Keep Calm and Love Australia

So the first pest control person didn't speak a language I knew, but I thought he did; I think he knew how to nod in approximately the right places. The second one said, "Wow there's a lot of webs; this place hasn't been maintained for this...and you've got a lot of trees. These are probably black spiders (a little like really big black widows, can make you sick, but not immediate-death-inducing)."

He went on: "Funnel-webs don't build on houses; they build in the ground."

The third person I spoke with, an experienced groundsman who's lived in the Blue Mountains bush for many years said, "Oh yes, funnel webs do build on houses, in eaves, on fences...anywhere there's a little corner of space." He showed me an area of fence that looked just like the fence outside the room where TJ was sleeping, where my greatest battle was fought, I armed with a broom and telling myself, "Strike with purpose. Do not waver." I almost flew a standard as I went around the house killing the things. What should the standard be? A dead spider? No. Standards are symbols of what we fight for. I would have had three smiling Kozinski kids on it.

So, anyway, after all that bravado, who knows what they were; all I know is that they were crawling out from the house and now I hate that house...the pest control said, "We'll just spray powder into the eaves and roof."

The groundsman said, "You've got to hit the things with the spray, directly. If there's an infestation, that's a real problem."

So the honeymoon with Australia is over. That was quick...I didn't have much time to be infatuated with it. Only a month in the country and I bet the "They"  that is the nebulous infrastructured bureaucracy would like us to leave quickly and quietly. No one wants immigrants who already know the number for the Tenant Tribunal.

What immigrant wants to live in a place where one really should wear welding gloves and thick rubber boots just to rake the lawn (funnel webs can bite through regular shoes and 'pansy' garden gloves..what I thought of as adequate)?

But in all the stress, and the hating of the creatures here, I have seen some funny things. The giant purple house on Nestor St. which looks like a cake from the cake decorating shop, an Indian version of the immigrant's-dream-come-true Portokalos house in a Big Fat Greek Wedding; a man with a T-shirt picturing a Star Wars storm trooper with the caption "Support Our Troops;" a man carrying up the gifts towards the Arnold Schwarzenegger crucifix for mass at the Paramatta cathedral who had on jeans, a paisley dress shirt and--oh yes--bright red dress shoes, with a face and head that looked like a benign, conservative grandpa.

I've seen some really weird things too, things that make you go 'eew.' One is an advert for a bank, showing you as a little red baby figurine standing, triumphant on a pile of prone, defeated white baby figurine bodies. I guess you're supposed to think you are the baby on top. And somehow that has to do with the bank. Weird.

There's some really stupid things too. I've already mentioned the trolleys with the four swiveling wheels: the anger about this is not abating. The other is that the lanes, and the parkinglots, are just really narrow. There's places that I really feel like I'm playing Street Rally, only I'm a middle-age woman in a bubble-shaped Toyota Camry (boring as hell with a V .2 engine) driving on the other side of the road on the other side of the car, and not in a Ferrari along the coast of Monaco (which might make up for it--what a place to kick the bucket)--sometimes, going on the loop-de-loo on Hastings Road on the way to Redfield, I let go and say "whee" but most of the time I feel like I'm about to hit something.

There's some things I love. I love the make-it-yourself yogurt places, and I love it when someone offers 'morning tea' or 'afternoon tea'--and it doesn't mean the acidic-to-the-max-but-tinny-thin Lipton junk and no milk and nothing else: it means good tea, with milk always ready and little sandwiches and delicacies. Very cool. It makes the Hobbits and their 'elevenses' delightfully real. I did find out the hard way that Australians really do just drink their tea and move on...none of this taking their drink with them into the meeting. "Oh you Americans" is what you'll get if you do that. I guess we like to carry our drinks round with us...I never noticed.

I've had the odd experience of hearing the American accent as if from the outside...after not hearing it for awhile (immediate family doesn't count for some reason), I was listening to the radio, and they were interviewing a Concert Master who is playing with the Australian Symphony. I was thinking, "She's saying intelligent things, but why does she sound so--well, what is it--kind of slow or something. I wonder if she has a speech defect?"

Then I realized suddenly that she was from somewhere on the East Coast. We do speak more slowly, almost excruciatingly slow compared to Australians; we have less lilt and inflection. Our accent is kind of a clipped, slow monotone with disproportionately large 'ay' sounds. But it is ours and it was nice to hear it and be able to follow along so very easily, like being in water the exact temperature of your body.

Getting to know a new country is perhaps a little like marriage. For most of us, the honeymoon ends when the plane hits the home tarmac, and for a few of us, at moments, even sooner. Sometimes, like in marriage, in rushes the desire to just go back to the way things were, especially when you find that the dangers and troubles are very real. But there's something about keeping promises, keeping faith, that patience IS love, that having virtue makes it possible for us to truly love. Without them we can't. I know that from the wrong-side round--sometimes learning is most powerful when we experience in ourselves, in others, the opposite.

I've always been an escape artist. Part of the charm of a new place is that it is new--I am an adventurer, but not an outdoors one. I hate camping. I'm a cultural adventurer--learning about a new culture never gets old, besides a few moments struggling with the stupid trolleys or trying to make a simple U-turn (not an option here for the most part): "There's a roundabout 2 km along--"

"Shut up."

"Pardon?"

"You know what you can do with your roundabouts and your trolleys and your spiders?"

"Pardon?"

Anyway, even with those things, I feel so enriched by a new culture. One great experience recently was attending a Syriac Catholic liturgy. We were invited by a prospective Campion student, who was born in Iraq. He's twenty-something and has lived in the cradle of human civilization and now, even inexplicably to himself, way out of the cradle, here at the ends of the earth. He has started businesses, worked as a mechanic, started a restaurant, and survived wars and immigration. His face is beautiful with joy and hope, and he wanted us to come and see his parish church.

The mass was full of Semitic people, people with black hair and deeply olive skin, long noses and luminous eyes with thick lashes and dramatic eyebrows. As I looked around, I realized that many of them looked like traditional icons of Jesus and Mary--suddenly the icons looked less like foreign, ancient symbols and you could almost see what they might have looked like. Some of them looked like the Man on the Shroud of Turin.

We were told this liturgy is the oldest known liturgy in the world, older than the Orthodox, older than the conglomeration of ancient liturgies that is the Tridentine...so I was interested to see what elements it might have in common with the Tridentine or the Orthodox rites--because, I surmised, those commonalities might be root actions that the disciples instituted.

The women wore head coverings; some of them did not, but the majority, who did, tied their scarves behind their neck. They looked like old Greek grandmothers to me when they did that, and I felt that old pang of reminiscence. The young women wore lots of make-up and fancy shoes, which made them look like Cleopatra. I understood the thing about Cleopatra's nose when I looked at them; their noses were straight and long, coming out from their faces dramatically, and it gave them a solemnity, a gravity, a beauty that is simply not Western at all. They make Claudia Schiffer look like a Precious Moments doll.

When the music started, Ana and I looked at each other. Syrian music is both sad and happy at the same time; it is in the minor, but with trills and a strength that is more like solemn joy than melancholic Irish music. As I watched the music player sway and add impossibly fast and complex trills to the solemn base line, I felt chills go up my spine--I was listening to something living, something that still visibly moved the people in their soul, that was also ancient.

They chanted--and you could hear a possible root of Gregorian chant came, but it was more complex and less bare. It wasn't polyphany; the music itself had detail and a movement that made it both simple and complex. It kept you interested, but allowed you to pray; it brought you into itself, both the rational mind and the emotions. It seems, to me, to be more about the full human person than Gregorian chant, engaging the emotions, spirit and mind in equal, balanced measure.

We listened to a language that is the direct descendent of the Aramaic that Our Lord spoke...it was wonderful to hear the Old Testament read with similar sounds to those Christ made when He was in the synagogue. The Syrian priest sang the Scriptures: I wondered if Christ did, too.

There were many responsive prayers, and you could see that the servers must have played a response-role right from the beginning of Christianity.

We went outside after, and no one stared at us as if we didn't belong. They looked at us with gravity and nodded. The young priest, tall and dark with a winning smile, greeted us and moved on easily. I found there seemed to be a feeling that these people were comfortable with their emotions, with each other, a people that accept what comes along the road, a people sure of their roots--roots not only racial but cultural and religious.

We, on the other hand, almost ate someone's funeral luncheon, thinking it was coffee hour. Luckily we noticed the lamb on the spit was surrounded by somber, crying people in black. We said goodbye to our friend and went to Red Rooster, suddenly returned to a Western ethos. We sat and watched button-nosed Norwegians race down a snow hill in Sochi as we ate. Talk about hitting the other end of the culture spectrum...the Scandinavian intensity reminded me of the cross country runner portrayed in Tintin, who is very Western-white bread and saying, after he'd won and been piled with laurels, "Yes, thank you...I'll do better next time..."

I thought about those roots I felt at the Syriac liturgy, and promises to keep, and virtue that disposes you to love; I thought about the virtues without which love invariably turns to hate, to indifference.

We probably have to break our lease, which makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to live in a house that may or may not be infested with some kind of spider. We may or may not have a case, especially with a pest control person who is for some reason, incoherent. Too much spray?

It has made me think about promises, and Austen's virtue of constancy, the virtue she said underlay all the others, made the others possible. Is being rooted in culture, in religion, a guarantee of virtuous constancy, that ability to keep promises and to make your 'yes' a 'yes'?  A rooted culture, a small-town life definitely challenges you to be real, to be constant...you can't hide, really, or escape from small-town family and friends. They simply know you, as you are. And this is good.

But also, being uncomfortable, facing loss, facing a new culture, also can challenge your true constancy: "Virtues are only real under threat." Along with the being known, it is also easy, in a small town, to create a role, a facade that works. One can become the 'respectable member of the community' and never be able to see the true inconsistencies behind it because the cost of being real is too high, a la Austen's characters who preserve respectability at the expense of true virtue, who in the end saw respectability as virtue.

Constancy is about keeping promises when one should, and knowing what the 'should' is about. It is about living your true self, saying a 'yes' from the true self. If one says 'yes' from the true self, that is the frame within which love can grow.

I was a young woman who did not keep promises; I was too run by the demands of my own feelings. A cross for the young is that you do not yet know yourself. It wasn't until meeting St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Jane Austen, Tolkien; it wasn't until I saw that Christ rested in the Eucharist in the Crypt Chapel at St. Mary's in Annapolis and knew that my yes to the Church meant a great deal of pain for others; it wasn't until Thaddeus and I struggled through, time and time again, that I began to see the true value and personal cost of constancy. And it does have great personal cost...to hang on through a storm requires something higher to live for; it requires a greater power that we must work with.

My moments in life of not keeping promises are the most painful wounds I have; my making promises I did not know the true meaning of, in youthful and selfish ignorance; my lack of the constancy built on true self-knowledge and a balance of the rational mind with the emotions and the spirit did indeed mean that I could not love.

Anyway, at mass today, after getting over the red shoes, I realized for the first time what St. Augustine is talking about when he says that we ourselves provide our own punishment. I also understand what he's talking about when he expresses his need of the power of God to fill his weaknesses, like water rushing into a hole. To keep constancy around the really serious promises in the messy world, out of a rather messy heart, is not in my power alone.

Grace Building on Killer Spiders

As they say, "Just when it seemed things were back to normal..."

I was putting the finishing touches on the Bulli house; I'd got to the point where I thought things like, "This would look nice here" or "A painting of this would go great on this wall" when I noticed a strange web by our front door. I knew there were spiders; the garden is quite extensive, and spider webs would be a normal occurance.

I'd cleaned out the beds and begun the process of re-establishing order, when I saw that web. Funnel-web. I knew about these things; the females are larger but less aggressive and less poisonous; the males are smaller, aggressive (they jump to attack) and their bite can kill you in nine minutes (like angry babushkas versus SS swat troops). Then I saw one, in the garage. I wasn't yet concerned, because if they are like black widows, they would tend to stay in dark corners and hide.

Then I saw more. Also, we'd been pestering the management company for screens downstairs. I've seen, incomprehensibly in this climate of some rather dangerous bugs, lots of houses without screens. "That's just the Aussie 'whatever,'" someone told me. Well, though we are fresh from a land where mountain lions stalk about neighborhoods, we were adamant about having screens.

Finally, the screen man came the same day as the 'flick man'--pest control. He kept coming back up the porch from the garden and looking at me, shaking his head as he knocked funnel-web after funnel web spider off his brush-stick.

After the spraying, the spiders must have had a war conference. They all started coming out on the outside of the house--balcony rafters, window frames. I myself killed five (how many Australians have had the adventure of killing five of these things?). By this point, I thought, "Well, they probably like to stay outside." At least that's what the flick man said.

At about nine pm, Ana was, without being asked, being unselfish and sweeping the kitchen floor. The house was quiet; everyone was tired from school and me from fighting with spiders. Thaddeus was out at the gym.

I see Ana come around the corner, her face calm but white. "Come with me, Mom. Quietly."

I didn't need to be told what it was.

There he was, on the floor. I attacked him with the broom and nearly destroyed the couch in the process. I would have set the damn thing on fire if I'd thought it would have helped.

Looking at the little carcass, Ana and I were breathing hard. Nine minutes til death and the thing jumps at you. We looked at each other and I said, "We're outta here."

I called Thaddeus, and all of us (shoes on and I wish we'd had nuclear bomb suits) packed up what we needed for the night; we called Ryan, and Peter Pelican, and Peter brought over the keys to our refuge, the Rausch House. Peter did not stay to chat.

We all jumped in the car and drove away. We pulled up to the Rausch House, and Thaddeus got a couple bags and walked toward the front door: right into a huge web. We all started screaming; it was 11 pm by now, and we probably woke up the neighborhood, but we'd lost our minds by then. The said web was occupied by a 50 c piece-size spider. We shone our cool i phone flashlights on it and then right there, on the spot, looked it up online on the said cool i phones. We identified it as a 'common garden orb-weaver.' We almost hugged it.

In the house we went, all of us wondering what this truly ridiculously scary experience was about. TJ fell asleep immediately; it took me much longer. I kept freaking out at anything that moved.

As I lay there, happy to be away from that house, I remembered the first night we slept there; I remember that I woke up in the middle of the night, feeling a terrible presence. I thought, "We have to get this house blessed." The next morning, without any knowledge of what I'd been thinking, Thaddeus said, "I asked Fr. Luke to come over and bless the house." I held that in my heart, wondering what it meant.

This morning, waking up in a refuge house, I wondered about the meaning of this; either some things are just random, just bad luck, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time--or, things have meaning, all things...good and bad events, naturally scary things a means to some supernatural end. When I wonder about this, I always think about Gandalf saying, "I've never met such a thing as luck in this world" and a priest who said once, "All these things on our road are the will of God coming to us in some way."

So I wondered, because this was like being attacked in some way. Other people I respect have said, "How can you say that bad things are somehow God's doing?" It is a tough question.

I thought about it, still, as I drove TJ and Sophie to school. Ana was too tired to go.

As is my habit now, I stayed at Redfield to say a rosary in the chapel. The year 10 boys came trooping in as I was praying, for a recollection with Fr. Felix (from Spain). I listened half-way and kept praying. He said, "In my homeeleey, remember I say 'Eet ees self-geeving and geenerowseety....." and his voice went into Charlie Brown-adult-voice-mode for me, as I prayed for a good resolution to our issue of being chased out by insects.

Suddenly, my full attention was on Fr. Felix: He was saying, "Selfishness is a poison...you know, we have in Australia these funnel-web spiders that can kill you. That is how strong is their poison. They have those fangs, you know? When we do selfish acts, we are like poison for the human community. Someone said once, 'One selfish act poisons humanity;' on the other hand, good acts bring health and goodness to the world."

It was one of those rare moments when you know God is looking right at you, a direct gaze, and He's speaking through someone--to you.

I saw, through my full attention, through my questions and fear, my own selfishness. Not a morose thing at all; when true sight happens, it isn't depressing: it is frightening. Why? Because you can see it but yet, when you really truly see your own face, you know you don't have the power to change it. Perhaps that is why we don't want to truly see our vices; it is like finally, after years, seeing a huge wall at the edge of a garden one has been living in for years, and realizing that one isn't in a garden but rather in a prison.

All you can do is stand at the foot of that wall in your heart and cry out for God.

I sat in the chapel and then went into see Fr. Felix. I asked him, "How does one deal with the poison of selfishness and yet be balanced about what one needs?"

"Yes," he said, "A mother especially has to take care of so many needs; it is a matter of keeping a balance, and of knowing that you can only be generous and self-giving in the power of God. You keep the image of Christ on the cross, and you think, 'You did that for me; I can do this little things for the other.'"

How pat that sounds; how many times have I heard that? I needed a bunch of spiders to help me see this truth anew, yet again. Yes, in order to make dinner with love, or clean that boys' toilet yet again, or do the -what is it now? 10 thousandth? load of laundry, especially in my middle-aged, hormonally-challenged, forest-dweller state, it takes the power of God. How do I then remain myself? Am I just a vessel for Him? Who am I? Am I just the selfish part?

Somehow, He says, "I will make you new"--like the lover who pours his whole being out for the beloved, we are not diminished by His help. Somehow. It is one of those truths I know, but I do not understand.

This was the grace of God for me, building upon nature, as Thomas Aquinas says; God using the things naturally around us, even the hard things around us, to create situations of grace...if we are looking.

The miracle is that none of us got bit, especially TJ, who had four of these things living right outside his window (with no screen). That's the miracle part. Sometimes you know the angels are about. It was clear to me that God simply wanted us to go through this, but that He held our lives in His hand, like a parent who calmly watches you approach the edge of a cliff...and you don't know the cliff is there, and you don't know that He's holding on to you, to let you learn, and live, one more day. One day, He will let you go, letting go only to catch you on the other side: learning will be over; a new life will begin.

Ana had her own grace-lesson: "Scary things like this, Mom, make you braver in some weird way...I laugh now, in the face of tarantulas."

Flowing Time and a Divided Will

Things are more like a river flowing rapidly in the spring; the ice blocks of moving, starting school, getting acclimated are slowly melting. I sometimes feel the spaces now left by those who daily enriched my life in Lander, from little Susanka boys trooping across the lawn, coming to play, to loving friends who carried my heart in tough times.

Life is just slightly quieter now; I remember after the particularly stressful time in 2009, suddenly learning to love a normal day. I still have that appreciation and love for the normal routine...and slowly, things here are coming into normal focus.

I realized the other day, for example, that I didn't know what was going on in traffic half the time...the lanes would suddenly, without warning, become left-turn only lanes; and in Sydney traffic, turning around is a ten-minute procedure (u-turns are simply not done for the most part). Suddenly something came into focus for me: the signs indicating lane changes, roads, stoplights, etc, are on the left. Not the right, which was where I was unconsciously looking all this time. I didn't even see the signs on the left. We see largely out of habit, out of what is normal for us.

This is usually a good thing, but it is a good lesson to have to shift focus, frustrating as it is. It is that same steep learning curve that you feel when you realize suddenly that you were not seeing something, simply out of habit--a kind of long-term choice about which we become, slowly, unaware.

Part of the flow comes from beginning to people our emotional landscape once again; one such time was when we had a lovely three-course dinner at Peronis in Paramatta with some of the Campion Foundation board members, to celebrate Geoff Caban, the departing Academic Dean.

Ordering dinner, delighted with the nightly made-up menu offering course choices (it reminded me of the Rotterdam ship, having dinner with Poppo in his very 70s tux), I amused the Italian owner, who had wonderful blue eyes, by asking for beef entree (appropriately, here, 'entree' is 'appetizer'--how did we Americans get that backwards?) and beef main course. He said sardonically, "I'm sorry I don't have beef on the dessert course." I just laughed and didn't tell him I was just glad to be able to eat something on the menu, and that I never get tired of beef. Not beef ice cream, though. I'm not that English (who might really eat something like beef ice cream).

I delighted in Edmund, with his kind, but sharp-edged humor, who lived for a time in Bellingham, and has been to Sheridan and Gilette as part of his job in the mining industry; Joe, who was a real estate banker and is one of the most gentle people I've ever met; Karl Schumde, a founder of Campion and one of my favorite people. I met a new delightful person in Sophie York, a woman about my age who is a lawyer, activist, law professor--an energetic, confident woman, who laughed at Edmund's quips all the way from the deeper parts of her being.

Sophie, Edmund, and I talked about the American idea of the 'respectable member of the community'--it is an American ideal that, like the road signs on the left, I didn't even see was part of what I thought was a normal landscape. Edmund said, "We don't have that in Australia. There are no 'respected members of the community.' We are all equal." We thought together about how this is a class notion, a notion of hierarchy that has its positive and negative points. Australians don't hold people up for 'doing a fine job and being respectable' and so there's perhaps less incentive to build community, to be philanthropic. On the other hand, the 'respectable' idea can be phony and simply--a desire for classes--or as someone said, a kind of subtle caste-system.

They all struck me with that Australian real-ness and good humor, people of great dreams and great optimism, and great energy, successful people who were also deeply involved in their faith and so giving back, supporting a new Catholic idea in a culture that does not, largely, value it or even see it for what it truly is...the inculcation of wonder, the precursor, as the great Simone Weil says, to prayer, which is in turn the precursor to a relationship with God, to salvation.

Sophie told us about why she'd set up a scholarship at Campion in her sister's name: "She died of cancer at 36; she was, at the time, completing a liberal arts degree...the faculty of the university gave her a kind of graduation for the point she'd reached. She came to that party only a few days before she died."

I thought of that strong will to live, that strength, that I see in Sophie her sister as well, and I marvel at it. I'm made of much thinner stuff.

Although students have not yet come back to Campion, Thaddeus has been doing interviews of prospective students; Campion strikes me, after our conversation, as following, in a sense, the spirit of it's saint-founder, St. Edmund Campion. Campion was a young man who converted through a process of realization that he was indeed moving along the shallow path of worldly endeavour. His single-minded turn, his discipline, his movement against the current of his time, to his death, is remarkable; and I seem to hear this same single-minded miracle happening with some of the people who decide to come to Campion.

Part of the flow now comes from Ana, Sophie and TJ  all starting school. I wondered how we'd handle a school-city routine, coming from homeschool-small town. I remember a wonderful family counselor once, who uses horses to help families heal, who evaluated us and told us: "You all work together like clockwork." This was, at the time, a pleasant surprise to me; my German Henrietta part was thinking that we were largely a disaster area.

I see now the clockwork...we make our lunches and get up at 6:45; out by 7:25 and on the road up north to the schools, flowing along with early-morning traffic.The kids are taking such responsibility; they care about their work, their social responsibilities.

7 :45 am- I'm busy testing all the different routes and times; I like Pennant Hills Road, because it flows like a river through one of those interesting parts of Sydney that seems like a cultivated, rooted, place of older money, a place where one can see colonnades and intricate stonework peeking out from sweeping drives and tall trees. New Line Road gets crazy though; as I drive along, like a leaf with many other leaves on the current, I wonder how many of us are thinking of the convicts who suffered the back-breaking work of building these roads up through the hills, out of Sydney towards the Blue Mountains. I often imagine them, leaning on a shovel and looking out across the same hills covered with the bright green of the gum trees. Did they take in any of the beauty, or were the trees just another sign of the wilderness that was their jail-wall? Some of them escaped out into the bush, and most never made it out, or surrendered in a few days or weeks, to get away from eating snake meat, or in one case, each other.

What would they think, now, of the slick cars and red-tile roofed homes? What would they think of the girls pouring out of classrooms at Tangara School, being told, "Where is your hat? Put your hat on, thank you."

3:15: Sophie and Ana pour themselves into the car, the heat of the afternoon wafting through the doors; they debrief:

"I can't think about one math problem for as long as I want; they talk so fast that I can't understand them."

"The girls seem to know which assignments to spend time on, and which ones to blow off. I don't."

"I want to be in the music band, too."

"Mom--they have a great music room with garage band."

"I discovered I can do my French homework in art class. Isn't that cool?"

Uh oh.

I try to encourage them to think of positive things along with the hurdles; I am finding that for them, it is not only a new country, and a new school, but a new existence that requires skills they have not yet needed. They have had, through homeschooling, the luxury to contemplate, to savor things. They have also not had to learn how to have a schedule (which is not so good).

3:30, Redfield College: TJ is sitting on a planter with his two friends Leo Chang and Leo's little brother, proportional replicas of each other. His legionnaire hat flap has been poked out through the hole in the back, so that he looks like he has a very stiff ponytail sticking out the back of his head.

We ride home, and Ana keeps trying to say something, gets interrupted, and finally says, "I've been trying to say something for ages." TJ, quick as a whip, says, "It's only been two minutes--what are you, a bug? A fruit fly?"

We all burst out laughing, and it is a second when I see the TJ who sometimes says deeply witty things, or gets right at the heart of an issue, succinctly and wisely. Most of the time, though, he is more like a cricket, chirping, limbs whirling. I wonder if he is struggling with tons of energy, or attention issues--all these he would come by, as they say, naturally. His parents are classified officially as 'random' in some Book of Judgement somewhere. Our weaknesses are probably his to some degree.

I just read St. Augustine's Confessions again for GB classes, and Augustine speaks about the problem of 'two wills'--we seem to have to fight against ourselves, our weaknesses. He asks why God, who is Simplicity, who has the ultimate freedom of a single will entirely love, a will absolutely free for love, a will that is Love Itself, would somehow allow the divided will, the warped will, of evil, the absence of good. It is a hard question and the answer only comes when it is lived, I think.

TJ, though, and the rest of us, must fight with a divided will; it seems the point of this life, this journey, of suffering, is to refine the will into a single one devoted to love, to God. The weaknesses become opportunities to see our true divided state; if we can see it, if we can see ourselves as we are, we may just surrender in a heap at the foot of the Cross, asking God to heal the faultlines in us, the parts of us that consistently choose the lesser good.

Sophie says through the soft roar of the wind and the cars pouring down Pennant Hills Road, "We were talking in religion about heaven; it is a strange thought that we would be somewhere forever."

I thought, yes, a single will devoted to love, completely, is forever. It is forever peace.

In my times of inflammation, or exhaustion, I have cried out to God to let me rest, finally, in that forever; but He just smiles at me, or recedes into the shadows of my moments of despair. Yesterday, as I read St. Augustine, I finally saw again, slightly more in focus each time, through my weakness, through my pain, that I am a person of conflicted will; a little suffering will send me scurrying away from love; how many times have I chosen the lesser good, hurt those who truly loved me to run after those who pleased me or flattered my ideal of myself? Augustine keeps saying, "These consequences, the pain in our lives, is meant to discipline us"--I think he means the discipline that results in a disciple, a student, of love.

So all that is in our life that is new, or hard, or challenging; all that is old and chafes our old wounds open again and again, is for us, as a mirror is for the face. I thought again about those convicts building the Old Northern Road and New Line Road. How far would one have to dig beneath this slick pavement to find their blood, splattered by the whip, in the stones and soil? Was their suffering a mirror for them? Or did the unfairness of it, the harshness of it, for some of them, destroy their spirits? God alone knows how to discipline--to cut with the surgeon's knife--without destroying also what is good.

I am a person of weak and divided will--but I know, because of my wimpiness around chronic pain, that I simply cannot, ironically, will a single will. It has to be my knowing, like a lover knows his beloved, my own weaknesses, knowing the truth about myself.

Every time I read the Confessions I feel like I have spent some time with St. Augustine himself. Amazing, fruitful work that never loses that richness, even after four or five times.

I am hoping, through Fr. Percy, to meet Sr. Prudence Allen's sister. I wonder what she thinks about the divided will.