We are so quick to put on the trappings of love, hop into bed, break out the champagne, break out the prophylactics. And we are so low on confidence, so unable to trust. So few are worthy of that trust. So love is an undependable word. No wonder people run away from it. It is not enough to say "I love you," once or even a hundred times. No, you have to find a hundred different ways to say and everyone of those ways must be true. They must be a revelation. Say, "You are the best part of me." Say, "My life is dim when you are gone." Say, "I thank God for you."
ASCENSION I
Everyone has been gone for hours I light the candles and the incense for the first office of the new day. (Every new day begins in the night) I am about to do the readings for Monday when the missal tells me that today, this Sunday, was Ascension. I’d thought it was next week. It’s always hard to know the end of Easter. I do those readings then. The hymns revolve around them. During the last reading from Saint Paul:
There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling…
I am overcome with emotion. Emotion comes from nowhere these days. As I read out loud my voice becomes stronger and tears come. I don’t know why. At these times my body knows the meaning of Ascension, or anything else, long before the rest of me.
ALL OF A PIECE
I think I used my life as writer to hide from everything else. I know I did. When i was high on my horse, and I am used to being on high horses, I retreated into the creation of the word and, as a result, ended up with a lot of dead words. I lost the ability to say what I needed to say on the page the moment I lost the ability to speak to the people around me.
But this gift, this thing we call writing, what does it do? Where does it end? Well, firstly, it is a gift. I've been thinking about that. I went into the cloister out of college with the idea of vocation, the calling, the task God has set for you. I went in as a monk and came out as a writer and so the storytelling, the work of being a poet is a sacrifice and not one of those whey faced, martyred looking sacrifices, but really a joyful choice you make forsaking lesser ones. And it is a gift, a gift from God. Now where does a gift from God go? It goes back to God. How does it go back? Through everyone he made and loves and so everytime a poet walks down the street or does even the simplest thing in love he is giving that gift. It is far more than being a good writer. We are talking about being good, being excellent people. About being pure and not vain and letting go of what holds us back.
The poet is to her people what the soul is to the body,
--Gabriela Mistral
We ride a bus all across town. As it whizzes I think of my newest book, my finest book. On the frontispiece it reads, "To Ben..." to the one I am sitting beside. My best work belong to the whole world, but before that it belongs to my best friend. After all this time there is no separation between being a good man, a good writer, a good Catholic. It is all love. Love throughout. It is all of a piece.
Now I know what must be written next. In fact, two things which must be written next. Now it isn't a matter of having anything to write, but having the energy, and perhaps the courage to write. Right now I just don't have the energy or the strength to journey to that place where the writing's done. I don't think I'm able to walk through people right now, pick through their miseries and show off the unsightly things. A little longer, a little more rest then I will be back at it again. I will need hands to guide me. Call them spirits or angels or whatever, they will have to bring me through the next thing I write. They always have. Telling a story is like the eighty-fourth psalm to me. While passing through the bitter valley I find refreshing streams on my way.
Like a breeze through the drafty window
Or the rainwater through the rent in a bell
Or the wind in the sail
Like glue
Sugary syrup
Like sap
Like honey in the cleft of the rock
Christ comes through the cracks
CHRISTMAS
After all the struggle a bit of rest. For over four months now, as winter ended, I have been wrestling with myself and everyone around me, coming out of this school year, finishing off books, a final edit of one and the original of another. That other one, that new one is a triumph. Every story that comes out is like some new child you have labored long to bear. When I think of this new one, when I think of holding it real and actual, even the galley of it in my hands, I think of how it almost didn’t make it. I think of its very beginnings, the first thoughts of it. When it wasn’t even a word on the page, when it was just the idea behind the logos. And now it is the word incarnate. This is the virgin birth. Was there ever a virgin, pleased as me, to bring his child into the world?
I think of the time I nearly lost it, that story, it was almost destroyed. I paid dearly to get it back, and all the long days and nights, the exhaustion, the depression, not only over those pages, but the pages of my own personal life. Me, sitting on my friend’s sofa, busily proofing and proofing again. Me, too tired to go on, knowing I’d come to the end of this, but not knowing when.
And now we begin to approach some end.
The best way to give thanks is, after all of these months of mess, just be quiet.
And for now do nothing.
THAT PLACE
The voice says write. And not write because you have something to say, but rather write or else you won’t have anything else to say again. This year—or rather these last few months of the semester were good for proofing, good for finishing up works already done ,but crippled for writing. Maybe because my life, my relationships, were all stuck in winter. What did I say to myself when I looked at Ben? Our relationship has come to the place where all of my most powerful friendships are sabotaged. It is time to end this. Let me end this. There were self destructive parts of me and three fourths of him are self destructive, no wonder things came to blows so often. It was a long time before we could come to something like sanity. All of that drama helped leech away the ability to write.
And it wasn’t time to write, either. I tried, but it wasn’t time. It was time to finish, to edit, to proof, to—yes, imagine this—to live. And time to reassess. This will be the first time in a long time that I have had in m life—a best friend who is physically at my side—and it is also the longest time I’ve gone without writing.
What will it mean now? To write? It was, for some time, my chief religion, my only vocation and—in some ways—the companion I trusted. When Ben exhausted me, and I thought that he didn’t understand or care about anything I said and everyone else was too far away it was what I retreated to—unsuccessfully. Now , if writing isn’t any of the old things, what will it be ?
The best answer I can come up with is that when I write I experience something that isn’t so true in my everyday life: fearlessness in the face of ambiguity, a richness of mercy and a suspension of all judgment. It isn’t that once I reach that place I can write again. Rather it is in the writing that I reach it.
