting God in the humiliations of life. I have often thought that God has taken especial care to send them the trials that would answer their real dreams, the dream of the soul that wants to please Our Lord, that values truth and honesty above success.

I, their second daughter, know that I am watching them slow down, almost imperceptibly, like a slowing snowstorm, and become more and more restful and quiet. Because the loss of either or both of them will be like the roof is gone from my world (how will I be virtuous, constant, without them? How will I reach their standard for my own children?) I am beginning to give them back to God now, in the small goodbyes after summers at Orcas and Christmases in Lander; I make sure I remember to thank Him from Whom they came, and from Whom came I, through them.

I know now, as I didn't when my grandparents had their 50th, what a glorious accomplishment this is and I cannot do it justice. I was a young, rash, mostly un-virtuous thing for my poor grandparents to look upon; I am now much more humbled and beat up, with wrinkles of my own that I appreciate, and able now to appreciate my own parents' accomplishment, an accomplishment not worldly, but more akin to Christ's own example of simplicity, holy obedience, humility.

One cannot do justice in words, or anything simply worldly, to the gift of parents who were able, through their desire to serve God, stay married and do it with grace.

Mosaic

One day, in the deepening dark and cold of the year,
I stood stiff, like a deer alert in the wind and the twirling leaves,
bits of death and change that battered me and settled on my back, unwanted.

Another day, in the deepening dark and cold of the year,
I flew light and soft, like a bird in the wind and the twirling leaves,
bits of death and change dancing in a pattern, around me in a mosaic, providence.

photo credit: Marylynne Wrye http://www.marylynnewrye.com/index.html

Ellie

Like a leaf still green
falling to the ground unseen,
you, my sweet, unfinished,
unborn.

Like water, fresh and sweet
rising away, lost in the heat,
you, my child, never held,
unknown.

Like a note full and mellow
swept from the strings of a cello,
you, my Ellie, untouched,
live on.

Perseverance

I sit with you, alone, in a dark, mercilessly exact-angled room.
There are no windows, no doors; I know,
because I have felt every square inch with fevered swipes.
I know all the pock-marks in the walls and the undulations of the floor.
I sit now, cross-legged; 

I have remembered to stop
searching for that tempting hole,
the one that is, in truth, only big enough for a rat to squeeze through
and would require me to shrink too far.

You, Lord, are Other, and I feel no comfort.
But because You are sitting here, 

I feel you have invited me
to sit.
So, I have stopped running in circles, 

and the silence
of the room, Your silence, fills me up.
You don't tell me the purpose of this entrapment,
this prison of pain,
but You have been there, You are there,
and You are here.

Mary

Mary saw the shining reflection under created things: 

the stones she swept were jewels uncovered,

the dust particles whirling in the gentle air

were tiny birds with luminous wings.

The sounds of birth and death, she did not avoid:

she heard the converging
which did not make a static and sterile prayer,

but rather a song, golden, unalloyed.

Being sang the recesses of her soul, she heard the hymn:

on the swaying donkey covered by glinting dust,

she heard the shining silver reeds 

as the edges of the world curled toward Bethlehem.

 

 

paintings 1) Le divin apprenti 2) Alma mater, by Virginie Demont-Breton

 

Zechariah

Zechariah was the chosen priest that year,

that year like so many before it in the turn of the land and the flight of birds,

the wet and the green, the dry and the brown:

but now the holy, third lot fell upon him, the lot of incense.
It was the first time for this old man.

Amid the tonal minor of supplication

his bare feet slid across the marble;

he felt the cracks between stones pass under his poor and bare feet,
under his thick robes stiff with the eight layers of linen and coat,

under the turban that was like the bud of a flower,

under the finely woven byssus, under the weight of the nation,
he was Moses going before the tree of fire.

He tended the fire in the Holy of Holies,

the sound of singing from the Temple steps muffled,

keening like creeping, weak smoke in the folds of the heavy curtain.

Zechariah turned back to the silence and the fire,

and his thoughts,

the thoughts of his heart were like boulders, rocks falling on the immaculate floor, 
rattling and cracking in that deep silence.

He wanted to weep,

because he could not

be silent enough inside.

He made an effort again and attended to the laying of the incense and again to the fire.

He then lay prostrate before the altar.

He felt silence entering him at last
like a gift not earned,
the rattling, falling stones in him swept away by another's power;
he no longer noticed the jewels of the ephod pressing against his chest;

the sounds of the singing ceased,

and he lay for a minute in the silence,
the silence of the Ancient of Days.

He lifted his head

and immediately put it down again.
This was not in the rubrics and the books.

The silence became too heavy, beyond him,

the fire and lamps too strong.

He tried not to see the color

that was more like the color of sunrise,

like the sun peeking, rippling through tree branches,

or the light on the water,

dancing.

"Zechariah. Do not be afraid. Your prayer has been answered..."

"How can I be sure of this?" He had thrown it, like a rock, from the center of his heart.

The light contracted, went still: "I am Gabriel...you shall be silent."

Zechariah stumbled out of the Holy of Holies,

and as he entered the outer courtyard,

He saw their frightened faces,

their fervent faces,

their waiting,

ever waiting,

but he could not give the benediction.

His shame also made his tongue lay useless,

before the great mystery which grew inside Elizabeth.

Slowly, as the months went on,

slowly as he could only hear and see,
within him embers of humility were lit by the daily evidence
of an old woman swelling with child, like a ship long docked, stretching and groaning

against the fullness of a wind on an unexpected sail.

As he watched her bloom again,

his son growing strong inside her gave him the courage
to speak the language of the heart:

"Our prayers have been answered."

He began, in the voiceless days, to see the shame of childlessness
was the impotence of Israel;

that he had been, in his barrenness, as the priest chosen by lot,

the one God had chosen from before time,

in his weakness, to be Israel.

And the silence grew white-hot, deep in the recesses of his house.

Oh Israel, hard like the smooth, stone floor which his priest-feet had passed over;

but now God was coming, coming to walk over those brittle stones in bare, human feet,

but first, His herald must come
to clear the rubble.
Zechariah began to crack.

The new fire in his heart, the swelling sound of a burgeoning blaze, poured forth:

"His name is John."

Kandylakia

Petros is driving.
Away from Athena, east to the Aegean
chortling a bazouki beat
past olive, cypress, past angulated, geometricized
confections in marbled cement invaded by
tokens of human existence:
shirts pinned in positions of helplessness,
soggy towels, potted plants, plastics.

My hand is grasping the grab-handle.
Hanging on in a filling highway wind my heart
ripples loose; I see Iris in the front
Germanically calculating the chances of death
as Petros sends horn-sounds around
the right side of a dwarf-Peugeot.

Roadside, a tiny church on a pedastal, a kandylakia, winks by.

I see inside for an instant.
Like the ember eyes of a young Greek priest
who passed me along Athinas Street, I see

behind miniature windows

smoky saint-eyes, watching, remembering
the world, and the long-ago accident that
pushed a soul through his gateway-iconastasis,
that soul-sized door.

I am still too composite for that door.
rocking and flapping past the candle-lit eyes,
the sea-soil-olive air fills me still
like a lover's breath.

But-- how, if Petros flicks a finger wrong and we die?

If you could only confect a kandylakia,
rooted in Greek soil, Agios Nicholas to watch
for us, to beg for mercy, then
you could believe I went through that tiny gateway
like a lover's breath.

Playing Lady MacBeth

For you and me it seems
one scene of joy to a hundred of sorrow
we are our lines; but no words come when pain enters
I turn, shattering spotlight beams

I now have a paper mask to wear
a virgin plaster, a face white and pale
I stand majestic in tapestried words until the dagger glints
I step away from the circle of light

For you I changed a hundred times for the lies' long drill-
through the red-lit, hundred, sorrow'd days:
now I am mad: comic-mouthing with a paisley'd mask,
I burn in the spotlight beams






painting: Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, by John Singer Sargent

God as Art

"...we must clearly distinguish our direct vision of God (after our death) from our knowledge of Him through the humanity of Christ. The Preface of the Christmas Mass gives an admirable expression of the relation between Christ's sacred humanity and the revelations to us of the Father: "By the mystery of the Word made flesh, from Thy brightness a new light has risen to shine upon the eyes of our souls, in order that, God becoming visible to us, we may be borne upwards to the love of things invisible." 

I sat on the steps of my parents' house on Orcas Island, reading in the sun. I am reading a book by Dietrich von Hildebrand, Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven, and I came across the above passage. Something in me stopped and was still with that deep-water attentiveness: the passage was addressing a question that I have had for many years, a question that has weaved in and out of the moments of my life for as long as I can remember, since that time when I sat on my parents' stairs in the house in Kabul, and first felt God as a presence, but was somehow sad that He was an invisible one. 

My child's mind asked then, and has kept asking, about the mystery between the visible world and the invisible. Why must God be invisible to me? Why must we see with the eyes of the soul, when we are made with physical eyes? Why the apparent abyss between them? If You love me, why are we separated by this invisibility I cannot relate to?

So I thought of this quote from the Preface of the Christmas Mass, and I immediately thought of another kind of preface, those words from the Introduction of Edith Stein's The Science of the Cross. I knew these quotes, one from the Preface about Christ, and one about the nature of art, were talking, really, about the same thing, and that somewhere in the marriage of them is born a kind of answer to my childish question. 

So, first to meditate on the Christmas Mass Preface: This part of the Preface begins with two prepositional phrases: "by the mystery of the Word made flesh" and "from Thy brightness." I immediately look towards what these phrases are assisting, or illuminating...in other words, the assertion they support; it is, "a new light has risen to shine upon the eyes of our souls." This is not, primarily, a physical light, or a physical light at all. It is a light that touches our soul's eyes, perhaps like the hands of Christ touching the blind man, to make the scales fall from his eyes, to enable or allow us a sight we could not have through our own soul's powers. In other words, this light is something like the mysterious light that Plato alludes to in the Republic, the light that is the source of all other light. Plato, I believe, is referring to the limits of rationality when he talks about the man newly out of the cave who can begin to discern the existence of Light by the forms it illumines by shedding itself on the natural world. Plato then attempts to describe a turning to the Source, to the Light, but cannot explain the nature of it, always falling short, as by our limitations we humans are fated to do. 

But suddenly, in the Preface, something seemingly contradictory to Plato, and strange, happens, akin to the beautiful statement: "Once there was someone inside a tiny cave who was larger than the whole universe." Somehow, the Light that Plato knew he could only allude to, is brought to the eye of our soul, directly, "by the Mystery of the Word made flesh." A single small creature, in a dark cave, carries within Him the Light, the fullness of all meaning, of all truth. It doesn't make any sense, really; it goes against anything from a natural perspective. Or does it? Is not the supernatural somehow intimately connected to the natural? Is not the natural dependent upon the supernatural for its very existence, for its meaning?

Christ Himself is the bridge, as Catherine of Siena said, between the natural world and the invisible Light, the fullness of meaning; He has opened the way for us to receive that light shining on the eyes of our souls. The physical has expressed, somehow, the invisible. Within a single body the universe and all truth resides; the Word made flesh is, in a sense, an external expression of Light.

The second part of the assertion in the Preface is begun with a phrase of logic, which answers the question, "Why should this light shine upon the eyes of our souls? What is the purpose, the end of this for us?" It says: "...in order that, God becoming visible to us, we may be borne upwards to the love of things invisible."

The Word has become visible, the Light has leaned down, concentrated itself, come up through the soil like a tiny, vulnerable plant, to become a sign that the narrow physical eye can see. The Light has expressed itself in a kind of art, a visible expression of the interior. It has conformed itself, in endless humility, humility that makes pride seem like a withered, blown speck of dust, to the language of learning of a sinful, warped, narrow-sighted creature who lives in the dark and the muck. The Light that Plato thirsts for has come down into the Cave and chained Himself up next to those who are blind and enthralled with shadows.

God has become an artist, the truest form of artist which is one who pours himself out, performs kenosis, to express something.

Edith Stein really explains this better, from the Introduction to The Science of the Cross:

It is the characteristic of the artist to transform into image anything that causes an interior stirring and demands to be expressed exteriorly. Image here is not to be restricted to the visual arts; it must be understood to refer to any artistic expression, including the poetic and musical. It is simultaneously image in which something is presented and structure as something formed into a complete and all-encompassing little world of its own. Every genuine work of art is in addition a symbol whether or not this is its creator's intention, be he naturalist or symbolist.

It is a symbol: that is, it comes from that infinite fullness of meaning into which every bit of human knowledge is projected to grasp something positive and speak of it. It does so in such a manner, in fact, that it mysteriously suggests the whole fullness of meaning which for all human knowledge is inexhaustible. Understood in this way, all genuine art is revelation and all artistic creation is sacred service.

Despite this, it is clear that there is a danger in an artistic inclination and not only when the artist lacks an understanding of the sacredness of his task. The danger lies in the possibility that in constructing the image, the artist proceeds as though there were no further responsibility than producing it. What is meant here can be demonstrated most clearly by the example of the images of the cross. There will scarcely be a believing artist who has not felt compelled to portray Christ on the cross or carrying the cross.

But the Crucified One demands from the artist more than a mere portrayal of the image. He demands the artist, just as every other person, follow him: that he both make himself and allow himself to be made into an image of the one who carries the cross and is crucified.

Expressing the image externally can be a hindrance to doing so internally, but by no means must this be so; actually, it can serve the process of interior transformation because only with the production of the external expression will the inner image be fully formed and interiorly adopted. In this manner, when no obstacle is placed in its path, it becomes an interior representation that urges the artist to effectively reproduce it in action, that is, by way of imitation, externally. 

I wish to focus especially, though, on this statement of hers: "Only with the production of the external expression will the inner image be fully formed and interiorly adopted...it becomes an interior representation that urges the artist to effectively reproduce it in action, that is, by way of imitation, externally."

This is one of those really thick philosophical statements that I have to read over a number of years. Three years ago, for example, my heart was not broken enough open to see it.

The artist, whether novelist or painter or architect or musician, knows that mused art flows from a fullness of meaning, from a spring that is ever creative, and true. The Greeks said that inspiration comes through the Muses, who were the daughters of cosmic order, or Zeus. This is a shadow of Christian muse, which is yet still the daughter of order, and also mystery, and love, the inexhaustible meaning that is God. Mused art is great art. There are other kinds of art, that which circles around only an ideology or a solipsistic expression. There are examples of classical art that I find ideological, like Mozart's Magic Flute, and there are instances of modern art that seem to express, in a very bright-color, almost direct way, the fullness of meaning, like the piece of art I saw in the MOMA in LA during the unfolding of AIDS. I have never seen a better expression of the experience of death as a punishment, as an inexplicable contradiction to love and life. Some of art expresses truth like a negative image, by expressing the hard questions. Some art expresses truth in its directness. They are both, at least in great art, a physical and/or imaginative expression of the fullness of meaning.

And art is, primarily, fundamentally, the way we humans learn. Aristotle, in The Poetics, expresses this so well. We are imitative creatures; we feel great pleasure in recognition. We connect things--this is how the different powers of the soul begin to come together, which is the only real learning: rationality and the passions and the will are brought together through these connections, these recognitions, to receive truth in the fullness of our being--the only way truth can come in its fullness. Truth received only rationally is only partial truth for us: our whole being must receive it, for "the inner image to be fully formed and interiorly adopted."

Love cannot be understood without the body, without the passions, without the will, without the rational mind, receiving in concert. Imitative learning, artistic expression, reaches out to all parts of us. Also, we must receive these things as whole, not as parts. Because we are so limited, and small, and sinful, and yet because we were created in the image of God, with the capacity to see the whole, we must ultimately live in the tension and difficulty that to receive truly, we must receive things in their wholeness--though we are tempted to stop with the parts. If we do stop there, the parts are in danger of becoming chimeras, because they become their own small kingdoms of meaning, rival meanings to the fullness of meaning. I think of Marx here, who created an ideology by leaving out the reality of the soul.

This is the work of philosophy, to distinguish the parts from the whole so that we can begin to rationally recognize the difference; it is the work of literature, of art, of music, to express wholeness in an imitative way that we can understand, through the elements of natural things which are appropriate to our capacity.

The eyes of our soul cannot alone see the whole of God. I think of God telling Moses, "If you see my Face, you will surely die. I will hide you in the cleft of the rock, and you shall see my back."

God, though, chose to do something that would, inexplicably, allow that fullness of Himself to be seen. By His incarnation, He made Himself a physical expression, a work of art in every moment of His earthly life while yet simultaneously remaining uncreated; the Artist that is also Art. Like a playwright, He created a katharsis for us, to order our passions, to heal us by showing us that we must, like Him, be broken open and to imitate Him, to live Him...only then can He show us the fullness of meaning that is Love and Truth and Justice and Mercy in one Whole.

As von Hildrebrand says, "Let us recall the words of Christ to Philip: 'Have I been with you so long, Philip, and yet you do not know me? I tell you, he who sees me sees the Father."

Sodom and Gomorrah

If I were a city, a Sodom or Gomorrah,
gates unused and unneeded, their wood
dried and splintered, sunburnt and warped
like sentries too long on duty,
their once-strong sinews stretched
by the carnival throng of well-wishers--

If I were Sodom, city of cinnamon and saffron odors
gliding along behind their silken masters,
bangle-spots of melon and wine-berry
squatting at the steps of carved doors,
sad and luxuriant notes twirling in the dust,
careless of the feelings they elicit--

If I were Gomorrah, the jewel on the shore
my eyes winking, chattering with the sparkles on the sea;
from my mouth, sauntering, swaying, laden camels come
moving in time with the ships, my suitors,
blown in by winds cold and warm, strong and subtle
in my harbor for the moment--

If I were a city, a Sodom or Gomorrah, what
if in me was a clean-swept courtyard with a child
quietly playing with the golden light,
or a curved, silent head in the shadows
praying wordlessly, with the groans of the heart--
humble oases, perhaps, only ten or so of these?

Perhaps, many hills away, a man grovels--
A man kneels pleading
after three receding figures, moving
with heavy and measured steps towards me
an unearthly glow from them interrupting
the chatter with the sea.

Early Winter

The sky was a dull grey

snowflakes coming down from it, like ash.

A metallic silver pinwheel pinned to a white fence

spinned in an erratic way

trying to free itself from the tape and stick;

in my mind, I took it

and set it free.

ps-

it flew south, for me.

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

Exile, The

What does it mean to be an exile? I suppose you'd have to talk to one to understand; perhaps even an interview with an exile wouldn't give you much real information, either. You'd have to have been exiled. But the question is not, "What does it feel like to be an exile?" but rather, "What does it mean?"

"Meaning", used in this question, has the connotation of 'purpose': What is the end, the directing paradigm, the teleology of being an exile?

I can think of many types of exile in my life. First, a very concrete one at age ten, when I was forced to leave Greece, where my heart lived. I have never gotten over this, this splitting of my soul. Do exiles, the more deeply suffering ones, exiles from their home because of war, ever get over it? Do exiles, the political ones, ever get over it? Do exiles, the third-culture kind, like me, ever get over it?

I have read in many stories, especially of the medieval bent, how a hero or villain is "banished" and he pleads, begs, for some other punishment, even death. I have felt my heart go back to that time, at ten, when I also wished to run away from my parents (a child's version of wishing for death) rather than leave my beloved Anatolia, for some foreign place; I had some presentiment that it would not be a place which welcomed me, that I'd be somehow an outcast. I was right. But are we meant to become so entwined with a place, a physical place? What is the mystical connection between ourselves and a place comprised of dirt and rocks with some culture plastered on it? No, I know it is more than that. We are deeply connected to places because we are composite beings, and we humans, because we are also spiritual, imbue places with spiritual realities: even as children, we sense this and connect with all of it much more easily and deeply than we do even as adults. That is why the places and people of our childhoods always retain a certain luminosity, a magic, which never leaves many of us- perhaps until we visit and see its destruction. Then our hearts are broken.

I have also felt exiled from people I've loved. From childhood friends, from those I've loved on the crest of life and lost due to the changing, sometimes inexplicable currents of lives meeting and sundering. I have never forgotten, not in my heart, those moments of joy, and in those memories do I most chafe against a linear existence, one we cannot escape, in which those times of real love, in deep sweetness or in friendship become hard jewels set in the past. We cannot escape the linear nature of our existence; in fact, it has been ordained for our life on earth. So there must be a meaning in it, similar to the meaning of being an exile. Time itself creates the state of being an exile.

There is an old proverb, which I hate: "Love makes time pass, and time makes love pass." I hate it because I think that then it cannot be love. This is speaking more about pleasure, I think. Love does not pass, not real love. But how does an exile from loved ones go on in a healthy way? How does one re-invest, an important stage of grief, if time does not make love pass? And the most important question: how do we truly continue to love if the real person is not with us, at least from time to time? Does it become the unhealthy love between ourselves and a vaporous memory?

I have also been an exile from myself, in those periods when I have tried, for safety or love, to fit into a mold which others set out for me, and consequently lost my own voice. To lose oneself is part of the pain associated with both the concrete, physical exile from the soil we love and the exile from those we've loved and lost. When we left Greece, I had certain knowledge that I'd left part of myself there, that I could no longer live to the rhythm of joy and sunlight, that the sea and the colours of beauty and light were drained from me, and I went on my journey a shell of the person that I was. In rebuilding, trying to fit into a new culture, into an extended family whom I did not know, into a culture which seemed gritty and twisted, I lost myself for many years. I lost my God because I had no real face or voice left with which to know Him. But as my sister, my partner in this loss, once said in a song, "You danced with me, through a bend in time." And He does.

Sin itself, trespassing the moral law, also creates in us an exile from ourselves, from our real face which is always before God, and destroys the true love which is the bridge between ourselves and reality, and the 'other-ness' of those we are called to love as well as the ultimate Other, our God. And sin can take larger, social forms, such as trying to be in the inner circle, to please others for the sake of advancement or to create a facade, becoming a fake of ourselves. All this is deep, hellish exile beside which the physical exile because of war or simple loss becomes a potential portal of growth and hope.

For me, my physical exile from the land of my blood and heart has made me feel like a wanderer, of sorts, on the face of the earth. I have struggled for an identity, and held understandings with other third-culture kids, understandings like the lighting of one candle to another. I have felt myself a citizen more of the world, and had no phobic patriotism which might blind me to the actions of the country in which I hold citizenship. I have become a culture-explorer and discovered richness everywhere; and in the pain, I have grown to understand how to discern bad culture from good, however amateur and often mistaken I've been at times.

There is still the question of exile originating in a linear existence, of the loss of those we love in this life, and the question of how love lives, real love, based in real people and not just memory. I think that there is an essential, real, eternal person inside each of us, and true love, rather than being blind, has true sight. If we love, we can see more like God. We see, if we truly love, the potential, the person that ought to be, whom God wills, whom God is trying to accomplish despite flaws and sin. If we love, we become co-conspirators with God in helping this person become what he or she should be. This is true, I think, for the love of friendship as well as eros, although the love of eros has an arrow-like strength for the melding of two persons into each other, and in a mysterious way, echoes the love of God for the soul, in that in becoming loved by God, we begin to be melded into Him, to become like Him: although mysteriously, this love, if true, and moral, always retains and enhances our uniqueness. Eros, and the love of God, is a beautiful paradox, and the person we love, whether with us in the day-to-day or not, is truly with us in essential things. Is the only thing that can separate us the marring of sin which destroys, in the end, the person meant by God? I do not know, but the person who loves always sees, and hopes, like God always loves and hopes.

So we see something eternal and real, and non-linear, when we love truly. This does not pass with time. There are those whom I have seen again after ten or twenty years, or more, and knew as I knew them so long ago: it is expressed in, "we picked up where we left off". I believe that part of the fear of loving is the fear of the loss of self, of exile, and of loss in a linear existence. But this fear is a half-truth, because in love, we are multiplied, we can become more ourselves even as we give ourselves away, and love does not die or impoverish, even in loss in this life. It is not easy, and there is pain, there is real exile. But there is hope, not necessarily for the consummation of real love in this world, but hope nonetheless. It is why people who have faith in a good God can continue through great loss, and even in time, grow though it.

I have felt my soul stretched and raw, when I've been through a leaving, an exile made necessary by circumstance, sin, or choice-for in every choice there is a yes and a no; and sometimes I have felt that I was, as Bilbo says in The Hobbit, "like butter spread over too much bread"; and like Frodo, feeling that some wounds do not heal with, or in, time. But still, I will to believe in love, in love that does not pass with time, a love found again in the ultimate eucatastrophe, or sudden turn from bad to good, that is found with God after this life. God willing I will make it there, past this exile. I hope it looks like Greece, too.

Perhaps the real meaning of exile, of a linear existence, is to test us in our hope, our love, and to teach us the real meaning of home- for as it is said, and I like this much better, "the darkness helps us to understand the true value of the light." Or something like that. I could change it, like this: "being an exile shows us the true meaning of home."

Or, perhaps, I just want too much and should just be more easy come, easy go. However, like Gandalf says at the end of The Return of the King, "Not all tears are an evil"; in other words, some things, some necessary exiles and goodbyes deserve the honor of tears. To deny this is to become flippant and shallow, I think, or to become a person who embodies the life equivalent of a womanizer. A lifenizer, in the endless search for the easy life, the perfect situation, quick-releasing anything that requires the risk of pain, or exile.

Maybe I can still believe in endless, eternal love, and be the exile of solemn joy traipsing through a field on a full spring day- like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows, who leaves his home and marvels in the River and the Rat, rejoicing in what is, what will be with God. And yet even the loving, happy Mole, upon scenting his old home in the midst of deep winter, weeps about the loss of it after so many months away. And, in one of the most beautiful metaphors on friendship, the Rat puts his impatience with all this weeping aside and helps the Mole find his home; then as they find that his home has been left in a shambles, the Mole weeps again in his shame over having the well-to-do Rat see his humble abode. But the Rat, with true charity, "-praised everything he saw, and said, 'Why Moley, you've a capital little place here! Capital!' " And they feast, as only love can do, on the remains of a sausage. It is a moment of kairos, a time when the love of God breaks through into existence and exile.

For you, you exile full of angst, and sorrow, do you not know, exile, that I know every hair of your head...that I know when each lark falls to the ground, and you, you are worth many of these...