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.