Ute Love in the Last Days

We've been loved and partied off the Australian continent; these last couple of weeks have taught me to love Australians, cradle ones and immigrants, perhaps because I see more clearly through our pain their inner gentleness and humility, and simplicity. You less easily overlook goodness, which comes I think in brown-paper packages. Somewhere Austen says so well, "..unkindness...has made you astonished to find friendship anywhere..."

Over the last days of putting ads out and garage sales, I have met some amazing people. It is as if we opened our doors to connecting with some beautiful souls in the process of suddenly having to Von Trapp it.

There was the professional garage-saler who laughed as he picked up strange things like extension cords; he had the gentlest voice and he bobbed and bowed toward me as he left. He looked Sri Lankan and he was like a character in a children's story, like a curiosity shop hero or a lollipop guild member.

There were the Sikhs in Shorts who bought our Kelvinator fridge. They came in with their turbans and their handsome, childlike faces, and we tried to transact by i phone. Don't ever do that. It was a mess, but through that mess we connected. They said, "Are you worried because we are Indian? We are Sikhs. We would not do anything to hurt you." I said, "No, not about being Indian...we're just clueless about i phone payments. We are Christians; we would not do anything to hurt you." The one with the phone held out his hand, with the single silver bracelet that they all wear, and squeezed mine. I asked him, "Have you been to the Golden Temple in India?"

"Oh, yes, you must go there someday. Beautiful, beautiful."

"Are women allowed?"

"Of course!! Everyone is allowed. It is not like a mosque." And then, as they loaded the fridge on the trailer, and I loaned them tape to tie down the door, he said, "I wish you well." And he was gone into the mysterious smoke of an ancient culture.

Then an Indian couple came, and they were so much like children; older, but kind and open faces like the best of  a child. They told me how they were told by a mystic to come to Sydney. They are Christians, and the mysticism, the talking to God about small and big decisions, from renting a house to moving down the globe, flowing out of them like water down a riverbed. It wasn't grandstanding nineteenth-century fad stuff, it was just there, like simple water. I felt jealous in my blankness and doubt. We forgot about the 'two-seater lounge' they came to see and talked about heaven instead. They gave me something other than money.

And then there was Father Percy again. We had a boisterous, hilarious, Italian, good-bye dinner down in Summer Hill. Father Percy has just had heart surgery. He is only 50, but had a condition that he knew would need taking care of sooner or later. Even a month after heart surgery, Father Percy presses the gas pedal on every moment: He lives fully and easily draws in waiters and baristas, making them laugh at us and at themselves. He creates the intimacy of an inner circle that somehow welcomes anyone in. A Revolving-Door Inner Circle. He is also like a child, in that he goaded us into wine and Thaddeus three scoops of gelato, laughing all the while. He seems already full of a kind of holy rashness, or at least his natural tendency to rashness and hilarity is being baptized as he goes along. As he moved more slowly than usual towards the beautiful Federation presbytery, disappearing into the blue and white carved porch, and became just a silhouette in the stained glass door, I felt sad, but glad--and honored--that I had known him even for a brief time.

Campion students came by with Lamingtons and Tim Tams, and we invited them to visit us in the Wild Country. Their eyes lit up, unlike some of the older people we invited, who only looked at us wistfully. Except for Paul Kennedy who is both old and young. You will know Paul by the fact that he, out of everyone we knew here, immediately said, "I don't want you to get onto that plane without friends to see you off." He could see the little sheep inside us...no position or polish or accent or vocabulary will fool him. Not that we have those, anyway. Maybe some vocab. And we knew him the shortest amount of time...but real friendship doesn't always need time.

When at dinner at the Kennedys, we encouraged Paul to come to see us someday; I told him he would look at some old-timers in Lander and recognize himself. Paul grew up in the bush, dealing with animals and cattle and 'marking' which is 'branding.' He is a history buff, a tremendously gifted actor (playing St. Thomas More in a Sydney production) and rhetor. He loves Shakespearean-Sophocles-heavy dramas; it is as if his heart and faith is large enough to receive tragedy and encompass it, change it. He wears a little of the tragedy with him, though; he is a lion in a world controlled by house-cats.

He's interested in helping young men transition into healthy manhood. He said, "I don't think I'm called to the ones who've already got it together, or to the ones who are too deeply in trouble, but to the ones who need and can take the affirmation I can give." He spoke about how a teenager who is struggling with anger needs an older man to steer him like a ship: love, affirmation, and guidelines.

He's a gardener and a courageous man. In an earlier age, they would have crowned him king of a group of tribes in Ireland. He's courageous and straight foward, and he has a kind, deeply Catholic, loving wife he married when they were middle-aged. That's me, too, isn't it? Kathy and I shouted "Go '68" and gave each other a high-five at some point during dinner, so I guess yes, I belong in that club. Right on. Kathy works with the archdiocese on religious outreach. You will know Kathy by the fact that she thought about what I could eat and invited me to be another mama in the kitchen.

They couldn't have children, but have adopted a sister and brother, teenagers, orphans, who had nowhere to go. Malia and Joey and their friend, Tristan, played games and songs with our kids and we watched silly You Tubes. The Oz lamb was fabulous, we were watching intense scenes in The Field, talking about moments of damnation, and an Irish level of drinking was heating up when we realized it was 11 pm. The time had gone like eternity--no time at all.

We hugged each other hard and were sad a little because we met in the Last Days. "But there's heaven," we all said. A little whiskey allows you to say that at the right time. I must have breathed in some fumes because I could say it, and feel it, and yet was perfectly capable of dealing with the Oz police drinking checkpoints. "How're you going, Oz copper?"

I met Anna and Martin, parents of a teammate of TJ's at the rugby trial today; they said, "Wow. Wish you weren't leaving. We like you a lot."

"I like you a lot, too," I said, as I reveled in the guilelessness. That's an Australian for you. Simply--friendly. I don't think I've met one snooty or aloof or rude person here. Except Sadie at LJ Hooker, but she's back in the eaves of my memories with the funnel-or-not-funnel spiders.

I guess, thinking about it now, I do recognize some of those people who are at the dance in the palace--or I realize that I am not alone by the doorjamb, and there are beggars with me, hoping for King Thrushbeard to whisk us into the kaliedescope, shame or not. I know more now that real beauty is found among fellow beggars, not among those who have nary a hair out of place: the foolish of this world, the weak person who is vulnerable because they allow their faults and their real passions to be seen, the children large and small who will tell you that you have a boogie on your upper lip, the ones who will sometimes risk their dignity and drink to hilarity with friends, the ones who will tell you the truth, the ones who will tell genuinely funny and humiliating stories about themselves, the ones who have chocolate ice cream on their shirt front, the ones who care about an end other than themselves, the ones who know they need their pots smashed from time to time so as to stay real, the ones, in other words, who see their own good as entwined with that of the naked, the poor, the ridiculed. How can I describe it? I know it in the moment someone reaches out in a kind of holy abandon, like Angela the Librarian, and Karen, wherein you can tell they have forgot themselves in receiving you. And so they see you, the real you, scars and gifts and all. They aren't aspiring to be Ferraris speeding through North Sydney, they are unabashedly aspiring to be Utes.

I think my sight is improving slightly. I wondered how I would ever protect myself from someone who masquerades well as a Super Citizen, Uber-Person, Got It Together More Than You Catholic, even if it happens to be myself. I think it is experiencing those who are living Gospels, the foolish who confound the wise of this world. It is feeling that little slice of heaven. You just want it--or you don't. It is a desire for the fruit that is Christ's "You will know them by their fruits" rather than the serpent's variety.

King Thrushbeard

So, I am living in the rather surreal world of change that I know so well, the world of taking the last drive to Castle Hill, of the last look of a friend out the door of the car after dinner in Sydney; the last few visits to the Sivanna Centre where I get my IVs; a house full of packing cartons. How many toilet rolls do we need for x amount of time? Should I give this huge container of olive oil away or just leave it? I remember buying it, not too long ago, with the assumption that I'd use it here in meals, after a day of school, a normal series of days, before that assumption was smashed to bits.

The 'last things' all feel so familiar to me, a rolling stone, an adventurer, and I keep forgetting--and then remembering with horror, humor, and some anger--that we've only just unpacked: It is as if my surreal world of moves is a record on too high a speed, and the packing has become life. I keep thinking that this is one of those weird, on-the-border bad dreams and I am now just hoping to wake up. Thinking of the curved driveway to the Orcas house, past the "Wrye 299 Nina Lane" sign made by Uncle Dwight helps a little.

The golden light in the eucalyptus that I looked so forward to seeing here has become a sick glare on monotonous flattened trees; the doors opening into Australia as a Place are sealing themselves up from me. I think we will not even leave a slight footprint in the minds of people here; like a ship blown back out to sea, we will fade from memory easily. Which is fine. And sad. It didn't have to be that way. Or did it? The space inside my heart, which I thought so full of relationship, is blank and empty.

Australia has truly been a nightmare in so many ways. I am waiting to wake up, looking for what to learn, but right now as we get ready to go it all seems so meaningless, such a needless waste. Woody Allen said something like, "Comedy is 30 minutes after sadness"--and I think there is truth in this. I understand why comedians seem often to have the unexpected, hidden, broken heart. I think they see more with the heart, more deeply into the heartache all around; they see deeply enough, are hurt enough, that they must find the incongruities, the ironies...in order to find meaning, in order for the broken heart to keep beating. I never understood the horribly tacky weeping clown pictures before. They are still tacky, even with their little truth. They will always be tacky. But I won't make so much carefree fun of them anymore. I have less of the mockingjay in me now after this trip-up. I feel like Bilbo except I only got as far as the trolls and did indeed get chewed on for a bit.

I think someday I will write to myself a little comedy about this...the sheer ridiculousness is all there, ready.

But I'm not. I'm still within the thirty minutes of sadness and surreal, though I know what we've been through here is nothing next to what others go through. And I'm trying to find meaning and not feel sorry for myself, and failing this time.

For some reason, in that deeper water in me, what keeps bobbing up is the fairy tale King Thrushbeard. Hans Christian Anderson, of course, poor Hans, has a version that is desperately depressing...but the Grimm Brothers is the one that keeps surfacing.

It is, as you will remember, the story of the proud princess who has everything, living easily in her father's house, confident of her ability to control her own destiny. Her faith in her father, in herself, is misplaced, because she does not know real life or herself. She knows the ropes and lives carefree.

She refuses a good man as a suitor, King Thrushbeard, because of his outward appearance and mocks him. Her father has had it and says he will give her to the next beggarman who comes along. She laments even Thrushbeard now, but it is still not in the right spirit...it is only regret for what she has lost, not true sight. So she must leave the palace and she is put through one trial after another, designed to break her spirit. The culmination is her working as a scullery maid in the palace she once danced in; there is a wedding on and she is looking round the corner at the festivities, a beggar in her own father's house. She sees her life as it was, from the outside, outside in the dark. She sees through a beggar's eyes.

A man pulls her out onto the dance floor, and she is humiliated and laughed at...it seems the height of cruelty, this man's actions, but it is actually King Thrushbeard, who is also the beggar, who has educated her out of real love--a love of her soul, not simply her physical beauty. He will not let her remain shallow.

For some reason, I feel like that proud princess who has taken for granted her father's house. I feel that my sight is somehow off, in the core. And now, after the washing machine we've been through here, I feel like the beggar in a house I thought I understood, even a little.

I feel, now, my tattered clothes and the little food jar for collecting scraps of hope tied to my belt; I feel the cold floor, the weird feeling of the little bits from dinner dropped off the waiters' trays, under bare and newly calloused feet; I feel the darkness of a closing kitchen behind me, the whiff of cold air sent up my spine as the garbage is taken out; I feel the doorjamb on my cheek, as I watch a celebration that I no longer have a place within, and I wonder if my life before, what I believed in, was ever real, or just what I wanted to see. I only see a nameless, mob-like crowd with no one I recognize. I think of the hovel and the daily grind and I know it was the dance, the belief in it, that kept me going. But now I see I wasn't seeing it as it really was, and so there is nothing to count on.

And I don't feel like dancing anyway.

My pots have been smashed by a bully, my pride has been wrung to bits, my faith in myself to understand what the hell is the point thrown down, and I am a beggar in my own father's house.

I feel it, in the deep water in me, and though I don't understand it, somehow Australia and all that happened to us here has brought King Thrushbeard up from the deep past, from the nights my sister and I leaned on my mother and listened to her read it. I remember feeling the princess' shame when she was pulled out onto the dance floor, as she thought, to be mocked. I just didn't know then what it felt like in real life. I didn't know, really, what it meant to live for awhile in that moment, not knowing what was meant to come next, not knowing the End. Like being chewed on by a troll without even your handkerchief for comfort.

But King Thrushbeard has given me a paradigm, of sorts, with which to deal with it, the beginning, perhaps, of the comedy--the classical sense of it, as an education. It is what literature is for, really.

But I still don't feel like dancing.

A Little Bird in the Wind

During the emotional fallout from our experience here, a number of images, from literary and spiritual mentors of mine, have cropped up for me: Orual from Lewis' Til We Have Faces standing in Hades in front of "Minos, or Tatarus, or whatever he was" and being stripped and standing naked in front of the millions of dead, reading what was truly at the center of her heart, underneath all the facades and defensive skins; Edmund standing in front of Aslan as a dragon; and St. Therese as the little bird in the wind.

Experiences of loss and confusion, experiences that seem to rip off a pleasant mask of expectations we have laid over life, make us feel naked on some level. When we've prayed through something and go into it with whatever measure of goodwill we have, and then we see our expectations dashed, it challenges us. Well, it challenged me.

I waited for understanding, for resolution, and it did not come. I thought, "This can't be right" and then, like the child I was when something like this happened, really for the first time for me, the deep anger born then that I have howled yet again. It was born, this anger, in the streets of Kabul. I was perhaps five, I am not sure. I lived in a large home with servants behind nine-foot walls; we went out into the dusty roads of Kabul to go to school or to the bazaar. I remember walking with my mom (boy was she big; I remember her voice coming from far above me), and I had been taught about how God loves all of us. And then I saw him, the beggar by the side of the road. My mom sighed, in sadness, and like the ice shard in Anderson's The Snow Queen, that sadness entered my heart, through my ears and eyes. I felt a sudden abyss of cognitive dissonance at a God who loves everyone and the old, helpless man with nowhere to go, no food. I can still see him there. If any moment can define a life, that moment is mine. I am not angry at fallen people, or even myself, I think. I am angry at God.

As I walked through the reserve near our house (still looking tentatively for spiders and snakes) the other day, I realized that I was angry, that this anger comes up in these situations because, suddenly, I don't feel safe. It is like a child that realizes one day that his parents have abandoned him. We simply are not safe in this world, a fallen world that Oswald Chambers says is wild and unpredictable due to sin. We are not safe.

Because we know that, deep down, we are not safe in this world, we desperately look for ways to provide ourselves at least with a system or a way of thinking that will allow us to deal with that cognitive dissonance of trying to step forward each day and yet not ever knowing what that day will bring.

The question really is, though, "What is safety?"

The human response to this is simple, straightforward: It is the answer of a creature that is eternally in the position of a child. We want to know that our needs and those of the ones we love will be answered, met.

The next question then, is: "What are our needs?"

We have many needs, from physical ones to intellectual ones, to emotional ones, to spiritual ones. We are communal creatures who are made to depend on others' provision: of work, food, infrastructure, friendship, love, Aristotle's "a life affording scope to pursue the excellence of all the virtues." These are more this-worldly, but there are others, deeper ones. What are these? And can we get to them if the more creaturely needs are not met?

Can we love God if we have never experienced the love and loyalty of a parent? Are our deeper needs dependent upon what we find in this world? If so, how can we ever feel even hope for supernatural safety in this fallen, wild and unpredictable world?

I think, too, now, that much of the evil in the world comes from this desperate desire to feel safe. We create facades and ideologies and rationalizations for ourselves in a bid to be safe. What is the search for power but the fear of being unsafe, of being the victim? What is Machiavelli but a primer on clever responses to fear?

We grow dragon skins around ourselves, dragon skins that are deceptive self-images, or impenetrable portfolios, or even food consumption. These skins work both ways, though. As we build them, we are less able to see ourselves as we really are; we are less able to be ourselves at all, and then we are blind. If we cannot see from our true eyes, a sight born of our true position, our perspective is warped. Then, we will do things as one does with a warped perspective: we run over things and become destructive to others and to ourselves.

If we wrap ourselves up in a thick skin of Catholic piety and correctness, and use the religion to make ourselves feel safe, it will become a blindness and a destructive force. I think this is what Jesus reacted to in the Pharisees. He dealt with many forms of the desperate search to create a safe life, and most of them He reacted to with pity and with healing. But the Pharisees he called whitewashed tombs. If He'd read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader He might have told them they had the worst kind of dragon skin possible, the one that completely rationalizes the dragon heart within, the heart that rages in empty fear, a heart of death.

Also, if we are basically trying to be good people, but are not able to accept the sight of evil in others, we have another kind of dragon skin. This one reminds me of the German populace (some of them probably family members of mine) in the Nazi era. It seems to me that they could not, would not, see the evil until it was too late, because in their fear, they could not deal with the sight of Satan within their own nation. But as has been learned over and over, and forgotten again, self-imposed blindness does not keep us or anyone else safe: it only produces scapegoats and injustice is allowed to flourish like rogue vines, and good trees die.

The sight of evil in ourselves or others, the self-absorbed quest to control what is around us for our own safety and to feel powerful, makes us all feel completely naked and exposed: especially when it appears in ourselves, our own family, or in people who seem like good Christians, the wolves in sheep's clothing.

We see also our own decisions that are made out of fear and we see that these are ultimately destructive decisions. As St. John XXIII said, "Consult love, do not consult your fear."

To stand, like Orual, in front of the masses, naked, and read the self-absorbed grasping that lays at the center of ourselves is too much to bear, especially if we have never felt safe, never really truly believed that God does make "everything work together for good for those who love Him."

It is only, perhaps, when we go through things that bring the anger up, the fear, that we have a chance to know that we are thick-skinned dragons. Sometimes the confusion and isolation becomes the ring eating into our arm-flesh.

As I struggled with our losses here in Australia, and the stress, and the doubts about ourselves in such a hard situation, as I saw the pain of others in the situation, I once again felt my dragon skins. I angrily told God, "I want to see my real self."

Thaddeus said, "You are full of fear right now." Sometimes a guile-less, New Yorker spouse speaks the answer you don't want to hear.

So I went outside and cried, and I tried to be honest with God, and I told Him that I didn't even know if He was there, that I felt like a child who wakes up from a nice dream about a family and realizes that the house is empty. And I, who have been given so much.

I realized that my even my prayers, often, are attempts at magic tricks...'if I pray this, then I'll be okay.' I was a chain-mail disciple. I realized that because we'd prayed about coming here, I thought that guaranteed that everything would be more-or-less okay.

I thought about how blessed Orual really was, to come to that place of nakedness, to hear the speech of fear and selfishness that 'lay at the center of her heart' and to be, finally, aware of the dragon skins. Yes, it produces fear, but a kind of holy fear, the absolute dependence on another, a blessed awareness of the true weakness we are in a fallen and wild and unpredictable world.

I thought then, sitting in the sun, of Edmund asked to take off his skins, and being unsuccessful. I thought of how Aslan had to do it for him, and how the nails of the lion were like knives biting into the layers, and how Edmund said later, "It hurt like the billy-oh but like when a scab comes off, it felt good too." I saw him standing, naked, pitifully weak and how Aslan threw him into the pool to baptise him, to heal him.

I then thought of, and finally understood, St. Therese's image of the little bird in the wind. It is not a cute picture of how she wants to be the cute rose-teacup saint of cutesy love; it is a saint's true sight of what she really was: a little sparrow cowering in the wind. Birds are impossibly light and can get blown away easily, easily die. They are one of the least safe creatures on the planet--hunted by many other creatures, fragile. Our dog Lucy once killed a bird simply by sniffing it too hard (well, that's what she said happened, anyway). They are also the creatures most of us envy, because they can reach heights and a perspective we only dream of. They are in the same foundational dilemma that we are in: they are meant to reach the sky in a world that pulls them down and blusters around them, an unpredictable place filled with mortal dangers.

St. Therese knew that she was a bird. She understood the complete weakness and dependence of her humanity, which our resistance to is perhaps the ultimate source of our fears, of our sins, of our injustices, our building of demonic structures of pride, our towers of Babel.

I am a little bird in the wind, and I have known that viscerally since childhood. It is my true self; it is also my best self. The fear, the facades of self out of that fear, are only covering that weakness.

But how does a little bird feel safe in this world? How am I safe from the winds inside myself?

St. Therese depended on God, from that weakness. She knew that weakness would lead her to the true safety not found in this world. I am just now really seeing myself that way, and do not know what God will do with me.

Another person with a reputation of great holiness and humility whom we met here in Australia, someone who has suffered a great deal, said, "Hey look, sometimes the not knowing, the trust in the middle of absolute uncertainty is what God wants. He makes the obstacles means to another end. And my word to you is that in that, He will bless you. Look, I hope that is His word for you; I feel it."

Yes, I changed the name (this was Lander to the Land Down Under)...same url, tho.