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.
No comments:
Post a Comment