2nd interlude: The anchoress speaks

*

No one understands sin today and that no doubt includes myself and tempers what I am about to say. I will say it anyway -- you know me.

Here is my stab, however dark. To understand sin first you must think of the 2 kinds of pain we experience: pain as subject and pain as object.

Pain as object is something one feels as from the outside. It is a feeling put on from without. When you have it relieved, the relief is like having something taken off the way a sheath is taken off a sword -- or a sock off the foot. Such pain is not you but something you undergo. Some people say that therapy or an operation or the sheer passing of time will remove it. It is not you. It does not have you.

The other pain is pain as subject and cannot be removed. It is not something you feel. It is you. Whenever you feel it also feels and whatever you feel it indeed feels. It does your feeling for you, against you. Whatever thought you have it is the pain that thinks.

No operation takes it off. A subject cannot be "removed" but only annihilated or (from far within "within") somehow healed. No doctor can bring a help or a cure, not for this. Only a brand new "you" can escape a pain that is "you".

No one who has not touched this second pain -- and been burned past the point of healing -- will understand me when I say it is a privilege to have it, if and only if you in fact know that you have it -- and know what it draws you to do. It is not enough to have it, you need to know that you have.

Without the need, what would relief of need even mean? Could you be relieved of what you deny? Yes, but denial actually *is* this second pain, in hardened form, like the crust of a bruise. So you would have to deny the denial and get back to feeling the pain, to the point where it throws you to the floor. And on the floor, thrown, maybe the next step can be taken.

So... the two pains. Pain as object can be a great teacher, the anchoress said. In its small window, pain can be good. So it needs to be listened to -- walked through -- learned from -- and only then relieved. Relieved within awareness.

But as for the second pain, avoid it with every inch of your strength and conscience! Never let pain become you and eclipse your own being. Even if you can only hold onto one small thread of yourself, you can still hand that thread to God and implore him to pull, so that the evil will at last unravel. Never forget that pain as subject is unmitigated evil. Feel the pain but never let it feel you.

Any pain can be borne and is tolerable as long as it is only that one thing: pain.

But do not imagine that you are strong enough and Christly enough to go any deeper than this. Because you are not.

*

The next morning, early November with its frayed leaves shrinking with the cold, the anchoress stood like Dwight Moody, with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And she was livid with anger, out of control, tearing the newspaper in her pain. Elf and the others ducked but could not get away as she began to speak.....

*

Interlude: The widow and the judge

*

There is a wonderful story in Luke 18 about a widow and a judge. He is a repulsive judge but she is indefatigable and her particular nature finally wears the judge down. She gets the action that she wants.

Most of the implications -- for instance, that you must pray with great energy even against the odds -- are clear enough. But I do have some questions:

- Why does a reader automatically take the role of the widow, not the judge?

- Why does even a male reader take the role of a female character, not the male one?

- Why does a judge reading this identify with the widow not the judge?

- Why is it that a judge who has just ("in his day job") ruled against a widow and hurt her, nevertheless, when he reads this parable, will always take her part and thus thinks of himself as widow, not judge?

- Is there any reason one should think of taking the role of judge instead, and perhaps consider oneself venal and stiff and deaf, also of course a bit bored? Does any of that describe any of us? Are we really good enough people to take the role of widow so offhandedly? Would it make sense to think of ourselves instead as the ones being importuned by voices we can't quite hear, or choose not to hear, voices that don't go away?

The parable then might be speaking to the very part of us that chooses not to hear it.

*

Story (Part 6): The Second Temptation

*

The missing piece is conduct (Wisdom said). People say they understand. But true understanding is a place, it is not just words. You stand within it (or you stand "under" it). If your conduct is not worthy of the place where you stand, then have you really understood? To understand is the skeleton of doing. Reciting words, that is not enough.

*

Wisdom sighed and turned back to her cupboard, pulling the Italian seasoning off its shelf. She flavored the ground turkey. She sighed. Again. The ears were pushing her away.

Clients unfolded tables in the mess hall and set the tables, their fingers moving swiftly underneath the surgical gloves the state required. There people, the so called needy, were secretly the deity's favored children. Their destitution was a way that God spoke to them. But again the ears would usually push away what was heard. Only Dave and the Southerner really stood quietly to listen to her.

Now not knowing what else to do, the convict who had become the accidental knight picked up a dirty pan and began washing it. Elf stood at his side and got happily splashed. After dinner and evening prayers they lay down in their borrowed sleeping bags. The second temptation stood nearby in futurespace, rubbing its hands and waiting to occur.

*

As the poor ones ate, the anchoress lectured them in her rough staccato voice, chopping words like bits of food. Questions are best answered not by a look behind but a look ahead, she said. Not just what caused what you did -- because that's a bit sterile, you can't change that now, my dear ones, but instead think about what you will do next, that is where discernment becomes potent. That is the mystery of your coming conduct. If you spent every minute of your day pondering your *future* conduct it would not be too much time. But of course you can't do that. So your acts themselves must ponder and make progress.

*

There she stood, the anchoress playing the role of Wisdom. She was not supposed to be in the room where he clients slept, but she was there anyway, with her graying braid dangling down her back and a thick and grubby night gown. Her clothes were as musty as the sleeping bags. But such was her authority that not one person dared to snicker, nor even dared to consider it.

*

You are my family, she said. I love you as my family. Ruth who is one of my heroines made her family even out of loss, and clung to it even after it had been taken away from her; and Jesus once said that whoever did God's bidding was his family. When you clean my floor, I must say, you bring Him very close to me. You are family, I feel this. So let's not quibble about DNA or skin color. Okay?

Some of you I might not have chosen. But a family is not exactly the people you choose or would choose. More true it would be to say that a family chooses you. Or else your community is nothing but an act of will, how sad. God's will is always better and to be preferred.

So lie down now. Dear ones. And let us not have any quarrels over turf or toothbrush, nothing of that manner, not tonight.

*

Dave floated in a half sleep that was deeper than sleep and felt himself in God's embrace. It was an extraordinary concession on God's part to embrace and reassure such an appalling self-doubtful Christian, or pseudo-Christian (that was the doubt) just at the moment when that Christian needed it the most. One knows abstractly that God loves one but abstraction is simply not enough. I need to be nourished, thank you. All of us, we are simply children as the anchoress says, and we need reassurance in the most concrete form. In this embrace, Dave felt comforted in a way he hadn't seemed to know consciously since he was a teenager. A no-strings-attached love. Must be agape. Then he woke up and found Elf with her arms around him, a mere carnal spirit clutching his ugly hairy shoulders. And his disappointment was grimmer than words.

He scrambled to his feet like a soldier under attack. He said:

I don't sleep with people. I just don't.

Dave, I was just resting, Elf said. I wasn't doing anything. Aren't you my brother really? Aren't we siblings?

Like a bad spirit the second temptation hovered in the air. It wasn't sex, it wasn't sexual temptation. There was none of that around. Elf rubbed her eyes in the semi-darkness, grinding little stars out of the gray air. People have got to band together, she said.

No they don't, Dave said, to his own surprise. A pause then try again. Battles like this, I mean spiritual battles, against evil, if that's what this is, I think I have to do this kind of thing solo, not just the battle but I mean the warrior, the one who has to go out and die -- he does that solo. I think I have to be, well, what I obviously am, just by definition, you know, alone, stop looking at me. What is this? What else is this? Because I am about to go and either *be* hurt or else to *do* hurt in a way that, look, it needs to be that nobody else gets touched because -- because I feel sick and twisted, so please don't cry, it isn't your fault and it isn't *you*. Okay. Not your fault that I'm so sick. Every time I breathe out I start to barf. Look at me, no please don't. This is what solitude looks like. So Dave dragged his sleeping bag to an isolated corner, a wilderness. Elf waited till the knight fell asleep then lay down near his feet, a little fool, like a dog. And it was humiliating and wrong. But not so wrong that she couldn't live with it, meanwhile saying nothing at all. And so the second temptation slunk out of the room, evading people's eyes in its shame.

Now if the first temptation was about being seduced, perhaps the second temptation was to see seduction everywhere, in everything, and thereby reject your own friends (and you don't have very many, after all). Dave had almost given into it but not quite. The family that the anchoress had talked about, this was something that Dave still had.

*

Story (Part 5): Travels in the Mud. The 1st Temptation.

*

As Elf and the convict walked into the yard, they passed Body and Soul, the most unhappily plighted couple on God's earth, arguing next to the toolshed. Soul like a righteous husband said: I want to go to Las Vegas and prove I am cured; but Body responded: No no no. You always take me with you and you leave me so damaged. We need to stay home this time. Because the proof that you're cured is that you don't go there at all -- not that you go there and try to resist what you never should have gone near in the first place. Now with a rote anger Soul scolded his spouse: You're always trying to tell me what to do. Even when you're quiet it's such an aggressive and *muddy* quiet.

Body folded her wings and was quiet.

Elf grabbed Dave's arm and pointed to the back fence. Who is that up ahead?

That's the Nazi Kommandant's wife, Dave said. She was in our Bible study. She's not really in a coma, I guess. She's still alive, it looks like.

The woman lay huddled, clutching her thighs. She wouldn't move or look up at them or at anyone in the yard. She was still a fervent woman of faith, so it was said, but now the edges of the cross she held were biting into her hand. In her appearance of despair perhaps she was trying to mimic one of the Holocaust victims that her "set", as if deliberately, had know nothing about at the epoch when knowledge would have been more historical, more useful, more fruitful. Now in its belated form the knowledge still cut her but without offering any healing. It couldn't. And it is said that suffering is in fact objective, exists outside any given human conscience and so *will* be experienced, like it or not, if not at the appropriate time, then with great futility at another time that you wouldn't choose. But it must happen. Because God would never be so cruel as deliberately to withhold the gift called suffering from any of his creatures. So much for the pitiful shivering woman.

Psalms stood like people on the side of the path. Different psalms would speak on different days (such as Psalm 104 which falls always on the 20th evening of the month). There was no doubt that Psalms were calling to you as you passed. "My foot stands on level ground." One prayed for this to be true. "Righteousness and peace have met together."

Finally, the two of them reached the mudpool near the cyclone fence. It shifted and moved. A woman lay floating face down.

That's Duessa! Elf cried.

She was very beautiful, with her look of wounded youth, slender, having eyes close together and a rather sharp jaw. Her mane was luxuriant. There was a physical resemblance to the girl, to Elf, which the girl herself trembled and rejected. As Duessa turned toward the pilgrims, her center activated but her leg sank deeper into the mire, the quagmire, all the way to her hip. Please help me, she cried.

I don't want to be the way I am. Not only filled with doubt but enjoying my doubt, luxuriating in it. It's beginning to harden and I have no future.

Her eyes closed down on the convict like a pair of tongs. He began to pull her out of the swamp, selva pantanosa, while Elf stood irresolute. There! There now! With a slap her leg pulled itself loose. It was the most beautiful leg on the planet earth. This was Dave's first temptation of the three to come. He backed away and closed his eyes. Far far away, next to the back door, the anchoress stood ringing her bell. She was crying: Children! It's time to come in now!

When Duessa heard the sound she shivered and ran away. She climbed the back wall to the school, even naked as she was, then she ran away into the night. So the first temptation had been survived.

*

Story: The Ridiculous Knight (Part 4)

*

The knight dreamed that his heavenly master had pulled him out of a burning building. The Lord's garments were brighter than neon bulbs and made the eyes pulse with a migraine. Pain the blessed messenger, our healer, and builder. "Do you think that the one who made your ear doesn't hear you?" Earaches more than flutters of the air.

In his dream Duessa, looking her true age, about 90 years old, was railing at Christians for giving in to their delusions. Don't they know, she cried, that anyone who touched the hem of his garment would have been electrocuted?

Terrible dreams came that were like giant moths covering the ceiling. And when they flew away the ceiling itself was gone, nothing but sky.

Stop it, you're screaming, Elf said, the little creature, not male, seemingly not quite female, who followed him around. When Dave woke up he found himself in the anchoress's back yard. All his bruises lay on him like mere decals applied to his surface and waiting to be shucked off. You slept for ages, the anchoress said, and this little one tended you all the time.

He had sores below his calves from where the thugs had hung him like meat from a hook. But wasn't that all a bad dream, a hallucination?

Elf followed the convict around, playing with gusto her lowly role of faithful servant or quasi slave. Such was the role of the -- what was she? a budding angel? a human whose gender was somehow dead-ended? Who are you, what are you?

I have no idea, I have no status, she said, not even among the Christians who like to pretend status doesn't matter.

The ones who talk the poverty talk but walk the supply side walk.

But now the anchoress has taken me in. Nobody dares confront her, whatever she does is just done. So at this point I would say that I am safe.

*

The anchoress was moralizing aloud in the garden while the rest of the soup kitchen, volunteers and clients together, cleaned up the tables. She sounded to Dave like Elise wound up into a second intensity. We no longer understand involuntary sin, she was saying.

People see *sin* as something they have chosen. Of course what you choose you ocan maybe later unchoose. But I would turn our eyes to the sin that has chosen *you* and wedged itself deeper than your own will. That's another story.

Picture the person born into a slave-holding societ. She did not choose for there to be slaves. She did not will slavery. But if she is not a slave, she is still implicated in slavery and, since she benefits, she participates in the sin. It is also her sin, it is also hers. She has chosen not to respond to the existence of this sin, its existence in her *own* life.

It cuts like the bitter October wind, it enters the body but it doesn't leave.

Sometimes, such is the mystery, you pay for sins that another person not yourself committed. They have committed the sin on you and as if engendered you with it. Not fair! Involuntary! But the simple fact that your role was to receive it instead of committing it, that does not cause the sin to cease to exist. And if it exists, it must be handled.

*

You must respond. You must deal with it. Because evading your need to do so only wedges you deeper!

*

After the dishes were clean, Elf and the convict walked into the tiny windy backyard to rest and meditate. This yard had the faerie-realm quality of never definitely ending. You saw the back of the charter school playground in the distance but you never got there. The path went on and on. It was like the world's most complicated labyrinth -- yet the eye's image of it was as bald and straight as a high school track. So the dizziness that twisted the lanes was something that the human brought within himself as he walked.

I have been working on my soul for months and months, Dave said. And yet it never seems to get any better.

*

Poem: A color problem

*

Among the decals of the flowers applied
to this green base that life rested upon,
I felt my colors clash -- and I felt wrong,
part of an uncorrected palette
that painted at a slant --
that painted images I did not want --
through a break or crack in things. My life did not
fit the world it was wedged in nor did it
deserve the daily rapture that it lived,
repeatedly, ecstatically,
its joy simply and slantedly to be
this gas of self that rose out of the flowers
loading the air with its own weight
of -- still unbalanced -- quick to dissipate.

*

Story: The Ridiculous Knight (Part 3 - El barrio rojo)

*

The red light district, it was set up as a hallucination -- a visual puzzle designed to keep people from thinking sustained thoughts such as this one -- or thoughts any longer than this one -- thoughts that might burst like a lion through the hoop of sorrow into another world -- but the marketers had decided and recommended.... oh they had done their work.... and so the colors flashed just barely off the beat -- so that whenever a bit of human mentation threatened to sprout, the flashing lights would burst into your visual field and kill it. As a movie this red district would have had no tracking shots a la Max Ophuls, only a series of disoriented quick cuts, frenetic like the kind of television show whose whole purpose is to make sure the viewer doesn't click the remote or remember anything at all including what was just said, no, already forgotten. The whole thing was exciting, but nothing that could be followed and cut loose. You were meant to live short term, just sensing everything... or everything but the One you could not sense in this immediate way. So vice was a powerful tool for keeping God out of the picture. And the quick cuts were meant to cut God like flesh.

The tourists gaped at the billboards with their subliminal changes. Slippage, despair. Hey, everywhere, utterly nude hostesses advertising car batteries, life insurance and the coldest wettest beer. The weirdness wasn't just the images of these hostesses but the way people, that is, mostly men would now take them for granted, forcing them to be outrageous to be noticed at all.... for all this slavelike labor of being sexy. So was there a sadness, a reflective sorrow behind the fake allure? Oh it seemed so. But all they were there to do was sell things.

The convict, the Christian, the ridiculous knight tied his imaginary horse in the bower next to a giant performance space -- or was it a casino? or was it a bar? or just a warehouse? -- which was the place where Don now lived, prodigal son of a Father that our air's perfumed insecticides -- country fresh incense of forbidden love -- tried to whoosh away with its spray. I think I said that already, did I? but the sensory overload in this neighborhood has emptied my head! Did I already say this too? Because you couldn't think a straight thought in this place, the atmosphere was too heavy and twisted and off. And yet God was said to be here, even here, lowering hooks to catch the humans and save them. The hooks would have to be extreme, to be sure.

*

The bouncers Sans Foy and Sans Loy, 2 huge ugly brothers, blocked the door with their elbows. Behind them giant posters of Duessa holding up a Coke. She would be performing tonight.

What kind of luck you got today? Sans Foy asked Sans Loy. Then Sans Loy said to Sans Foy, I got the best of luck today, brother, and pulled a rabbit's foot out of his pocket. The foot was still bleeding and still twitching, very fresh. God help me, tell me that the blood is not real. Would this be part of the allegory? Because they say that writers use allegory for 2 different reasons: 1) to express things that can't be stated in any less mysterious way; and 2) to mask the direct expression of all of the things in the world too horrible to be said directly. In other words, to say what must be said but is too horrible to say.

Because sometimes it is a sin to hide the truth and equally a sin to tell the truth. And that's when you have to ask for help from the bag of magical evasions.

The brute Sans Loy put the rabbit's foot back into his pocket while the foot continued to try to run away. There was a rabbit's scream but it was imaginary, it hadn't happened. This is a personal gift from Duessa, he said.

And the 2 of them refused to let anyone in and they beat the people who tried. Their uncle Sans Joy was a miasma in the back alley that was trying to swallow up stray pedestrians and cars.

*

So staring at the 2 bouncers, you felt nausea flood your heart and overcome it, a familiar sensation alas. Your head still worked but somehow it didn't care to. It was pulling in its horns. In this neighborhood people laughed a lot and were very afraid. But the ridiculous knight was maybe too dense to catch the ordinary signals. He walked up to them and committed one of the sins he was known for: he lost his temper big time. First breaking the nose of the closest one, he leaned to the side and disabled the kneecap of the other. So immersed in violence he became violent. Crying, get away from me you goons, he pushed his way into the warehouse, stood open mouthed at the the tapestries of blood that hung like brochures until their slaughterhouse smell overcame him and he began to totter. And someone knocked him out from behind, felling him like the flat of a sword.

*

He collapsed through hallucinations and a vision of Don lying buckled to the wall, connected to an electric prod. Did you come to rescue me? Don asked. But Dave wasn't listening. He lay like one dead.

*

The Reader's Digest Prayer

*

- When you pray, do not just pray the Reader's Digest prayer (the anchoress said).

- What do you mean? What kind of prayer is that?

- Well, there is a magazine, or there was a magazine that made its reputation on rescue stories and "life endangered" stories. A girl rescued from a stalker, a town saved from a forest fire, a little boy who gets his donated kidney just in time.

- What's wrong with that? Is there something wrong with being rescued?

- Well there was a question that the magazine never asked. Once the rescue has happened, what kind of life does the rescued person live? Is it that they shopped at Walmart, then had their danger, then were rescured, and then went back shopping at Walmart every day? As though nothing had really happened?? Was that the rescue? Was that the good life they were born to live?

- I'll bite. *Was* it?

- But that's not the question I'm asking, not exactly. (Since I don't even know the person who was rescued.) I'm not asking whether their ordinary life, outside the emergency, was a good life. I'm asking, how do we decide? How can we know? And why doesn't the writer of this article help us answer this? Why this focus on protecting the normal day to day secularity and never looking beyond.

- And when it comes to prayer....

- Do not settle for the Reader's Digest prayer. That was what I was saying. Do not be so sure you know what to pray for. When a person living an empty life suffers a fire in her house, pray for her to survive the fire, pray for her house to survive. But don't stop without also praying for that life that was rescued also to be rescued, if need be -- rescued a second time, a deeper time. Even if that second rescue comes in the form of fire.

*

Poem: Epigram of the pilgrim

*

May my life pacify my faithful aching
and every move I make be of God's making.

*

Interlude: Wisdom stands at the intersection

*

Wisdom stood at the intersection calling. The cars would cover her voice and then roll away.

Follow me and stop medicating yourself with wine and speed. Don't flee your sorrow but turn and face it, confront it, let it shape you into the person you were born becoming.

This here is prayerspace, she said. Not somewhere else but here.

Wisdom was with God before he even created the world. He did not shut you folks out of his blessedness -- not ever -- nor did he ever choose to exclude this place. This place here. Therefore the first step into his kingdom can be, could be, taken just as well here as anywhere.

*

Come listen to me, Wisdom called, but the pimps and dealers laughed at her ill-fitting clothes and un-made-up face and they swore they would never stop and eat her charity food or sleep in her hermitage. She wasn't to their taste, they said. The others, most of them, walked by without stopping. A certain heedlessness bound rich and poor, young and old, black and white. They were all equally averse to her words. And outside her retreat the cars went by in a relentless mood, a form of fury, ready to run over anyone of any age who got in their way.

The convict stood in the street and drank in her words. He never wanted to move past her. And it wasn't that he lived by what she said, as much as he might have wanted to. It was just that he was nourished by hearing them and he wanted to listen forever.

*

Story: The Ridiculous Knight (Part 2)

*

So the knight in Spenser's Arthurian poem, saddled and caparisoned to such a point that his will disappeared beneath allegorical paint -- how did he manage to move at all? Every inch of ground became so meaningful and symbol laden that the horse's hoof sank in and could not could not move. Dave in his nightmare rode the horse (though he didn't know how to ride a horse) while beautiful Elise (in reality strong minded, definitely stronger than he) fell out of her natural role and stood at the edge of the clearing wringing her hands. Find Don and bring him back to reality, she implored him in the "voice without refusal" that Dave at least would not know how to refuse.

But was this reality? Dave looked down at the valiant Arthurian knight that he was pretending to be. His body, his real body, was covered with tattoos and arty obscenities from his former life. He was no knight, he was not in any shape to rescue anyone. All his own color was ashen.

He woke up slowly, cautiously, and dressed (it was like putting the eggshell back onto the egg). Then he set out to find this guy, this Don whom Elise valued so much.

*

St Diodochos of Photiki distinguished evil dreams from innocent ones by pointing out that the demons were by nature restless, squirming in their misery, unable to hold still, and the dreams that they sent were the same. A reality forever in flux was like the doubled tongue in the Book of James. You needed to gallop through this particular land without letting it touch you and convince you. Likewise the first temptation of our leader in the wilderness was the work of the master of flux: "tell these stones to become bread".

*

Whereas the person of faith -- whether artist or Arthurian knight -- sought nothing so much as to live in a vision that was sustained. But this aspiration was not simply granted, it had to be achieved.

*

But what held steady was not the symbols, only what they pointed to. Dave stopped and rested his steed, wiped his sweaty forehead as best he could. In the baddest part of town the gas statons were all shuttered up and the anchoress's soup kitchen was practically the only legitimate business. Prostitutes from the casinos floated by the pumps waiting for their dealers. They were very sad and very hard, no, the hardness only masked the sadness but made it impossible of access because time was running out. They needed medication to get through the day. Their medicines came from the south. The wino with the bag of wine, sitting on the bench, he too was in desperate search for medication. All of them, they looked at Dave and recognized one of their own, just in the way he was flinching.

*

I cannot go through with this, he said to himself.

*

The world as an entity?

*

Some people assigned this world of ours to the devil, others insisted that it belonged wholly to God. Well, manifestly the 2 of them never "co-owned" any entity, or played a game of sharing, so did that mean that our world was not an entity, not a thing per se, but rather a transition, and a place of transition? More like an arena than a home?

So that one couldn't own it or survey it or even describe it, one merely crossed over and hoped the direction was a good one?

In any case, its basic transience somehow seemed truer in October than in August.

*