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.
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