Poor rich poor -- sad happy sad

*

She was poor but she was rich. Her being rich was poor in that she didn't know how long (or even whether) it would last. So there was an inner poverty to the comfort she temporarily felt, a feeling of its only being for a time. Meanwhile her being poor was rich.

Poverty was rich insofar as it didn't worry and didn't bother about worrying. It was actually sufficient, for now and now and now. It was comfortable not because it was but because it had decided to be, no matter what. It didn't fret about what it didn't have. The moment it fretted it became poor, even if its supply of money was bottomless. Bottomless!

So the sense of being well off was a state of mind that had nothing really to do with money. Except that the state of mind itself was a bit like money, in that it could be collected or spent.

And if she thought about it in that finite way ("collected or spent") then she became poor no matter how much she had.

But there was always a point at which poverty stopped. And that point was always rich.

*

Prayer and behavior -- in the world -- they must be a single seamless entity, a garment with no seam. If you "withdraw" into prayer, well, a valid prayer does not *leave* you there, abandoned and withdrawn. Prayer is action, prayer is behavior. "Prayer changes things". What doesn't change must not have become prayer.

*

When I am happy I am sad. The happiness stops at a point. The world stands outside. Ummm, the sadness has an inner red seam that is already happy or at least will be. Not will be, is. It is there. And the self is always ready to turn inside out. The transience -- that men are "a puff of wind" -- that is part of the definition, intrinsic. The discipline to accept that sadness and live with that is... well, that's what happiness is.

The closer you approach the One who puts reality off and on like a garment, the happier you will be, even not to be happy. And the sadness -- that too is something you cherish and do not readily surrender. So it continues.

*

Soup

*

A church bell rings -- in your head, not outside. When you recognize it, then it's physical sound, a vibration. It was inside first somehow.

It sings: true prayer is conduct! Prayer is conduct! True prayer is behavior.

Never pray for someone you can materially help without also providing that help. The help and the prayer: one seamless thing to God. A pretty garment.

So Elf's bones grew moist in the Christian air.

She could not close off -- moved in the mist of conversion, where being Christian still seemed easy, natural.

Free of the triple demons? (Avarice, gluttony, self-esteem). By no means. But they were placed, limited, parenthesized for now. She fed on God and fed herself with God.

Ordinary (?) people found her hard to be around. Her boss would complain about the times she would pause on the floor, move through a trance on the gym floor, in the middle (so to speak) of her own swinging arms.

I feel elated and I can't explain. Her own body spoke in tongues to her. No time or space to analyze this.

Serving the hot meals, she smiled like an idiot. That's all right. I am an idiot. With incorrectness she gave her loose money away. The "poor" found her a bit eerie, but interesting. You could say otherworldly.

Wrapped in time, not at al ltimeless, but in a different time going a different way. She hovered more than cycled.

When happiness walked the labyrinth in the porch behind the kitchen it would seem to sink into the turns and acquire a spin that difficult to carry back into ordinary, repetitive, humdrum daily life.

*

Depression would recur when she brought her gaze back to the people around her: from those near homelessness to those like Ainsley who were richly housed and miserable. Happiness was not an art to be taught, did not have prescribed steps, could not be passed on like a disease. If you scrutinized it coldly it disappeared -- like faith. It remained but wasn't yours anymore.

Don't just stand there, honey, you have to dish out that soup. Elf would fill the bowls so high that clients had trouble carrying them.

This is absolutely the finest soup in the world, Loopy Billy said one day. Listen, if you put this soup in cans and sold it, you'd turn the church into a billionaire. This soup is magic. This is the best soup ever made. (Pointing to a pot of zucchini soaked in salty tomato.)

Billy talked on and on in his sweet disorderly way, while in the background, behind him in the hall, Elf saw (but was too repressed to pursue) a familiar wraith moving from table to table, eating pieces of bread that others had left behind. It was her love, her true one, her lost one, now reduced below destitution, her beloved Dave. But by the time she managed to track him he was long gone.

*

The Eucharist Repeated (Part 2)

*

There were days when she felt like an uncontrollable child. She would fidget during the sermon, she would not attend to the mass of wordage they called "prayers". The music would push her away. And then the liturgy would begin, the story- telling, the blessing of the bread and the wine. Then they would all walk up to the altar, fat and thin, infirm and otherwise (if any otherwise). The priest would offer those things from the table and the people would swallow them, take them in. And no matter what -- no matter what -- she would return to her seat assuaged.

You could talk about the strangeness of a God giving as a gift what was not at all a separated gift but rather that God's own self. The words were ture but they were orthogonal. The Eucharist went a different way, did a different thing. It silenced the words. And she would return to her seat assuaged.

*

On some Sundays the established families would plant themselves in their seats without even looking around. Had Christ sat next to them, had he even looked like one of the classic portraits, they would not have been likely to notice. In a separate fluttering group, remote and not quite estranged, the so-called seekers would sit as close to the door as possible, expressing with their bodies that they were there and yet not 100% there or at least not yet... and what a long patch of space and time that "not yet" surely covered! Indeed the seekers did not like to be categorized, not even as seekers. They hovered like hummingbirds over their own sweet tasting hestitation. Can I just plunge in? When will I know the answer for sure? Is it all right never to know? Is it all right to stay where I am forever?

And the established families and the seekers co-existed as if *too* comfortably, their mutual tolerance almost saying that this incomplete state was the best thing attainable, a sort of final happiness, not even to be questioned: a good as the enemy of the best. And Elf sat neither established nor a seeker, not exactly, nor could she say se was in-between the two. Perhaps God wanted more from her.

The service was always too long, the interim pastor liked his own voice so much too much, and the congregation tried to routinize its exaltation -- the presence of the Lord -- as if it could be automatically captured at the exact same moment every Sunday, as though exaltation could be trapped like that, or isolated from this other strange hodge-podge that we call human conduct. It was always there but it was elsewhere. So her mind wandered without rest. Then the wandering suspended and the Eucharist began. She rose from her seat, approached. And even before she reached the altar, it always happened.

She was assuaged. She couldn't help it.

*

The Eucharist repeated (Part 1)

*

At Elfs covenant class, veteran members taught her the rudiments of faith but also and most of all they taught her that she was worth teaching. And this was a lesson that embossed itself on one's heart, on anyone's heart. Am I worthy of learning this? The members treated her with courtesy, with respect, with a certain subdued something that she decided was love.

And after a certain number of weeks, the group took a breath and seemed to agree that it was time. Prayer occurred, a meal, fellowship. She walked through an ancient forest with Elise, confessing how low and broken she felt. We know that, Elise said. Then there was an awful time of hesitation, a cleared throat of minutes and days, and Elf became the Christian that she already imperceptibly was. She no longer needed to cross her arms at the altar. The Eucharists began and then began to be repeated.

Father Sam, oh Father Sam (she wrote), I am the same thoughtless idiot as I was before, and yet now I am sealed. As if protected. Boosted. And somehow exhilarated, almost as if without a cause and this is so disconcerting.

Father Sam (she wrote), I am afraid -- that I might be a hypocrite and fooling everyone.

END OF PART 1

*

Feet

*

The washing of the feet -- why was that not made a sacrament too?

*

Elf (Part 10): The boys

*

The day before her covenant class Elf stayed late at the gym and has to walk home in full dusk. There weren't very many bad parts in the town, the maybe weren't even enough bad neighborhoods really -- there were only a few blocks here and there that the residentialists and purists had forgotten to take a good look at. Some of these were demoralizing to something of an extreme. And one of them was in her path.

The boys stood doing so little. The boys stared at her. She suddenly had the most appalling sense of herself, something that she knew she had to hide from the boys: a sense that she was prey.

I am not prey.

But her sense of being only half a Christian hit her very hard.

She believed -- she was safe -- but one foot still lay wedged in unbelief -- it tried to pull her into peril that she couldn't even imagine properly. Nor did she want to. And then the ugliest boy in the gang took a metallo-plastic object, a tiberius, out of a paper bag and began to threaten her with it. To describe the apparatus would be to cede the story to a hoodlum. For such is the sucking force of empathy and imagination that, in a work of art, merely to describe something is to add a sort of hallowing to its meaning, even when you reject that meaning and everything it implies. And I won't do that.

So he wielded it and insulted her with it, saying: Happy Valentine's Day, sweet girl. And Duessa, flipping idly through the stations on her Cosmical TV of Evil, abruptly sucked in her breath and watched with great interest.

Elf looked at the other boys, at their liquid, rather nonexistent faces. She suffered a sudden horrible memory of wielding a knife, of cutting through a monster's substance in a visionary nightclub. Shaking off her memory, she took the thug's wrist and pushed it away from her. There was a small snapping sound inside his wrist, the crying out of a tiny bone. Then the punk began crying like a baby and the others, the ones with no faces -- they simply disappeared, gone almost without a breath of air, it was hard to believe that they had been there, that anything had happened. Ultimately nothing had.

The woman walked home, miserable now, feeling as if she had been raped, although she hadn't, not quite. What had been raped somehow was the innocent piece of ground that lay where she walked. One sensed a demon's shadow over the block she traversed. She prayed, hyperventilated, and closed her eyes.

Mother is near. Protect me, Lord.

*

An imbalance to restore

*

Time passed, a current, a churn. The 2 young women, trainers at a gym, were stretching between classes. Ainsley's leg was raised in an impossibly perfect liftt. She looked like a beautiful slim bird. She pressed her spine into the blue foam and switched the 2 legs like a magician waving 2 scarves. They sliced the air acutely. Elf was a clumsier model altogether. She lay back and let that hard abstraction Exercise crunch her stomach like a hungry ogre. She was feeling too happy to concentrate. She watched as her friend seemed to "dance upside down".

Still I think you're going to have to do it (she finally said). You're going to have to learn how to pray for him and with him. I'm talking about, well you know who I'm talking about.

Oh no, Ainsley said. It is logically impossible. I pray but when the object of a prayer is so impossible, so false, then the prayer becomes false. And therefore worthless. No prayer is possible. Not for him, not now, not yet.

She had collapsed to the floor, as if invaded by an imbalance. The 2 of them began vigorously exercising, immersed in a willful pain whose purpose they wouldn't have been able to describe, though that didn't mean they didn't know what it was.

Elf said later: you must have been called to do this. The fact that it disgusts you so much is probably a sign that you must do it. Maybe. Why would something be disagreeable if it weren't also important.

But I can't have been called to do something I am physically unable to do!

I don't see why not. Lots of people have had exactly that happen.

If exercise is so painful yet necessary and deeply sought, wouldn't the same thing be true of the ultimate exercise? Namely, of course, prayer?

And if it were only easy would it need to be done?

*

What is -- no, where is -- discernment?

*

Discernment is not a human attribute, like one more thing that a person has or boasts; if that were all, we would hardly respect it. Discernment not only exists but, if you will, pre-exists. Pre-exists the discerning human for sure. A human can only attain it as something that was already there before it was attained -- a measure that knows the way to measure what in reality is -- what is -- but "what is" itself includes discernment.

It is not a ring you put on because, if you do discern (not many do) then the truth is that discernment is wearing you, not the other way around.

You can't boast you have it. It isn't yours.

It can't just be described and measured like the height and width of a house. It built the house and built the measure that measures the house. The act of measure is its own. It is not a thing to be manipulated and mistreated. The only way to describe it is to have it -- that is to wear it, to attain it, to let it well up in you. It is like clothes that you have borrowed, like a style that you have assumed.

Discernment isn't yours. And it is hardly impersonal. "For that we would be unclothed but clothed upon."

*

Do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it do it don't just talk about it one two three four.

*

There is a paradox of involvement here as well as a refusal on discernment's part to be talked about as though the talker stood airily above it and examined it from the outside. There can be no tourists of discernment. The paradox is like the one about making a vow. You say to yourself that it is wrong to keep making vows that are not kept, that such behavior wrongs the Lord of all vows, who is also the Lord of *you*. So you say: I will stop vowing and simply try to live the best I can, day by day. A worthy goal, but this "rejection of the vow" is in the final analysis also a vow. So you simply cannot be uninvolved and need to stop trying.

*

Continuation

*

How can I? Ainsley said. I want to but how can I? You can't pray for something that voids your mouth and makes your prayer nonexistent.

So the girls sat talking.

I cna't do it, Ainsley said, not won't but can't. How do I pray for the social security I love and at the same time for *him*?

It is like praying no prayer.

Elise carefully sat silent. She let the girls go on talking. She embraced listening as a discipline. A long pause.

What I think you do (Elf said) is pray for his discernment. You leave a little space there. You are pretty sure you know what he *should* discern but you don't pray for *that*.

You simply pray for discernment, more or less throwing your own self into God's hands. Then you don't look down!

There is a right way, there must be, so you pray for him to find it. Security is worth praying for. He must think so too. (A long pause.)

*

Elf (Elise said) you are a person of discernment yourself, a person of faith. I am glad you are a part of this parish.

Because you discern discernment very well.

(However, discernment is nothing without vigilance.)

*

Elf (Part 8): The inability to pray

*

The oddest thing about Ainsley was her inability to pray for George Bush. This woman of faith was not a rebellious Christian, that is, she didn't think so. She did not pride herself on independence, au contraire. She felt strapped to God. She loved the very places where she couldn't move. Close to God, who would want to be elsewhere? All right, it wasn't that. Her problem was something else. She was not a Democrat, not even close. Furthermore, she never refused to pray for an enemy, say a warrior, a zealot, a sociopath, or for any person who happened to wish her ill (and few did). She did not refuse prayer for any human on earth, whether known to her or unknown. This was, as far as she knew, simply the truth. She did not refuse prayer for anyone, not for no one, definitely, including the President. So. No refusal was involved, rather inability. She could not pray for this one. Her throat closed like a pipe when the indicated moment came. This one thing she was unable to do.

I believe the end of civilization has come and this strange man has somehow brought it, she said. Now here is the eerie part.

I know very well (she said) that the inhabitants of the future will make fun of all the people like me for our intensity. They will quote what they will call my overreaction and they will laugh. And laugh and laugh, I can hear the sound. But what will be the nature of that laugh? How to assess that laugh? That is, the quality of the feeling's future, so to speak.

Babies will be born. Schools will exist. The old will survive, a few of them. And despite attempts to eradicate the poor (as opposed to eradicating poverty), there is no question but that the poor will still be with us, that is, with *them*, the laughers. Yes but who exactly will be laughing when the future laughs? Will there be a person inside the sound of the laughing? When they make fun, who will it be that is making fun? Will those people still exist, in a civilized sense, *as* a civilized sense?

If the person laughing is *not* a person, then won't I be in fact the one laughing? If a culture of measure exists now (and I think it does), what guarantee that it still exists then? And if it doesn't, if measure is gone away, what then will there be to laugh about?

In other words, will my inability to pray for him be vindicated even if it's not? Will the person who laughs at me no longer be a person?

*

Duessa grooming

*

Duessa lingered in the ladies room of the coffee shop near the gym. She pondered her bag of wrinkles. Put on this one, take off that. Who shall we be today?

She had eyes like light blue stones. They were great for girl to girl talks and they also fascinated men.

The person they no longer interested was herself. The mirror sagged in weariness to see her face once again. Evil is banal and derivative. There's nothing there to keep you getting up in the morning.

She placed a thin line at the side of her nose.

Duessa was weary, ready to die. Could she do it?

She knocked her bag at the side of the sink and all the pictures of Elf fell out. Daughter dear, you hate me, I don't care. As long as I can have just a wee bit of control.

She smiled at her mug in the mirror and rearranged all the byways. A woman came into the room, stared at the pictures on the floor and frowned. Duessa pointed her finger at her and cursed silently, watched the stranger clutch her stomach.

Why isn't evil fun anymore? she just had to wonder. After all, what profit was there for her in someone else's pain? No artistry, no anything. I think my imitation life is a waste of time. Depression fell like a weighted blanket. And nothing like Zoloft was ever going to work on her, not on her.

Her misery was an itch that no medicine in the world would ever scratch. She couldn't even feel proud about that -- it was just a fact.

*

Later she sat in the coffee shop pondering. When the coffee came she gave a quick taste and then forced herself to swallow some. Gran dio! It had the taste of sulphur, the aroma of sulphur, its essence was sulphur. It left terrible orange burn marks down the sides of her soul. She began to retch in a delicate way so that no one could see, while behind her paramedics came to take away the woman stranger in the ladies' room. Duessa cried into her coffee but the tears were of no consequence, not for her. Because the tears were only for herself, they were for no one. Her daughter would probably never see them.

So her tears led to nothing, meant nothing. She waited and waited for her heart to feel "strangely warmed". But the warmth didn't come, not for her. And never would. And never would.

*

Elf (Part 7): The girl who fell in love with God

*

Dear Father Sam (Elf wrote). Everything I have God has given me. When I feel most autonomous, no, indeed, at that precise moment in fact, the power I feel is God's power. The release, the freedom, the autonomy -- whose are they but of God.

Father Sam (Elf wrote), I am in love. I cannot stop thinking about the one I love. A teenage insomnia from too much love. A song on the radio that lasts for hours.

Father Sam (Elf wrote), I think there is a chance that even a piece of crap like me can become a -- whisper that word -- a Christian, Father Sam. Maybe God will work this strange effect in me. I can't say not, how would I know that?

Maybe, Father Sam (Elf wrote), my parentage will not determine the rest of my life from now on. After all, the devil is not *really* a parent and never engendered anything. Except in a manner of speaking. Which is a manner I wish to renounce.

Father Sam.

Father Sam, Father Sam. Why did you never mention this joy, not once, not even in passing? It is the feeling of being on track -- or at least on track to being on track. Not to be but to be on the way to being.

Father Sam, I stopped resisting. I walked in and sat down. And there they welcomed me or seemed to. Now I am one of those stereotypes, a "churchgoer". How very strange.

Father, how I wish you were here with me. I am so sorry that they have dismissed you yet again.

*

Father Sam, pray for me. That I can be the thing that I want to be. Not a finished person but at least a yearning. (And what was I before?)

*

Continuation: a question

*

When you retreat into a garden, don't you lose the ability -- or the right -- to interact with the people who are outside? Isn't this the price for your meditation, your aspiration?

Unless at the center of the garden God is found. Where God is found, the rest of the world quickly follows and nothing can really be locked.

*

Interlude: at the edge of the garden

*

About the church's garden there had been so many discussons.

Do we lock it or leave it unlocked, gang?

Now the governance committee, such as it was, strongly favored locking everything, since, for one thing, this was property and property existed to be protected, existed in some awkward sense as though for itself alone.

You remember the terrible sinking feeling, the feeling of having been raped, when you returned to your car, say, and found the back window broken and your coat and your keepsake album taken. The coat you could replace. But the keepsake album? It was filled with mementoes of your dead ones, irreplaceable items of no value to anyone but yourself. And the thief, perhaps an addict, had probably just thrown all those things into the trash.

Property then was whatever thing whose removal left you feeling violated and punctured.

So was the church's garden like a coat, ready to be shared with anyone without question?

Or was it like that keepsake album? Was it filled with a treasure that you couldn't spare and that another couldn't use?

Or was it balanced just between the two?

*

Now the suburban churches, they weighed in with their opinions, just like everyone else, but their opinions were thrown away like an outdated album. Because by retreating into the suburbs they had already locked their gates and decided the question in advance.

*

The Threshhold

*

Elf's dreams finally pushed her to a decision. In her dream there was always her mother -- the devil's wife? the devil herself? -- sitting in a comfy armchair reading the paper. How cozy we all are in our affluent house! 2 or more dogs were curled at Duessa's feet. One of them always had the face of her beloved, her Dave. The other dog wore the frozen howl of some other man. It was a Kurd or a Turk who had wandered too close.

Out the window, the neighborhood church was always outside the window, just outside, normalcy, peace. Elf the athlete climbed out the window to get closer to it, I want to be close to you, but then the backdrop wrinkled and really that's all it was. Scenery. A dream.

We don't really need those places anymore, her mother said.

Church just gets in the way of shopping and soccer.

The 2nd dream was of the Garden of Orthodoxy. Another place she was not allowed to enter for real. When she probed her foot into the ground beneath the last lorn bush there was a demoralizing squish, a gray swoosh. Her mother was a worm who travelled rapidly through the bushes eating everything she touched. Other little beasts lay cuddled in tight Darwinian balls, copulating with and then consuming each other. The outer branches shook with dismay. If she only get past these thorny outer places, if she could get herself into the Garden, she would be okay. Finally okay. But the creatures, shimmering with their DNA ("just like you and that's all you are!") would not let her take the smallest step or even think herself through to where it was safe.

I want to *be* where it's safe, Elf said.

I am nothing but a helpless little girl.

Then -- she simply did it. Stepped through the branches bodily and came to a stop in the midst of the garden where indeed even doubt was able to stand still and take a breath of calm, standing so very near one's Lord. The dogs circled the fountain, playing and frisking, freed at last from the burden of having human faces. The indecisions and pain that existed here (and everywhere) could finally be shared with God, absorbed in God's wider power, so that there was a lessening of tension in the garden. And he walked with me. And he talked with me.

She thought wistfully about this safety that was more than simply hugging a base and not being "it".

What if safety were a substance as deep as salvation? And what if it were something that covered her too?

The next morning, gaunt and quite nauseated, was a Sunday, one slim seventh of the week. She said to herself, Today I'm going to risk it, I don't care.

She pulled the heavy door toward her. She went inside the darkish building. Suddenly she was there. She was in church, she was somehow inside and her friend Elise was hugging her. She had crossed the threshhold.

*

Elf (Part 6): At the gym

*

The studio where Elf worked. One two three one two three. The 4th beat an indrawn breath. Then the sound of calisthenic crooning. Aerobic music, musclebound, buff. And all the gleaming dames in their teal sweats, middle-aged, brittle, beautiful, forgetting to breathe. One two. One two.

Now do a repeater here, then over the top, remember to straighten your spine. Grapevine, skate, dig that ditch, knees up and now peel yourself gracefully off the wall. Lovely, very ladylike. But when the class moves clockwise, counter is not the thing.

Heart rate, now drink of water, stretch, cool down, give thanks to God ("all blessings"), and now sink the chi. Slowly. Is this a pagan ritual, ma'am? By no means, not at all. Think of this. If God is with you at all times, he is with you in these Chinese exercises too. He is with the Chinese. Unless someone pushes him away. But we are pushing him close. That is what we are most doing.

Words of wisdom. Please remember to perform all your four basic exercises in some way every day: cardiovascular, muscle toning, flexibility, and then deepest prayer. And by the way that last form of exercise enfolds the others, enfolds them all.

Not to be skipped for any reason.

*

Nothing so unhappy

*

So now that the phone might be Father Sam calling, Elf answered it without so much fear.

*

At the end of his visit, the father washed her feet, an ancient ritual that made her feel squeamish and was supposed to. Then he went home by his long distance bus, good bye good bye, the sound of it pulling away so final she thought she'd never see him again. Never once had he come close to, well, insulting her person, even making a rude gesture, in other words touching her besides the feet. He was actually, of all things, chaste and self-controlled. She found herself mourning his departure. Yet also feeling buoyant because some of his atmosphere remained. She walked home in a muse from the gym where she worked. Every step buoyant like her thoughts. Touch toe to the ground. Winter sun was wrapping everything in a blue gas. The park the park the park. God is good. My secret love. One "daffy dill" already, well, not exactly open, true, but it was there. The yellow bud was there. The future was yellow.

Perhaps then I am a Christian, Elf thought. No I'm not a Christian, but maybe a wannabe. Is it impossible to be a wannabe? Impossible to stay there long. Backward or forward. You have to move, have to travel.

Across the way young ladies were jogging. Flat chests like mine. Then she saw a dog and the dog was abandoned. She first saw its abandonment then felt it. It ran through the park, it ran away from her so she couldn't check the collar, if there was one, then it ran in the path of a car but missed the car. Blue gas everywhere.

The thought of that creature in free fall. A very little dog, as though size had anything to do with this. The pain that gripped her heart was so sudden and ill founded that she didn't think she could bear it. She couldn't bear it. Definitely. Yet the evidence was that she could bear it because she in fact was. No alternative. There was nothing in the world so unhappy as happiness.

On the way to her room she passed that church again, the neighborhood church. She scouted it. Leaned her hand on the bush guarding the garden of orthodoxy, which she so much stood outside. Bent the bush an inch or 2. Looked in. Well, the place was closed. So she couldn't go in, didn't go in. Wasn't her fault, it was locked. As if not really wanting her.

It was locked, it was locked. Nothing so unhappy as happiness!

*

Bullying...?

*

You are bullying me, Elf said. The father looked at her.

All right then. I'll go. Stood up. Shook some leaves.

She spoke without really thinking. Always.

No no. Father. Daddy. Sir. Reverend. Oh *you* oh *you*. Please don't go.

*

Elf (Part 3)

*

When the phone rang again, she had finally taken on again the habit of answering it -- you can fall out of this habit or fall back in -- and said hello in her tentative voice as if for the first time ever. And a man's voice, not unlike Dave's and certainly not unfamiliar, greeted her like an old friend. You are a friend of Elise's and I am so sorry I missed you when you came to town.

Father Sam. Actually -- actually we may have met -- but on the other hand, perhaps not.

Elise says that you are interested in the church. Tentatively.

Oh I got past that, Father. I'm just a really good pagan, it runs in my blood. I have to go to work now, Father, must hang up, don't think me rude.

And as she came out of the workplace, carrying her little kit bag, there he was. Let's just talk a little bit. It might help me to talk.

Don't want to, she said. Don't want to. And he said, okay, I never press. For me, faith is totally a matter of persuasion, there is no force involved -- except the force whistling through one's own bones, sort of privately, silently, but only you can know anything about that.

No one can describe any of this to you. It's there, you take note of it, or it isn't and you don't.

By this time the two of them sat on a cold stone bench under late transitioning leaves, cracking and falling, poor corpses, circling the dusting of pollen, totally inappropriate, totally out of season, that lay on the shoulder like an unsteady hand -- an the hand and the shoulder both shook a little bit, from cold, from the general lateness of things, from thoughts of some inner chlliness that was refusing to relax and get warm.

Faith is an addiction, Sam said. Not so completely different from, you know, alcoholism or gambling or a man's inability to take his eyes off a naked body -- or even a person's urge to make more money or build a bigger house. I mean, faith is more like that than the professionally faithful seem to realize.

So if you have any weakness or brokenness of that nature, you have not been completely shut out from -- this other possibility you know.

*

Elf (Part 2)

*

In the little hotel room the phone kept ringing. The man at the desk said that a very sophisticated woman had kept calling. No messages, I want the real thing. I want to talk to that girl. Elf shuddered every time the phone rang. It was surely the devil calling. More on that later.

She couldn't stay in her room. She went to the church office and asked to see the father. Who might you be? asked the stiff lady. I took him home last night, Elf said, from where I found him to be. The place your assistant gave me.

I think you'll know that he's in no shape for idle chat, said the stiff lady.

Are you one of those who thinks the Lord wants us all to be hollow and perfect? Are you one of those who has a big thing for the concept of sin but won't allow any of us to be a sinner? Not even a fashion plate who models the power of forgiveness?

So you're saying I can't see him, Elf said and went back to her terrible hotel room. And the phone rang and rang.

So she gave up and went back to Elise's town, now her town too -- she huddled back in the square clean burrow of her SRO on the edge of town, and waited for the phone to ring. She spent Thanksgiving alone, walking around the closed up town, enjoying the feeling of having a city, walking by the church, passing it, rounding the block, walking by, passing. I can't go in there. People go in there but the people who go in there are not me. The person walking into the sanctuary can't be me because... I don't go to church, for one thing. It's not in my repertory. Walking around the block, walking around the town, getting a bit cold. Seeing Elise come out with her friends. Hiding. There is something in there I perhaps need. But I can't go in.

So after these strange evasions, which she herself could neither explain nor simply leave to hang unexplained, she finally went back to her room, heated a lean cuisine turkey dinner in her little microwave and stared at the phone on the verge of ringing, then it rang.

She picked it up. It was her mother Duessa. Darling, I've found you at last.

*

The story of an elf (Part 1 of many)

*

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

*

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.

*

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.

*

Conduct? Not overnight

*

It is a long journey to the correct action. You can't just do it. Your whole life needs to do it -- or to learn how.

A martyr's final moment culminates everything before -- or *is* everything before.

Imagine if hands and feet spoke the Apostle's creed, not just lips.

Is there an exercise course for *that*? I'll sign up!

*

Conduct: the space behind the glass

*

If conduct is our truest way of worship, why does this leave me so scared? What is going on?

(Aside from my own evaluation that my own conduct is consisently appalling and fake -- it would turn God's stomach if God were the giant body that most people visualize.)

((And gets worse when I try to repair it.))

(((So that "faith not works" becomes this hasty bandage that I apply to my own ghoulishness.)))

*

The fear. Is it that I don't know what conduct is? In other words, don't know what to do? Moment by moment the question recurs: what right now? what step will do the least damage?

*

There is a barrier like glass (metaphor of Francis P Sullivan SJ). Something gets through -- but touch does not. Can't touch. Light goes through, also something else. The gap is not empty but feels like a sprouting vacuum.

This is the point where omnipotent God has stopped -- willingly. God knows why. Out of love perhaps? giving the creature the freedom to move of its own volition? An infinitesimal space, too small to measure or of course see: the creature's separation from God. That infinitesimal space is conduct. I don't know what to do with it. Use it? How? Widen it? Make it smaller if I can? Give it up? Give it away?

Talk about it like an idiot?

What to do with this gift? Will God eventually take it back? Is my existence inside it? What to *do* with it???

One listens for an answer -- but that too, the listening, occurs within this infinitesimal space.

*

Broken space

*

You can't enter Prayerspace unless you are first broken (Luke 18:14).

What the president is doing looks like prayer but is something else.

*

And what is at stake here is not the country or some political party but faith itself.

If pseudo faith is exalted and praised, what happens to the true variety?

*

The place that is truth abides. Is anyone standing inside it?

*

Prayerspace

*

Touch upon Prayerspace

(the place where prayer becomes possible).

*

Not congruent with truth -- with the sacred space truth occupies?

I don't dare to say they are congruent.

I can't *know* that.

Prayerspace is where you *try* to enter the sacred space. You ask, you knock, you request. It's possible that the request is turned down.

*

If no request was made, no prayer occurred. No uncertainty, no request.

No request, no prayer.

*

Prayer must be an action, not a passive sitting with eyes closed (unless that too is an action). Prayer is a plea for change. I don't believe true prayer can ever leave the pray-er unchanged.

That is why I am offended at the president's pseudo prayer. Where is the change? How can prayer calcify the beliefs of the pray-er?

Where is Prayerspace?

*

I think it involves the undermining of certainty. Oh well -- the pitiful thing that humans mistake for certainty.

But if we tell the truth (if we stand within the place of truth) what we desperately seek is God's certainty not our own.

Awesome thing to ask for. Some are too wise to ask.

*

God has a vision politics knows nothing about.

*

The places

*

So....

if truth is a place --

and faith is a place --


-- is it the same place?

*

How could it not be the same place? If to be faithful is to align oneself with truth, and if to sustain the truth requires faithfulness.

*

Truth as a place

*

Honesty too -- that, like faith, is a place more than a state of mind to be willed. You don't will it, you enter it (it exists without you).

Lies maybe float in the head. The truth is beyond it (or is not true).

Our sacred space is true. Other things too but always that. Lies are noplace. Truth is a place.

So if I choose to be true or will truth, it isn't *really* my will or my choice. Not if you measure the disparity between my pitiful self and the truth (which is: the One who founds it and intends it and holds it upright).

*

Without prayer, no truth.

So.....

*

Low

*

We can't will ourselves to be low, we can only *be* low.

*

No "team" prayer

*

Prayer my darling, where to find you? Rules...

Avoid "my team vs yours". (Check Lincoln 2nd inaugural.) Do not demonize. Do not demonize. "As we forgive those who trespass." Do it!

Jeremiah to Israelites: stop demonizing Gentile peoples. Take that energy, turn it to God. (Team spirit as a nation's idolatry? Is this our fate?) The prophet's audience didn't listen, but turned faith into a sporting challenge and lost the challenge.

God doesn't give a damn about our competition.

Flee the triumph, avoid the prayer of GW Bush. Christianity as Caesarist triumphalism beyond Constantine's wildest urging -- was there ever such a danger to faith? When evangelicals grow so corrupted, who is left?

America as "my team", other people as the hub of evil. No way. We are in quicksand without a prophet to pull us out. Help us God. Please. Help our enemies too. Bush too.

Politics is a foxhole now.

*

The foxhole

*

The best place to meet God -- a foxhole?

*

Where on earth is not a foxhole really...

*

The place called faith

*

Urgent urgent need, to find the place called faith -- the right place to consider God and be with God. A place, not a state of mind. The place you stand shapes your conclusions. Who sets the fighting arena wins the battle.

*

The place is not a debating hall. The "god" of that place is Debate. Stripped-down rationality, hopeless.

*

The place is not a market place. That "god" is sales -- watch out. Most to be feared when most apparently your friend.

Pretends to have your best interests at heart. Couldn't be farther away from the place of need.

*

The sidewalk, no home. The horror of the diaspora: not having a "place". Or not having *the* place.

*

Place where I may be with my God and speak freely without a single lie! "All my fresh springs in thee."

The ark! We heard it was in Los Angeles. Then Sri Lanka. But it's not physical travel, a change of heart.

Place of safety, place of refuge. A church? The so-called sanctuary? Sometimes the dove alights, sometimes flies away. A place more of acquaintance than habitation? You touch it, the experience is fleeting and ephemral but what is fleeting is not the place but yourself. Your conduct is like a holding action but all you have.

*

In John 6, Jesus, disciples and followers occupy a mountain area with superfluities of grass and comfort enough to seat 5000. This *is* the place but neither mountain nor grass make it what it is.

*

Simulations

*

There are plenty of simulations of Christians walking around.

*

When I play the Goodness Game and try to fool people, who is most fooled?

*

Why Conduct is the Heart

*

Why conduct, so taken for granted, is the heart of faith, just as James says.

I can't explain, any more than Tristan could. Here is a stab... I believe that we as a species live in a world of doubt but the doubt is secular, not religious. There is probably much *less* religious doubt than people think -- even if the faith is heterodox and scattered and probably doesn't do as much good to the believer as it could -- but a much wider secular doubt than people would admit to having. By secular doubt I just mean confusion as to what you are supposed to be *doing*, both at this particular second and with your life as a whole. I suffer from huge amounts of secular doubt but no religious doubt at all. However, the secular doubt seems to be enough to kill me by itself.

When the father in Mark says, I believe -- please heal my unbelief, he really has a foot in the two different kinds of belief and unbelief. Not does God exist, but what impact does he have. Or what impact can I have upon him.

*

My need from church is not lovely music and a well-spun sermon. I don't even need Jonny Baker's worship tricks. What I need is help getting from Monday through Saturday as a Christian. People affirm their belief on Sunday but when they need counseling on Monday, they don't seem to mind going to a complete agnostic for practical help. I feel sure that the church should be engaged in practice, that practice is its deepest worship -- if prayer is really a form of action and a cry for change.

*

If conduct is one's heart, the expression of one's heart, then certainly my heart needs a drop of lubrication from a tin man. Please offer me a sermon that is not just a ride in an amusement park, letting me off at the exact point where I got on. I want to change! I am not the only one.

I can barely help other people when my own soul is damaged.

*

From the Garden of Orthodoxy to the Garden of Conduct

*

When you put flesh onto preaching, blood, bones and twitching muscles, you get literature. Maybe bad literature but in any case.

God likes our stories because they move -- they have conduct, they don't just talke.

I am trying to write a story about the girl who grows up in the Garden of Orthodoxy (see last entry in December 2004) but is booted out with her brother -- not for some transgression but simply because this is part of growing up -- at least for many. She tried to get back in whilst her brother gives up.

Eventually a man of God (Father Sam or someone like him) steers her to the Garden of Conduct, in the midst of which the Garden of Orthodoxy lies hidden. Where is it? This is not easy to say? So she asks: Where then is the Garden of Conduct? And he answers: Everywhere you go.

This mysterious paradigm or parable at least slightly shades in the deeper mystery of the importance of conduct to faith. Faith is not a set of rules or dietary laws, but that doesn't mean you can be a person of faith and do absolutely anything you want. There is a sort of side effect to everything you do. As a sort of subsidiary motion embedded in your actions, there is a second deeper action, which is: your conduct leads you closer to God. Or your conduct leads you away.

John Bunyan captured this perfectly, beautifully. *His* work of fiction is an actual piece of conduct, a good deed in itself. I wish I could say the same of myself.

*

Conduct: Prayer as a form of action. Prayer as change.

*

Prayer as change, so that the best proof prayer has occurred is a change in the heart, a change in the world, a new behavior? The idea that praying, e.g., to help someone whom you could help practically but do not help would be not prayer but a form of sin? Placeholder for now. This topic burns my hands. I am upset that the President holds prayer meetings but comes out affirming exactly the same things he affirmed when he entered the meeting, as though prayer were a formality and not a deep action. Of course God might just be confirming a person's pre-held beliefs but is that likely?

Pray before you write this incendiary stuff.

*

The mystery of conduct - 3

*

Paul warns about "speaking in tongues" because it makes for a private and unmeasurable spiritual experience, one that doesn't "edify" the person outside it. Such is the cunning of the devil that the eucharistic liturgy, arising from Paul's own words, evolved into a form of speaking in tongues.

That is, people sit in front of the liturgy and listen (with wandering attention or none) but rarely feel its words hooking into their own will. It must have been really bad in the old days with the Catholic priest intoning Latin and turning his back on the congregation. But the modern liturgy still feels like a form of private speech. If it was talking to the parish wouldn't the parish be talking back?

Then there is the sermon. Does the sermon alter the listeners' conduct? Does it invade the will like a loving virus? Not a rhetorical question, my love, but not an exam question either. The most important questions are answered after the exam when all the textbooks are closed. Or else... the real exam is on the sidewalk waiting in line.

*

The mystery of conduct - 2

*

In my church (Episcopal) I used to be flabbergasted at how many people would volunteer to do something and not do it. Alas, I started doing it myself. It was as though a Christian promise was somehow less -- less in need of being accomplished -- than a promise at work. At work if you don't do what you promise to do, you're fired. But I guess God was considered in comparision to be a softie or even a patsy.

In a volunteer environment, you never actually know whether something will be done or not.

In my more judgmental state, I used to assume that the problem was the paradox of too much forgiveness. If someone felt automatically forgiven for a transgression, what's to stop them from transgressing?

Paul, I think, faces the same problem in his Epistles. I think his response is that the authentic Christian doesn't do good from obligation but as a sort of emanation from his or her faith -- a natural outgrowth of it. So then if someone declares faith but goes on to behave badly... there must be a bad connection somewhere in their faith?

Many of the Episcopalians that I know profess their faith and, I am sure, feel that faith, but its expression in conduct is hard to see, hard to measure (not that it's my business to measure anyone but my own pitiful self -- of course!).

More on this later.

*

The prayer about conduct -- "Lead us not into temptation" -- became changed to an inscrutable concept: "Save us from the time of trial". Well, I know what temptation is, but the time of trial, not really. So the cutting edge of conduct somehow got dulled. At least in that prayer as it was reworded.

*

And we go to church as if to the theatre.

*

The mystery of conduct - 1

*

In the time of New Year's resolutions, an opportunity to measure the concept of conduct. What *is* conduct for a Christian? Anyone can measure professions, the words that more or less fall out of the mouth. But what about the body's own form of Christianity? What about behavior? What should *that* be?

Our conduct as Christians is the bottom for sure.

I am always so amazed that people treat George Bush as a Christian because he says he's one. What if the emperor Tiberius had called himself a Christian? It's what you do, not what you say, or not only that.

Do I sound like I'm talking about the Jewish law? I am not talking about the law.

*

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.

*

Story: 2 brazen sluts -- ?? -- The "Girls for God"

*

"My song is Love Unknown".

*

Christians, read this story to the end before you judge it.

*

2 teenage girls were comparing their love adventures from the previous night. The teacher overheard and felt enormous shock. Said to himself: America is doomed. Doomed.

First girl: He was so tender, so understanding. When there was a movement in my heart, he anticipated it and made the movement *first*! He was the perfect dance partner. All night long. I felt so safe inside his rhythm and his thrust.

Second girl: Well, my love was rough with me, maybe a bit really. He took my spirit places I thought I didn't want to go. Weird exciting places. With him I decided to go. I went. Pain waited for me there and yet, on the other side of the pain, this vast "acceptance". A sense of beyond pain. Not without it but beyond it. Nobody ever gave me that before.

First girl: So did you "entregar"? Did you give yourself completely?

Second girl: Oh girl, me entrego, there's *no* hesitation, I assure you, I just do it. No ifs or buts or filthy qualms or lacy gloved evasions. Oh no. I'm there for him. He's there for me. We don't measure our love, we go for it.

Teacher: Why you brazen, shameless little sluts. But then the 2 girls laughed at him.

For the girls both had the same lover and that lover was God.

What they described was a sort of prayer life, in a world where prayer is real.

And their teacher was only shocked at them because he didn't believe any of it, that poor sad man. He had unwillingly become a sort of atheist. Which was another way of saying that, when it came to the life of faith, the teacher was nothing but a prude.

*

Christians, read this story to the end before you judge it.

*

"My song is Love Unknown".

*

Defense of Muslims and Jews

*

American evangelicals make a great deal out of verbally professing Jesus's name -- something even a White House warlord can do.

But what if the key factor is not your recognizing Jesus but Jesus recognizing *you*?

*

Love and death

*

The lover fingered death like a product in a store. If I were to put this on now, would I be closer to the one I love?

Like any shopper the lover found it difficult to just walk away, because the price seemed so low. Every bargain screams to be bought. Otherwise someone else will buy it, some stranger, and then the good will run out. And you will be left out. The rack seemed so tempting. But oh no. This was not the way to get close to God. Paying for closeness with your own conduct. That was not the way.

How did you get here, get this existence? You were foisted on earth, rolled out of darkness brutally into existence, shaken there out of the dark sack of genetics. You existed, you lived. That meant that you were wedged in conduct -- the conduct flowed out of your body like a form of energy. So God was insisting that you live here and spend your being *here*, use it up for your love's sake, not dare to bury this vibrancy in the ground like the smothered talent in the sacred story. So death was the shortcut you were not allowed to take, lover.

Conduct was not a side-issue but the center of one's love for God. People said that the ones who loved God spent their entire lives trying to learn what God wanted and then do it. If so, you had to be too busy listening for his advice to so much as consider a cheap good like suicide. God is God of the living not the dead.

Even so, you wondered why people who don't much care about God act as better Christians than you ever seem to manage!

*

"If push came to shove..."

*

So you vowed never to abandon yourself to anyone's hands except God's hands. Only those hands.

I will be faithful above all and after all. This was how you put it. Yes but God's hands, however mighty, were invisible and hard to measure. It was still you who decided, it was still your responsibility.

So that even when Father Sam, in his kindness, said: Do (some specified) thing and you will be purposeful and happy, you had to stop. You stopped and thought.

What if "purpose" took you away from God? What if "happiness" moved you out of God's hands? Wouldn't you rather be close to God than be happy? That is, if push came to shove, and the kingdom of God drew "near".

*

Poem of waking -- someone had willed the recurrence of your will

*

Your best moment was your waking. Existence occurred, not for some judicial motive but because it simply did. There was someone who loved you and wanted you alive.

The waking was full of silence and the silence was full of order.

Your love awakened you. As long as God continued to breathe you, you would continue to breathe.

*

Magical?

*

There is something magical about being poor. What, you mean drinking polluted water and not having medical care? No, not that, I didn't mean that, something else. Something that can't be pulled off like a decal and applied to the rich (as anxiety can). Hey, one thing is, the poor know they're poor, the others don't know -- but still are. Still that isn't quite it.

*

It isn't just knowing but knowing what it means.

*

There is the shiver of existence, the fact of having it -- so many people don't anymore or never have or will. They don't *exist*, forget about happy and sad. So why does X have it, when Y has had it taken away? It's not like an injection or an application, it's more like you yourself. X exists. He cannot say he deserves it, he can't say that. You can deserve a salary or title maybe. But existence never. To deserve you would first have to *exist* and what justifies *that*??

So back to the nakedness of existence, and this is something the poor still understand and the wealthy would seem to have forgotten. Because it seems that if you barely have it, you have more of it than someone who thinks he has so much that he can take it for granted and ends up -- well, essentially not even existing.

*

The blessing of Brokenness

*

"I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame." (Job 29:15, KJV)

Yes but what an arrogant bastard I was -- not like Job at all!

Whenever I was "eyes to the blind", they would try to avert them, they would turn their eyes away, in order not to see how broken I myself was.

*

The secular ones...

*

... act more or less correctly but no longer know why they do this -- or want to -- or ought to. Who this is for

-- & thus expend the capital of their own love.

*

Like dying

*

The sweetness of your love is like dying. It hurts like nothing else on earth, hurts way more than a petty orgasm, hurts like a body tearing to let transcendence come in. Scary, horrible. So do it. Come in.

This is not a "safe" love. This is not a healthy love from the point of view of your dietician or neurologist or even your priest. But what they no longer see behind the damage is the new life that the damage hides. Are you addicted to God? Oh yes, you will never let this go no matter what. Only it seems that your addiction is different from the countless others insofar as it leads you to nurture the widow and orphan and to pray for all prisoners, homeless, little ones in pain. Because they are now you and *you* -- through sheer crazy love -- have chosen also to be *them*. And if you don't do this, you are not in love.

*

When God takes away...

*

The most amazing aspect of God's interaction with his lover is that when he takes away he gives.

One movement, not two.

*

When he takes away everything -- yes but look carefully. That is when he gives the most. Nothing but himself equals -- himself.

*

Love not a drug, after all

*

No way. "I have love so it doesn't matter what I do." Forget all that, you simpleton. Conduct matters more than anything.

Conduct was the only communion on offer to you. It mattered what you did. Helpful?

Terrifying?

Love not an assuagement, not really comfort. Your new age friends told you what a fool you were to have chosen this love. Chosen? Was love ever chosen?

Time accumulated and spawned reflection. Then reflection invaginated and became a will -- your own. So your conduct was still a mystery, was it?

What to do from moment to moment, given love has eyes, given love watches. Guards in a way, in a way not. Breathless. Ask the question without stopping for breath: what should I do?

They said that love would tell you what to do but you had to ask, so had to know how to ask, how to hear the answer when it came, words or silence, perhaps silence. But a silence full of clues.

Oh God, make it easier for me.

It seemed your conduct always got in the way of your asking and hearing. How to pray in front of a honking horn, in the middle of an argument, on a weary day like today? Hearing the phone ring, not answering? Hearing a voice on the phone that pulled you into outer space without a helmet, without a plan. Why have you left me here so unsupported, Lord?

Or was this conduct itself a way of speaking, a form of conversation? Were you saying what needed to be said?

Was even this a kind of test? And if so, were you failing the test or passing it?

*

The main thing....

*

The main thing for the Christian at least is not to "give to the poor" but to *be* poor, and then to give from the gushing abundance of your poverty, which is infinite and bottomless.

Not to be separate but to be with -- and to give as to a brother, a sister, or to yourself.

*

Obsessive passion

*

You now seemed to spurn your friends, you lost consciousness of them. Your love was everything. You sat at your desk waiting for the allotted time to end so that you could run to be with your love. The thought of your happiness constricted your breath. Then like a bell ringing slowly came the hour that had been designated and you rushed to your meeting, stood waiting for the door to open. It was the hour when things were still visible but without sun, everything outlined and a little bit dark. There were dry crackling branches against the walls, and shadows in the chalk powder alcoves. Where was your love? What could you do to get close to your love and give yourself away completely, forever? You climbed into the bus. All the passengers were drab and sad.

Your love was here, riding in the bus (as he’d been at the desk before), but you couldn’t just take a seat next to him, he wasn’t simply sitting in one of the seats. It wasn’t that simple! Your love, your God, was more widespread than a single seat or a single hour.

*

One certain fact: every gesture of love that is given to God or received from God has this in common, that it has some relation to the poor. Sometimes in America, it is hard to tell who is poor, the poverty can be hidden behind money, of all things, but there it is, and God is not far away. After all, who exactly is poor, if not you yourself?

*

There are many more poor than the poor themselves realize, no, don’t say they, say we. Why hide? A refusal to be poor is a hindrance to love.

What is wealth but a distraction?

*

It is on the bus that you first betray your love – by not in fact loving, not sharing it somehow – for instance, in this space where all the poor are riding home, sullen and disconsolate. You know what you are supposed to do but you don’t do it. You are worn down by sharing, you want to keep it all. So you frown at the other passengers or ignore them. The love ebbs away at the exact moment when you think you are storing it. And it is a shock how poor you yourself will suddenly feel.

No longer abundant but scarce.

*

“Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not; he passeth on also, but I perceive him not.” (Job 9:11, KJV)

*

Love the forbidden substance

*

A. So do you think the whole conflict between faith and sensual pleasure is based on a fallacy? People talk about sex and drugs as sort of incomparable, delicious forbidden things. You know, nonpareil. But what if those sensations didn't even *exist* compared with the love of God?

B. You mean that feeling God would be like the ultimate high? But if that were true, how come nobody ever says so? How come nobody knows?

*

Why was faith always described as a duty? Why didn't anyone mention the joy?

*

What the fig tree sang

*

Oh you sweet idiot (the fig tree sang). The pain and sorrow, they come to you whether you love or not. Love as love has nothing to do with pain. Only the 2 of them, that is love and pain, huddle together under a single reality opened like a transparent poncho, a fabric that ripples while rain falls on top of everything, all things equally wet.

Then the sunlight transpired and you stood in the garden. And the fig's "hands" were huge and its leafsurface rough, and the uneaten fruit fell onto the slab in a livid color like a three dimensional bruise.

*

The Pains of Love

*

Why you're really a pervert, some sort of degenerate. That's what your friends now say. Ex-friends, it might seem.

You don't have any more words to fight them with. Love has drained the fight out of you, truly.

Your situation has become one of intense pain. Was love supposed to lead to pain? Other lovers have weddings. Why is it that only your love leads to ridicule? Shouldn't we all be in this together? (But in "what" are you to be in "this"?)

If we all belong to God, why are we so torn among ourselves?

*

Explaining your love of God

*

Oh no, you try to tell your friends that this love of yours -- which you pause to relish for a moment in bliss -- you try to tell them that this is not an *instance* of love, not one more *case* of being in love, oh no -- it's not like a story in some book they've already read, where everything turns out weepy and tragic, oh no -- oh, no -- and it's not like some illness that comes and goes or the redness of the trees in fall, oh no! The contrary! You guys have it *exactly* upside down. This thing that *you guys* are calling love is just a bad reflection of the reality of love that our world has distorted but cannot explain. But they only reply: yes yes, every lover always says that.

So you say to yourself -- your you says secretly to your you -- okay okay, allright, I'm just not going to talk about it at all. Nothing anymore, no thanks but then God says, No. That's not an option. You have to talk about it. At least your body does. Your conduct. The behavior that oozes out of you based on who you are, which is: a person in love.

And of course whatever God says goes. Absolutely. No one is questioning that. Because anyway that's the way you want it to be. That's the kind of love you go for and go after. No other. Complete abandon, complete risk, no hesitations. Anything else is something else, not love.

People talk about "safe sex" but there is *no* such thing as "safe love".

Now when your own mother says, You seem to be talking about a brute and a bully, you answer: No way, Mom. Because "brute" and "bully", those words are for *men*.

And really that's the issue: Nobody understands who you're talking about. When they say "overpowering" and "terrifying" they've barely taken their first baby step into the mystery. Because God is love. And he isn't kidding about that!

*

The gift of destitution

*

Exploring the gift

So destitution is a gift from God, a gift that first takes away and then gives.

They say that every true gift tells as much about giver as recipient. So a gift is not simply something that the recipient wants or needs. To be true it needs to speak to the giver, say something about that person. If this is true, then destitution must not only be from God but somehow of God. Yet how could the creator be destitute? Or is it a form of destitution and kenosis merely to notice human beings at all, to stoop to interact with their dissheveled unruly attitudes? Is the destitution one goes through something God is going through at the very same time? And is that in fact the gift?

*

That God is love -- is a frightening thought

*

We're talking about a destructive passion. The love of God is like explosive material handed to babies.

*

This is not a sanctioned relationship and nobody approves of it. No one who takes the least thought for your welfare, your comfort, is anything but disturbed. God is the wrong match for you, darling -- everyone agrees. The ladies sit and talk about it. Your family, your teachers, your counselors, your friends, the person who writes editorials for the New York Times -- they all, there are no exceptions, not one, all of them try to dissuade you before it's too late. It's a life decision --

And even your enemies are dismayed to see you enter so violent a relationship!

He will hurt you really bad, they say.

Right -- you answer. And now you're going to tell me that God will leave me too.

No they say. Not that. You'll be in pain and begging to be left to your selfish idleness, alone. You will beg, it won't be pretty. But no, he won't listen to you -- he is always faithful -- he will never leave you or let you down. Can you even bear such love? We really doubt it!

*

Evangelism to the Flesh

*

A new month, a new topic. New? Aren’t we still trying to get well?

*

Well, I am not yet well. But move on so that we can hover there.

*

We Americans are a fleshy people, we love sex without commitment, Lord almighty how we love this! So how do you evangelize God’s love to such a weird people? Don’t walk away, oh no. Instead you try to speak what an ear can hear. What was always true remains true now. “Be all things to all people.” Okay. So you remind the people of the times they were smitten, against their will, by a lewd armpit popping with smoky curls, a nipple with a briny sheen, and a little tender fold of skin that is pouting like a face. Oh, I’m in love, a person would cry, but this is never exactly love. It had the sting of something temporary – namely, of flesh. And the person with this horrible power over you would always abuse you in one way or perhaps in another. There was always abuse. Because a human body, in fact *because* it was human, was not likely to be a fit object for worship, oh my delightful yes but not *fit*. And so the human one with this power over you would betray you to your face, that was just how sex operated, one of the rules of the game. Yes, but the intensity of the passion, that still hung around when the object of the passion had disintegrated and fled. There was always a sudden opening of the soul. The opening was real anyway.

And so you tell the people of one you love with the same intensity as this. You love this one just as much. But this one does not betray you or hurt you in a wanton fashion. This one is so oddly *worthy* of your love. And the hearer starts to have the awful impossible suspicion that the one who is worth loving is God. He was here all the time, why did we ignore the passion in that name?

*

A Summary of the Plot

*

A novel? A diseased allegory? Here is the plot of "The Ridiculous Knight" with pointers to the chapters.

*

A suburban church has gone into an interim condition -- an emergency wrapped in cotton? -- after the former rector known as "Father Sam" is forced to leave in order to dry out. [ADD DATE POINTER]. The church is fairly well demarcated into insiders and outsiders ("the broken") [DATE]. But in fact the insiders are broken too, and one example is the conflicted character Don [DATE]. He is a youth minister, teacher and gung ho Christian, one who has "washed his hands" like the speaker of Psalm 26. But he breaks down when he accidentally touches a student, not because of what he's done but because of all the things he thinks about and doesn't do. [DATE] He disappears and abandons his apartment and his cat. [DATE]

Meanwhile one of the church's members has been entrusted with church finances -- not a great idea. [DATE] It takes a criminal to spot another, they say, and the only person whose suspicions are aroused is a slightly seedy ex-con named Dave. This man somehow becomes the main character of the "novel" against his will and against anyone's will.

When the de facto leader of the church, a woman named Elise, discovers that Don is missing, she seems to panic and asks Dave to go on a quest of recovery. [DATE] The quest takes him through the allegorical land of his own sexual trauma and self doubt -- no end or bottom to that land! He meets the false Duessa, in fa light from Spenser's Faerie Queene epic, as well as the vicious "Sans" brothers -- without law, without faith, without joy -- and a guardian angel or 2: the asexual girl Elf and the anchoress, who sometimes plays the role of Wisdom as best a mere human can. [DATE]

Dave passes through 3 temptations. He and Elf free Don from some ugly sexual game playing, too mean and futile to be described. [DATE] But Dave becomes emmeshed and re-entangled in his own trauma when the man he rescues kisses him in Christian love. [DATE] And so Dave disappears. [DATE] Someone perhaps Elf may need to go on a brand new quest.

The spiritual reflections that sometimes hide the narrative, and at other times move it along, offer, not an explanation of the story, but the reason that the story is worth telling and living over. No ridiculous knight ever reaches his shelter on earth.

*

2nd Epilogue: The Missing Retreat

*

A few days later or perhaps more.

I can take you where I think he is, Elf said. Dave is probably back in the barrio, recuperating.

After all, even our town, nice as it is, has its own sort of skid row.

Elf sat in the right hand seat while Elise drove, rather stiffly, through the part of town she'd never had much occasion to visit. Signs were sometimes in foreign languages, storefronts were largely broken and empty. The blight seemed kin to an organism, it had a biological outline. One was really afraid to touch this part of town. There were some churches on corners but not the kind she'd ever considered going inside. Former dry cleaners that now said Assembleo de Cristo in crooked lettering. But of course people live here, souls that is, so I should be drawn, not repelled. It was always possible that the human repulsion one felt was a kind of sin in disguise.

Up there is the anchoress's place, Elf said. The lady who made the hot meals and had the emergency beds. She would be, I pretty much think, a good person for you to talk to, Elise, but whoa, what has *happened* here?

Where are you pointing to anyway?

They drove by a beaten up old warehouse, maybe a warehouse, now tattooed with grafitti, otherwise exorcised and empty, and now there was a straggly charter school, barred from outside entry, with a Tongan guard in front. So where is her, you know, her hermitage? Elise asked.

All I see is a vacant lot.

Elf didn't answer. Her jaw hung open. There was nothing, no hermitage, no house, no garden, no toolshed, no mud, no whirlpool, no people, no anchoress, no anger. Nothing.

There might have been an aroma of Christian spirit hanging in the air. But no thing tangible.

*

"My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off." [Psalm 38:11, KJV]

the end

*

1st Epilogue: Church function

*

Checks were bouncing. Mary Louise was mysteriously gone (new start in Las Vegas, they said). Absconded with funds not hers? We're talking plain thievery. How sad. Church membership somewhat dropping. The interim rector a mild bashful sort, out of his depth in a shallow pool. Still the church moved ahead through time, it persisted, it was like a barge, sometimes bumping the side of the canal, yes. But standing still was no option at all.

Elise, sitting in a folding chair at the church function, watched the early refreshments (out of her own purse) run out. Why aren't you upset and concerned about the money, Elise? I don't know, I just rarely am. Someone stole church funds but a church is more than its funds. She felt too heavy to move around but hardly wanted to. Kindly folk shifted through the place. It was odd, everyone always made fun of a church. That was because people's goodness, or at least their aspiration to be good, stood so exposed in a church. Being laughed at can be really not so bad.

Sometimes I see someone looking at me in church who is thinking I'm a good person and then I try to be what they see against my basic evil nature, which of course wishes to be otherwise. But momentarily at least, I am good. So, over all, the effect of this place on me is good.

After the minister's wandering grace the people all began eating the main course. A young woman stuck her head into the room and backed out, then came all the way in. Then turned back to the door and talked through it to someone one couldn't see. Something in Elise's heart began to tingle like the music in "Shaker Loops". Her thoughts started to flutter and she put her plate down.

Then the young woman came back into the room leading a gloomy stranger behind her and the stranger was somehow Don. Elise's husband stood up and started to approach, then became still. They all were still really. Even the little ones at their special table. Still. For a moment the room was as absorbent and tender as a paper towel.

Nobody spoke. The stranger moved toward Elise through recognition that was baffled. Because he was different. Oh Don.

Are you more of a Christian? Less of a Christian? Out of the fold? Huddling in some place we can't follow?

Oh, my heart is hurting for joy, Elise said. Oh Don. Oh Don.

*

We brought him back, the young lady sad, the elfin creature, the little elf, indeed Elf. Dave and myself but mostly Dave really. We did bring him back.

But Dave got lost on the way. We don't know where Dave is, we've lost track of him. We had only this partial success, as you see.

Oh Don! Sweet child, you sweet child (Elise said).

[So ends the first epilogue. The second epilogue immediately follows.]

*

Story (Part 8): The Third Temptation

*

As if shaken free of allegory the warehouse seemed cold and bare. It was like the garage of one's childhood where the kids would go together to escape the heat, sitting on the cement floor and eating Popsicles. It was as close to cool as there could be. But here, in this cool place, the prodigal son, the fallen Don, sat propped against the wall. The dirtiest of all the walls. Dave found a pair of old overalls and threw them on top of him. He was no longer leashed like a dog but he still looked like an animal until he put the overalls on. Then he almost regained the dignity of a human. But not quite. He sank back to the floor, too beat and ashamed to stand.

I think this sh**ty place is just where I belong, he said, wetting the asterisks with his spit. No way, Jose (Dave replied). Elise is holding onto little Tinker Bell for you. That whole weird church is waiting for you to at least come back and show them that you're still alive.

There's been so much churn, some people are holding their breath waiting for you. Hey, it's not gloating. Everybody breaks. Some people are really quiet about it, that's all.

Okay, Don said. Then: Can you help me up stranger?

*

He was like a child inside the body of a football player. Dave reached down to his armpits and lifted. Slippery, harsh. This was like manual labor in the prison yard, don't think about that. A demoralizing smell. So much of life is nothing but an effort not to be demoralized.

There was a third person in the room watching. Who was watching? Who stood there in the darkness? Was it the prison guard? The guard was corrupt, a criminal himself, bought off, paid to be bad. The guard pretended not to be a criminal. Pharisee. Pretended not but was.

Bad people blocked the sight of the good one who stood over all. They couldn't block it forever. You had to hold out.

A third person watched. Then Don got up on his feet. He reached forward and embraced his rescuer, a Christian embrace. A Christian embrace. Can we all be brothers? Can we love each other as our savior asked us to? You know, just brothers, nothing more? And then the third temptation stepped out of the wall rubbing its hands, smiling, indeed gloating. Dave's body fell into the embrace like a traveller stepping in a warm bath. Overwhelming memories filled him of the prison, of being passed around like a slave. The most terrible thing in the world. Even the memory was bad as a bone breaking. He shivered and tried to step out of his skin, like the dead rat once picked up in an old swimming pool whose innards just slipped out of its skin. Help me, Jesus, now more than ever.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Don was saying. Please take me back so I can -- I don't know, let's go see Elise. Make things right somehow. I am so grateful.

And so in a simultaneous movement one of them stepped out of danger. And one stepped right in. And it was the same step, just 2 different sets of feet!

*

Interlude: The ark

*

The ark! Elf walked outside the dead warehouse and looked up at the ark.

The ark was in fact the entire planet and its boundary, for humans, was this blue sky the color of a cop's uniform. Once the billboards were turned off the stars could pierce your heart again.

How had we ever allowed so much human wrongness to enter such a sacred place?

*

Story (Part 7): The Mask of Sorrow

*

The bar -- or is it a casino? or a communal performance space? -- or a sick child's video game, hidden from parents? -- what word fully covers this space? Is it the inside of a pinball being tilted by Satan? Tell me, is this the inside of your fevered nightmare? Or the side effect of a drug from the sixties? Or is this someone's everyday reality? And where is God, can our loving God be found even here? Even in this space? So is it that even in the human's denial, God cannot deny himself? Can this truth be applied?

The entrance is of tapestries but the tapestries move. They before your eyes and cling to you as you move through. Zeus and Apollo gallop through their multitudinous loves. There is a hologram of a Christian politician consorting with the Caesarites. He holds up a coin with his face on it, winking and smirking like a fratboy. Is this what it means to be "wise as serpents"? As the spectators clap, Sans Foy and his gang walk through the image and disperse it into a flickering migraine.

Of these images some are real and some are merely projections of brightly dyed photons that the sound of a gong will destroy. They say that fiction hardens people and encourages them to treat their neighbors as only fictions like itself. Watch what happens. Duessa dances on the bar while Moloch her slothlike manager (predatory old guy in leather and steel) ogles her wiggle from a low side table. Is it really a woman dancing or an animated image? What a terrible thing to have to ask. Is it real, the little dagger hanging from her heart? Or is it just a prop on her costume?

You tear my heart in two, she sings.

*

I want to stop living the life I'm leading, she cries. An Arab boy walks up to her and tried to touch her. Her image goes up in flames but there she is on the other side of the room, wearing a new non costume and surrounded by Renaissance cupids. She has 2 leashes in her hand. Each holds a man topped by a dunce's cap. I can't seem to get them to heel no matter what I do.

Do not describe more. Allegory's deepest wish is to point to God. When Allegory discusses the world it does so reluctantly, in deep and resonant euphemisms. If you touch the world without a mediator you will be defiled, and this she knows. She wants to lay all her words in God's hands so that what they depict will become tolerable and cease to harm. But artists (like myself?) exploit her and use her to depict all the things that are too vile to be described on this "as is" basis, things whose depiction outside God (if there is such a place?) would make the heart stop -- as for so many people it already has! The way evil invades the soul -- that is the very topic that Reader's Digest decided not to tell you about. Not everything is external. Nor can an artist safely discuss it without becoming unwillingly immersed in what it is and what it does. You must somehow learn how to walk through dirt and stay clean, like a forties gumshoe. But the Black Maskers pretend it is easier than it is.

*

Inside the mildewy vestibule with its dripping glitter, Dave fell onto his knees because, as Lincoln once said, "there was no place else to go". Elf hovered beside him looking fiercely left then fiercely right. She carried a knife from Wisdom's kitchen, something Dave didn't know.

Thank you , Lord, for existence. Thank you for pain. Thank you for this plowing and harrowing of my heart because in this condition it is just like a heavy metal dial pointed straight at reality. At least I beg you to make it so. Yes indeed.

Even here, God is good.

*

Then the 2 giant brothers, Sans Loy and Sans Foy, dragged their brain damaged uncle Sans Joy into the room and propped him up against the bar. The wood shifted with distaste. They saw the interloper on the edge of the battlefield. Pressed forward.

Colors of some other team, a gang we don't like. Not good not good.

Their movements were slow and larded over, as though their inner heat was on reserve or their memory was running low. The closer voice was unsteady like a frayed tape: Get out of this place, stupid Christian. The one in front had a power saw in his hand. Dave was about to be cut in two. And the fool was on his knees praying! So Elf closed her eyes and plunged forward with the blunt knife, hardly good enough to cut butter, but terrible all the same, and she felt herself as much under attack as the goon, because she had been a committed pacifist all her life, but was someone else now that commitment was more than a name she liked to use. And it seemed that something inside her was painfully tearing, now it was torn. Yet the knife fell as through butter or Jello, there was no body inside the person she attacked. Sans Foy split open like a vegetable as Sans Loy bellowed in pain, was it pain or a construct's rendition of pain? The moan came of herself. And Dave cried out: Please no violence. Let's find another way.

The 2 dogs were loose and one of them, hardly human anymore, was nipping at the image of Sans Joy on the bar floor, but it was like one delusion chewing another. Were they real? The Cupids fled screaming, the allegory dispersed. Moloch withdrew for a better occasion, or fled like an abject coward, pursued by a man in the shape of a dog or the other way around.

*

The blood is supposed to be over. The blood of Christ is to be the last blood shed on earth, an end to the shed blood, so that all the violence afterward -- in Iraq or at home -- is really just the thrashing of the ones who have not heard the news, not really heard it, like the soldier on the island who didn't realize that the war was already over so kept fighting. And there are others who can't seem to subsist in a world of peace. The ones who need war. Elf, please (Dave said), withdraw your sword and acknowledge the new realm. But when she pulled her hand loose, dropping the sword into the vat of melting lard, she found she had cut the night club's power cord somehow. The delusions sank slowly to the floor. It was nothing but an unused warehouse that they stood within. Duessa now looked 60 years old or perhaps more. Her white mane hung brittle on her shoulders like Christmas tinsel when the holiday's done. I am really a Christian myself, she cried. I go to church. I uphold family values.

This is just my work! It has nothing to do with -- with.

She sank "on top of" her knees on the cement. I don't like anything about myself. I am not going to defend myself.

But if you were inside me you'd know how I got here.

I would pray now if you only let me pray. But nobody listened to her, for good or for ill, and inexorably in the course of the dream time, the melting swirling lard that had been her bodyguards rose and covered her voice for good.

*

The Pseudo Evangelical's Trap (10/19/04)

*

The Pseudo Evangelical’s Trap


The anchoress was so angry that she almost seemed out of control.

But if Christ is who he says he is, we have no time for the games played by pseudo evangelicals, definitely not just no time but less than that. Less than none.

What do you mean, game? Here is what I mean. The pseudo evangelical – Jerry Falwell or President Bush or, for that matter, that person, whoever he is, who heads the Southern Baptists – pretends that evangelizing non Christians is a high priority. And he speaks the old words of evangelizing, from Luke and Paul, while knowing perfectly well that these particular words will fail, will never reach a non Christian. So his effort fails and he knew that it would fail. And he is happy that it failed. He expected it to and enjoyed this expectation, since it made his own club membership all the more exclusive!

Because nothing that he did was ever really directed to the non Christians who are in desperate need of his help. Everything he did was really directed to Christians, shall I say pseudo Christians of his own neighborhood, the pseudo evangelicals much like himself, who now can of course smugly congratulate themselves on this “effort” that was no effort at all. And they can say that, well, they tried, although clearly they didn’t. Of course it was no valid effort if it was predeterminded to fail and if it even congratulates itself on its own failure. We have a very deep hypocrisy here, to be sure.

What would it be to be an actual evangelical? It would be to speak the language of the one you wish to save. It would be to show, no, not only show, but to feel concern for the person you would otherwise be manipulating into Christianity. Christ uses persuasion and Christ plays fair.

The deepest scandal of our church is not gay bishops or whatever but the fact that evangelicals are comfortable not really being what they say, only speaking the words to their own comfort. And they slap Christ in the face whenever they do this. And that no longer matters to them!

By this time the anchoress was so mad that she could hardly speak and Elf had to calm her down, soothe her back into a normal non-fanatical humanity -- the kind that says “Let us endure awhile and see injustice done.”

And the blond young man they called the Southerner gently rebuked her: Ma'am those people you critique all tend to come from my neck of the woods. And when Northerners critique them out of context, even though what they say may be right, or have some right in it, it still becomes wrong because it never makes mention of the *context*, ma'am. Their context or *your* context either. And you kept telling me that true faithful conduct was a *place*, was not just words, but now I don't know whether to believe you.

And I do surely know that you're not claiming that *this* place is the model that *they* are going to follow? Not Duessa with her bloody dogs and all those prostitutes tortured like rabbits? Please, ma'am.

I counted on you to be balanced.

And Elf said: I always felt that the part in the Lord's prayer about trespasses was really saying: Oh please, do not demonize.

Even the demons are pitiful in a way.

Oh you people, the anchoress said. Just leave me alone. I may apologize tomorrow. And I may not!

Meanwhile, the convict, the ridiculous knight, lay on the floor snoring like a sawmill. A big quest tomorrow.

*