Wednesday, Part Two

Here's the rest of what I've got. If you like it, you might enjoy another post about Ruth I wrote last January.
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Each Wednesday, the new seminarians take a hiatus from class and go out into the local community to get involved in some form of service; this is referred to by the formation faculty as “field education”. I’ve been assigned to a group called the Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly, whose mission is visit isolated, homebound, or otherwise neglected elderly. Today is my first day on the assignment. After morning prayer and breakfast, I get in the car to drive down from the far northern Chicago suburbs, to the North Side, where I am to meet up with my program coordinator who will then introduce me to the first of the elders I am to visit regularly over this year.

Traffic has me in its clutches for an hour and twenty minutes. Inside my head, I rail at the drivers alone behind the wheel of each of the hundreds of cars obstructing my way, and then rail at myself for being one of them. Our lack of options does not absolve my conscience. Overhead, the sky is clear and solid. As I approach downtown, massive clouds hang low and thick over Lake Michigan, a snowbank corralled by the imposing skyline. Memories of the approach to Denver from the east drift along before me. Checking myself, the vista regains its immediacy. Say what you will about the Midwest and its paucity of grand scenery, but the vaulty sky reveals itself here in ways not glimpsed elsewhere. The crags and preposterous bluffs of the Cumulus Range are more precious for their precarity.

Stiff and cranky, I make my way into the central office of the Little Brothers, just inside the Loop. A National Geographic on the table occupies me as I wait for Seth, my program coordinator.

A perfunctory “You have a car?” jolts me from my world of burning sands and barefoot Bedouin guides.

We grab a few flowers from the cooler in the kitchen and throw them in the paper bag he’s got with him. On the way to our first visit, I learn a little about Seth in the awkwardly close quarters of the front seat of my vehicle. Having met him only moments before, we proceed to have somewhat of a disembodied conversation as I negotiate the traffic and pump the clutch. He’s a skinny guy, built pretty much like I am, and not much older. His arms swing through a long arc in time to his undulating gait. Three-day scruff grows in patches, and tones of enlightened foreign policy and human interest seep through his voice, the sort that would do well against a backdrop of ambient city noise or a hammer dulcimer on NPR.

“So, you like working with the … ah … old folks, huh?” I make a mental note to come up with better slang as I await the inevitable rejoinder: “Dude, ‘wrinkly hags’ is not the preferred nomenclature.” It doesn’t come.

He ended up with the Little Brothers after wandering a bit, getting ordained out in California from a school well known for its willingness (as he described it) to confer orders on pretty much anyone. As I stare down five years of post-graduate preparation for the priesthood, I teeter woozily at the edge of the chasm that runs roughly halfway between my passenger and me.

Seth’s not a Chicago native but has adapted well to the city life, with which I am not overly familiar. He recently moved after getting jumped by eight kids outside his apartment on his way to the corner ice cream stand one evening. He maced one.

“You maced him?”

“Yeah, I carry it all the time, now. I swear by it.”

This obviously isn’t terribly remarkable to him. I have to prompt him to get the facts that he doesn’t consider worth mentioning.

It turns out he had to use the mace another time on the ‘L’.

“A crackhead got in my face, yelling and screaming at me. I tried the apologetic back-down, telling how I didn’t know what I did to offend him, but that didn’t seem to work, so I got up and started screaming back at him.”

Chuckles.

“That didn’t work either. I sized this guy up, and he wasn’t that big, but who wants to roll around on the floor of the ‘L’ with a crackhead? So I maced him.”

More chuckles.

“Did you just leave him there?”

“Well, mace doesn’t really knock you out. I moved back in the train a couple of cars and hoped he wouldn’t come after me. A few minutes later, I saw him coming—is this Addison? Uh, take a left here—so yeah, I headed to the back of the train. I grabbed a bottle on the way. You never know. He was definitely coming after me. There’s a bottle in his hand. I had nowhere to go ‘cuz the train was moving, so we just … stand off, you could say.”

Seth hints at to some of the tactical maneuvering of two bottle-wielders in a stalemate, neither willing to risk losing his one element of defense in a bold projectile offensive. He ended up jumping through the doors of the train just as they closed, implying a studied familiarity with their timing. His adversary pounded them in frustration, screaming with sunken-eyed ferocity as the train rumbled, hotshoes arcing, from the platform.

We make our way to an apartment building run by the Chicago Housing Authority just a few blocks from the lake in one of the nicer parts of downtown. Seth is new to the job, too, and so we’ll both be meeting these folks for the first time. Ruth comes to the door with a smile on her face. That is good; you never know what’s on the other side of that door the first time you knock. The fear of a really difficult encounter subsides as we take in the décor—every horizontal surface is crowded with trinkets and fleamarket baubles. Around her neck are necklaces of every conceivable variety, obscuring the pins, buttons, and ribbons on her blouse. Her wiry hair is pinned up close to her head and twin folds of skin hang from her neck like they did on my grandma; there was a day when I would sit on her lap and play with them until she got tired of it. I never did. They were so soft and parallel. We only saw her once a year when I was young.

Ruth is sweet and chatty, so she is well into her life story by the time we have been there fifteen minutes. She doesn't offered us a seat as there is nowhere that isn't already covered with stuffed animals. She tells us of how she grew up in an orphanage, made her way to Florida working for a wealthy family as a nanny, then went west to Texas and up through Oklahoma and Fort Gibson where she met a soldier who never wanted kids but got her pregnant every time he was home on leave to visit his young wife. She couldn’t support them on the money she earned from waiting tables so she gave them up for adoption when he didn’t come back from the war, and was reunited with them both in her old age.

Later I found out that he had not died in the war, but simply left her; yet that was not how she told it, and therefore not how I remember it. I believe that it’s not how she remembers it, either.

As the years sweep by in her story, the circumference of her life gradually shrinks in on itself until it scarcely reaches beyond the walls of her little apartment, like the interplanetary wanderings of a comet that has slowed to a tight orbit around the star that would eventually swallow it up. All the kitsch is the last sentimental remnant of a more widely distributed existence; age and weakness had served to concentrate whatever freedom remained to her and bind it to her tightly, and so she had populated these few square yards with the things that could still please her.

And slowly it dawns on me, as it probably dawned on her at some point in the past, that she is preparing for herself a small army of attendants and well-wishers to see her on her way when at last the time came for her to lie on her bed, never to get up again, and let this life of hers dwindle to vanishing.

We leave her the flowers. I’d lucked out. Ruth is a peach.

The Dark Knight Runs Because We Have To Chase Him

I’d promised a review of WALL*E about a week ago but I made the mistake of going out to see Batman this afternoon. Sorry little guy, but you just got bumped. The Dark Knight brooks no competition.

This movie provoked some incredible discussion afterwards that I’d like to put up here, but most of that will contain spoilers so it might be nice to put some preliminary thoughts down first. Let me just say that I have not enjoyed a movie like this for a long time—Children of Men was probably the last film to give me such a high as this one. The filmmakers were able to build on the foundations laid in Batman Begins, and there is no question that Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker takes the character to new heights (and/or depths). What a phenomenal film to have as one’s last.

As of today, the whole Batman world has taken on a more distinguished hue. The word “epic” has been applied to the film, and I myself had the feeling that what I was viewing was at least was striving to operate on the level of something like Greek drama. About three quarters of the way through the movie, I realized why this comic book figure has fascinated us for almost a generation now: it is a modern myth. It is the same sort of myth the ancients recounted as they circled around the fire and reminisced about their godlike heroes late into the night, perhaps only dimly aware they were telling stories about themselves. It is what their poets worked and reworked, fleshing the tales out over time, embellishing them with their own narrative inclinations and truncating what did not grip the imagination or fortify the soul. Where else in our age can we find this storytelling than in our more enduring popular literature and film?

Now, I am no reader of comic books. I’m sure there are plenty of deviations in the movie from who Batman is in those original comics. Most of what I have to say will have no awareness of the prior fieldwork that has produced this fruit; I judge the film on its own terms. As long as what is presented stands in basic continuity with its prior forms, there is room for legitimate reinterpretation of this heroic figure and his attendant nemeses. There are no copyrights on myths.

READER BEWARE!

I should also note that I am chronically incapable of enjoying stories for stories’ sake. It’s like I have a compulsion to launch into abstraction without taking the time to delight much in characterization, scenery, or storytelling. This is nothing to boast about and is probably the reason why I could never write good stories (I mean stories with a plot and not just things that happened to me). Most of what follows is going to fall into this, so if that annoys you, bear with me.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

Dark Knight is about the meaning of the unrequited suffering of innocents. (There’s a thesis statement for you.) Most crime heroes are concerned with one question—justice—and its corollary, the gratifying application of it to the deserving. Innocent suffering falls within this category, but the writers are doing more with it than just using it to demonstrate the bad guy’s lack of compunction. What snapped it all together for me was a friend’s observation of a significant fact about the Joker: each time he tells the story of his disfigurement, it always changes, and it always places him in a state of innocent suffering. The Joker, though he has no backstory (and is therefore all the more menacing—a great move by the filmmaker, framing him as a sort of absolute), in some way sees himself as embodying the unjustly wounded innocent and puts into the practice the only response possible to one who has despaired of healing. The Joker is the agony of unrequited (and unrequitable) suffering, run amok.

I should say the Joker is one of two erroneous responses to unrequitable suffering: the other villain of the film, Two-Face, constitutes the other, which I’ll get into later. In a way, these two are the twin spawn of this grief-stricken mother. Bruce Wayne refuses either of these and chooses a third way, which in a remarkable ending gave his character the shadowy depth that caused him to assume the mythical proportions I spoke of already.

So, the Joker. It is no stretch to see him as aggressive despair cloaked in violence. A world in which there is unrequitable suffering is devoid of justice and therefore is a world in chaos. There are no rules. He is driven by no motive, operates according to no plan, and as such, cannot be placated or intimidated. The fear with which Batman weakens his enemies is useless against this creature, and so this villain, in his immunity, is the Batman’s supreme enemy.

Yet, it should be noted, he is not Batman’s correlative (as it's often said). Joker insists “they’ll go on and on like this forever,” but that is a lie—not only is this the voice of despair at the cycles of violence and retribution, but in stark contrast to the Joker, Batman is a response to the parasitic presence of evil. His particular brand of vigilantism only came about through the rise of criminality (into which he was drawn, interestingly enough, by the unrequitable suffering of his parents), and it would cease if it achieved its purpose. Yes, the day may never come when criminals do not hold the populace at its mercy, but that does not mean good needs evil. Quite the opposite.

The Joker’s mandate for chaos requires him to inflict suffering on others. In his more personal encounters, he draws his victims into pity for him by telling a false story of his suffering to make them more vulnerable to his final blow. In the wide angle, he creates a number of dilemmas for his victims in which they are forced to choose between two equally abhorrent situations involving innocent suffering.

The most interesting of these is the ferry dilemma, in which an element of culpability is introduced with the boat full of convicts. Innocent citizens of Gotham are confronted with the possibility of saving themselves by electing to blow up this ferry full of convicts. Each ferry has the detonator to explosives in the other ferry, and will be spared if they are the first to use it. If neither use it, both ferries will explode and all will die. Thus, these people are given the semblance of control and freedom in a situation manufactured to inflict pain no matter what.

The citizens insist that “those men have made their choice.” The felons’ character has been unimpeachably established as unworthy. The citizens’ protests are fueled by an awareness of the injustice of the situation smashed up against their conviction of their own innocence. Compared to the men on the prison ferry, these people are clearly less “killable,” and they seem to intuitively recognize the reasonable course of action: blow up the other boat. We simply can’t be killed instead of them. We don’t deserve this—therefore, they do!

Note the modus operandi of evil here: it dehumanizes its prospective victims. The citizens see a crowd of mothers, children, elderly, and identify with them; that other ferry is full of felons and lowlifes. The antidote to this dehumanization comes from an unexpected quarter. The convicts' boat is the first to recognize good in the situation—one guard points out, minutes before their deadline, that “we’re still here; they haven’t killed us yet.”

That observation expands the space to surround both ferries, and it snowballs into one convict’s demand for the detonator to the other ferry. This con recognizes the guards can’t make the choice because they do not know what it means to kill. In a stunning and cathartic move, he chucks the detonator overboard and refuses to engage evil on its own terms, demonstrating the revulsion for doing evil that overpowers the visceral urge to live at any cost. To capitulate to the dilemma is to surrender to chaos concealed beneath a respectable veneer of the lesser of two evils. The businessman who attempts to take responsibility, however, fails to see any way out other than injustice because he has never felt the life of another run through his hands. A split-second intuition preserves him from doing what he does not understand. Only those who have done evil and experienced its meaning have the clarity to short-circuit the dilemma.

This is the only proper human response to unrequitable suffering (this side of heaven). Director Christopher Nolan insists that “the Joker's form of evil is a very human form of evil and I think it is very important you believe in him as a human being as well as a monster.” This lends credence to my intuition that what drives the Joker is not just insanity but something human gone into meltdown. This gives rise to a the common characteristic between these villains: facial disfigurement. What else but the face can sum up the whole of the person? Inflict pain in the foot and you will see it reflected in the face. Analogously, so too with the soul.

Now for Two-Face. He, too, finds his pathological genesis in truly unrequitable suffering. He, too, seeks satisfaction by inflicting injustice on others. “I did not deserve to suffer this loss, to be deprived of this promise of happiness, and there is nothing that can heal my wound. Others deserve nothing like this, either, but they don’t suffer, whereas I do—is there not injustice here? Would it not be just for all to suffer unfairly, then? Is this not my only hope for justice?” Such is the reasoned interior monologue of the bereaved Harvey Dent. With no hope to soften his own loss, he must inflict the same loss on others—and he does so by forcing Commissioner Gordon to “lie to his son and tell him everything’s going to be all right,” flipping a coin to decide the boy’s sentence.

Clearly, the ideal of this justice is not pure chaos (the Joker) or the restoration of balance between right and wrong (Raz al Gul, in Batman Begins), but blind chance. It is impersonal and requires no one to act responsibly, and therefore is an abdication of human freedom and the projection of it onto the cosmos. The law of chance is always watching and always acting. Nothing escapes its jurisdiction, and therefore it has appeal for this man who can find no tribunal to hear his claim. I would not be the first to point out the clear parallel to Anton’s coin-flipping discipline in No Country For Old Men, though Two-Face has been making his own luck for much longer.

How, then, does Batman himself fit in to all of this? We pick up in Dark Knight as Bruce Wayne is stepping out of the honeymoon phase of being a hero. We can sense his awareness of the grind of his double life and the relentlessly encroaching intensification of evil. We see a shot of the numerous scars across his back and arms from untold encounters with unscrupulous evildoers. Alfred, in perennially wise tones, informs Bruce he is still only a man, with limits. Something tells us we are going to witness a transformation in the Batman.

Indeed, it proves to be a transformation from symbol and executor of justice to despised bearer of secret truth. The Joker maintains the upper hand on Batman by playing on his reputation—only a weakling and a coward would allow a psychopath to continue to kill people rather than reveal his true identity (so goes the Joker's story). Batman’s ethics require him to rise to this challenge, and he does. It is here he discovers his limit—Commissioner Gordon saves his life when the Joker gets the best of the Batman. In Harvey Dent, Bruce recognizes the man who can do what Batman can never do: bring justice to the daylight. Dent is the White Knight; Batman only comes out at night.

It is this recognition that requires the “noble lie” following Two-Face’s death. This lie is required, we are told, because the people need an image of hope, and that “their faith deserves a reward.” This reward must be of the waking world, or not at all; shadowy vigilantes are no basis for a system of government, after all! (Nor are watery tarts distributing scimitars, but that’s another argument altogether.)

And so Batman assumes the role of the scapegoat. Like Plato’s just man, he is most truly just when he does right even when opprobrium and abuse is heaped upon him, even from the very ones he protects. A common enemy diffuses the rising tension and allows it to expend itself on a victim equally repulsive to all. Bruce Wayne has been thereby invited into a new way of being—one in which unjust suffering is its very condition. Yet he does so with alacrity. As we see him run from the scene, a new weight is upon him, which he bears willingly and secretly. Not only does Gotham’s order hang on his shoulders, but its sanity as well. In his acceptance of unjust suffering lies the rescue of Gotham.

[END SPOILER ALERT]

Whew! Where does all this leave us? Unrequited suffering of innocents is a real question, and so we ought to expect faith to have something to say about it. It’s not exactly peripheral to Christianity, after all. I will not attempt a thorough answer to it at this point, but I do want to emphasize again how this film carries a portrayal of the longing for ultimate justice. It is the cry of the suffering innocent from beneath the altar in the Book of Revelation, where they cried out with a loud voice,

O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?

Revelation 6:9

It is this cry that nourishes Christian hope. In this case, God's judgment is good news! Not without reason did the Holy Father Benedict write his latest encyclical on this most fundamental of virtues. In a short hat-tip to the atheistic philosopher Theodor Adorno, Benedict addresses the longing for justice cast in dramatic terms in our film (and in so many films today). The answer to this longing is not to be found in ever more spectacular retribution against those who perpetrate violence and evil. Rather, it is only to be found in the final judgment. Adorno insists that the horrible injustices of history should not have the final word. There must finally be true justice. But that, in the words the Pope quotes from Adorno, would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.” In other words, there can be no such thing as unrequitable suffering, and therefore it is never justified to inflict it on others in order to preserve ourselves from it. Yet this would mean, as the Holy Father points out, something foreign to the thought of Adorno: the resurrection of the dead.

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him,
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not fail or be discouraged
till he has established justice in the earth.

Isaiah 42:1-5

If we are to evangelize this culture, we need to find ways to unearth its deep longings and show what truly satisfies them. And if that means I have to go watch Batman again, then I think I’m up for it.

[Update: saw it again this past weekend. I stand by my interpretation.]

John Brown Would Be Disgusted

The Kansas chapter of the National Right to Life Committee has just published an in-depth summary of the recent history of late-term abortion controversy in our state. If you are not aware of this controversy, I highly suggest you take a half hour to read this article and learn the details, regardless of your geographical origins. I assure you, there is no exaggeration in the reporting here. The press against Phill Kline is relentless and violent; every time I pick up a paper when I'm visiting my folks back home, the editors and journalists kick and spit on this "hayseed Torquemada," this "right-wing fanatical ideologue". No stick is too good to beat the man with. One begins to wonder, in the absence of any positive qualities whatsoever, how the man ever got elected to any office to begin with.

It is a struggle that parallels with startling precision the slavery controversy that played out so dramatically (and violently) in 19th-century Kansas. The principles in question pertain just as directly, if not more so, to the question of human rights; the derisive and bewildered gaze with which we look rightfully upon slavery proponents of yesterday will one day be turned upon us here and now, and just as rightfully. Let the thought of that piercing gaze shrivel and crush this willful corruption of justice.

[In case there is some ambiguity regarding the title of this post, I do not mean to advocate violent resistance of the abortion industry; in this regard, John Brown would most likely despise those of us who pursue justice through law rather than violent conflict. Nevertheless, he was a visionary willing to make tremendous sacrifices in order to snap out of complacency the people of his time who were perfectly fine with allowing millions of human beings to be subjected to the cruelest forms of abuse and oppression because it was simply the way things were. That Kansans cast the late-term abortion issue in terms of "justice" when a massive memorial of this man has been enshrined in our state capitol only indicates the inability of our citizens to learn the lessons of history. My guess is that each time Governor Sibelius thinks of that terrifying mural, she either runs her mind in circles trying to rationalize her conduct or resolves never to let it cross her mind again.]

A Carapace Dissolved

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God," a poet once prayed,

For you

as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me; and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I couldn't help but remember the opening lines to Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV as I wrapped up Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych for a class on death and grieving here at the seminary. Back in college, we had an all-school seminar on this work of short fiction, and though I enjoyed it then, the intervening years have only enriched my experience of it. It is the ultimate drama: the inner dialogue of a dying man confronted with the possibility that his entire life was lived in the pursuit of vanity, and nothing less than eternity is at stake. Every other story derives its dramatic power from this possibility of salvation (or its loss). One moment stands out. Ivan lies in pain, waiting for death, yet unable to let go of life; as the truth of his situation slowly dawns upon him, all those who peopled his life and participated in the game of bourgeois society along with him are stripped of their charm. Only the duplicity and superficiality remain, and they are loathsome to him.

He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which choked and stifled him. And he hated them on that account.

Consider the agony of this moment: the possibility that what by all accounts was a decorous, gentlemanly, and entirely correct life might have been spent "plowing the sand and sowing the ocean" is real; I have reason to believe that my life has been spent this way, and every relationship I examine in the light of this possibility, even the most intimate, reinforces my conclusion that it is so. Now, at the end, I am forced to discard all my labors and sacrifices as so much smoke and wind. Had this knowledge come when I was in a position to do something about it, it might have served some purpose. All that is left to me now is to die in despair, rueing the day I ever asked the question "what was it all for?"

Anger is understandable in this situation. Augustine remarked in passing about this in his Confessions:

Why is it that 'truth engenders hatred'? Why does your man who preaches what is true become to them an enemy (Gal 4.16) when they love the happy life, which is simply joy grounded on truth? The answer must be this: their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken. And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong. Because they do not wish to be deceived but wish to deceive, they love truth when it shows itself to them but hate it when its evidence goes against them.

Yes: it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For we provoke Him to wrath with our misdeeds; yet His wrath is nothing more than His steadfast resistance to the encroachment of the forces of sin and death upon His creatures. God's wrath is good news, as it's been said. It is the wrath of a protective Father. The discovery of an awful truth about oneself is a gift, never to be refused in order to return to manufactured illusions. In His mercy, a moment of clarity is offered. For those with eyes to see, it is presented through the ordinary things of life, standing behind them, knocking, breathing, shining, healing. Yet for those whose sight fails them, who render themselves incapable of apprehending reality as it is, other more forceful means are available to the physician. And it is here that we find ourselves confronting the reality of suffering.

What strikes me as wholly inadequate in most attempts at theodicy (the justification of God's ways to humanity, the presence of evil and suffering in the world, etc.) is that they are always directed outward. They are meant to explain the suffering of another to the audience that observes it, and one that observes it from a distance, no matter how compassionately. Ivan Karamazov is not plagued with his own suffering, but that of the innocent five-year-old girl pounding her chest with her little fist and crying out to "dear God" to protect her from her cruel and hateful parents, or the infants skewered on the bayonets of pillaging soldiers. Yet it is precisely the meaning of her suffering that is inaccessible to him. What would lead us to believe that we have access to what transpires in the hidden and silent recesses of the person when the full weight of pain is laid upon him? It is incommunicable, for it is inexhaustible, unable to be labeled with neat classifications and placed in a scheme that somehow takes Everything into account. It is always more.

What these fail to take into account is the meaning of suffering for the one who suffers. This is not to glibly dismiss it in the way the genuinely compassionate find so repulsive; it is to ground it in the infinite dignity of each person in the sight of God.

Our own pain speaks plain words, though we may not have ears to hear them. What it has to say, it says to us and to us alone. To me. I alone am responsible for discerning its truth and learning its lessons. I cannot interpret the suffering of another, and so I cannot justify it or explain it away. Only I can discover the secret resistance to the love that draws me to itself, and so the messenger of that love—be it ever so kind or savage—is meant to overcome that resistance without force or compulsion.

If we truly understood what was at stake, the poet's prayer would ever be on our lips. The possibility of refusal is very real. We must cultivate a readiness to be o'erthrown:

That we might rise and stand.

NC08 From the Inside

After four years of involvement with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, I was able to attend a conference for the first time this past weekend.

This was not for lack of opportunities—they held four conferences in the last five years (six conferences, actually, if you count the regional ones in 2006). This one was the fourth at which I was present, yet it is an understatement that as a staff member, I certainly was not in attendance at any of them. The pressures of conducting the event in collaboration with the other missionaries were too great to allow for much real receptivity to the gathering and the movements of grace throughout. Never before was I aware of the magnitude this privation.

For the first time, conference permitted me to pray. This was not a result of the way we all prayed; FOCUS has always leaned more towards styles of prayer that did not attract me. Yet this year, it did not matter. The intense devotion was plain, and anyone with sense was aware of it, could recognize it, saw it ebb at points and rise at others, the climax of which was always in the liturgy. And this time there were no talks to prepare, no events to fine-tune, no organization necessary to make sure dozens of students got where they were supposed to go, or last-minute pitches to reluctant potential staff-members. A certain unreality hung about the place. Part of that was not leaving the building for four days—though this gave me the distinct pleasure of savoring the taste of fresh air after getting nothing but the reconstituted stuff for so long. In another way, though, it was the conviction that the total submersion in this intensely planned world of talks and vendors and wall-to-wall custom carpeting was not to last, and should not last. Drink, and move on. Be about your business. The real work is yet to begin.

The family members of missionary staff were in remarkably high attendance, a first. One family I know piled five children in a van and hauled them from Nebraska. The thing is, families know when someone changes. When something different in one, all notice; if they are good changes, they are also intriguing ones. What caused this? they ask. Where did this come from? This is the child or sibling or friend I know, but there is a difference, and it is one I like. Perhaps I, too, should see the source from whence this freshness flows. I, too, will come and see.

There were students all about, and I was free to sit with those whose personal history had intersected with my own, and to hear what has become of them these last few years. Missionaries know there is no blame cast on those who do not stay in touch; that people lose track of one another pronounces no verdict on the authenticity of their friendship while it was a plain fact to both. The testament to this is the ease with which the darkened rooms of the soul are warmed by the tiny candleflame rekindled by stumbling over an old friend in the murk while shuffling about, each straining to catch the failing light in the corners of their eyes.

There is a distinct memory of a day when, in the midst of discernment over whether or not to throw in my lot with this bunch, I was intrigued by the thought of the faces of the people I would be given to know, to influence, and to be influenced by. They were all figments of my imagination then, adorned with cartoonish grins of adulation. They have since been retouched with a more realistic tone. The people with whom I was given to live and work, who once were mere guesses, are real. Some of them had changed since last I saw them, others were comfortably the same, and still others were discernible (along with another’s) in the round and fleshy bobblehead of their first or second child. Each had their own place within me, shaped me, are me. Out of their magnetism or repulsion, and that of many, many others, somehow a uniqueness is shaped. An unrepeatable instance of God’s creativity, each and all.

In the midst of all this, it was hard to decide whether the circumstances of our age that have made relocation so commonplace—even mandatory—are desirable. At what point does exposure to people from so many places and backgrounds cease to enrich? Is there a time when one loses a stable identity and learns little more than to step from one world to another, to navigate the world rather than to be a part of it? There is a certain violence to being thrust back into situations and relationships that were once terribly formative but are now more like the rings of an oak—to revisit them involves a rupture of subsequent progress. That is not to say that they are not intensely pleasurable or regrettable in any way, but simply that our here-today-gone-tomorrow world has made such situations standard. At such times, it is a source of refreshment to contemplate with anticipation the place where I will die: where I will leap from becoming into permanence, sped along by those with whom long friendships have mellowed with time.

This seems a strange way to end a post on the national conference, but really, what more was it about? What more is there to hope for than a long life filled with companions fueled by the love of Christ, perhaps some of them ignited by one’s own flame, remembered and offered as one breathes the last “Amen”?

Eternity
DanielMartinDiaz

The Cloud of Unfeeling

Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him,
and let none of his words fall to the ground.

1 Samuel 3:19

As I rounded the corner into her room with a red poinsettia in hand, the gold foil in which it was wrapped crinkled in my grip. Here, there was no smell to get used to. Both the nursing home and the senior housing project, my two previous visits, had rancid air that clung on me for several minutes after stepping outside into the crisp snowfall. In the hospital, nothing stayed around long enough to get rancid—a new bed, a spongebath, fresh sheets, then off to a new ward. Yet when left to themselves, the elderly do not change unless they have to. It is a survival mechanism, I think. At times I wonder if the only reason some people live so long is that dying would disrupt their routine.

For instance, I had called Larry (the one in the project) the night before to let him know I would be coming; the neutral voice of the phone lady informed me that 3-1-2-2-5-6-2-7-5-6 had been disconnected and that no further information was available. The only two possibilities quickly crystallized: a protracted stay at the VA precluded his usual timely bill payment, or the chronic pulmonary obstruction had finally asphyxiated him. Larry doesn't skip on his bills; quite the contrary. I have a hard time convincing him that I can't take any money from him when I run little errands he can't do himself. This time, I bought him a smaller poinsettia and didn’t buy him a box of chocolates like I did for the others, figuring that either way he’d be in no condition to enjoy them. The attendant at the door informed me he was still around, 313, same as usual. As I pounded on his door, hardly wanting to open my mouth for the taste of the air, there was no response, and the door was locked. I assumed I’d just missed him, until one of the neighbors stepped out and informed me he’d moved up to 413 two days earlier, and the phone company hadn’t hooked up his new line yet. (Apparently there was a third possibility.) I found him in 413 with his headphones on, leering into the TV set, and his pale eyes filled the lenses of his glasses as he tried to recognize the sound of my voice. I sat as he griped and cursed and laughed at my jibes, just like old times.

The elderly do not change unless they have to.

Ruth had sounded horrible on the phone the evening before, but she seemed happy about my promise to visit the next day so I assumed the subdued tone was because she had her teeth out. Seven hours after our conversation, a neighbor heard her shrieking for help and the paramedics brought her to the nearby hospital to recover from massive dizziness and pain from her recent falls. She had shrunken visibly since I saw her five months ago, now bent nearly double in her bed, the crown of each knob of bone whitening the skin along the horseshoe curve of her spine; speechless with pain and horrendous vertigo, unable to lift her head for more than a few moments to acknowledge that she recognized me—and in so doing she revealed through the neck of her shift bowls of skin hung around impossibly thin bones whose arrangement I did not recognize. Her chin sunk back to her breast, and she whimpered for the dizziness. As I greeted her son, who had driven many days to be with his mother during what may well be her last days, every word we exchanged in the vicinity of this contorted woman had the tone of a blasphemy.

There was not much time, as several inches of impending snow and a good portion of Chicago still lay between me and evening Mass. Ruth was insensible so we chatted for a few minutes as if she was not there, and the abyss gaped wider. This woman was in a sorrowfully shrunken world of her own, isolated from us, and we from her. I was as desperate as I was unable. When I took my leave, I put the beads that had slipped into a crease in the sheets back into her hand, and told her that he would be with her; keep fighting, it would be better soon.

As I uttered them my words rebounded back into my face as if I were speaking alone in a silent room with my nose against a plaster wall.

They dribbled off my lips and ran down my chin, splattering on the bedrail and running along the leg of the bed into a puddle on the floor, unnoticed, forgotten, dull, worthless, absurd, like the red poinsettia wrapped in gold foil that sat beside her, out of the range of her crippled vision, on the bed tray.

amdg