How a Christian can be a Wrestler

            I like to think things out by walking.  S---- called me peripatetic … like Socrates.  Whenever he would say things like that, I would try hard to shake off the flattery—water off a duck’s back.  “I am nothing.  I prefer to be nothing … like the characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear who embrace nothingness to be made new.  Today, I have just enough time for a short walk.  I pull in the driveway of ForMar, past turkeys grazing.  ForMar is an arboretum on the edge of Flint that was once a farm and is named for the married farmers who left their home to people far from home, people seeking peace.  I head straight for the highest point today—a hill at the back of the acreage—walk up into the sky and sit at the summit watching the clouds roll over me, enjoying the protection offered by high grass and weeds, facing the old oak below that is the axis of my mundi.  It is my sacred spot.  Usually I pray here—a strange mixture of Muslim prayer (prostration), pagan prayer (arms outstretched), and Christian prayer (kneeling and whispering Hail Marys).  Today I am Abraham on Mt. Moriah and Moses on Sinai:  “Here I am!”  Loins girded, pen in hand, I am ready to try the strength of my own religious tradition whose Son-God suffered, died, turned the other cheek.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about emblems:  the Reformer John Calvin chose an extended hand holding a burning heart with the motto, “promptly and sincerely in the service of God.”    

My emblem, if I could choose, would be a woman wrestling with angel or God.  In an essay I wrote on Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, the competition between Jew and Christians for chosen status gets figured by their competition over the biblical character of Jacob.  Christians identify with Jacob the trickster-thief who robbed elder brother, Esau, of his birthright, while Shylock, the Jew, identifies with Jacob who wrestles his way to atonement (with God and with brother).  I am a Christian who identifies with Jacob, who wonders if there is room for a feisty fighter, a woman who takes a stand, a woman who wants revolution and revelation in her life?  Pen in hand, I have come to this hilltop—waiting to take dictation from the God of my heroes.  Writing like Moses wrote and rolling like Moses rolled toward my own promised land.

            On Sundays since my one world ended leaving me dogpaddling in the welter and waste of original chaos, I sit in church, secluded in the side chapel.  I watch the congregation through glass.  I see my place vacant and imagine I’ve died.  In the beginning, I sat apart so no one would see me cry and so I could be close to Christ in the golden tabernacle.  The chapel is dark, and the space feels more intimate.  Sometimes I sit there and have the sensation I am laying my head on Jesus’ breast.  At other times, I feel like I’m in the belly of my own great fish, waiting to be spit out … but not before my own prayer emerges from my own depths.  The fish is patient.  Last Sunday, waiting for Mass to begin, I was praying when I felt the proximity of great gentleness.  It was Barbara—the old woman, dear woman—who has sat behind me (and sometimes me and my daughter) for years.  I felt the fingers on my shoulder, turned and saw her face, and instinctively hugged her.  “What happened?”  she asked, and I told her.  And what she said melted me.  What she said made me believe that I am redeemable.  “You are so soft.  It breaks my heart to think of that happening to you.”  Barbara said something so simple but true about me—I am a creature without a hard shell, a soft porous responsive being.  “I want to learn compassion for my husband.”  “I miss my Papa.”  “I love my students.”  I revealed such things to S----- straight up.  And I know that you, like him or anyone who spends any time with me can tell that I spend most of my days in the space of questions, in the passionate state of unknowing or never being certain about anything.  I read and walk, and let myself absorb my surroundings—a thinking sponge—which is why, since moving to Flint, I go to ForMar most days to call the flowers by name, to make the deer stand still—one day two deer approached me, to dance in the wind, and feel myself in the world.  I let myself think S---- was Boaz to my Ruth, Adam to my Eve, but he confessed that he only saw the world through my eyes.  “I never really paid much attention to flowers.”  How could he love me if he could not love the world?  And S----- had nothing but disdain for my essential softness:  “Christianity is a religion for weaklings,” said the confident Zionist, who I learned by the way is a gun-toting believer in the Republican party—“the party of Lincoln” and, much to his elitist chagrin, of Donald Trump.  He adored my softness only as long as it made me malleable and susceptible to his manipulations.  When I showed the least bit of chutzpa, he told me I was “hard as nails.”

            My task on this road of trials is to discover the strength of Christianity—not just its paradoxical strength in weakness but its unadulterated strength.  It must exist.  How else could seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionaries, like my hero John Milton, rise up to challenge King Charles and to justify (as a tenet of his faith) the peoples’ right to put him on trial and behead the pretender on a cold day in January for breaking his covenant with them?  “It sounds just like S-----,” said my husband when we were talking about the English revolution and how it fed the minds of the American revolutionaries.  I was explaining how the musical Hamilton had resurrected the American heroes in the same way Shakespeare’s wildly popular plays about English history resurrected important—because useful to the present—people and moments from the past.  The challenge to Charles was enabled by remembering the way the peers challenged Richard II in 1399.  The stories of history matter.  They are seeds of time that if nurtured turn into new ideas and avenues of action.  Stories matter.  Bible stories.  Historical stories.  Myths.  They help us to see moments of struggle and conflict in our own lives as the stuff of hero journeys, trials of character, ways that our life evokes our character, calling the best out of us.  Here and now—Here I am!—still wrestling with S----- and wrestling with my Christianity-induced guilt about standing up to him, permitting the reduction of my covenant to a legalistic contract, suing him for negligible therapy … not for the money, but because stories matter, ideas matter, and covenant has become a tenet of my faith.  I still remember a particularly painful exchange in an argument I had with him back in May.  “What about our covenant.  You said it would be immoral to break it.”  I had learned by then that the difference between covenant and contract is that covenants protect relationships while contracts protect interests, and covenants (at least those between God and human beings) are irrevocable.  “So you think you are little Miss Covenant,” he sneered.  Yes, as a matter of fact I do.  I embrace that identity and will show him just how seriously I take covenant.  S-----, if you are there, I want to tell you that I am not beheading you or ruining your life.  I really don’t want your money.  I have taken this step because the story matters.

            Over the summer, I decided it was high time I read the New Testament for myself.  Steeped in stories from the Hebrew Bible, it seemed fitting to begin with the Gospel of Matthew, which, as I understood, was written specifically for a Jewish audience.  The Jesus I encountered was anything but weak.  I was especially taken with Chapter 14 of Matthew’s narrative.  It begins with Jesus going into a desert place, presumably to mourn.  He has just heard of the beheading of John the Baptist.  So often in this gospel, Jesus is going into the desert or up a mountain to meditate, pray, to be with his Father.  On my own desert journey through the months of summer, I identified and was reminded of the Israelites in Numbers, struggling to trust even though they hungered for the fleshpots of Egypt.  Moses was the means by which God wrought food and water miracles for the people he loved:  so many quail that the meat stuck in their throats followed by the more delicate manna that they would collect—just enough for the day—every morning before the dew dissipated; and water flowed, miraculously, from the hot rocks.  Jesus, like Moses, seemed always to be feeding people in the desert and feeding his followers, who worried, understandably, when they found themselves deep in the wilderness without food. 

            When Jesus was mourning for John, the people followed him.  Their presence drew him out of meditation.  My Tyndale translation says that Jesus went forth and saw much people, “and his heart did melt upon them, and he healed of them those that were sick.”  When night falls in the desert, the disciples, in voices on the edge of panic, insist that Jesus send the people away so they may go into the towns and “buy victuals.”  But Jesus wanted them near.  Perhaps he needed them.  “They have no need to go away.”  Feed them.  He gave the command, but the anxious men had only five loaves and two fishes, and the crowd was thousands large.  Jesus took the food and “looked up to heaven” (I imagine him talking to God), and then he blessed and broke the bread and gave it to the disciples to distribute.  All the people ate, and there were baskets of leftovers.  The narrative does not begin to explain the miracle.  Nothing is impossible with God, and Jesus trusted God, asked God, talked to God, and, as I believe, remembered Moses.  During the Exodus, to satisfy the peoples’ thirst, God had told Moses to strike a rock to bring forth water.  But much later, at Meribah, in the Book of Numbers, the people were pressing Moses for water.  This time, God told Moses to talk to the rock, but Moses after speaking angrily to the “rebels,” struck the rock, perhaps venting his aggression, perhaps valuing force a bit too much, perhaps remembering his own past action, but not listening, not trusting God.  Water poured forth but so did the voice of God, telling Moses that because he did not trust him (broken trust equals broken covenant), he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land. 

            Jesus knew his Torah.  His actions in this desert place lead me to believe that he remembered the old stories, thought about them, and breathed new life into them by acting them out in his own ministry.  His strength lay in his absolute belief in what he told Satan when the trickster tempted him in the desert, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  To feed, to succeed, to obtain the grace we need every moment of every day, we cannot fall back on old habits or take God for granted, thinking that we know what to do or know Him.  Jesus didn’t imitate Moses, he learned from Moses’ mistake to go directly to God.  But that wasn’t the end of the teaching.  He went a step further, creating a situation in which he could effectively dramatize to his followers this message that the new covenant required absolute trust.  After the meal and after the crowd scatters, Jesus, in need of time alone, sends his disciples ahead of him across the lake in a boat.  He goes up to the mountain to pray.  Meanwhile, a storm has kicked up on the water and the disciples’ boat is floundering.  Jesus, ever the shepherd, walks on water to safeguard his flock.  Master, says Peter, if you are you and not a spirit, bid me to come to you.  “Come,” said Jesus, and Peter stepped out of the boat and onto the waves, but he was frightened badly by a wind, and his own fear caused him to falter, but Jesus reached out a hand to catch him, saying, “O, thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”  Although Peter falters, I think he is so beautiful for trying, really trying.

                Part of the reason why I wanted to read a gospel is that Jesus always seemed so distant—even scary—to me.  Son of man, son of Mary and Joseph, our brother, our shepherd—I had heard these things about Jesus all my life, but he seemed so out of reach. Here I am!  I have needed to reach out for the hem of his garment, reach out for his hand for so many years … all my life really.  He was there all along, but I didn’t take time to know him.  I am trying now, really trying, like Peter.  I know he is God, and therefore it is fitting that he is beyond me, but in order to love him, I had to make some kind of connection, and I found that bond in a shared skill—wrestling with stories and with coming up with ways to teach the heart and gut truths that stories contain.  Finally, this is what my complaint is about:  I am trying to be true to the covenant and even to S----- by continuing to wrestle with and revise the story we started.  Moses repeated the past when he struck the rock; Jesus learned from Moses’ mistake how to do something new by trusting and talking and believing that the answer would come even though it would not always satisfy his immediate desire.  On this hilltop in Genesee County Michigan, I offer up my heartbreak and my half of a broken covenant, and I will wait, Father, to accept the sustenance only You can provide.  Sitting on that green mound in ForMar, the clouds parted, and I knew at once that Jesus wants me to be and that He spent no time feeling guilty when he turned the tables on the moneychangers tables and chased them out of His Father’s house.

Our Bodies Are Not Our Own

            By the time we had our talk, relations had regained their suppleness.  Monday was a blowout.  When I picked Katya (Kat) up from seeing Suicide Squad with two girlfriends, as I trusted, I looked in the plate glass window of the theater to see her bending over kissing a seated boy, who was wearing neon green—frogman (let’s call him).  “You are in big trouble,” I said unsubtly.  Later she confessed that when she heard me say that she thought of the children’s book Countdown to Kindergarten with the little girl’s running refrain—“I am in big trouble”—because the first day of school is coming and she doesn’t know how to tie her shoes.  Kat may be fourteen, but she is still my baby, and frogman is seventeen and drives!  Yes, she was in big trouble.  After a night of screaming, cutting, and threatening, the upset subsided into days of suspicion and disappointment until, to make peace and preserve my relationship with her, I offered a possible way that she might see frogman.  The proposal was no sooner out of my mouth than she texted it to him and her mind turned to wedding dresses—mine of all things.  And funnily enough, Friday of this week from hell was my seventeenth wedding anniversary.  “It’s probably yellow by now, huh?”  “Maybe not.  It’s folded up in a pillowcase somewhere upstairs.  I’ll see if I can find it.”  I was quite surprised that she would care about my wedding dress, especially since she seems to know that my marriage has been less than ideal.  At dinner that night (to celebrate), we were also working hard to make light of the heaviness that was past, and it was fun to re-tell the way Frogman’s Flint-tough mother showed up to scream at me for implying that her son was wrong to sneak off to the movies with a young girl.  “I know why she was so upset,” I said.  “The 17-14 age difference potentially makes what he did illegal—statutory rape … if anything happened.”  My daughter’s face turned serious before she popped the question.  “Mom,” she began, “I was going to ask you earlier what would be okay.”  I knew at once what “what” she meant:  what level of physical contact would be permissible?  I almost choked.  “But we can talk about it later,” she added, glancing at my husband, who clearly had no clue what she was asking.

            Later came sooner than I was ready for.  But when would I be ready?  She settled down into the red armchair in my office, facing windows open to the night air.  With little premeditation, I told her things that I hope she remembers like she remembers what I said about kissing one day driving home from school—“everything depends on the playfulness of your mouth.”  She loved that and has brought it up many times since.  “The thing about sex,” begins Mary Jo (not Mom), “is that it is too easy to get caught up, swept along from kissing to touching to sucking to oral to vaginal … you get the idea.  But if you get to the end of the story too quickly, there is no more mystery (even though when done right the ride is different each time).  So you don’t want the story to end too soon; you must take time to savor each chapter or, better yet, each word.  It would be fine to hold hands, to hold him … for days, weeks, years.  Let the boy’s ‘vegetable love grow vaster than empires and more slow.’”  Oh, no, I didn’t really say that.  That is Andrew Marvell’s seduction line from “To His Coy Mistress.”  But I did say, “let the feelings grow,” and I was thinking about Juliet’s metaphor ‘this bud of love may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.’  “Because here’s the truth about sex:  excitement is a mystery that has as much to do with the mind and the feelings as it does with lips, breasts, and genitals.  If you can’t kiss a boy for a year, then maybe he isn’t playful enough or creative enough.  Test him.  See if you feel comfortable showing yourself, expressing your self in words, in smiles, in gestures.  Sex is a language or a dance that involves the whole person.  See if he wants all of you before you give away the parts.”  I said these kinds of things, derived from all the bad experiences, half-lived dreams, and still undiscovered country that exists for me somewhere over the rainbow.  I, too, am young in this.

            But there was a lot that I didn’t say and, perhaps, should have said.  Today I feel all those unsaid words jostling around inside me as I sit in the bleachers of Mt. Morris High School waiting for her team, the Kearsley Hornets, to play again.  “That’s my girl,” I say to Stacia’s mom and every time my girl serves, my eyes tear up.  She didn’t get to play the first round, and I felt dispirited but tried hard not to let my face register the disappointment.  At such times, I feel her feelings, smart at her rejection.  At these times, I feel like we share a body—that mine is not mine alone and hers is not hers alone.  After I shared my thoughts with her about boys and sex, I wanted to say something that perhaps doesn’t make sense or wouldn’t have been helpful to her:  “Remember: our bodies are not our own.”  This may seem counterintuitive and a far cry from the liberal feminist emphasis on a “woman’s right to choose” what’s good for her own body.  But I am, first and foremost, a Shakespearean; and the self-fashioning credo sounds dangerously close to Iago’s belief that “our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.”  Iago, for those of you who don’t know, is devious, plotting, self-interested, jealous: the snake in Othello’s paradise.  Shakespeare is consistent across all the plays:  the villains never feel the “deity” in their “bosoms” called soul or conscience, only the humble characters (the murderers and slaves) hear their consciences accuse them when they steal, swear, lie with their neighbor’s wives, or even think to do such things.  Any man that seeks to live well, says one of the poor men hired by the evil Richard to kill brother Clarence, must live without this “blushing shame-fac’d spirit.”  All of Shakespeare’s simple men know that a demanding immortal spirit dwells in each one of us.

            I could have avoided Shakespeare and employed the easy phrases—oft heard in Catholic schools—to make my point:  “you are a temple of the Holy Ghost” or “you are made in the image of God” or “we are parts of the body of Christ.”  Even though these statements may be true, they sound like church irrelevancies, abstracted from the texture of real passion and real searching.  Who am I?  How can love be wrong?  Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days.  Had I said these things to my daughter, she would have rejected them, as you, reader, may be rejecting them, now.  I could not then and cannot now rely on trite Christian truisms, to gain her attention and move her to reflection, I have to find words for real experiences.  I remember something that my little sister said a very long time ago.  She was describing an early experience of sexual shame: after going down on a guy in a casual hook up, she remembered feeling that “the woods woundn’t look at [her] anymore.”  I can recall countless moments of estrangement after sex—the first and worst followed an anal rape when the unknown man dropped me in the middle of Athens, and I made it back to my hotel room where I cried, tucked into crisp white sheets, too shocked to feel anything much except horrified numbness.  Sex can render us faceless.  We cover our faces quicker than our loins so that our humiliation expressed in vacancy, disappointment, and deep sadness doesn’t show.  The deity leaves the facial threshold to hide out in the depths of the body.

            Disappointing sex proves better than many other experiences that we have souls, and those souls play across faces involuntarily if they are coaxed out, breathed out, shared delicately.  Doctor Faustus (from Christopher Marlowe’s play) was plagued by his soul because he could find no way to express it in the external world of work or love.  His solution is to dispense with it; and, in a chilling scene, he attempts to sign his soul away to Mephistopheles in exchange for twenty-four years of unlimited power.  As he tries to write the deed of gift in blood, his own blood congeals.  Mephistopheles must fetch a brazier of coals from hell to get it flowing again.  Even more frightening is the writing that appears on his arm—“Homo fuge!” (O man fly!).  If we listen, our own bodies (like Faustus’) tell us when we are desacralizing them, using them in ways that sever the connective links with mysteries of spirit and cosmos.  Faustus knows, as soon as he hands over the deed, that he got the short end of the stick.  “Give me a wife,” he demands and gets a hot whore.  Tell me about the stars, and Mephistopheles hands him a book of diagrams.  When he asks to be initiated into the secrets of nature, he is directed to the same book … as if a book could contain the experience of being alive and surprised by joy and pain.  At the limit of his twenty-four years of power, Faustus seems to understand that he could not get rid of the immortal part of him.  He wishes that he was a body without soul because then there would be some limit to what he must suffer in hell. 

            How could I say all or any of this to my fourteen-year-old daughter, who just wants to go out with frogman?  Yet, my body insists on saying one more thing:  a jock in a neon green shirt who continues to fiddle with his phone, after being kissed by my beautiful blue-haired daughter (nymph or naiad) wearing a fetching black camisole, is probably not be good enough.  Who could be good enough?  No one this mother knows.  Even if Kat and I never shared a body literally (she is adopted), we share one now.  I held her, rocked her, spooned her while singing lullabies.  When the dentist said, “open,” I opened my mouth.  When the doctor gave her a shot, I flinched.  When she got her ears pierced, I squeezed her hand hard.  And when she sits on the bench in her first tournament at the beginning of her freshman year in a new high school, my heart hurts.  “That’s my girl,” I say proudly.  She is worth her weight and more in joy, in fun, in playfulness.  And I want her to find someone that helps her become her whole immortal self.  “Hey, Mom,” she says to me today while helping me clean up my school office in preparation for the start of school, “wasn’t it weird seeing the other volleyball girls with their Moms.”  Why?  “Well, they just kind of sat there, and they seemed distant … mature.  I’m glad I’m not mature.”  It occurs to me that I was not alone yesterday in feeling that we shared a body.  The simple explanation is that she is still dependent on me, but I prefer to take the coincidence as proof that our bodies are not our own but meant to be shared.  And we must listen oh so carefully to our fleshed selves as we struggle to share them only with those who will wait for the monarch to appear on the balcony of the palace and be graced by a smile that comes from God knows where.

Fighting my way out of Far Rockaway

            “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  This was what the medic in Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, says when he has picked up the pieces and plugged up the holes of too many bodies to count and he’s beginning to imagine his friends dead and finally himself as nothing more than meat for jungle bugs.  Brian, a student of mine is writing about this book in a thesis that analyzes the ways writers use humor to cope with horror.  The book is very moving but not funny … not to me.  I feel like I have just come through a struggle that for five years has felt like I was battling for my own life.  The battle ended with a sabbatical during which I was using an academic project to free myself from dependence on an abusive therapist, but he called every day and tried to insert himself into every thought, every insight.  He even called himself the “midwife” of my project.  Even though I was working well and keeping him at bay, the nightmares worsened.  I could taste something rotting in my body.  The taste (or was it a smell?) worsened at night.  I felt like I was dying inside.  I tossed and turned, imagining the feeling of being buried, in a casket, watching my funeral from a distance.  The image of myself dead met me everywhere.  I concluded that I was damned and that God was punishing me through my own body.  I knew that whatever was causing these thoughts had to stop.  I knew that somehow I had to get out, get free—of him.  The only way I could stop the thoughts was by working.  Writing—about Shakespeare and the Bible—was my way to hold onto my life.  So I understand what Rat Kiley, the medic, was going through when he said, “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  Rat shot himself in the foot to get helicoptered out of the jungle to a hospital in Japan.  “I thought I could be a good friend to you,” said my abuser, who, at the end left me to live or die … alone.  “No one gets out of these situations without external help.”  “He confabulated everything, making himself your husband, father, even God, how could you have chosen?”  “But you were working yourself free.”  These are the things people (counselors) say to me to help me live.  Jesus walked into the house where a young girl had died, “Get up,” he said with authority; and she lived.  For years I’ve imagined myself as Jacob wrestling with the angel.  Now that I am beginning to read the New Testament, I am trailing Jesus, longing to touch the hem of his garment, believing that with just one touch I, too, might live and stop seeing myself dead.

            The second time I saw S-----, I told him about the way my father died—in his sleep when “us kids” (myself, three siblings, and our Florida cousins) were in a rental cabin in the Adirondacks.  We found him.  I touched death and drew my hand away quickly.  Horror.  Liveliness gone.  Dead.  There was no more warmth in my life.  Childhood ended when my mother came to pick us up, pack up, and soldier on.  We carried away from that cabin more than clothes, towels, lamps, pots and pans.  No time to unpack the emotions.  No grieving and no depression allowed on Mom’s watch.  “This happens to lots of other families.”  Reality hit.  I hated myself for the selfish thought, “how will I go to college?”  I told all of this to S----- and cried.  Years later, he told me that the story of my early loss moved him because he, too, had lost a parent early.  His mother.  He felt bonded to me.  As the years went by, we often spoke about the losses that bound us to each other.  I wrote him a letter once in which I tried to explore our different ways of handling loss:  I held mine close (to the point of writing a dissertation about elegy and the female complaint) while he ran from his loss (leaving Far Rockaway far behind).  "I didn't know how sad I wanted to get," he said when I pressed him to explain why he had never helped me with my problems.  He brushed them aside and redirected me to focus on him, "us," and our study of philosophy, literature, and finally, the Bible.

            Reading scripture together, working on a project with a completely engaged older man could not help but remind me of those lost days when I suggested to my father that we build a greenhouse, and we did it together, raising plants from cuttings in a little house (90 degrees in March, heated by a chicken brooder).  Being with S----- was a fantastic way of resurrecting the dead parts of my life:  he played my father—magically returned—and my husband full of desire for me.  “All kinds of feelings come up in therapy.  The patient transfers her attachment from people in her life to the therapist, and those feelings should get talked about.”  S----- did not help me talk about the holes in my life, he filled them with fictions and with promises of an impossible future … because nothing is impossible with God.  To disconnect was to suffer the loss of my father all over again.  To succumb to him (as I did) was to lose myself, to die.  

            The war is over.  But is war ever over?  Do we ever forget the comrades we’ve lost?  My new therapist urges me to grieve.  She is different from my mother.  Tim O’Brien helps me to understand how soldiers, whether or not they have been directly responsible for death, absorb responsibility.  Several different men in his company believed they let his friend, Kiowa, sink into a field of shit where he suffocated.  They didn’t do it but they did.  In a similar way, I assume blame for what happened.  I chose to go.  I chose to let him use me.  I chose him over God.  Even though people say that I could not choose.  Even though I was battling.  Even though I was open about my struggle.  He was the therapist, and I kept turning to him for help, but he never reached out a helping hand, only a grasping violating one.

            After probing my wounds with my new therapist last week, on the drive home to Flint my mind drifted back 36 years.  I was in the car, riding shotgun.  Pop was driving through the village of Warrensburg.  We were headed back to Indian Lake where he would die that night—just hours away.  I remembered vividly the black thunder clouds over the mountains.  I remember the chill that comes before a summer storm.  From the backseat, my little cousin, David, asked me why I didn’t go to my Junior Prom, and my father, who understood my shyness, reached over and squeezed my knee.  He had just taken me back to Glens Falls to have my nose cauterized because it had been bleeding for days.  Driving north to Flint, I marveled at how vivid the sights and feelings from the last bit of time I would ever spend with him still were.  That sky was the last evening sky my father would ever see.  The night of August 18, 1980, it poured all night.  We were stuck in the cabin (no late night fishing off the dock), and he talked to neighbors about his recent (minor) heart attack and, unbeknownst to me said (I learned later) that he was ready to die … that he had raised four good kids.  I had had insomnia all week.  This was my first experience with sleeplessness which has become chronic.  The night he died, although I had not slept in five nights, I lay awake in the loft of Camp Mary listening to rain fall on the tin roof.  I heard Pop fiddle with the stove somewhere around 4:00 and imagined him in the kitchen of the cabin, the ash on his cigarette glowing in the dark.  The next morning, the coroner said he probably died around 5:00, which would have been just when I fell asleep.  I’m not aware of feeling guilty, but perhaps the guilt is too deeply buried.  What I think about is that I felt the coming storm—lay in wait for it, bled beforehand—but was helpless to do anything about it. 

            For years I knew that there was something very wrong about the relationship with S-----, but I couldn’t do anything to save my soul and myself.  I had thoughts of death.  I considered taking my life.  I imagined myself damned in hell.  But I kept dutifully writing him letters and kept reluctantly making the drive to East Lansing.  Long ago in graduate school, I had an Irish classmate.  We agonized about boyfriends and oral exams over beers in the Irish pubs of Brighton, surrounded by very drunk and rowdy guys who painted houses for a living and did other hard labor.  “You have an amazing survival instinct,” she told me once.  I caught the echo when my new counselor said, “You are a survivor.”  What triggered my survival instinct that got me out of hell (I hope) was S----’s carelessness.  In a phone conversation after his wife had discovered some emails and determined to put an end to what she concluded was an “emotional affair,” he told me that he would be devoted to my memory and compared himself to Joe DiMaggio, who took flowers to Marilyn Monroe’s grave five years after her suicide.  That remark told me that, on some level, I had become his mother, and he wished I would just die.  The impact of that bullet, made me realize that, more than wanting him as a friend, more than anything else, I wanted to live.

            I asked him to mail back some special things that I gave him:  a picture of me as a child, a wooden pen box from Kazakhstan, a silver filigree pointer for reading the Torah, a patchwork quilt, and a framed postcard of the Tent City (circa 1915) at Far Rockaway Beach.  Seeing the returned postcard hurt most of all.  It was something like a relic or the sign of my absolute devotion.  I’d fallen in love with the idea of him and with the sound and smells of his seaside home.  “Just a finger of sand at the edge of Brooklyn,” where he was taught by Irish nuns, where he found a rowboat in the reeds, where he loved a girl across the street, where he swam across the channel, where his mother got sick.  When he saw her in the hospital for the last time, she came down to the lobby looking tired.  She died.  He did not seem to know exactly what killed her.  But he went to the synagogue three times each day. It was the right thing to do.

                        “… no matter where I wandered

                                                off the chart

                        I still would love to find again

                                                that lost locality

                        Where I might catch once more

                                                a Sunday subway for

                                                some Far Rockaway

                                                of the heart.”

            I made pilgrimages to Far Rockaway four times!  The first time I went was when my sister got married.  I’d ask S----- to try to draw a map of the world he inhabited at seven years old.  Holding tight to that map as I climbed off the train at the end of the line, I emerged into sunlight.  I felt like Gilgamesh who after an endless journey through dark mountains enters the garden of the gods.  It was magical.  When I found the postcard on ebay I was even more charmed.  The idea of a makeshift life on the beach, living in tents, like Israelites in the wilderness struck me as a beautifully impossible fulfillment of all my erotic and transcendent yearnings.  The tent symbolized sacred, moveable, space made in-between two people bound by countless silken ties of love and thought. 

            Before I unpacked the box of returned tokens, I bought I bottle of wine to dull the pain.  It was working.  I couldn’t look long at the postcard which once reeked of meaning.  Now it was just ephemera.  Gaudy colors on cheap paper.  Its living soul had dribbled away.  But I remembered that I had taped a quotation from Romeo and Juliet to the back of the postcard.  The line (still there in my handwriting) was Juliet's, spoken when she wakes up in the tomb after drinking the sleeping draught that makes her appear to be dead.  “I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am.”  When I selected that quote, I was really in love and committed to my pact with the impossible.  I never thought of Juliet as naïve; she was rock solid, real, pure, and took a courageous leap of faith.  Wide open and vulnerable—so many things could go wrong (and they do)—she trusts.  So did I.  When I gave him that card and inscribed the lines on the back side, I really believed that I would land in soft sand after my leap.  Things went wrong. 

            Now I wonder if, in choosing that line, I was prophetic.  The night Juliet drank the drug, she was full of anxiety and thought she might die.  The next morning, her nurse and family all believed she was really dead.  But she came through an experience that is only like death to LIFE.  She WAKES in the tomb: it is the faithless Romeo, the Romeo moved more by his own fantasies and fears than by the lively and loving Juliet, who is dead and can no longer feel the brush of parted lips.  My lips are still warm.  And I pray God will put a new song in my mouth and give me the courage to sing it.  My body will not be a sheath for Romeo’s dagger nor will I be any man’s dead mother or play Marilyn Monroe to his Joe DiMaggio.
 

            As I finish this blog, I see, more clearly than ever before, the dangers of loving literature.  I believe that fiction can be used to deepen our relationship to real life, but it must not become more important than life.  Literary characters can seem deeper and more beautiful than human beings.  We can know them in ways we often cannot know the people in our lives, and, as a result, they seduce us.  S----- turned me into Ruth (renaming me for the character in the biblical book).  Ruth is a loyal daughter and a lively redeemer whose redemption begins with surviving loss—the death of her husband and the bereavement of Naomi.  Ruth is a Moabite, and the women of Moab are, to the Israelites, whores capable of luring chosen men into the worship of idols.  But Ruth proves that the “other” is really the face of God and a force of God in the world.  Ruth teaches me many things, not least of all that I am Mary Jo and neither Ruth nor Juliet.  I am Mary Jo—daughter of Joseph.  Mary Jo, who worked with Joseph every summer to plant and tend the garden surrounding the statue of Mary at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Queensbury, New York.  Papa was a Lutheran, but he knew, without ever spelling it out, that it was more important to be in church—even a Catholic church—and to put his arm around the daughter next to him in the pew.  Being in the presence of God is what matters—in a church or in a garden.  It doesn’t matter if you fall asleep and even snore during the homily.  It doesn’t matter if the sun is hot and the weeding interminable.  What matters is being with God and with one another in His dazzling theater for worldlings, reading His book all around us.  Even in thrall to a false god, I never lost my love of His book.

Art of Hands and Feet

“Imagine surrendering to entirely different agents of knowledge:  say the pressure of fingers, such that we feel a world.”

We wet our arms in the women’s locker room so it would look like we showered and made our way through the cold corridors into the humid air of the pool area.  The shallow end was filled with animated people but was strangely quiet.  They are making shapes with their hands, my eyes told my brain.  “It must be the MSD kids.”  MSD is the acronym for Michigan School for the Deaf.  Katya and I dropped our towels and bags and found a spot along the pool’s edge where we sat to talk as we tried to ease our hot bodies into the cool water.  I learned from her that there was pleasure in watching our own feet.  Relieved of the pressure of bearing our bodies’ weight, they hung down into the watery blue, looking light, white, and even delicate.  For a second, I could imagine them detached, separate creatures. 

Lost in that meditation, I didn’t see or even sense the silent man inch toward me.  His gentle hand seized mine, which must have been dangling loose in the water, too.  His grip didn’t hurt but did feel bony and angular as if he were perhaps trying to make a shape in my hand.  I looked at Katya and felt a lump form in my throat.  I never saw his face.  He did not look at me but stayed bent over in an attitude of prayer.  Feeling the need to say something, I touched his shoulder as if to say “it is okay … it is good.”  One of the teachers drifted over (probably to make sure we were okay with his advances), and she told us that he was a person who rarely signed.  The teacher guided him away from us and waved all the others out.  Time’s up.  “Deaf people are the nicest,” Katya decided.  

We splashed around and swam.  She wanted to grab my feet and find the ticklish spots.  I eluded her easily by swimming underneath her woman’s body animated by a kid’s spirit, dog paddling on the surface so her blue hair wouldn’t turn green.  “Surrender,” a small voice told me, “Let her touch you.”  I obeyed.  Then she remembered funny assignments she was given in religious schools:  Choose your favorite station of the cross and label the prepositional phrases—“on the cross, next to the tomb, after he died.” 

--“And Mrs. McNea asked us to draw a picture of ourselves talking to Jesus.  I drew me and him at the beach.”

--“It sounds like a nice thing to try to imagine,” I said, thinking that I would try to draw the crouching man who seized my hand and pulled me toward a world where the body expressed the mind in simple shapes.

Something I like to wonder about:  where is the life in one of Shakespeare’s playworlds?  What produces it, or counts for it?  How small or brief can a playlife be?  Is it located in character or plot?  Maybe it is more manifoldly possible than our theme-driven, commonsensical, or sentimental responses to plays capture.  Maybe we access it by attending to the moment-by-moment phenomena.  To carry this insight into life is to realize that there are centers of feeling at every turn.  We can enter the life in anything at any moment.  So … it makes perfect sense that the Italian ballerina, Alessandra Ferri, can dance the role of fourteen year old Juliet even though she is 52 years old!  Ferri, I learned from a New York Times review of her one-off performance of the ballet at the Met, is famous for her arched feet, and with age “the arches have grown yet more strangely pronounced” making her appear more touchingly fragile.  But the reviewer singles out for praise her “vividly particular acting” in which the movement of thought was evident in every movement of her body.

It seems that the extremities of our bodies (which we ignore or cosmetically enhance with manicures, pedicures, and garish paint) are undiscovered artists.  This is as it should be since hands and feet are the means by which we come and go, touch and mold each moment in time, making it a potential pas de deux (“step of two”) or pas de Dieu with the always present, only sometimes unseen, beloved:  my daughter, my brother, my stranger, my mother.  

I have recently experienced something extreme, and it happened to my body.  "The survivor cannot reconstruct a sense of meaning by the exercise of thought alone.  The remedy for injustice also requires action."  Thinking about the way I have been pulled toward the notion of shapes made by singing hands and dancing feet, I remember that Robert Frost, somewhere in his prose, wrote that if you suffer from any confusion in life, the best thing to do is to make forms.  He goes on to give a list of suggestions: weave baskets, plant gardens, build woodpiles, blow smoke rings, write letters or make poems.  Even though I don't trust words because I was deluded by false ones and because it is hard to find true ones, I am doing this blog.  Not writing it, but doing it.  It is a formaction, a path to possible life, a way of digging my fingers into moments and not letting go.  It is a way of both saying and hiding the truth that something happened which I can only sign and solve with my whole self.

Creature Conscience

            “Their souls expanded beyond their skins.”  This is Thomas Hardy’s way of describing the transformation that happens to poor rural working people when they step out of the rounds of labor to have a pint at the Pure Drop and share rumors of their noble Norman ancestors with neighbors.  I am still taking deep whiffs of Tess of the d'Urbervilles as if the novel were the boxwoods in the Mary Garden outside St. Michael’s church from which I inhale deeply to remember South Jersey.  I appreciated Hardy’s phrase because I have, over the last ten years, experienced soul expansion “under the influence” of an extramarital involvement that was as intoxicating (for better and worse) as Tokay wine.  Imagine my delight when I today I had my soul expanded in the company of my blue-haired teenage daughter, and all it took was a walk in familiar woods.

            Content-making was the way I would describe the experience.  And it could not have happened at home.  Or could it?  I have to relearn the movements and gestures of everyday life as if clumsily learning a dance I have never danced.  At home, I am usually buried in a book and she is connected to her phone, listening to music, texting, or in her room with the door closed, face-timing Lonnie or Trevor.   “Let’s do something,” I suggest midday on July 4^th.  “Okay.  How bout the Hogbacks?” she offered.  I was surprised.  The Hogbacks are a favorite place of mine.  Because of the hills that surround a lake where, on a day in April, we spotted trumpeter swans and active beavers.  When I am there, I am almost at home in the Adirondack mountains.  Katya probably associates going to the Hogbacks with stopping at Speedway where I always buy her a Monster or Rock Star, but perhaps there is more in the experience for her, too. 

            After we made it up the first hill and started along the spine of the ridge trail, walking into fully leafed-out woods—done in the verdant palette of a master.  I was stunned by the intimate beauty of it all.  “Isn’t it lovely and peaceful,” I said aloud, as leaves lifted and fell like the petticoats of some fairy, curtsying and inviting us into a veiled layered space.  I thought about Eden—the garden God created for man, that needed man to watch over it as much as it needed rain to water it.  “It is good,” God, the maker, decided after each day of creation.  But after making man, he decided that “it was not good” for the man to be alone.  

            “I just want this to be over with,” said Katya when flies were buzzing around her head and the thorns of wild roses scratching her ankles.  “Oh, no.  Let’s just enjoy where we are now,” I said as much to call myself back to myself as to coach my daughter.  She and I are different.  She is not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.  I adopted her when she was nine months from a baby-house in Kazakhstan, yet we have lived the same seasons and sadnesses for 14 years.  Too much sadness.  “I hate to see you like this,” she said to me in the depth of my depression several weeks ago.  She has cut herself since she was in sixth grade and is in therapy for ADD and anxiety.  Mother and daughter, genetically and ethnically different, occupying the same invisible body of emotions.  That is why I now know that I must defend myself for her sake.

            Eden was not perfect, and that was its special beauty.  God rested on the seventh day, leaving creation open-ended, letting his creatures be … creative.  She and I begin to tend the garden as we walk.  We stop at the run-off pond, dotted with duckweed, where she likes to chase frogs and I like to observe the miraculous growth of skunk cabbage (the first green thing up as the ground thaws—a plant that generates its own heat).  We delight in the alarmed squeak of frogs, and she looks when I point out the tiny sky blue flowers of forget-me-nots.  Talking about bands, boys, and coming back to life after break-ups, we get to the end of the lake and she groans as I turn downhill to find the path along the opposite shore.  “It’s too long.”  “Oh, it isn’t far, and we can dip our feet in the water.”  My mistake:  the path is seriously overgrown, and there are places where we have to crawl to make it under the thick growth.  “The struggle is real” is one of Katya’s favorite expressions, and it suits the moment:  arms and hands, arms and other brains, stay low, watch out for your head, cheek to the ground, the moss is dreaming, listen. 

            “Mom, I need a moment,” she says, and, after GI-Joe crawling through the thicket, we stop.  In the silence, she listens and alerts me to a tap tapping that is not a woodpecker.  “It’s a beaver,” she says.  We are near the lodge and actually saw a beaver with two kits swimming around Easter time. “Let’s sit on this rock.”  Although I don’t say it, I remember an intimate moment sitting on this same granite outcropping with my imaginary lover who couldn’t feel the spirit of the place without putting his hands all over me.  I remember him gazing over my sunglasses and commenting on the amber flecks in my irises.  He couldn’t see the greater loveliness of the wild purple irises hidden in the grasses along the water.  Oh.  It was sweet but ultimately ephemeral because groundless.  Sitting in the same spot with Katya, from which I spot a deer in the thicket and point it out to her, I am happier … really content … we are together forever and, as we help each other connect to real things, we are nourishing our shared body. 

            Rest time over, we continue walking and, although she groans her way through brush and prickers, I can tell she is enjoying my company.  “Just move through them gently like that deer … which must be bigger than either of us."  Imagine yourself a deer, with the grace to pass through a forest of tree trunks, alive to the fact that hearing is vibration.  A few steps later, Katya slaps my back.  “A bug?”  “No, it’s your punishment” [sarcasm] … “this was all your great idea.”  We make it through the woods at squat down along the water’s edge to look at the creatures in the shallows.  We see tiny crayfish scuttling along the bottom and a catfish whose existence we debate.  I think he is dead, but Katya votes for life.  Turns out, she is right.  “When you get really old and sick, what if this all turns out to be a dream and I am your conscience?”  I think about how wonderful it is to be a mother, imagining the doe with two fawns following that Katya and I saw in a different woods just yesterday.  What a privilege it is have to learn to move gracefully around obstacles for the sake of a creature conscience.

            By the time we get back to the car, together we’ve spotted a bronze toad, captured, kissed, and released him.  Katya is still swatting flies but laughing, “I want to be attractive to boys not to insects.”  I am laughing inwardly that, at this stage of the game, I find insects far less irritating.  We are humans from the humus of the earth, animals amazed at understanding what we do.  With Katya, I started to trust that I have enough vitality to assume the responsibility of my vocation, the human vocation, which is to feel the world, to be affected—like God who sat back and admired on the seventh day.