The place of being - Chap 1: Parable of the garden

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The 2 children were not evicted -- from the Garden of Orthodoxy, where they'd grown up -- but, more simply, wandered away from it one day and were unable to get back. Or was it really "wandered"? Had there been a plan?

What was it that we did? the girl wondered. What closed the door?

Was it like the heart's semilunar valve -- the valve that allows egress, lets you out -- but doesn't afford a path for returning? So was it a natural process?

Oh no, her crazy brother said. Face it, sister, we were booted out. We grew up. No place for adults in *that* place.

Orthodoxy (he said -- with the air of certainty people use when they are not sure but wish to be) -- this orthodoxy is for children. We are moving beyond. And high time.

Then he went back to his college and she to hers -- and they rarely saw each other after that. Because that painful thing -- dispersion-- was one of the side effects of their banishment. If "banishment" was the right word, the correct word to use. If that was not too harsh.

She was no longer sure of this or of anything. She continued to pray, morning and evening. She continued to believe, even as she stood in a wide place of unbelief and felt herself not estranged from its wideness. When her roommate laughed at her gestures of faith she still did not waver. That was something to remember.

For surely you can talk to me of impersonal science. But I have lived in a place where even impersonal things -- insofar as they were there -- had a face, had an intention -- acknowledged that they too were part of a larger plan. It wasn't what they knew but where they stood that mattered.

People today will grovel in their uncertainty. In the past we never did that. It never occurred to us. Maybe it wasn't possible to do that, where we were.

*

In her adulthood she found faith but not the comfort of faith. A certain part of her soul was as if starving in its speculative abundance.

The pain was not trivial. It was not something you could brag about overcoming -- or simply dismiss -- or discuss in a casual conversation -- or measure on a dial. Simple meditation could not shuck it off. No exertion took it away. Drugs and alcohol were not an option, though her roommate insisted she would feel better if she only let herself relax.

Because faith is not something that you "have" but is more like the register of a dial. It points to something outside it that is pointing to *it*. It is a measurement of something immeasurable and it lies inside the will but is not something you will.

So the girl -- the straight backed nubile woman -- thrown out of her garden now, walked through the place in which she found herself. Wearisome, full of pain, a path sharply pointed.

Yet shaped and cultivated. Like a garden.

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