monastic living
in a city dwelling
On Christmas Eve I wear a buttoned down shirt. I comb my hair. I even shave. (A babyface seems appropriate.) But this year, things weren’t ready. Unironed were my slacks; unpressed, my shirts; and unprepared, my soul. Time to rejoice? What work gave me merit to deserve a feast? Even this ritual email was left undone.
How did this happen? I read the Advent stories, heard the prophets’ calls: “The kingdom of God is at hand,” “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” The Christman cometh! And he caught me naked as Adam. No wonder the shepherds wore their dusty cloaks; the magi, their oldest robes.
Even mom and dad swaddled the child, forced him into our costume. Some irony: the one who could live nakedly without shame — who died nakedly without shame — was thrust into clothing. Why? Are we so vainly insecure that we can’t cope with being exposed? That, when confronted by the bare reality of fragile humanity, we put fabric between it and our eyes? We are all Peter, weakly denying that we are but dust.
This is not about nudism. This is about seeing the short truth of our efforts to make ourselves and our world: not enough.
On Christmas I wear wrinkled pants and a broken heart. So does earth. Both will continue. Salvation will arrive another day, an ordained day, no matter what I do or how I dress.
I have worn my humanity arrogantly and childishly, believing it to have power beyond what it was made to have. But there was born a man who tells his father, our father, to look beyond the wretched ways I array my life. Gracefully, I may wear the perfect nakedness of a son of man — shedding the trappings of sin, denuding my soul, and making me clean in a borrowed birthday suit.
Speak, no others have.
“Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.” (Milton)
I’ve always wondered where Jesus went while he was dead. Or rather, where his soul went, what it did and saw. Popular tradition says it went to hell for a spell, a three day/two night vacation to beat up on Satan. A fun thought that fits with the notion of his being separated from God so as to suffer the weight of our sins, although I struggle with the concept of only temporarily participating in an afterlife that’s supposedly eternal and timeless.
The problem in these cogitations is that I rarely feel Easter. I get so distracted along the way, preferring to dwell on theological curiosities, or to tend the world’s practical demands, or, most grievously, to remain in fasting and repentance. I’d rather continue scourging myself in hopes that, given enough time, I can preclude the need for a dying and rising savior. By Holy Saturday I find myself wishing today were a day for Jesus to come out of his tomb, see his shadow, and proclaim six more weeks of dark, delicious Lent.
I’m never ready to celebrate Easter, never satisfied with my penitence. It is far easier to continue to lament my sin than to rise and leave it behind. It is easier to try to redo what Christ already did than to go forth and do what I was made to do. It is easier to try to not die than it is to live, to really live, to live so abundantly that death is ultimately nothing but a victory.
I have a fully invented and scripturally baseless idea of where Jesus went while he was dead. Released by his patient sacrifice, he went straight to the hearts of all who knew him, rejoining them in their souls. No wonder so few went to the tomb; they were ashamed to be caught mourning while he was triumphing. They didn’t want him to see their failure to understand that the time for living had finally come.
He is risen. And we are risen whether we like it or not.
Speak, 1 other has.
Early in my run today I saw an old man dressed for the weather but not for the activity, which I’m still having trouble describing. In a fishing hat, loafers, and khakis, the man shuffled or slogged or toddled or — let’s say he performed some type of bipedal locomotion. It was slow, and my bouncy strides whisked me quickly past. It felt young and good, and I silently prayed I would never move like him.
As I glided away, I imagined what that man must have said to his wife before stepping out. Honey, I’m going for a run. At which I laughed: “run” being the last word I would have used to describe his activity. Any runner will be quick to help you differentiate between running and anything else (labeled scornfully as jogging). It’s easy: we runners are far more adept at our form of bipedal locomotion than joggers. We seem to float down the sidewalk, whereas joggers creep. We are held by impeccable balance, whereas joggers totter. We, with elegant form and a quick cadence, cover vast swaths of land between each footfall, whereas joggers shuffle and slog and toddle along. In short, we are good.
Yet while being good at running, I enjoyed a boastful thought that was far from good, which brings up the big difficulty of such a little word. The Oxford English Dictionary lists twenty different meanings (not including four idiomatic phrases) for good’s adjectival form, and each meaning has several variations of usage. As has already been seen. Earlier in this paragraph, good denotes morality. In the previous paragraph, it denotes skill. And in the opening paragraph, pleasure, which is form eleven in the OED‘s catalog and is the form that fuels the old joke regarding today: “How good can it be if that guy gets killed?” And thus God, according to such linguistics, is not good.
Well, sometimes God isn’t good. He does not always give pleasure, and life is not a bowl of cherries. Good Friday is sometimes not good, especially not when one is fasting, trying to focus on spiritual things rather than food, and one drives past a steaming food truck, receives a package of Easter candy from one’s parents, and has a USDA prime steak in the refrigerator. Not good.
Silly wordplay, that — for anyone can see that the goodness in such a situation refers to the moral form of the word. It is very good for me to know that I could, in under twenty minutes, be eating a well-seasoned medium rare steak (or, in even less time, be halfway through a chocolate bunny — but to choose otherwise. Good in two senses, in fact, for there is some skill involved in not (yet) tearing into the Peeps and Whoppers.
But what’s the good in sacrificing your only son? Certain would say there’s no good at all in it and that to celebrate the macabre passion of this day is a misguided and barbaric delight in bloodsport. Good Friday is not good, they would say. I see the point. Do we want a God who requires death before life? Do we want a God who chooses to make a way to him paved by the flesh of his own? Is that a good loyalty to have?
It’s not entirely pleasurable, I know that; it’s rather frightful and demanding; it certainly engenders a . It doesn’t even seem skillful, for couldn’t a more inventive God have come up with a kinder method for atonement? Like throwing a pebble into a pond for each sin? (There go the oceans.)
But morally — is this a good day? Can anything good come out of collective murder? Collective murder is the implication, the indictment, of Good Friday. By our sin we have slain him, and we are rightly ashamed of it and driven toward penitence. But we benefit from it and use it for our own good (meaning pleasure). That does seem twisted.
I will probably never carry a cross or be nailed to its planks. I doubt I’ll die in anything near martyrdom. Part of this is the blessing of living in 21st century America; part of it is pure statistics; part of it is my own avoidance of physical peril. So I don’t know everything about sacrifice, and I’m about to get presumptuous. But it’s possible — just possible — that dying brutally can be good for a man (and for mankind), and that our fright of the cross comes primarily from pridefully clinging to our flesh. Perhaps we think that a mercy killing is evil only because we aren’t humble enough to understand that the kingdom of God is greater than the kingdom of earth that God built so fragilely on sinew and wrapped so vulnerably in skin.
Over the course of Lent I have denied, like Peter, the opportunity to sacrifice in small ways, and only on my foodless Fridays have I been able to experience a different denial: the denial of desire, the same denial Christ practiced for forty consecutive days. He was a man, yes, but he was a better man than any of us, and who are we to think we know what was ultimately good for him? If anyone was born to be killed, it was he, the lamb. I don’t know anything about that.
Can you see what I’m trying to say? I’m not writing too good (skill, pleasure, maybe moral) right now, and it’s killing me because all these thoughts were so well-formed while I was running — yes, running, not jogging — through a fine rain. In those moments, my feet lightly brushing the ground in a flawless rhythm, everything bad was made good, and I understood. But I can’t convey it perfectly to you, just as I can’t convey the multitudinous feeling of goodness. Many would call today’s forty-five degree drizzle miserable; many would consider a tempo run to be the truest form of pain; many would say my oxygen-deprived brain was subhuman. But I was good then, and it wasn’t all that long ago. I was hurting, but I was good, and I knew what was skill-good and what was not pleasure-good and they were one and the same: running.
It is a small word in a large world, but it trips us up. I often don’t know what is good. I mean really know, because if I knew I would do it and not let cravings (like my growing hunger for that steak) overrule real spiritual desire: the desire for the moral good, which is the good that is greater than other forms of good. Whenever we talk about what is good (pleasure, skill, or moral), we are, by association, describing God, and that is a dangerous endeavor. God is good by definition, and what God does is good by definition, and it’s a sin of the highest order to reverse that and try to map our ideas of good onto God. I think that it’s not good — not moral and certainly not pleasurable — to stick nails through someone’s wrists into old trees and let him hang there until he dies, but that’s largely because my understanding of good is limited to this world, and I have no idea what is good in God’s kingdom.
The frames are entirely different. Running, to me, is pleasure-good partly because I’m skill-good at it, but that’s not the case for everyone, and often it’s not immediately pleasure-good even for me. But later it is, and I know that as I pound through the final wheezing mile. We’re good at seeing this sort of relativity, mostly because physical frames (size, age, shoes) can clearly show who’s a runner and who isn’t, and temporal/causal frames show us that other forms of good can and often do result from the sacrifice of pleasure-good. But this isn’t as easy when looking from the frame of this world to the frame of God, because God’s is a frame that is defined only on the outside: we know mostly what God is not.
But we also know, from the ways God has revealed good (in so many forms) in this world — the wonderfully marbled steak awaiting the breaking of my fast, what joy I receive from pursuing my vocation and becoming the man I was made to be, running in the rain — that what is good to God must be very good indeed.
It was hard for me to accept that that old man’s running was good. In my frame, he was everything that good running was not, from absurd apparel to ridiculous form. But who am I to know? He may have been eighty-five, a stroke survivor, and finishing a twenty mile outing. It was a small span I saw of his story, as this earth we see is a very small span of God’s story. Let us know that what he reveals is good and ever will be.
Speak, no others have.
Oh, to be in sackcloth, now that Lent is here!
Yes, I do like Ash Wednesday. Eager to get my
But is it not always in the air? We, alive, have one promise: we will die. We are given life knowing we will lose it.
We, alive, have one more promise: we will find life. We are given a life knowing we might yet find a greater life. If we seek, , we will find it.
This is the promise of Lent. All throughout this time of repeated repenting, of waiting for absolution, of sacrificing, we ultimately know that, practically, nothing comes of it. Lent deals in pain, in punishment, in loss, in death.
And yet it deals — if we are willing, if we wait and let it — in inexplicable life again. But we must seek with an unrelenting heart, holding back nothing, yielding all, giving everything. The truth of the quest demands acceptance of the reality of the program: to surrender the very life we have in order to receive the greater life we are merely promised.
I find it impossible to give up everything. What a life I have! I have a job, I have a love, I have a body, I have so much joy, so many outlets for delight. The call to fast seems extreme — I must surrender this? Please, Lord, I’m not ready.
Waiting for the imposition of ashes tonight, I looked down at my belovedly morose outfit. In my shirt is a tear, and its cuffs are thinning. I saw chalk spots on my pants. My face itched; I hadn’t shaved. What kind of penitent comes so disrespectfully? Lord, I’m not ready. I cannot surrender anything now. Please, wait until I can prepare myself. But now? I would rather die.
And such is the point. Here we have only a little life, whereas all life is promised later. Here is dust, and only dust will come of this life if I cling to it. Even if I maximize it, even if I translate it into stunning beauty and joy, still it is only a life formed of this earth, hardly a thing worth holding out against the eternal, the indissoluble living beyond this dirt-based realm.
It has become popular to shun the surrender of things. What good does that do, ask the pragmatists; shouldn’t you instead add something to your life? Instead of stopping something trivial, why not start something beneficial? These are questions to which there can be no objection. Of course we should always start beneficent deeds; we should always add acts of charity to our routines.
But I cringe to see basic fasting get discarded. Did not Jesus fast (for forty days, notably) before beginning his public ministry, including the many miracles and reforms he wrought? Perhaps, before the fast, he was not ready. Did not Jesus say there would come a time for fasting? Is not Lent that time?
I support every Lenten resolution (well, maybe excepting one friend’s resolution to, daily, cause a person to break his/her resolution), but I worry when resolutions become increasingly practical and decreasingly spiritual, as though social justice has no relation to internal justice. As , “No mystic can prevent himself from becoming a social critic, since in self-reflection he will discover the roots of a sick society.” But now the discipline of denial is dying.
The discipline of denial is dying. It is a practice in remembering that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. When I deny myself throughout Lent, I find myself humbled. How weak I am to struggle with such small physical surrenders. How shabby I am to fail to come to the Lord’s house in anything better than rags that suit my vain enjoyment of dour rituals. And still I cling to this little life as if I know so well how to run it. Wait, Lord, until I am ready to release it. Then, take it.
No! Even now, God calls — even now, God insists — especially now, in your overworn clothes and underwashed face —
And I remember I am not just blood, nerve, fiber, hair, air, and dust. I remember I am spirit, too, and more than a life designed for death. I remember the eternal, impractical promise: all the life I can want, if only I will leave mine and seek a Kingdom instead. The rest will be added later — including the impulse for charity, the good works and world-improving deeds — but first I must die.
Speak, no others have.
In Cleveland is a street made of wood, thick cross-cut chunks cobbled together in a grid, rings facing upward. To drive on it can be worrisome; the frequent drizzles (let alone snow or ice) make it like a bowling alley, and the parked cars along its gutters are waiting to be struck. But it is a delight to walk on. The grain slips gently under shoes, breathes beneath steps, and sponges slappy footfalls. Where concrete or asphalt feel coarse and hard to human amblers, Hessler Court welcomes any saunter in the same way that it scorns and slides away violent automobiles.
And the cats! They are everywhere. Hessler should have a checkpoint only to ensure that feline allergists avoid what would be a den of lions to their sinuses. Tabbies and bobtails and blotchy black-and-whites roam from porch to sidewalk to road to tree lawn to anywhere they wish. Try, see if you can walk the single block without being brushed by a tail. Slink through, I dare you, without being espied and nuzzled by olive eyes and a button nose. Do not take this route after buying salmon.
I used to go out of my way to walk down Hessler. At least on the way back from class. When I was late, I had to avoid Hessler, lest a marmalade furrpuff delay my arrival. Perhaps I had no need for fear; perhaps professors knew of the trap, and would have forgiven me upon seeing slathers of orange and cream fur upon my sleeves. “Ah, so Rudi’s on the prowl today?” they would’ve said, as the other students nodded and smiled.
I liked Cleveland and I liked Ohio. The Heart of it All™ raised me well, though it is a flawed place, full of bigotry and resentment. If you want to witness mob justice, spit on a Ford in Toledo. If you want to hear racism, bring up the forty-fourth president in Dayton. But these, though inexcusable, are only hisses from frightened kittens whose protective tom has vanished. If you talk to them, if you listen to them, the purrs will come.
There are any number of stories about the excessive politeness of Ohioans. I’ve been apologized to by a spice lady because she didn’t notice me within five seconds of my browsing smoked salts and dried herbs. I’ve been given fig gelato because they remembered that, last time I was there, my burger was a little overcooked. I’ve swapped dubious homebrewed beer for fine pancetta and mozzarella di bufala. And once, when Zorro, my childhood cat (a wiry thing we rescued from the street), ran off, we found him again because someone across town (Zorro had hopped into then out of a moving truck) noticed him and put bowls of milk and Fancy Feast out so he could nibble even if he never stuck around or let them pet him.
I don’t live in Ohio anymore. I don’t even live in a state. I live in a district that gladly calls itself a seat of power and the center of the free world and other abstract appellations. It is a strange, constructed thing, and no one really lives here. They stop by for awhile, then, well, I don’t know. Most of these areligious pilgrims vigorously take up the three-starred flag and wave it around, but I’ve never seen much DC pride anywhere else. I’m pretty sure this local fervor is mostly to pat themselves on the back for being in a supposedly important place where I’ll (hopefully) never live again.
Apart from “Taxation Without Representation” (which is absurdly true, but a separate issue), the motto of this place is probably “Work Hard, Play Hard.” It fits because most of this town does work hard. The legions of nonprofiteers and advocates toil tirelessly for assorted causes, and I have good reason to believe that they (and even some of the Hill staffers) are earnestly invested in bettering this nation, this world. I have talked to a cross-section of this populace, and they want mostly to fix a particular problem of today’s existence.
There are asshats, of course, and they tend to dwell on K Street, the epicenter for bombastic toolholes (read: law firms and lobbyists). These, when you meet them at a party, clearly hinge the entire conversation on your answer to, “So, what do you do?” It has come time to be categorized: are you a housecat, a pussy? Or are you a tiger? I — a strange academic, , a not-big but not-domestic — am fortunate to have a response that makes the asker suddenly need a refill, or feel full-bladdered, or hypnotically wander away in search of the nearest source of political relevance, Nosferatu for new blood.
Alas, this peripatetic method of socializing — this is the “play hard,” the aggressive after-hours quest to further their interests — means that they, like a rabid cat, infect a multitude of those who, unlike this fortunate scribe, must play in the games of government. So even the noble-hearted become affixed on practical, personal benefits. Can you help me? You cannot. Fare thee well.
It plays out subtly, too. The elitism of power relationships trickles down to leisure. Do you like author X? Yes? Have you read book M? What did you think? Really? I thought it had its lapses. And now you are lowered on the taste totem. You have been Districted.
And it trickles out to everywhere. Grocery stores slather themselves in anti-theft signs, insistent in reminding you that they are watching and can punish you. Waiters and clerks decide that they will serve you on their schedule (unless you flash an important badge). I’ve heard stories of runaway cats being claimed and kept; finders keepers here.
Yes, there are cats in DC, too. I hear them more than I see them. At night I notice a sudden rustle of a bush as I walk by. In the day I see a blur of black as something skitters away. They are very afraid here, because, to them, I am a large man, and why wouldn’t they fear my hands? Except sometimes they don’t. Each assesses me. “This one,” a Georgetown Abyssinian thinks, “whose wallet barely bulges his slacks. Ha.” Or the Dupont manx: “Uh, please! That lumpy jacket and tattered shirt?” And the Capitol calico taunts, “Too slow, can’t keep up with me,” while walking just ahead, a few leaps to stay way forward, walking again.
What if I caught them? What if I held them awhile? I’m sure they’d squirm, claw, howl. But if I did it again and again? I wonder.
Sometimes, when I see one from a distance, I can scoot forward in a squat, drop to a crawl. Mewing and purring, I slink toward the skeptical feline. Her eyes widen, and she slants back her ears. She crouches, ready to spring. For a moment, she sees that I mean her no harm, that I am a nice midwestern boy with soft fingers and a careful touch. She thinks, “This one is different. This one knows to scratch at the root of my ear and on the tuft of my chin. I will go to him,” and takes one step forward.
But a car blasts past, a man tromps near. Little Lulu hears them and shrinks against a townhouse wall. She slips, paws in a presto patter, around the corner and into another yard. That is the only place here, alone and away.
Speak, 1 other has.
Here is some background on the mood that birthed this . Because I am a frail and easily emotionally wounded man, I am usually unable to sleep before the first day of class; I intimately fear that my students will mutiny in one form or another. Such is the greatest shame I can imagine, and imagine is just what my mind does all semester’s eve, consciously parsing situations of terror and disgraces from 1 am, 2 am, 3 am…until the alarm rings and I must inhale caffeine to be a competent, conscious instructor.
Usually, the following night fades rapidly to sleep. But this year, I was so filled with rage that I again could not slumber, and so I arose to type out this unrequited, uncensorable rant.
Like you, I’m pissed off about people being killed in Arizona. Murder is (must always be) enraging. But unlike, say, every political wonk and pundit, I’m not pissed off because of “uncivil rhetoric,” whatever the fuck that may be. See, I’m pretty sure that this gun-toting wasn’t driven by a From my irate vantage, there are three tragedies here, and none of them is directly about the way in which American political discourse is framed.
Tragedy One: that people died. This trumps the rest, and I won’t demean it with excessive prose or profanity. I pray for their souls, their families.
Tragedy Two: that a person fell into such a state where he felt the need to murder. Someone fucked up. A lot of people fucked up, and most of them were not named Jared Loughner. I’m not going to condemn any particular persons, because I don’t know shit, but I will state a few relationships he had: parents, teachers, peers, professors, counselors, friends. Fuck you. Some of you fucked up because, apparently, none of you was human enough to notice that he had problems and to take significant action. It wasn’t your fault? You didn’t see it? A real human — a real neighbor — would look more closely. Fuck you, navel-centric assmongerers. And yes, I’m guilty of not prying into lives that seemed a bit awry. And yes, I tend to let people go along their less-than-merry ways because I’m afraid to butt in. But no, I’m not right. I’m a timid human paraquat, too, but at least I’m honest enough to admit it.
Tragedy : that the systems of this nation are constructed in such a way that a Jared Loughner can easily fall into an outcasted place without anyone showing concern. In this aspect, peers are absolved, and so are teachers, mostly because they’ve been shackled by whose requirements crush time to care for actual human beings. This fuck you is directed at you, school assministrations and state legishitures, you prickknives who seem to think that human development can be assessed by narrowly manufactured multiple-choice exams. And this fuck you comes from someone who thrived on such exams.
Tragedy Three: that the mainstream reaction to this is so self-serving in thinking that “political rhetoric” is what really needs to be reformed here. Fuck you, too, you solipsistic wankhats. As previously noted, everyone has been doing it, so you’re already an assgrape for not having called it out before now, and you’re even more of an assgrape for singling out Sarah Palin when plenty of others from everywhere on the spectrum have used violent imagery. You biased twatknots. But that’s not a tragedy so much as an expected idiocy. The real Tragedy Three is that we’re all such shitsouls for being complicit in a society that is so fraught with fear, it won’t trust the hoi polloi to handle parlance that is obviously rhetorical, not literal. I don’t know when everyone became suddenly unable to handle metaphor or exaggeration, but I sure wish that moment could be undone. Obviously I have , but rants are no place for .
Tragedy : that the frivolous uproar will ultimately be mostly, Your side said this — But your side said that, and nothing relevant to the actual conditions and environments that funneled Jared Loughner (who has plenty to account for himself, the dickwart) into where he wound up. I’m not saying that rhetoric is meaningless. Obviously I , and I uphold its power, but I am deeply disturbed to see the primary and dominant reactions focused on something that is so secondary, so minor compared to the causes of Tragedy One.
If this isn’t (yet) an(other) indictment of the way in which American society raises children, I don’t understand what else needs to happen to demonstrate the deeply degraded and strangled roots of this nation. The lot arguing about rhetoric and imagery need to get their heads out of each other’s asses and see where the real wounds are falling and why.
Speak, no others have.
People have babies. They do; a little person just pops out of a woman: here it is! But what is baby? Boy or girl? Large or small? Sweet or strong? Like mommy or daddy?
People put expectations on baby. Baby should have answers, fulfillment, completion. Baby makes a man a father, a woman a mother, a house a home. Baby makes you more you. Yet no one knows what baby really is. So everyone squeezes baby’s cheeks, gazes into baby’s sapphire eyes, and cherishes baby as cuteness. This is why we have nativity scenes with clean hay and soft sheep. There lies rustic baby, making us warm and comfortable.
Perhaps we would rather not know who that baby really is. That baby demands that we be just as perfect. Perhaps we would rather embrace the mystery, admit consternation, throw up our hands in perplexity. Here it is, sure, but what is it? Can we even know? So The Search becomes glorified, even deified. “Something is out there,” the Spiritual-Not-Religious say, “but I don’t know what.” There are many so-called seekers.
In typical post-modern meta-ism, they often seek only the seeking. There is no intention of finding; there is delight in being lost. While there is humility in admitting their unknowing, there is folly in their un-ambition. They sit on the ground and look down, which is sad because something is coming to us from above. Baby. Not just a baby. The baby, the absolute meaning of what a human is, the of man. What is coming is us, the most us we can be, the way to be home. Here it is. May we dare to know it.
Speak, 1 other has.
In the safe lives of suburban children, the most terrifying nights result from noises cackling through the hallways. The earthen groans, the wooden shrieks — immense sounds that suggest a fundamental unrest within the domicile, belying the comforts of tree lawns and double garages. But although the child buries his head in his pillow, disembodied calls pierce his downy helmet and fill his head with multi-winged, sharp-toothed terrors. How real these monsters are to him, and no wonder he refuses to believe his mother’s strange comfort: “It is only the house, settling.”
Settling. Does his mother take comfort in settling? Does she, patting his sweaty head, feel happy to have settled for a sometimes terse but largely reputable man who will have the mortgage paid in only eight more years? Does she rejoice in having settled for a part-time job in order to ferry a trio of young ones to flute lessons and swim practice and orthodontic checkups? Or does she pause and sneer the word, settling, and forget to breathe it out, coolly like the oak leaves rustling in the spring night, for her boy’s comfort? Neither of them rest.
The two branched veins of my heritage collided in the Midwest, right around the 85th western line of longitude. Relative to the origins of man, this is quite a journey, but as far as American frontiering went, it was paltry at best. My father’s side, at least, can lament its late start, or perhaps praise its farther foray — Budapest to Dayton was a trek. But whatever the distance, at some point they both settled in nearby regions, and planted themselves there. One grandpa ran a drugstore; the other had a beef cattle farm and grocery. None still lives: neither men nor edifices. But when they were there, oh, they were there. Who in Carrollton didn’t eat Young’s steaks? Who in Englewood didn’t fill prescriptions at Molnar’s?
I like these stories, tales of homesteading, of families starting out, seeking a place, and sinking their stake in it. How practical were they? Did Grandpa plumb the land, check how level it would be for planting? Did Mom and brothers argue about how much brush would need to be cleared? Did Dad gaze at the young oak’s veiny leaves and say,
Why did they settle? Why don’t we settle like that anymore?
Suburban settling implies being stationary. In this culture that praises action and movement, settling is quickly equated with stagnation. Settling is an accusation. It is an inaction. It is a dereliction, an abdication. It is, as with the settlers of old, a departure from society — though now not by traveling away, but by becoming still.
There’s a historical theory of America called Frontier Thesis, and it essentially says that American culture — with all its aggression, violence, and innovation — was born out of the irresistible invitation of the westward swaths of wilderness. Its proponent, Frederick Jackson Turner, wrote at the end of the 19th century, when the frontier was dwindling. Would this be the end of all our exploring?
No, said Turner. New frontiers would be found. Edison was in his inventive prime during Turner’s day. Henry Ford pioneered automotive mass production. There was, of course, imperialism. John F Kennedy later called space a . New frontiers will be found.
The shift from geographic frontiers opens ten thousand doors for paths of advance, and such possibility drives the engines of our hasty nation. You must not settle; you must go on; you must never stop. “Go west” is still cried, and now not only to the young.
It has been done before, about half a millennium ago. Magellan went west, and kept going west, and kept going west, and wound up back home. TS Eliot wrote how such an end “Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” And then what? Settle?
Oh, how I hope so. I have settled so many times, and I will never stop. I settled on a vocation, and the labor of that life brings fullness and joy. I settled on a wife, and our love surges and billows daily. I settled and I settle and I will settle all the days.
The act of settling is an acceptance and affirmation of identity. “Here am I,” replied young Samuel to the late night summons, running through the temple in search of the voice. How right he was! He had found his place, and his call came to him. He would never leave.
Nor would he ever be at rest. His life as prophet grew full and fuller, for settling is not a diminishment but a strengthening. Samuel settled at his very edge; he ran there, to his frontier. His old guardian, righteous Eli, even acknowledged that Samuel had surpassed him. Eli had not been summoned, so Samuel had to wait for God alone, and for God, alone. There, unshielded by edifices on the coastline of his self, he stood bare to the atmosphere, vulnerable to seas of unending change.
New frontiers will be found, for time and life flow like Heraclitus’s river: you cannot step into it twice. There is no need to run and run and run in search of the new place; there is only need to run in search of the right place. There you are. And a tree will be there, and the place will be prepared, and you can settle though you will never rest. Your home will keep you up late; it will terrify you; it will never let you rest. But it will be yours for the total exploration that only a settler can plumb.
Speak, no others have.
Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you. (St. Augustine)
On Easter, my guilt rises. I regret praising only now, now that I’ve been amazed by a love that surpasses righteousness. I hurry to get everything back in order (knead the traditional dough, type the traditional email), surprised that he is alive again. But my hot cross buns plump so slowly, and my words won’t flow. I won’t be ready in time.
With oils and incense, they all came too late after the Sabbath. He was no longer there. They wept.
Will I ever be ready in time? I had finally grown accustomed to Lent, grown comfortable with bearing crosses and thorns. But now the millstone is rolled away, and it is too late to love dismal Lent. Everything has changed! Life flies again, drenched in all the colors; we are called up.
At Emmaus, they were late to catch his meaning. He vanished. Their hearts burned all the more.
God, You know our lateness, You expect it, and leave just before we can arrive, just as we were learning to love. What a flirt! But what joy it is to chase, late, late into life. Late, Lord, still we love you. Don’t be too fast. Come back, again. We want to visit; we’d like to stay so late.
Speak, no others have.
I like Good Friday. I like the violence, the pain. I like the darkness, the vacuum of beauty, the dearth of imagery. I like the directness of the narrative, the absolute focus. Above all, I like the barbaric justice of someone dying for my (mis)deeds. The atoning execution re-establishes equilibrium in the cosmos, and I contently walk out of the service, quietly and plainly forgiven, as if nothing more needs to be said or done. It’s all good, so to speak.
This redemptive equation’s simplicity makes Good Friday readily understood. Here in DC, the heavily Hispanic congregation of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church publicly walks the stations of the cross on Good Friday night. Police block the traffic of a few main avenues in Columbia Heights, and many people watch and comment. The hymns and readings are entirely en Espanol, yet passersby feel knowledgeable enough of Good Friday’s serious proceedings to make remarks like, “This is the world’s most depressing parade.”
The procession has many levels of participation. There are the aforementioned passersby, who think they pretty much know what’s going on. There are curious observers, standing along the streets, watching. There are children with candles or light-up toys. There are perimeter marchers, mostly included, partly apart. There is the large, singing cluster tight around the cross. There is an inner mass almost entirely shielded from the outside. These are, if you can see, very happy.
Their happiness is different from that of the playful kids delighting in the chance to frolic with glowing gadgets in closed-off streets, although perhaps not that different. It’s certainly different from that of the snide commenters and their ironic judgment. The happiness of the inner mass is the relief of the old farmhand removing his boots before dinner.
At a dinner not long before his death, Jesus was met by a woman who dumped on him a life’s worth of perfume. Judas, righteous treasurer, condemned her, lamenting how the value of the liquid could have deeply helped the poor. He was right, of course; anyone can see the merit in such a charitable donation. Doing what is good is very simple.
Jesus was interested less in goodness than in greatness. Or rather, he preferred holiness to righteousness. Righteousness is the Pharisees precisely upholding their 613 laws to every jotted letter. Pretty good, no? Holiness is healing a hurting man even on the Sabbath. Pretty great.
The cross was a very great burden. Even the man I see carrying it along 14th St. looks weary, slumped a bit, his spine twisted by the unwieldy wood. Imagine it: the weight of the world’s wickedness. Only a truly holy man could touch it, embrace it, hold onto it for dear life. So Jesus did. So no one else has to. Justice simply completed.
Is this, then, why those in the inner mass near the cross are so relieved? That they are free from the sentences of their crimes? Perhaps. But there’s a holier reason, too. They know that they are already on the cross. They confess it, lamenting that they, like sheep, have gone astray, and have invited the cross upon their backs. They will not deny it. They will suffer it, nobly, holy.
Their relief comes in the form of a visitor taking their form, joining their plight. Jesus, too, presses his back into the planks and walks along with them, wincing with them at the weight, weeping with them at the splinters, suffering alike. They see him, with them. He is there. They are not alone.
This is more than good. Righteousness is a man dying for the salvation of others. Holiness is joining the others in their suffering. This is a great day.
Speak, no others have.
