I don’t call you servants, because a servant implies a master; I call you friends, because I open my heart to you, and I share everything I know. -Jesus in John’s Gospel (my paraphrase)
Many years ago I had a philosophy professor who upended my view of the world. It wasn’t merely the concepts he taught—which I didn’t always grasp; it was the way he taught. It wasn’t the text so much as the teacher, that tilted my reality.
Everything flowed. Beliefs, enshrined, cherished, or nascent, were not in need of protection, all were open to examination. He had no fear of being wrecked by a rogue wave, as though tied to some dock of received dogma. He lived, it seemed to me, upon the waves, with only the steadying effect of big abiding faith in life—his sea-anchor.
Sitting with him in his office, or meeting for coffee in the cafeteria, the oxygen seemed denser, the energy livelier. It flowed through him and you felt your own energy responding. He had a superior mind. A student/teacher relationship, should it have ended there, would have been natural. But instead he offered me friendship, freely, like that of a fellow traveller.
While my picayune beliefs surrounding the Jesus Story have leaned this way and that, there’s never been a time the Story left me. Now, in these narrowing days, it’s reasserting itself at something like ground level; and I do mean ground: take a moment away from the ugliness and you glimpse it: mineral, animal, human, all matter, this universe, imbued by divinity, by Christ, the creative, vital, evolutionary energy of love. The love that made and the love that holds together the tiny planetary system called atom.
What I’ve always found astonishing about the central protagonist of the Story, is that he offers those he meets along the dusty roads of Galilee, this same kind of ego-less friendship. Declining the power inherent in his unique position of knowledge and impossible-to-fathom status, he became, “…just a slob like one of us (Joan Osborne).”
No obvious pedigree, celebrity, prestige, clout. What this suffering scullion offers, is friendship. But it must be said, a somewhat destabilizing one, unscripted, unformatted, radical, and revealing. Friendship with Christ is not Christianity, not a denomination or even, an added dimension, but a new orientation. Too grandiose? Then compare it with finding a soul-mate, it’s a start.
We’ve just come through Easter—the axial moment of the Jesus Story—the pan-historic moment that subverts death, destroys our anxiety about death and transforms us into people, living as though death were past. No longer run by death, we’re existentially and psychologically free to look at reality and still love, still have an abiding faith in life.
It wasn’t part of some transaction, Jesus died out of radical friendship. Some deep desire to evolve us, free us from our asphyxiating fears—which underlie our distorted structures of power, forms of violence, planet devastation, hatred, greed, racism, war—and gather us together as friends.
Ash Wednesday, the dawn of Lent, and I’m riding my bike to church to receive my emblem of embers— a small cross of damp ash, marked on my forehead by the rector. I signal, turn off Dogwood Drive toward a trail I take. From a car behind me, through a rolled down window, I hear a curse, guttural, venomous, amplified and aimed, I HATE YOU! It takes, on average, half an hour to ride to Chemainus Anglican. For most of the way you ride on a groomed trail that runs along the abandoned E&N railway. Through forest, over a bridge, up from Stocking Falls, along the farms and gardens of the Cowichan Valley, then views of the ocean, and on a good day, Mount Baker, and for that half hour, despite the setting, I try to work it through— that blind bullet of hate. On balance, a mere thing; in my small world, something larger. And I churn within, wrestle with my angel badger. I turn off the trail, cross Chemainus Road, coast down Mill Street, past Mural No. 12, which reflects First Nations’ heritage of Chemainus, Tsa-meen-is, meaning, “broken chest.” I veer right at Willow Street, lock up my bike beside Owl’s Nest Bistro, and walk the half block to St. Michael’s. Kneeling at the railing I receive the bread and the wine; then the ash, where I’m told, with perceptible empathy, Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return—told— as though the mark of expiration was a blessing of perception, and kneeling at this altar was assenting to the invisible; and believing in Easter was subscribing to the impossible: a faith in One so outlandishly human, that, while cursed, while hated, reciprocated with an outpouring of love—as if there were some other way to make a world, as if there is another kind of world.
(2001) With Fr. James Gray, OSB, in his hermitage.
Whatever happens, those who have learned to love one another have made their way to the lasting world and will not leave, whatever happens. -Wendell Berry (Given Poems)
Yesterday, preparing supper, I caught my reflection in the kitchen window; the light above the sink made it look like what little hair I had left, had left me. Bald and bereft, I stared, went searching for the younger man that just a few years ago I could conjure, but he was gone. It’s a paltry matter, the mist of which, apparently, has not quite burned off. I smiled at the old man—and remembered:
It started with turtlenecks. They were trendy at the time. Musicians, authors, actors, even newscasters wore them. Sweaters, or dickeys—dickeys being those turtleneck affairs with the bib-like extensions that would reach just far enough to disappear inside a button-up shirt.
I procured one. A hand-me-down from my brother, Paul. The stretch had gone out of it and being a skinny kid, with a skinny neck, the dickey hung off me like the wattle on a tom turkey. I remedied this with a paper clip. Reaching behind, I made a fold that snugged everything up nicely, pushed a paper clip over the crimp to hold things in place. Looked in the mirror—marvelous! Then, turning my head I saw the problem. And saw the scene: I’d be sitting coolly in class. Then, in a forgetful moment, I’d turn my head too quickly causing the paper clip to somersault across the aisle landing on the desk of lovely Brenda. Obviously, I’d court truancy forevermore.
I changed tactics, settled on a safety pin. I could fix it up before putting it on—a definite advantage. I bunched up the back of the dicky, inserted the safety pin and slipped the fabrication over my head. As long as I was careful to keep my collar high so that it covered the fold and the shinny silver line of pin, I was fine.
For a birthday, eleventh, I think, I begged for, and got, a bright paisley shirt with a wonderfully high collar, and flared burgundy slacks care of Eaton’s catalogue. No small thing, as we were not wealthy. Tall, mod, and secular, with a Jagger saunter, I went out to meet the world. Passing Margaret and her friend, I heard giggles, felt the sting and knew I failed.
Clearly, hair was integral to the package. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had appeared on Ed Sullivan and the Monkeys had their own TV show. Everything was hip and every little Samson was judged by the length of his hair. I, like my friend Lonnie, was not fortunate to have parents that allowed hair to creep past the ears. The best we could hope for was length on top, and perhaps bangs. We did what we could. Came up with a reverse comb-over—so that hair actually hung an inch over our left ears. We knew we were flirting with the ridiculous here, but just by half, and we dared ourselves to walk past Margaret’s place, gauge her reaction, showing off, of course, our cool side. On the way home I combed things back into place and decided groans were not an improvement on giggles.
Adolescent angst? How strange that at the cusp of 70 I can still feel a twinge of that old inadequacy. True, through the rasp of time, one lightens up. What else to do? Yet, comes some furtive second and I’m eleven again, baying to fit in. Geriatric angst? Perhaps, just more complex with a wider taxonomy; one is now allowed to be sheep or goat, or a chicken for that matter, but one is not allowed to not want to be a lion, a leopard, or at least an elite sheep.
Many years ago, before moving to the coast, I’d attended, then attached myself as Oblate (a “monk” who lives in the world) to a Benedictine monastery–currently, as I understand it, on the edge of closing. Even then, most of the twenty five or so monks who remained were getting on, some were tired, a couple, infirm. Fall was setting on the Abbey. Yet they remained, living together, sharing, wearing their black habits, working at their given tasks. And then at the sound of the bell, several times each day, from Lauds to Vigils, they’d drop what they were doing and walk to the chapel for a time of chanting and praying the Psalms. Brother Francis, afflicted with Alzheimer’s toward the end of his long life, was always wheeled in by the brothers. He would often startle visitors by suddenly shouting out bits of Psalms. When all else was gone, the Psalms remained.
Hungering for something more than social cooperation and religious patronage, I found all of this deeply attractive. The monastery symbolized something both similar and opposite to the libertarian notion of freedom. Instead of the independent striving for self-agency, their praxis was cooperation and conformity within a nonconformist community; not in the first place as a reaction to secularism, but a return to essence, to kenosis—the daily hewing of self for the sake of others—the labora of love that empties the ego, or rather, transforms it. (Blessed are the poor in spirit.)
At least that’s the aim: the cloister (literally, enclosure) of the monastery brings emancipation, suppleness, even joy, to the soul. Well, not in every case. Some monks, usually younger, looked positively disillusioned and were destined to leave, a few, often older, had no desire to leave, but looked like they already had. Yet there were those whose obedience to the Rule, which is to say, obedience to Christ, had made them magnets. You could not sit in the same room without feeling your own soul’s filings pattern around their loving bearing, their being.
Renunciation (for that is the meaning of monk), implies a new attachment. Vacating wants refilling. Put another way, the chattering imposter, the glut within, secretly longs to be filled with nothingness—the isness of God (Meister Eckhart). We are, unequivocally, communal beings, patterning, receiving our selves through other selves. The monk keeps Christ—unmasker and liberator—as that model-self. All that contemplative chanting within daily elbow-proximity of other, sometimes prickly, personalities, is for one thing: discovering and loving the Christwithin and the Christ in others.
Today, thinking of all this, I was struck by something else—something to do with faith in life, of regular people, even when hope feels like mockery, even when grief sucks the marrow out of every hour, how they band together, become buttresses for each other, these ordinary souls—I’ve seen it in friends I’ve met, family members, even acquaintances—how someone steeped in kindness, love, and charity for the human menagerie, never seeking to stand out, the more they stood out, uniquely, transparently, freely, themselves. Magnets really.
In the midst of creeping worry and mounting grief—a moment of calm: almost happiness, not epiphanic, simply present; and when I turned my head to it, of course it left, but in leaving, left a warm shadow and a pleasing shimmer that almost produced a tone, the kind one feels the northern lights should make. I leaned in, then followed its disappearing form, as if down a dark street within me, deep inside— I want to say—for it took some breathing to arrive at a destination, that, while rumoured, I hadn’t truly encountered; a terminus, the terms of which I’d not fully undergone; an end, let’s say, without an end, which presented as a dark stillness, that permits no entrance unless it enters you, and isn’t there unless you expect it may be, which is not to say it’s imaginary, instead, to see that it’s prior to you, and realer than one imagines; for as I found myself standing there, or rather, being there, I longed to call out some name: the thousand names of YHWH, but couldn’t name one, and it mattered not, as I couldn’t stay, and just as well, for now, compelled, I sent a word of care to a family member who suffers, and checked on a friend who has a weight on his heart, made an overdue call, wrote a consoling email, also overdue; and now many names flooded in, and I quietly and earnestly bowed, and prayed for them all, and then for the millions I didn’t know, and all the while it was though a power was going out of me.
