*
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.
*
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