But what a plait of thorns faith is. Mine has grown wild, as I suppose happens in mourning and in desperation, when the mind would cling to any order it can discover or arrange. And this easy effusive credulity is the common denominator of your churches. It catches on fast, an invasive weed, the lowest sort of idolatry made base and crude, and even dangerous, by this constant desire to see ourselves--our finite most interesting selves--where we stop short of ever seeing we cannot see your infinity. Here I am, seeing through a crown of thorns, imagining you are there, plain as pain. This is my winter garden.
I ought to put aside looking for signs of you in all of material creation as it breaks and decays and presents its little whispering mirrors of you. What a broken thing hope is: shards looking at shards. Yesterday I asked Br JJ, how do we get out from beneath this idealism? How do we know the difference between the spiritual drive to see the person himself and the imaginative drive to see the person as we think we know him? Loving the ideal is something already spiritual, he said: it is artistic. That's why it's so good for the other to break from my ideal--to do something that bothers me--so that I can begin to encounter reality. But the breakage only produces more mirrors, more surface reflecting images of the things I think I already see. Will the surface eventually be crushed to mere glass? To the smooth round worlds of sand tossed in the depths of the sea?
So you break with my expectations of you, Lord, and but for a fleeting a glance--in which I see what I have formed has been thrown from the heat of your kiln and has cracked wide open from the impact--I am already making sense of you, already conforming the unthinkable into a newly imagined form. Already the potter in the mind takes up her wheel and clay and begins again. What an artist love is. Why have the Brothers never said: of those who struggle against love, the artist will struggle most? Much as the artist is held parallel to you, you Creator, so it is just as likely the two bodies of work might never converge, as the artist is so accustomed to her independent making.
In faith I make idols. In hope I make ideals. In love I make art. No wonder death is necessary.
...
THOU: Wept through another Mass yesterday. Fr N mentions you awaiting your death in his homily, I am thinking of Maribel, full of stab wounds, fighting off her death while her attacker slices her throat.
I ask Fr for reassurance. Nearly two years of practicing an increasingly chaste life, and suddenly even you, Thou (especially you), are sexy: an indication I ought to reconsider?
He looks uncomfortable. There are often temptations before taking vows in religious life, he says, temptations to leave, to act on whatever floats in from your environment or your imagination. He goes on for a bit in the same vein, trailing off, repeating himself a little until I interrupt him, which is our habit.
So it's normal, I say, noting he will again refuse to address directly what most perplexes me about the question, and duly noting too that the coward in me will never push him to respond to anything he's dismissed in the moment as mere anxiety. Or imagination.
He nods. I can read his impatience with such questions, and I used to think that his discomfort stems from whatever indelicate way I have of expressing my concerns. But I'm beginning to sense, too, it is not the subject of my questions that offends him. He is made wary by the fact that I am always living in my head--always imagining I know more than I know or that my experience is in some way exceptionally telling. He sees he is rarely dealing with a sober person. Inebriation offends him. Okay, I say.
Then he says: now let me ask you a question--is it okay for me to ask you about your background?
Of course, I say, thinking: that's never happened before, not recognizing right away this is protocol for a priest who is about to address something left behind in confession.
Have I mentioned Rachel's Vineyard to you? There's a retreat in Peoria this October, but there is also one this weekend in Romeoville. I spoke to some people from the Peoria group and they mentioned many of the women have backgrounds like yours, that it's very healing. He is animated now as he talks, happy.
Outwardly: You mentioned it after my first confession with you. I don't know. Maybe in October. But I don't know if I can take on more grieving right now, Father. (Inside: of course it would be this, what else would I expect of a man so emphatically pro-life? Then: perhaps he is right. Then: perhaps he is only going after what has seemed obvious to him all along. Then: perhaps he's delighted to see he can address your healing through a trauma he thinks he can understand. Then: am I traumatized?)
--I thought of that, he says, still animated, interrupting my pause, but I think you were hit hard by recent events because everything (he gestures in a circular way with his hands), your background and so forth, is related. It could be good to go now, if you can--
We have been sitting on a bench in the grass outside the chapel. The day is full of sun and wind, a rare warm break in winter as it waffles into spring. The Brothers were at their choir practice minutes before, lounging at the picnic table, sipping coffee from thick white mugs, singing. I was skimming a book with two beautiful paragraphs and 150 pages of facile watery outlines. I was calm again and irritated with the book for telling me no more about suffering than I've arrived at--for being no better written than this journal. Fr is beside me. I have seen more of him in the last two weeks than I have in all the months since September, and my confidence in him is growing. I am full of myself.
But now I take off my sunglasses, vulnerable again, crying again, feeling hit where it hurts most. --I used to be able to deal with this. Violent deaths come out of Del Rio all the time, Father, all the time--
--I know, it's so close to the border, they've been finding bodies recently--
--But I mean in my family, too. When my mother calls, I already know, I know what she's going to say. My grandmother died in a flood, did I tell you that? No. Well my mother cared for her for years, getting her up and dressed and fed before work in the morning, spending her lunch hour preparing her meals and keeping her company, and after work feeding her dinner, doing her dishes, washing her sheets, changing her into pajamas, and tucking her mother into bed before ever going home at night. Then one day it rained.
--And she was sitting there.
Yes. And my mother's two brothers died horrible, violent deaths as well. And until now I was able to deal with all of this, able to ... (the word escapes me, I put my palm against the copse of trees across the property--)
--distance yourself.
But I can't seem to do it anymore. That's why Maribel hit so hard. So I don't know, I don't know about Rachel's Vineyard right now. But I'll think about it.
Do. And I will continue to pray for you. What is your full name, did you ever tell me, your middle name? He is animated again, certain, I suppose, that prayer is a priest's greatest gift.
Lynn.
Lynn. No confirmation name?
I was never given one.
No special patron saint...? Oh wait: Regina! Your name comes from Regina.
And he left off with a blessing, for which I knelt into the wet cold earth, and crossed myself, and felt consoled by the thought that he would lift my spirit up to the Mother of the dying Son, in Mass or in silent prayer, and that she would receive his words in her arms like the corpse of the messiah, and clean the body gently in preparation for its return home. I straightened up, wiped my face, lifted my bag to my shoulder, and looked back to see him standing by the chapel, looking back at me.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.
Amen.
...
"We must understand well this total surpassing which the Christian vocation represents (for it is not only true for religious, it is also true for all Christians). There is a way of living Christian life in a lax manner, looking at ourselves. Surely we do not go as far as to deny the sacrifice of Christ; we do not deny the Cross, but we are so much afraid of it that instead of looking at it we look at ourselves and no longer at the Cross--it is we and the human aspiration of our hearts....
These human aspirations of our heart will remain as long as we are on earth; they will not be completely purified, assumed by charity, but in eternity. That is why that on earth there will always be an alternative: do we wish to live that which Jesus expects from us? Or do we wish to live that which we understand as the love of Christ? These are not the same thing! Besides, we know that we live very badly the call of Christ. Not one of us would dare say that nobody can live the call of Christ better than he himself lives it--that would be entirely erroneous! The more we have the sense of the call of Christ, the more we are aware that we are unworthy of it and that there is a total inadequacy between this great call, so imperative--'I thirst'--and our manner of contemplating the sound of the heart of Jesus, of receiving this last revelation, this last manifestation of his heart which for the love of us ceases to beat and still wishes to cry for us and still wishes to give something for us, to show us how much he loves us and manifest to us that he has given everything."
--Marie-Dominque Philippe, Homily for a Mass in Honor of the Sacred Heart, February 8, 1996
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