Apprehension

A loving, wise aunt, my aunt who says little but sees much, sent a short email to me today: All she said in her quiet, simple, Danish way was, "Welcome home...see Phil 3:12-14."

So I went and saw it. 

"12 Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.

13 Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,

14 I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

That second part of verse 12 is a kicker. I've always just read it like this: "Not as thought I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, blah blah blah rumble huh?"

I think I get the first part...St. Paul meant a following that is more like a chase, which fits with the idea of race (and almost conveniently rhymes). So I got that. And I got that I'm not perfect. And I've often thought of myself as a little kid on the Pinewood all-school race in Greece. I was the fastest in my class and I spent more time running, in those days, than breathing. I ran for the pure joy of it, pre-puberty at least...I'm one of those who hopes I have a child's freedom to run again someday. I loved the wind on my hot cheeks, the joy of following my speeding heart.

On that Pinewood School race day, I was the Fast Girl. Flash. And I remember lining up with the high school students, thinking seriously that I would win this race and bring glory home for the 4th grade. 

And the St. Paul's race also reminds me of the mile and a half race at Oakdale Jr. High, mid-puberty, when we back-o-the-bus rebels walked it, blowing it all off. How I had changed, but this was simply the other side of the see-saw that, if level, would be fortitude. 

True to this form in the spiritual life, I have flung back and forth between rashness, almost a manic love of God and a desire to die a thousand deaths, and fear and sloth disguised as rebellion. Once again, Aristotle is right about that balance stuff. Running a race, a long-term one, is about balance. 

Okay. Got it. But what on earth is " if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus"? 

I'm trying to accomplish, or gain, a purpose, a relationship, a creative act. And it is that thing for which I was made. I am trying to be what the Logos spoke when He translated the thought of the Father, a tiny thought that became, in my mother's womb, me. I am both that thought, but in God's wanting me to be a co-creator, this great sharing of Himself with us, I am also a becoming of that thought. He wants me to co-create it, to race for it, to sweat for it, to die for it, like the seed falling into the ground. And I am not just a thought isolated; no. A thought is communication, by its very nature it is a reaching, a spilling out towards the Other, towards Unity. I am meant to be a flame flaring up that lights other flames: we 'sign' this reality at Easter Vigil Mass.

And it is in the particulars of this life, the messy stuff, the matter, the small actions and hard choices and fails and successes and words and songs, the things we choose to see and not to see--these are where the unity will come, that unity that God wants to recognize as His thought of me, and when He will kiss me, finally, with the kiss of a bridegroom. 

So, even on days when the waves crash in (and I had a dream that the waves, giant ones, were coming horizontal with the beach at Curl Curl or somewhere, and I then did not see them coming), on days of darkness, or days filled with glorious light, the particulars are there to create opportunity for me to become more myself--or less. As CS Lewis said, nothing is static. We are either getting better or getting worse. And I guess I might change that a little and say that we are either becoming more unified, more a cohesive, faithful rendering of God's thought of us, or less of one. 

Violence is a kind of force of disharmony, Thaddeus told me today. Sometimes he teaches me; I am sometimes, in precious moments alone, a class of one, because he is just always and everywhere, a learner-teacher. He is my Socrates. Who could be so blessed to be married to a philosopher--not the academic kind, but a real one? Okay, yeah, sometimes I want to give him hemlock. But most times, I see how marriage is supposed to be, where one grows the other.

So I thought about that as I thought of myself as trying, running to apprehend what God made me to do, to be, in a situation where I feel somewhat more than usual that foreignness I carry with me always. I thought that as we run, we act, we live, if we run so that we become more ourselves, what God saw us to be in His mind and then spoke us, we are a force towards harmony. If rather, we run without that hunting, but just amble along or 'walk it' or rashly think it is possible for us to do it ourselves, we become a force of disharmony. We then become a thought of disharmony, a violence. 

After talking to Socrates, I felt suddenly as if my heart rested when we got off the Bellair shuttle at the Anacortes terminal. Dad and Mom were there, and I smelled again the blue and green, the water and the pines, and it seems to me that the sunlight in the islands even has a certain smell, a smell like bread baking. Oh, right. We're sitting outside the Cheesecake Cafe. Dumbest name ever, but please, don't change it.

And how I love the ferries. I know their names by now, and where things are in them, and I love especially the padded linoleum benches sidled up to rows of rounded-square windows; I love the clear, sparkling water, and each island with its over-dress of dark green and petticoat of white rock (I take this from H. Glidden about Patos); we all know that when the ferry pulls away from Shaw Island, it is time to "return to the cars for de-embarkment" and we take the winding drive through Orcas forest and farmland; we always stop at Curtis Lane, just before the turn onto Nina Lane, to do the ineffable Curtis reverence; then the satisfying centripetal turn onto the gravel Nina which takes you through a canopy of Scotch brush and pine and finally, the sign in the reeds on the right "Wrye 299" that my uncle made, and the turn past the blackberry bushes, the rope swing, and first sight of the beautiful art that is the home my uncle built for my parents. It stands, understated and modest but beautiful, the cedar shingle siding still honey-color, with the wide stairway, and the hint of the ocean behind it. The walk up the stairs, the swoosh of the heavy front door, and the soft pine, high-ceilinged great room with the panorama of old friends waiting outside the large picture windows: the little path we made that is still springy from the wood pulp of the building nearly ten years ago now; the rainbow rocks, the quiet gardener snakes surprised, the rock beach, and Patos, lovely magical Patos and Sucia and Matia Islands sunbathing in the blue water. 

The anxiety sort of put up a white flag and I walked out of the battle inside me, looking forward over the water. 

I don't know what's ahead for us, but we asked God to bless our next chapter so that we can help each other "apprehend that for which also [we are] apprehended of Christ Jesus." Instead of fighting over what Jeeves and Wooster episode to watch.

Off the Edge...and into the Shire

We went off the edge of Australia 27 May. Or now, I will say, May 27. Back home, dammit. I will say "renting" not "hiring" and finally, I will go directly to the proper side of the car. I don't miss the Panadol capsule Corolla, though I did get weepy when I took the Redfield Rugby and Campion College stickers off the back as we handed the car over to Wayne and his wife Angela, who were our answers to prayers.

We hadn't sold the Panadol thing, and so I decided to do what Achilles did and go to Our Lady and put my arms around her knees in ancient supplication for her prayers....I asked for someone to buy the car who needed it, who would really like it--and pay what we needed, not necessarily what we wanted. The next day, Wayne showed up. Wayne and his wife have never driven before; they have lived in Vietnam, and in Australia now, they saved up enough money to buy our car. When Angela saw it, she jumped up and down, squeaking, and she hugged me. "I love it," she said, "it is so cute. Cute." Angela told me, looking sideways at Wayne, "Now that we have this car, we can have our baby. You need a car to have a baby here in Sydney."

We decided to call Sydney "Pusstown." "Puss" as in liquid, not as in kitten. I decided that I just cannot live in Commonwealth countries. Just never works. Comedy is setting in now; I guess it has been 30 minutes since tragedy.

But we were waved off with love: thank you, friends, friends who came by in groups the last day and filled us with love; friends who took us to the airport even in morning traffic; friends who behaved more like family. They are the real Australia for me, and have made it all worth it. That is the Australia I love, not the beaches or the tea shops, though those were nice things.

Three hours after leaving Sydney, we landed in Auckland for a short stop in New Zealand. You know, thinking in more shallow ways, New Zealand is awesome. They have trolleys with back-locked wheels. I immediately liked New Zealand for that, even felt fuzzy about the nation. Oh, "carts" not "trolleys."

I did decide though that I am going to stay with "biscuits" for "cookies" and "muffins" or "scones" for "biscuits." Just because the Commonwealth nomers for these things make more sense. "Biscuits and tea" I loved and will refuse to forget them.

We landed in Auckland in the evening, and suddenly, the stress level went down. Even the airport was quiet, and green, like the countryside. The first thing we saw was one of the huge stone dwarves from the Lonely Mountain.

We got our Jucy campa van--a Hiace, which I absolutely love driving. Yes, it was green and purple with a stupid sexy lady on the side. It just screamed "tourist" but maybe that is still good, since we're still American drivers at heart. We took the thing out, like a boat out to sea, the Sea of Adventure in the land that really, really, is Middle Earth. It is so green, and blue, and lovely...it has all the seasons at once, it seems, and we hit it in late fall, when the trees were golden and orange.

We got to Hobbiton in the late afternoon, on a day when that sea light slants sideways and makes everything a more intense color. It was a magical afternoon, and we got to the Green Dragon for pub food and ale as the lanterns were being lit. It was like being in the story.

We felt as if the healing was starting, I think; the kids' joy at being at such a wonderful place was a balm for all the ruptures.

The next day was rainy, and misty, and we spent time in the mysterious Rotorua mountain area, where little valleys everywhere put off steam clouds from hot springs, fissures in the green overgrowth. In a secret valley surrounded by small farms and high hills, we heard Mass at the Tyburn Monastery with the nuns, in what must be one of the most remote-feeling places in the world. Edmund Campion died at Tyburn, and we felt a connection with him there. It was dark, but not empty; it was poor, in a sense, and silent, but the silence and the darkness that is so full that one cannot but recoil in one's nature from it at first. It is challenging and daunting that the nuns live this life, this hidden life in this beautiful but unbearably quiet place. Once again, just like at the Clark monastery in Wyoming, I felt like an intruder into the heart of the Church...their work is so hidden, so deep in some way, that it feels almost meaningless--but that is because my sight is so used to clutter. I cannot see in the dark.

In the Waikate Valley, we soaked in hot pools and looked up at the stars which are intense like light shining through holes in black velvet, coming in and out of crystal view as the steam clouds pass overhead in a prehistoric rhythm. We drove down through mist to Taupo and met Jamil Scarberry from Seattle at an Austrian-themed pub; we spent the night at the Top 10 Holiday Park, which we decided was an alternate universe, with the giant pillow play thing and the light pattern game and the giant chess board. They were playing Star Wars for the Queen's birthday celebrations. What?

It was cold in New Zealand at night, so cold, and this intensified the alternate universe experience, because it was May 31. By day, the fall colors were out, and the cold wind swept across the sky, dancing with bright white clouds.

The next day was spent at Rotorua. Sophie and I explored the dark forest with a group, high up in the trees, crossing across the rich greens and chocolate browns on 50 m high zip lines. Our group, headed by the relentlessly positive Anna and Jenny, had Kyle and his girlfriend, a few kids and their reluctant-to-zipline mom, and a guy from Yorkshire who joked about being off balance because one of his buttocks must be heavier than the other. He kept us all laughing as he hugged trees and flipped upside down as he zipped. The longest zip was a 220 meter flight in the sun. It was marvelous, and young and old and middle-aged, we all turned into children with the delight of flying and having little NZ birds eating out of our hands. The van ride back was boistrous and chatty. On the way there, we'd been shy strangers.

Ana, TJ, and Thaddeus meanwhile went bungie jumping at Agroadventures. Thaddeus came down, as Ana said, like a huge fat bird with tiny wings flapping. The kids did Zorb balls, a ride inside a giant ball down a green hill.

I noticed the lack of commerciality, the personal touch, the absence of crowds and lines and rules. We ate pub food in The Pig and Whistle watching the Glasgow rugby tourney. I love rugby. Love it. New Zealanders seem like hard working, hard playing people, and there just aren't that many people there in this young, volcanic, emerald green land.

The highlight, though, for me, was the Zealong Tea Estate. Long ago, in the deep winter of Wyoming, I copied an old painting I thought of as a picture of walking out of the dark of death to a home waiting; it is of a cottage flanked by cypress trees, in the setting sun, surrounded by intense colors, with blue mountains in the distance. The Tea Estate made me feel as if I'd walked into that picture. I'd painted New Zealand. We had high tea with smoked salmon sandwiches and petit fours, and tea in an elegant Chinese style (infusion cup with lid and hot water to hand on a flame). The teas ranged from 'pure' to 'black' and 'aromatic' with delicate but obvious tastes of honey and smoke. I looked out over the tea fields, through a pergola with vines (that strange New Zealand green but cold winter), and it was one of those moments that you could understand staying eternally in one spot. The beauty filled the senses and overflowed easily, like smooth brew, into the soul.

That night, we just couldn't take the Jucy campa anymore, so we got a hotel and had a good night's sleep.

The next day we boarded a huge Air New Zealand plane with Hobbit characters all over it. I could not see anything of my last look at a Southern Hemisphere land.

Arriving in the US was strange. For me, I got deep anxiety, some kind of old, and deep anxiety, and I haven't figured that one out. Sometimes our feelings and the reasoning of the heart are more accessed by the body than the mind. It just might take some time.

Or maybe I'm just jetlagged.

My parents and Aunt Maryanne met us at the airport waving American flags. We were all looking around to see what was the first thing we noticed that was familiar. It was family for me. For this Third Culture kid, familiarity is truly relative.

In an odd twist, my dad booked the same hotel and restaurant for us that Thaddeus and I had booked when we went, in excitement and hope, out to Australia for our interview. A strange, and somewhat sad, circle, but somehow comforting, a kind of closure; a gift.

But there was some fun from God in it, too. My cinnamon oil ("Your stuff always smells like a kit for embalming," Sophie says) leaked and all my clothes smelled like cinnamon. That stuff is so strong that all the people in the hotel shuttle were wondering what candy factory they'd walked into, probably feeling sick. Smelling like intense cinnamon, we walked into the restaurant where there were literally buckets of cinnamon fireballs on every table. Never seen that before.

We drew rabid interpretive crayon pictures of our experience in the washing machine that was the last six months, on the paper bag paper table covering as a kind of debrief, and we enjoyed the big American portions for less money.

It was nice just feeling like in most situations I just knew the ropes; I didn't have to endure that timid "Hi. I'm obviously American and so of course do not know exactly how this works and will most likely annoy you at any moment now" feeling. That's nice.

My dad put his arm around me at some point, and said, "Look forward now."

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.

Empyrean Friendship

I think we are meant to spill over into each other, like wine from a carafe into a glass, like a fountain leaping over, falling towards, touching, and forever changing, the water below.

This spilling over is, I think, something we experience most often in this life when we are sharing suffering with each other, but I think that it is actually a taste of life before the Fall, or life as it is meant to be lived. It is Holy Friendship, and most people deeply desire to be a friend like that. Most of the time, we fail, I fail, but failure only shows more clearly the ideal--I hope.

We are meant to be like glass filled with liquid and light, open and with our own unique liquid. But like water that sits in a container for too long, if we do not share ourselves, we become bracken, stale, contaminated. My own experiences with people I suspected were hidden saints are always prism-memories of sparkling light, glass, color, liquid spirit pouring like blood, an openness and a promise of refreshment: the wine of Cana transformed by the action of the Lord. These people have become, instead of water held for washing hands, fine wine that warms the spirit and breaks down division and just pure uptight-ness in general. They seem unconcerned about the vessel emptying; they have some eternal source. Some of these people have been people who do not claim to be religious, but have been filled with rain, with something of God, with love.

My experiences with darkness--in myself, too-- have been stone-memories of simply hitting a wall. It is being a stone-jar person filled with unused water. It can happen from wounding, more easily healed; it can happen from arrogance, pride, security in abilities or eccentricities, and ends with petrified vessels. Some stone jars filled with brackish water are the most outwardly religious. Perhaps the piety can be taken in, like everything else, to only strengthen the concrete mixture of pride and complacency.

I am teaching Dante in the next few weeks, and perhaps these images rattling around in my brain come partly from him. Dante's Comedia is structured, in part, on the image of a city, perhaps a building upon St. Augustine's City of God and City of Man. The Inferno is a hard, stone, brittle megaron, a monstrosity of concentric circles filled with various forms of hellish liquids and fire and rock; the center of Hell is frozen, stone water. All cities must be held together by some sort of structure or meaning, but Hell is full of enmity and dissension...so it must be held together by hard stone, torturers, threats, envy, and horrible bureaucratic terms like 'constructive dismissal' and general sneaky stuff. It is the evil of particulars used for power, compartmentalized from principles, and the evil of principle as a stick to beat others, with no regard to the particular person.

When we move through Dante's Purgatory, and into Heaven, the opaqueness, the hardness, the forced, isolating 'comraderie' slowly gives way to light, the city of the heavens, in which one can see infinite distances, and the sense of openness and freedom becomes more and more intense, to culminate in the heavenly rose where the saints spill into each other in light, and love, and singing, so much so that they themselves are the structure of the city. It no longer needs hard substance to create community or infrastructure; it is structured by love and humility and simply the sight of God.

The freedom of love and encouragement and mercy and honesty is, simply, that we do not need to be structured, any longer; by loving the right way, with humility, we structure ourselves, we simply are part of the order of goodness, effortlessly. It is the meaning of St. Augustine's cry to "love God and then do what you will." It is the freedom symbolized by the light, openness, and fluidity, and results in profound and tremendous influence over others for good. But it is born, for us, through sorrow and suffering and humiliation and necessary discipline...and feasting and joy and through others who will pour themselves on our wounds.

We are meant, created, to spill over into each other in love, to bear one another's burdens as practice for a greater, more joyful bearing of one another in freedom. Suffering together, and best of all, suffering for what is good, for what is right, for the weakest among us, prepares us by asking us to pour ourselves out for the other.

I have had friendship made in almost an instant through a recognition in the furnace. This brings great joy, if we can stay in righteousness together, and not ourselves become a stone circle, an inner circle to keep out the world rather than a true intimacy. The best explanation of this is CS Lewis' lecture on the inner circle, given at a graduation. I've committed that sin, too--to take an opportunity of deep friendship, a pouring into one another and allow it to be turned into an inner circle of holier-than-those-jerks. Then destruction, opaqueness, the stone of hell, sets in and the friendship becomes destructive.

I have had friends who have poured themselves into my life and yet have kept their eyes--and mine--on continuing to ask for the wine, the grace, to be continually transformed, always aware that we're jerks a lot, too. Some of those friends are in Lander, some in Seattle, in Oregon, some on Orcas, New York, California, and other places. Just the thought of them sends the warmth of wine into my soul as we pack up the house and sell things only the way absent-minded academics can do it.

I have had the privilege of meeting friends in the furnace, friends like this, in Australia...even in this short time, and these are the eternal connections that will be well met again, I know, where nothing is more important than love, reaching across many boundaries, where boundaries are no longer needed.