Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Light Shines


I grew up in a semi-rural community just outside of Detroit.  My mom worked as a clerk in the building department at city hall and wrote poetry and political satire at night.  My dad drove a truck.  We lived in an old farmhouse on a couple acres of land, just far enough away from the neighbors, mom always said, on a mile square tract of fields plowed with rows of corn and soybean and bisected by the old county ditch running through it.  

Bleakness hung in the air. There was a perpetual cloud over the house, not quite darkness nor yet cloudburst that might flush away the blue-collar gloom, but instead a paradox of inchoate form and overfullness that never gave birth hanging heavy with the smell of boiling cabbage, gravel and ash, axle grease and dirt.

Wintertime was my favorite season.  The bare trees standing in the oblique light expressed something inside me that I could not.  I was the immigrant’s daughter, my father from a land across an ocean, whose grandmothers had stood upon a black earth “sown with bones and watered with blood” in the catastrophe that had befallen Europe between Stalin and Hitler.

It was impossible to turn a blind eye to suffering and to the dark world of the human heart.  One could see it sometime in the people, those who sought money and power and held a hand over the bent heads of others.  My father would point it out, commenting in his oblique way, “the hand goes to the mouth.”  And I felt the shame of being human, trying to recall the better parts of myself, knowing darkness was there in all of us. 

What is wisdom?  What is noble?

St. Augustine said that God gave man memory so that he might find the light inside him through the act of remembering.
If we remember that we have forgotten something, we have not forgotten it entirely.  But if we have forgotten altogether, we shall not be in a position to search for it."
Remembering leads back to a beginning, to the truth, as we recall the steps we took that got us where we are.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

In Life, Each Must Sew Her Own


She in her magnificent robe takes up half the sky.  She is a protectress, still and silent.  Loving.  Her arms, spread like sturdy boughs, invite me to come and shelter there under her mantle of shade and solace. 
 
I seek her comfort and her strength.  Still, I yearn to stand on my own and give form to something inside of me.  How am I to make the thing called me?  How am I to know who I am and clothe myself with grace and elan?
 
In his writings on faith, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard says that the secret is that everyone must sew it for himself, the costume that one must wear in life. The coat in that old fairy tale, the thread of which is spun with tears and bleached by tears, is sewn in tears, but the garment gives better protection than iron and steel. 
 
The catch is, you have to sew it for yourself.
 
You were given the material: a life, which is your fabric.  Perhaps you wove that cloth yourself from threads that were handed you, be it cotton, wool or silk.  All cloth is not the same and what you start with is always reflected in the end, but it is up to you to work it.  Some cloth is suitable for making work clothes, some for jackets that are lightweight and travel well.  Some are best used for sportswear or tailored suits or delicate underthings.  Some can hold a pleat while others find form in soft, billowing gathers that come to life in evening gowns.  Others are fit for a queen’s mantle or the cloak of Mother Mary, The Protectress.
 
However you decide to work your cloth, whether to go with or against the grain or to cut along a pattern line or on a whim, ultimately, it is up to you.  You choose the thing to do and make it.  Nonetheless, every seamstress knows that a good result does not always come to the one who labors for it.  In life, there are no guarantees a thing will turn out.  But in the spiritual world, the part we clothe with our inner work, anything is possible.  There, the result is always commensurate with our effort. 
 
For Kierkegaard, the coat made from our tears is completed by a marvelous leap, one filled with vacillation, fear and dread.  The trick, he says, is not just to take the leap but to believe, on the strength of the absurd, that the ground will appear and you will safely land, which, for all the world, may seem as ordinary as day but for the one who leaps there is no greater task of existence, requiring immense courage, trust and devotion.
 
To perceive the impossibility of a thing and to live joyfully and happily in the belief that it will happen anyway is a costume I foolishly construct on my very best days.  Whether it will ever be finished, God only knows.