The story of an elf (Part 1 of many)

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It is time to tell Elf's story, we can no longer put if off.

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In the last dregs of 2004 Elf had fallen in love with the man called Dave, the missing man, the "ridiculous knight", had swallowed the love quietly and "offered it up", a common story -- but love was not the source of her troubles. After all, she had been in unrequited love with many different people at many different times -- love for a human was one of those things you just had to give to God and try to ignore. Love was almost never *returned*, just held close to and somehow dealt with. Love was not her problem.

It was the world's problem, not hers. Because the same way that the world had more explanations than there were things to explain, and had more causes than there were effects to be caused, so, in just the same way, it was that the world contained more love than there were people available to receive love and accept it with gratitude or even to give it away carefully. Love overpowered all the lovers, there weren't enough places in the world for all the hearts that looked to be placed. That was the basic structure of our sorrow. So love -- in or of this damaged world -- was like an acute pain that you might find a way to alleviate or might have to live with for the rest of your life, and there was nothing to say, that was love, that was its nature, on the human level, without God's intervention, and Elf's problem was not love per se, that is human love.

Elf had learned to live with all of that, it hardly even hurt anymore. Her troubles were something else.

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Start the story with the moment she visited Father Sam in his distant parish. We don't have an active priest here at the moment, Elise said, so honey if you want that kind of priestly advice, here is where you need to go. So Elf travelled to the boondocks, places almost without names, in one of which he'd been re-assigned. But then it happened that he was drunk when she found him, Sam was off the wagon again. This was her introduction to institutionalized Christianity. Not as terrible as it might sound. You will learn that spirituality of a kind had followed her all her life.

Don't tell Elise you found me like this, Sam said. Then, putting him in a taxi Elf found herself -- oh no, dear God -- falling in love with him too, just a little bit. He was a bit heavy and ethnic, and despite his condition hadn't laid a hand on her. He was gentle getting out of the car. He was sick and lovable, although love was not the subject here.

Why am I so helpless around men? she asked herself. But even this helplessness was not the source of her troubles, not even close.

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