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I haven’t done a ‘Bible study’ in ages, having developed a strong distaste for them somewhere in my past, but I signed on to a study of John that my mom was doing with two other girls because the title of the study was from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and there were quotes from Beuchner, Rilke, Eliot, Lewis, Augustine, Chesterton, L’Engle, and others whose writings I have loved and lived by inside it. It’s been a series of small revelations, just like a study of a gospel must be, and the question we are contemplating this week, “Woman, why are you weeping?” is ringing a nearby bell, so near.
In John, after the resurrection, Peter and “the other disciple” ran to the tomb to see if what Mary saw was right (door wide open, no body inside). After they saw what they came to see, they wandered back and left Mary there, “outside the tomb, weeping.” At some point Jesus is there, having walked around or having gone and come back in the guise of man or light or wind or whatnot else, and looks like the sort of person that lives in backgrounds (gardener). He asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
Up to this point, Jesus’ question felt shallow to me, almost like he walked up behind her and said, “Guess who!” A conversation-starter, meant to arouse her curiosity — self-concerned, self-revealing. As I’m reading through all the excerpts and answering all the irritating questions, though, this act & these words are turning from shadow into shades of light. It’s beginning to seem as weighty and selfless as any other word from the mouth of Christ, like the words of Aslan when he was still shrouded in darkness, walking beside an ignorant Shasta in A Horse and His Boy (Lewis): “Tell me your sorrows.”
That a hugely powerful being could concern itself with our language, our opening our mouths to say what’s so terribly the matter, is incredible. Jesus is tortured and killed by a frenzied mob, and comes to meet Mary to ask her to tell him her grief. As if that act were a catalyst for her healing, awakening, richer being. As if that were the point, the primary concern.
As a writer, I spend vast amounts of time considering my own griefs and trying to organize them into some kind of coherence, some kind of orderly expression, something that makes sense. Ever since I read Aslan’s question to Shasta, years ago, I’ve hesitantly come forward with my own sorrows, hoping it was ok, and have met with the kind of grace that I didn’t recognize in the small story of Risen Christ and Mary the prostitute … until now. I don’t know how this all can be true, but it may be. I’m entertaining (wildest) hopes.
I’ve realized this morning that God’s promises live outside of my hopes in them or despair of them. It’s a revelation … for someone with shit for brains. Apparently the power of God exists without reference to anything but God, and that is saving my life, today. In an extremely, tangibly real sense, I’m knowing the healing of his nearness. So, my broken legs and broken skin are coming together, cytolysis averted again.
The petals are whipping off the trees in white flurries, leaving the small green leaves, so thin that the sun lights them from above like tiny fluorescent lights. Like a thousand small green moons. He is risen, indeed.
Speaking of narrow escapes, when I called this morning to set up a payment plan for the $585 ultrasound I had last month, they said that I did have a discount of 90%, and the bill had just been sent out before the discount had been applied. Now I just have to pay $58.50, oh so sweet small numbers, triply good because I’m starting to pay on my Stafford loans next month. I’ve been doing calculations and figured that I will have about $50 a month to burn, and when I say burn I mean like, buy food and gas. If you can imagine me smiling right now, do it, because I am smiling. God has fed me like Elijah, with ravens, and now is never more difficult than any previous moment. It’s going to be a good day.
I’m listening to Iron & Wine’s “Someday the Waves” and looking out at all the sunlight. I’m listening to the Lord, these days, and coming back to some stillness of soul. Still coming back, still slowly. Katie’s in Bogota, today, Natalie’s at the courthouse, today, and I am remembering the surprise of reading Song of Solomon last night and realizing that I was a delight to God. This realization, that someone’s “desire is toward me” brings a wind and my sails are luffing, flapping, filling with a breeze and lifting off the surface of the water, flinging drops like diamonds into the air and pushing the canvas into a firm bow, pulling the boat, moving. Distance is so hard to understand, but it’s easier because in spite of the unknowable distance between us and God, there is no distance between us. In the sense that I can never enter or leave His presence; I can only ignore or attend. Somehow. I don’t know how.
Clothes I wore to AB’s last night still smell like smoke, and I still see her sitting in her chair as we were leaving. Dimmest sadness but not hanging onto us, as a younger person might have, not asking any favors or for any understanding. Getting old must mean an enormous amount of containment, and I can be ok with that. Perhaps.
So what’s it going to be like, moving away again? I still don’t have any feeling for this, like it’s a numb limb. When will feeling start creeping in?
P.S. The ultrasound results came on a little blue card a couple days ago: “Your ultrasound on 12/28/09 has been reported to us showing completely negative [results] with absent right ovary. Great news!”
It’s snowing, like they said it would, trickling through the air with hurried thoughts. It almost looks like salt or white sand, dusting the walkways and stumps, no warmth about it, no insulation. I raise an eyebrow, because some warmth has come back to my soul and I don’t feel like that anymore, like a single crystal of snow alone on the way down and alone on the ground. Sometimes you have to throw a tantrum before whatever dam will finally break in you and you ask for a lot of help, which I did, and a lot of help has come to me.
Being with someone, in life, not being allowed to hide things, is good. I’m full of fears, not just small ones but large ones, ones that sit and wait until their time comes to haunt me, which might be only once a year, or even less often. Being with Marshall means that my grinding dysfunction is obvious, obvious in its sadness & suffering and obvious in its tacit desire to ruin every relationship I enter. Not being able to kind of whisk it away in corners or hide for a while before it goes back in the closet is illuminating to him, to me, the most shocking discovery being this: that it isn’t going to kill me.
It’s a revelation, that admitting my abject poverty of soul isn’t going to end my life as I know it, and it isn’t going to make all my nightmares come true. Last night we sat in the car for an hour and hashed it out, hung on by the skin of our teeth, then by the grace of God, then were lifted by the grace of God, then carried. All because God cares for us to understand how He understands the world, how He understands us. Yes, “this knowledge is too wonderful for me.”
I put together a couple of late Christmas presents this morning while listening to a mix cd that Lauren made for me, seventeen tracks of Sarah Watkins, Regina Spektor, Nico, Brandi Carlile, Mississippi blues and an unbelievable Avett Brothers song, which (like most Avett Brothers songs) I hadn’t heard.
The snow’s still coming, just like they said, and it’s softening now. You should see it somehow clinging to dotted lines of frost on the car windows, small shelves of snow. I want to be soft, and with a fire inside me. It seems possible, today, and I’m more thankful than I can say.
lately about Peter, and how he dealt with Christ leaving. I’ve been having a still and silent couple of days, walking in and out of rooms like every one was a garden, and following sunlight like a leaf. I have so much to do but I’m only doing what I can, and not crying about the rest, which is normally what I do. Yesterday I bought two new tires and got a partial alignment. Good, that my Dad wants to take care of me, wants to drive away from his workplace to meet me and look at tires, wants to loan me enough to get tires with 40,000 miles on them. I got a kefir at the Co-op, and he got fig bars.
Stillness of days has to do with thinking, this about how I get cared-for, this about how rich I feel, being the owner of two new tires! Also with Innocence Mission, since I put on Christ is my Hope yesterday and haven’t taken it off. I take it to the car when I have to drive, bring it inside when I have to come inside. I realized (an aside) that “O Lord of Light” is a Gregorian chant. Of course, oh of course. Maybe someday I will meet the Perises on earth … otherwise, it will be after. The stillness also has to do with an empty house (wonder where my roommates are), and with reading Acts, thinking about Paul and Peter. How were things, just after Christ left? It seems that paradigms were being broken. Strange, that things would change so much … but only after He left. It’s like Him being there was so many years of people being incredulous, so many years of people standing there looking at the sky, wondering if they were dreaming. Sometimes you have to leave the presence of a miracle before you can understand it, or let your life be changed by it, I think. I’m still thinking.
My dearfriend’s parents gave me a birthday present today, which is a gift card to go buy myself an oil-filled radiator, because he told them that I’m poor, and often cold. The gift card has too much money on it, though, and they said to spend the rest on whatever … the world is alive with possibilities, and I am all warm already, thinking about having a heater of my own, and something else too. Like, maybe I could go see a movie, or buy some pants, or some coffee. This is the kind of generous gesture that breaks, again, the resurgent poverty mentality that I unconsciously use to help my financial poverty make more sense. In fact, it ruins my life.
I feel both like I know a secret and like I knew a secret but keep forgetting it, because of gifts like this that are so wholly unexpected, so wholly undeserved.
I hardly worry anymore about where the money will come from, because it always comes. I look … and it is there. I get back home at night and there are onions and apples and lentils, with a sign that says “ANNA LAURA” in black sharpie on the back of a box of disposal insulin syringes. Something in me stands up very sharp without taking a breath, I feel the orange light from the sunset flickering behind, I wonder how it feels to be a gift, if you feel very proud or if you are shy. Both, I think.
This morning as I opened my front door to charge off into the day, I saw two cardboard boxes on our welcome mat, no names or signs, but filled with food. One box had a half gallon of orange juice, a pint of half & half, a lb of strawberries, a pint of Green’s Amber Ale, a huge bag of lentils, smaller bags of pumpkin seeds, almonds and cashews, a box of Annie’s macaroni mix, two boxes of Luna’s and Lärabar energy bars, a can of coconut milk, two lbs of basmati rice, what seems to be about two/three lbs of “Farmer’s Cheese,” and single cans of garbanzo beans, great northern beans, cannellini, kidney beans, salad beans and “soup beans.” The other box held bags of eight Pink Lady apples, seven yellow onions, ten new potatoes, two honeycrisp apples, one green pear and two red pears and a smallish orange gourd of some sort.
This at a time when I needed it. Yesterday I was thinking about how it felt impossible to eat well, because stocking up a pantry is expensive at the outset, and about all I have right now is flour. So someone brings all this food, and my first impulse is to run around the neighborhood asking “did you bring this?” Because a) I don’t deserve it, and b) I feel a tiny nudge of outrage when I’d prepared myself to be overlooked and suddenly it’s obvious that I am noticed. Isn’t it strange that I can be upset with God at allowing me to be poor and then upset when it becomes clear that all my wanderings are only inside His garden.
I put it all on the couch with a sign for Claire and Brittany (“Girls! Look!!”) and left the house, crossing the street in a river of golden air. After all our rain, the piercingly blue mornings are visiting us in East Tennessee and as I got to my car I noticed it was covered in tiny white fuzzy aphids. In dry seasons of the soul, every grace seems stranger than possible, but when I am awakening I am not surprised to find that living flakes of snow have slept on my car all night long. I am not surprised to find their legs and backs like ice crystals and like cotton.
Walking downtown, then, from free parking in the Old City up to Coffee & Chocolate, I pass an old man combing his long beard and another man who nods and says “what’s happenin’ sister.”
You look back on past days with nostalgia, realizing that a certain year in which you pinched and scraped, or cried a lot, maybe every night, was the year you went the most places and lived the most deeply. You remember it and wish you’d realized its depth of color at the time. This morning, walking down Gay Street, I did this. It was partly the fall morning, partly all the colors and the extravagant gift on the doorstep, partly the moving toward grad school and partly having Marshall as a dearest friend, all this, wading through it like I’d escaped the mental hospital and was wandering through a Narnian wood. Via wardrobe. I believe in wardrobes, you know.
If I can start expecting the world to be closed to me and then get a huge box of clothes in the mail from KG & Emily, boxes of food on the doorstep, a free bus ticket to Nashville to see Mary Oliver & my Great Friends, letters and checks here and there from unexpected quarters at unexpected times, then it seems I will have to keep turning. And by turning, I mean turning on my axis or on my stem, following my new understanding of the working of the universe like I am turning my leaves to the sun. Turning as in turning into the person that is turning into the right kind of person, the kind that is able to expect miracles every day, and is not surprised to find them, not surprised to have to wait for them either because of the certainty that they are there, the certainty that I will find them if they are ready to be found.
