In the garden of Orthodoxy

*

Your love had provided you with a sweet-smelling yard, a garden smudged at its edge -- like chalk in the rain -- with sudden open fields. Although the yard was bounded, it was infinite. You could well walk the labyrinth of its pine-needle path for a lifetime without reaching a pause in its great mystery.

You were alone there or comfortable enough that it felt like being alone in any case. Where are you, my sweet one, you would sometimes call with sorrow in your voice but if you asked with enough insistence and for a sufficient time, God could always be found. God could be depended upon.

And in any case love was always more delicious being found after being lost. Just as truth always feels *most* true at the moment that it is revealed.

There was a sort of bricked enclosure in the center of the garden. It was like a fortress yet somehow much easier of access, and the truth was that it let anyone in who really wanted to come in. So if it was a place guarding from danger, the danger wasn't you. You seemed to have free privileges there. Now the fortress was called Orthodoxy and it was an expression of your dear one's love. Orthodoxy was not a set of beliefs, though it looked that way from the outside. It was really a mode of protection, a place in which, standing covered, you could think safely. For instance, your doubt existed as a fact of life in the world. But when you stood within the fortress you could envision doubt without getting hurt by it. The place was not a book of facts but more like a concavity of knee-worn stone where you could feel the touch of a certain kind hand, God's hand. There were oddities in Orthodoxy's structure but these oddities could only be seen, much less understood, from the inside. So, in summary, Orthodoxy was another word for protection.

You did not spend your life within this place but you did go to very great effort to make sure it was never far. For its assurance was realer than real and truer than true.

If these bricks made in some sense a house of assignation, nevertheless the love that was made there was clean and holy and enduring. David's ark was not so far away in spirit and truth. People mingled here from various faiths that were able to keep their privacy and integrity just that, intact. Mingling heightened the purity of faith; no reductivism occurred. It was like a house of prayer that had never stooped to politicize prayer. People were happy here. God was so much present that you became dizzy with joy.

Such was Orthodoxy -- hated by those who didn't know how tender it was.

Your only sorrow -- in this place that was single yet filled with folk -- was to watch friends you loved grow comfortable and play fast and loose with their own protection.

I am completely safe, they said. I can walk out of this place and not worry. God is love and God is everywhere, they said -- a truth that was correct and yet not complete. I am not going to worry, they said. They were like Milton's Eve, who when she gathered flowers was yet a more perishable apparition than the flowers she gathered. Don't worry about us, these friends would say, then they would wander off into the smudged and confused edges of the open field, never indeed to be seen again.

*