Magnets Really

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 Christ within 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.