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."