Grace (a prayer that I did not intend to be about writing)

I’m writing here because if I can’t write here where else can I write?  Here more than anywhere else I can have the freedom and courage to speak.  You are my Father.  I don’t have to be afraid of you not understanding.

There are so many words in the world, so many ways to begin things.  All I want is to speak, but it seems like the scariest thing to do, probably because it is the one thing I know you made me for beyond loving.  That would make the fear of failure even more acute.  I think and I see and I breathe and I touch.  Give me voice and freedom to speak.  This is my offering and no, it will never be perfect enough for anyone’s ears, but still I speak to you who gave lips and eyes and ears and fingers and heart.

My heart is for you.  But how do I speak that?  I get caught up in things too big to handle because I cannot narrow my focus with you in my sights, with you on my mind and my heart.  There is, plain and simply, too much to say.  “Of the making of many books there is no end.”  Why should I add my voice to the throng?  Endless words.  But I want them to say something.

What do I want?  My pursuit of this speaking seems to match up with my pursuit of holiness.  The thing I most desire is the thing I’m most afraid to pursue.  But in the process of working with my fear of failing at both, presumably to fix myself before I can begin my journey, I find I have been pursuing both and that they are finding substance within my fear.  Like now.  I write about my fear of writing and I am writing.  I pray about my fear that I will never see holiness and I feel holiness imparted to me in my weary brokenness.  Perhaps we can only receive when we are most afraid of not receiving and ask anyway, knowing there is no other option.  Perhaps this is grace.

This partly explains why I often can’t write and why I stall in my sanctification.  In both, I only measure my progress by quantity and flow, by degrees of goodness and amount of pages.  But I’m beginning to see that both are gifts given when I stop trying to achieve them, to listen and listen and listen harder.  The more I try, the more white noise invades, and I am overwhelmed.  Your voice is not in the noise, but in the stillness, the absolute silence.  You are not another sound I have to pick out from the chaos.  You are the only place where silence resides.  Peace.  We strive in noise, in sound.  We sit and receive in silence.

This is my writing, then.  I am tired because I consider all the voices, all the styles, all the words that I could speak.  The noise.  But the one word I want can only be found in silence, receiving what I hear and see and touch in that quiet that is me and you and nothing else.

Stillness is the shaping place because it is not the world outside.  Holiness on the outside, the things I can see in myself, come from within the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, the stillness in chaos, the silence in noise.  Holiness is stillness, and in you it can come to the world.  Received.  In speaking, as in holiness, I am not giving but receiving.  This is grace.   

Waiting for the Train

I avoid eye contact on the train platform as usual as I look for a place to sit among the benches that line the track.  Friday afternoon is busy with other college students going into Chicago for an escape from classes.  They stand in huddled groups, a few in dresses or ties.  Going to the symphony or the opera, probably.  Some carry bags stuffed with picnic blankets and dinner, preparations for an outdoor concert or a few hours at the beach.  I stand with only my purse.  I'll be meeting my Bible study group north of the city.  I just have to bide my limited time as a forlorn figure until the train comes to carry me to friends and food, my refreshing weekly routine of acceptance.

No benches.  The one closest to my chosen sentinel spot holds three people, the nearest occupant with his back turned to me in order to talk with his neighbors.  The white button-up, black slacks and shiny black shoes mark him as a businessman.  Or a missionary, I think.

The words of the woman next to him, the woman blocked from my view, are slurred by a lisp and a nasally tone.  

             "We's just don't know what we're gonna do.  There just ain't no money, you know."  Her voice sounds like she's speaking through a snorkel mask.  A voice that carries over the blending, pleasing monotones of others, that makes you want to stare, but makes you feel bad for doing so.

I dare a glance around the back of the white-shirted man.  The owner of the voice sits, slouched over, in an oversize t-shirt on which the iron-on colors have been faded by too many washings.  Her short red hair is pulled back with a purple scrunchie.  Blue eyes as faded as the t-shirt meet mine just as I look and in the millisecond of connection I see her self-consciousness.  I wonder if she sees mine.

What does a woman like her think of a girl like me?  Maybe she asks the same question of herself, but something tells me that life has taught her the answer in glances like mine, glances she has come to fear.  She stumbles a little, like she wants to begin a sentence but has forgotten what she was going to say.  I apologize by looking away and forgive myself silently.  She has given me my answer.

             Her partner takes over in her pause.  He is older than her, much older it seems, but hard to tell.  The undershirt he's wearing is no longer white but clean, barely covering his large, brown belly.  His frizzed, black hair needs cutting and is fading to gray in patches fanning out over his ears.

 "I mean, I love Jesus, I really do," he says to the man in the black slacks.  

The uneducated accent holds a note of self-justification.  It also holds the simplicity of truth.  The missionary-businessman only nods in encouragement, as if this is what he has been waiting to hear but doesn't really believe it.  Maybe the other man understands this, remembering past conversations with similar businessman-missionaries.  He keeps talking.  I hear in his tone the same lessons of experience I saw in the eyes of the woman, the well-dressed man’s reaction as anticipated and expected as the thoughts the purple-scrunchied woman saw in my momentary glance.

             "I mean, I love God, and I think everything's 'bout love and faith an' all that...I'm working hard to get my life right," the big-bellied man says.

The man in the slacks and white collar keeps on nodding.

             "I love God, and I'm working to get my life straight.  I mean, I love my kids an' I want 'em back...so bad.  I love 'em.  I'm taking classes and working hard.  I want to learn how to be better."  

             I see him gesturing with his hands out of the corner of my eye, leaning forward and backward and forward and backward, like his hands are the hands of a conductor, his body the music.  

 I stare into the sunshine, the green park across the tracks, and listen.  I listen and see his children as he speaks, the three young boys who he wants to raise better than he was raised, but that don't listen to him because they don't respect him.  Their mother, not the red-haired lady, says bad things about him, and they don't listen, don't let him speak.  He doesn't want them to grow up like him.  He wants their respect.   He wants their love to mirror the love he has for them.

             "I hope by me taking these classes they can see how much I love 'em," he says.  His voice is deep, gravelly, adamant.

             The red haired woman nods.  The missionary-businessman nods.  

 "He's a good dad," the woman says, shifting her heavy weight forward onto her worn tennis shoes showing beneath too-short khaki pants.

"I'm trying to be," the man says, almost whispering, not looking at her.  "I mean, I love God, I love Jesus..."

             His voice is drowned out by the ringing bell and the roar of the approaching train.  I hear the missionary-businessman speak for the first time over the thunder, wishing the couple well and goodbye.  

            “It was good talking with you.  I hope everything turns out all right.”  He doesn’t even stop to shake their hands.

They don't board the train with us.  I stare out at them from my lofty vantage on the second level through the smudged glass when I take my seat.  They stare at the blank silver sides of the train, longing for movement, for departure.  Their tired desire molds their expressions into an almost-embarrassment for non-participation, only able to offer internal apologies, excuses, and explanations.  No one else is there to listen. 

It doesn’t seem right to me, sitting at a train station without boarding the train, while people talk and listen and then leave, moving on from the place where everyone moves on while you bide your time.  I turn away from the window and find myself ashamed to be glad that I could get away.  I was just waiting for the train.  I don’t know what they were waiting for. 

             

New Dimensions

The recovery is slow.  Slower than expected, I must admit.  I can read the magnets on my refrigerator now, but for some reason I still can't seem to make out the features of my face in the mirror.  For the first time, I can recognize the distance between the mountain peaks and my neighbor's backyard.  But I fail to understand the directions of street signs without recognizing their shapes and colors. 

A few days ago, I laid down on a table with a donut cushion to stabilize my head.  I couldn't see the nurses when I first entered the room.  They were hidden by the dim light, the blue masks, and my own blindness.  Ten minutes later, I had vision.  Cloudy, like looking through smoke, but I could see.  With my own eyes.

The process wasn't free of fear despite its rapidity.  Fully awake, I had my eyelids taped back and my cornea exposed first to a machine that cut off a perfectly shaped flap, then to the laser that would burn off single layers of corneal skin one at a time.  The whole machine was run by a program, not by my surgeon.  His main job was sealing my cornea flap back onto my eye correctly.

During the surgery, I felt disconnected from my own eyes.  When they are held open and not allowed to blink, being instructed to fixate on a steadily blinking green light, it feels more like a bad dream than being conscious during a medical procedure.  The light becomes your place of unfocusing on what is being done to your eye even as it becomes your sole focus, your one constant, keeping your eyes from wandering and suffering the indiscriminate burn of the laser.  

Though the skill of the surgeon and the advancement of the technology inspired in me an appropriate level of awe, I find that they only attest to the even greater awesomeness of the eye itself.  The cornea is made of skin, living and renewable, like the skin on my arms and fingers and the bottoms of my feet and the inside of my mouth.  But cornea skin is clear.  Skin that I can see through, perfectly.  Even the clear materials of contacts and glasses distort vision to some extent.  It is impossible to make them so clear that they have no affect on vision.  

My contacts, for example, kept me from registering distance.  After climbing a mountain and looking out on the city below, I always felt as if I could pick up the tiny cars and people and put them where I wanted, like museum dioramas of the battle of Gettysburg or ancient Aztec civilizations.  I had to learn to keep appropriate following distances when driving by learning the rate at which cars shrunk and grew when I held back or stopped too near to rear bumpers.  My world was flat because of pieces of plastic glued to my eyes.

And in ten minutes, by burning of all things, the world became real.  Horseback riding a few days after the surgery, I looked over the steep edge beyond the trail and knew, knew for sure and not just in conjecture, that if I fell I would fall a long way.  The horizon became an unfathomable, unreachable distance, not just a line separating air from dirt.  Everything became larger, though it has yet to get clearer.  But it will.  And then clarity will match the new dimensions.

My eyes have been repaired, but this smaller surgery has only served as a reminder of the bigger healing that I am working toward each day.  Layers are being burned away one at a time, not painfully really, though I often tell myself that I should be fearful, that I'm losing pieces of myself.  It doesn't really hurt so much as it is scary.  Scary, that I'm putting myself completely under the mercy of my Surgeon, blind and helpless on the table.  Daily, hourly, each infinitesimal cell of rebellion is being scorched and shriveled for the purpose of clarity and focus. I know the focus is vital.  I have the light, all I have is the light, and I know that allowing my eyes to wander from that point, I risk losing my vision forever.  But I so want to wander, to settle for the mediocre and try to live my life with half vision, half clarity.   Everything feels as if it is being forced open, told to concentrate on a single point, to wait and not move until the cutting away is complete.  If I move before it is finished, I will be scarred.  But the point is secure.  The lighthouse beacon continues to shine strong, blinking intermittently to remind me of His presence.

Burning and cutting done, there will be clarity.  At first everything will be smoky, hazy, unfocused, but then the skin will be restored, the tears wiped away, and the whole universe will turn out to be bigger and more beautiful than anything I could have imagined.          

Patience

First entwining of nervous fingers

A blush and a flutter hiding behind a veil

The child in the womb

Hand-wringing happiness

Shoes bought one size too big

And the cookie jar with the lid on

The growth measurements on the door frame

The bike ride up the long hill

A handful of sand on summer vacation or

The sunrise on Christmas morning

Spring

A fullness filled.

The Librarian

Meredith hadn’t always wanted to be a librarian.  In fact, she had never wanted to be a librarian.  It just seemed to happen.  Her whole life had just seemed to happen.  She supposed she once had dreams, maybe even an adventure or two before the library.  But she didn’t remember.  Her life was just like the books.  She had stacked the memories away somewhere, somewhere she could keep them for later when she wanted to check them out, read them one more time.  Or more importantly, where she could forget them without losing them completely.

            She had gotten used to being invisible.  Her job was to be invisible.  If people did come to the library, which wasn’t often, they didn’t come to see her.  No one came to the library anymore, much less to talk to the somewhat young, somewhat pretty, somewhat short, somewhat average, somewhat altogether uninteresting woman behind the desk that sat directly in the middle of the first floor, surrounded by evenly spaced rows of composite wood shelves.  Besides, she liked being invisible.  Perhaps it was the reason why she had accepted the job.  Things were just easier when you were somewhat invisible.   

            The library itself was unimportant and unnoticed to the majority of the people in the neighborhood.  Built in the time before internet and amazon.com and Ebay and even Barnes and Noble, before the time of coffee shops with free wifi and cafes with comfy chairs, the library had outlived its time of mystery and adventure.  The old armchairs tucked away in its corners were now lumpy and an outdated orange.  The books themselves were faded and dusty, many of them put back in the wrong place and forgotten, checked out indefinitely.  It wasn’t old enough to hold that mystery that is only attributed to the sort of buildings made of stone with pillars out front and marble curved staircases and light fixtures that are made to look like old gas lamps. It was square and made of brick and cheap linoleum and gray carpet and composite wood.  Utilitarian does not create mystery.  The library was utilitarian.  The library was old, but not old enough.  The library was not mysterious.

            Much like Meredith. 

            She didn’t look up when she heard the approaching squeaking of the shoes on linoleum.  No one ever saw her sitting at her desk, stamping the ten returns she received each day.  Before lunch, after she had unlocked the front doors, turned on the lights, and put her brown canvas purse, the one that she always thought was too large, behind the desk beside the wicker trash can, she would go the return box and recover those titles that had been so lucky as to be found among the thousands of ignored on the shelves.   Settling herself into her chair, she would then arrange the stack of books in a neat pile beside her left elbow, not the right, so that it wouldn’t interfere with her stamping. 

The ink for the stamp was pink.  She hated pink.  She had always wanted it to be blue.

Only when she realized that the squeaks were moving in her direction did she raise her eyes, only her eyes, from her task of placing the new stamp perfectly below the last on each yellowed inside page. She saw the disheveled curly head before she heard the voice, but the person across the tall, composite wood counter from her was too short for her to see his face.  She only caught a glimpse of golden freckles on a pale forehead that almost glowed in the overwhelming white of the fluorescent lighting.  The squeak of his sneakers on the beige-speckled linoleum floor betrayed the hurried frustration of his miniature purpose.  

            The hair was the same color as hers, except that it hadn’t been dulled by an entire lifetime spent hiding from the sun.  A soft, internal light radiated from the golden-hinted auburn.

            Meredith didn’t stop her mechanical stamping.  “Can I help you?” 

            The clearing of the small throat reminded Meredith of the high pitched grind her electric pencil sharpener produced, the pencil sharpener on the left side of her desk that sat at a perfect right angle to the corner and that she used everyday right after her lunch break.  Even if her pencils didn’t need sharpening.

            “I need an adventure.”

            The stamp hesitated for a second as Meredith processed the request.  Did they have a section labeled adventure?  No, no of course not.

            “We don’t have an adventure section,” she said, looking up from her stamping and addressing the red mop that seemed to hover at the edge of her desk.  It reminded her of…she didn’t know what.  “You should go to the children’s books.”

            She thought that would end it.  But the disembodied hair remained.  She heard the squeak of the shoes again and the hair gave way to a forehead, then a set of huge blue eyes framed by long golden lashes.

            “Please.  I can’t find an adventure.”

            The plea held the tremor of tears, but also confidence.  Assertiveness.  Duty.  The plea of preachers at altar call.  The call of patriots for liberty and judges for justice.  A prince pleading for the people of his nation rise up and fight for their way of life.

            Meredith sat with stamp suspended in midair above The Birdwatcher’s Guide to the Birds of North America.  Her hand trembled.  Only the when the stamp quaked from her fingers and bled a fatal pink stain onto the wrong side of the inside cover did she recover. 

            Preachers?  Patriots?  Judges and princes?

Leaving the desk now would mean that her stamping would be interrupted.  The pile of books would be left on the desk when they should be stamped and put on the shelves.  Those books were her only task.  She was a librarian, and librarians put away their books.  A librarian was what she was.

            The blue eyes blinked once.

            Her tongue rebelled against her and formed the one reluctant word of rebellion.

            “Sure.”                   

Revolutionary

“Jules, smile!”

            Christmas morning always brings the video camera.  More than birthdays, more than choir concerts, more than events like the day I learned how to tie my shoes.  Every December the 25^th, my dad’s hand brushes off the hard, black, twenty pound plastic case that holds the gargantuan icon of our holiday season.

Even though they all look the same, Simmons Christmases must be recorded.  To miss one, even one, would be disastrous.

            “Jules, say something.  The camera is on.  This one takes video, not pictures.”

            The relatives also come out from their dusty hiding places whenever the end of the year brings the smell of Christmas cookies to our tiny kitchen.  They’ll be arriving decked out in their finest lumpy, scratchy, red and green sweaters later in the afternoon, burdened with boxes of food and hurriedly wrapped packages of plastic toys destined to be torn apart by my younger brother and I. 

Even though they don’t care and have never cared what our house looks like, Mom seems to think they’ll notice the dust that’s collected behind the picture frames on the entryway table.  She’s been scurrying around the house with a frantic pace in her socks and gray sweat pants, vacuuming and wiping and rearranging surfaces in the house that only the resident miller moths have ever paid much attention to.  Now she’s upstairs, getting the sleepy Tyler, never a morning person, to come down and open presents with his impatient sister. 

            I’ve been waiting for the last two hours for it to be the appropriate time to open presents.  I’m always awake as soon as any hint of light makes it through the yellowed metal blinds in my room on this most anxious of mornings.  The sound of mom and dad’s creaking bedroom door as it joyously announces they are finally awake sends me flying down the staircase in my footy pajamas to sit, straight-backed, on the cold tile in front of the fireplace.  From here, I can have a perfect view of the tree, positioned proudly by the front windows so that all the neighbors can see our multicolored Walmart lights, the tree under which all happiness lies shrouded in pine-scented mystery.

            Except that dad blocks my view.  The video camera has once again emerged to interrupt my attempts at guessing what surprises the wrapped boxes might contain.  And this time, it’s also ratted me out.  The big black eye and the blinking red light have caught me, frozen, with my finger up my nose. 

            “Julie, take your finger out of your nose and smile for the camera,” Dad coaxes in a voice that only barely betrays his frustration and embarrassment for my sake.  Only the fringes of his tousled curly hair are visible behind the monstrosity of the camera, so I can’t guess his expression.

            The instant I realized I had been caught, I didn’t know what to do.  A good scolding usually followed the revelation of the crime, especially recently, since my parents didn’t want me to pull out a big green one in front of the relatives.  Putting the video camera in between me and Dad seemed to have changed something.  He couldn’t scold me.  And I couldn’t react in a customary pouty way, with a frown and a prominent bottom lip.  Not only that, but even though I didn’t want to drop the habit, I still had some understanding that I should be embarrassed.  But Dad was asking me to smile.  None of it fit.

            So I froze, hoping that I would fail to capture the attention of the all-seeing eye if I just did nothing long enough.  With my finger up my nose, I made a defiant stand against the tyranny of the video camera like no one ever had before and no one ever has since.  After those few agonizing minutes and several nervous laughs from my dad, its horrible gaze finally shifted to focus on Ty and Mom as they descended the stairs.  I had won, or so I thought.

            I lost in the long run.  Though I resisted the demands of the camera, it had marked me as a nonconformist in the records of Simmons Christmases for the rest of time.  Nearly every Christmas now, the tape of me staring blankly into the lens with my finger up my nose plays on the television for the entire family.  Instead of being recognized as a picture of the beautiful realities that are not a part of our Christmas because of the tyranny of the video camera, the clip instead perpetuates the way things always have been by teaching the youngest generations what not to do when they’re asked to smile for the camera.             

Stained Glass Windows (the unfinished story)

Even in the dim haze of muffled daylight, I recognize the shape of the man holding the rifle by the door.

            “Ben,” I say just above a whisper, “put the gun away.”

            “But, Rebecca, I…”

            “If they want to kill us today, they can.  We just have to hope.  All we have is hope.  Today is about that hope.”  I listen to my own feeble, overused speech fall strangled into the dust on the floor.

            But Ben finds the truth in it, the truth that has been there every time he’s heard it.  He shuffles his booted foot on the concrete.  Looks at the small spot he has cleared of grey dirt.

            “Of all the days though…of all the days I would fight and die without regrets, today would be the day.”

            I can’t keep from smiling despite the momentary fear that clenches my throat.  No matter how long this war lasts and no matter how much hope fills my heart, I’ve never gotten rid of that instinctive fear.  Not for myself, but for them.

            “Thank you.  Isaac and I both thank you for that.”  I pause as his deep-set gray eyes meet mine.  “Hope.”

            “Hope.”

            No more needs to be said.  Our motivations have been discussed and re-discussed enough for memorization over the last two years.

            The hem of the dress sends out a small rolling cloud of the dust as I turn.  “Come on.  They’re waiting.”

            Ben still holds the rifle as he follows me through the doorway and down the staircase, his lined face a grim mixture of hard determination and anticipation.  The two expressions hit against each other in his eyes, like flint and steel striking out sparks.  Like always, he unconsciously rubs a sweaty palm through his already-spiky gray hair.  His prematurely gray hair.

            I wish I could run my hand over my hair, entwine my fingers in the dark curls, pull on the braid in agitation.  But there is no braid today, no scratchy dirt.  Anita would silence my excuses with her tsk tsk if I allowed my nervous habit to muss the intricate bun she has coiled on the back of my head.

            It is Anita who meets us at the bottom of the stairs in the storeroom with empty shelves lit by a single, flickering fluorescent tube.  I can tell she has been pacing while she prays for safety, praying as she scuffles across the tiny space, back and forth, with tired feet and back hunched under a tissue-thin shawl.  The dust is kicked up and has formed a halo around the solitary light and her callused palms are pressed together so tightly that I think the bird-bone wrists might break backwards.

            I see the ghostly paleness of those palms as she releases them from their position of contrition and places them softly on my blush-hinted cheeks.  Her thin, cracked lips spread slowly into a smile filled with scattered yellow teeth as she examines my face.

            “You look absolutely stunning, Rebecca dear,” she says.  Tears fill the bloodshot black eyes.

            If only I could cry.  I used to be able to.  That was before, when I had not spent all my tears on countless deaths, countless trespasses, countless evils.  But by the burning in my chest and somewhere behind my nose I know that my body longs for that release, even if the tears have long been absent.  Like clouds over a rainless desert.

            “Thank you, Anita.  Only you could have found a way to clean me up in a place like this.”  I place my cold hands on her perpetually warm ones and smile widely so that my cheeks press into her palms.

            She smiles wider and chuckles a little.  There is a pause as I watch her focus shift from my face to something beyond me, from dimly lit reality to something beyond the present.  Her beautiful memory.  The memory that nothing could destroy.

            Her voice is almost giggly as she whispers.  “It was a sparkling new spring day in May.  I remember being so nervous, checking my hair and my dress over and over again in the mirror.  Praying that it didn’t rain, even though everyone told me that was supposed to be good luck.  I told them we didn’t need luck.”

            I release her hands as they leave my face to play absentmindedly with the worn gold band on her finger.

            “I remember the sun being so bright that the colors from the stained glass made the whole audience glow like painted dolls in the wooden pews.   I felt like I was inside a kaleidoscope, like I used to have when I was a kid.  The room stopped spinning when I saw his face, though.  Even from all the way down that carpeted aisle, I could see in his eyes that he thought I was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.”

            A deep chuckle escapes through the gaps between her teeth.

            “It never rained that day.  There was sunshine then.  Sunshine and stained glass.”

            Her eyes come back to my face again, the tears still present but changed.  Sparkling.

            “Love, my dear,” she says, taking my hands in hers, “makes everything beautiful.  No matter where it is.”

            He had been destroyed with the stained glass windows two years ago.  And yet she never remembered how his body crumpled in the shadow of the steeple, his blood staining the white limestone steps they had climbed every week together, his life blending with the shards of glass and making them all the same color.  All she remembered was his face and the stained glass.  Love makes everything beautiful.

            Fear stabs me again, my fear of loss now that I have something to lose.  I never had anything to lose before, ever since my parents and brother and almost everyone I had ever known was killed or sent to the prisons.  Until now, I had fought for ideals, values, that really couldn’t be destroyed even if I lost my life like so many others before me.  But now.  Isaac is living, breathing.  I don’t want to lose what I’ve fought so hard to gain.

            But I need to remember.  At the foundation of everything is the faith that it cannot be destroyed.  My fear finds its way back to the bottom of my stomach where it waits to slither upwards to my heart again at the sound of one out of place footstep.  The cold heaviness makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed a rock.

            I let Anita wrap me in her twiggy arms, leaning down so that even with the hunched back she can rest her elbows on my shoulders. 

            “Show the world what love is like,” I barely catch her whisper.

            The syllables contrast gratingly with the muted tapping of Ben’s finger on the barrel of his gun.

            Anita releases me and I turn to him with an expression I hope resembles sternness.  “Leave the gun here.”

            “But…”           

            “Leave the gun here.”

            He places it gingerly on one of the empty, dust covered shelves.  Close to the door.  

            Ben and Anita let me lead the way.  My hands are shaking as I climb the stairs again.  I try to think about why, the reasons why they should even with the fear suppressed.  Are the police close by?  Do I feel exposed without a weapon, without a hiding place? 

            It almost scares me more to realize that I am giddy with anticipation, maybe even happiness.  Joy.  Hope, in this dusty shell of a building.  I’m not used to this sort of expectation, this unknown.  For such a long time, anxiety has meant nothing but pain and loss.  Strange that it should be stronger when it is about a gain.

            And whenever there is hope this strong in something, someone, I can see and touch and hold close, there is one more thing that will leave a raw hole when it is torn away.  Haven’t I learned that I shouldn’t care?  That I shouldn’t love anything living?  That my hope for something good in this world will destroy my heart over and over again? 

            My foot hesitates on the last step before I reach the floor above.

            But my hope is not on things here, not in today.  This hope, this fluttering, this internal shining of colors, comes from something else, something untouched by the ever present darkness.  My hope springs from that hope.  That there is such thing as incorruptible.  That there is such thing as love.    

            For the first time in the entire preparation, I wish desperately that I had a mirror to reassure me.  Though I know it wouldn’t help.

            There is such thing as love.  There is such thing as beauty.

            Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s hard to believe.

            “Faith.” 

Anita’s single word hits me as if she has physically pushed me with all the might her frail body can give.  Though it feels heavier than it should in my worn out flats, I lift my foot and take the last stair.

The dust billows around our feet and the faded cloths covering the broken windows sigh in and out as we pass through the dead space of the empty room.  Our footsteps don’t make a sound.  I can hear my own breathing, the blood pounding in my ears, and nothing else. 

He’s waiting for me on the other side of this door.  I hold my breath and wonder if he’s been holding his.  I want to know what he’s thinking.

Anita puts her hand to the door.  What is the matter with me?  I’ve had the cold muzzle of a gun pressed to the side of my head, insults screamed into my ears until they rang with despair.  Never have my hands shaken like this.  I ask myself again: is it fear?  No.  It’s the hope.

And then the door is open and I’m walking toward him, floating over the stains and between the dust-coated old pews toward the light that hovers above him and Rick, a single bulb.

His eyes shine even in the dimness, even with all the windows covered by particle board and the single light bulb haloed by a sphere of dust.  His eyes shine blue, bluer than the lake the day we sat on the bench under the tree and talked about the future.  We could never have predicted that it looked like this.  We couldn’t have predicted the heartache and loss it had taken to get here.  But we also couldn’t have overestimated the joy of finding a glimmer of this light in the darkness, this glimmer of hope hidden by dust. 

That day by the lake in the sunshine with our bare feet in the gravely sand we had talked about fear.  But we hadn’t known fear.  We hadn’t yet had to run.  We hadn’t yet lost home, and family, and freedom.  The stained glass windows hadn’t been broken by the charismatic leaders and their men with guns.  That day by the lake, beauty existed.

That beauty still exists in his eyes, luminescent in the darkness.

            I want to look down and blush demurely, like I always expected I would on this day.  Maybe even cry a little from the overflow of emotion that was supposed to quicken my breath and make me think of how this day marked the end of everything I had known before, the day where a new unity is formed and old ties are broken.

            The old ties had been broken long ago with the windows.  Now there is just particle board.  My heart unified itself with the fight two years ago when the stained glass was broken.

            I don’t look down.  I keep his gaze, held fast and matched with mine.  Neither of us smiles, but there is an understanding.  Something deeper than a smile.

            I take his hands.  They’re cold.  He smiles at me, a small smile.  Half mouths, half whispers the words “you look beautiful.”

            Rick begins as Anita and Ben come to stand alongside.  The old Bible looks bigger than it ever used to in his weathered, large-knuckled hands. 

            “You both know the risks.  But you also know something greater, and that’s why we’re here.”  His gentle voice is muffled by the dust even in the echoing space of the sanctuary.

            I can feel him scan our faces as he pauses, thinking, or maybe overcoming the hold of his own memories.  He hasn’t seen his wife in seven years.  He hasn’t received a letter written from her cell in dissenter prison for a year and a half.  I think he asks himself whether or not he thinks we are strong enough to make the sacrifices he has made, to endure what he has endured.  I wish he would tell me the conclusion he comes to, but I think I already know the answer.  We have to be strong enough.

            He doesn’t even need to open the Bible to read the verse.  “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”  He places a hand on each of our shoulders.  The weight of the Bible sits heavy on my back. 

“Today is about love.  True love, the way it should be.  This is how it used to be.  And we can only pray that this is how it will continue to be, even if it has to be in secret.

            “What you proclaim here is sacred, solemn, and binding before God.  Even if the world has broken the tradition, the freedom, the family that should be surrounding you today, the foundation of the holiness on which this promise rests can never be killed, never be broken.”

            I wonder what Ben thinks as I notice him begin to sob silently behind Isaac, arms hugged tightly against his chest and tears running unchecked down his scarred face.  He never had this chance, this day.  He, Isaac, and I are the last of the group known to be alive.  Prison or an unknown fate had claimed everyone else.  Giving me away means more to him than it ever would have even to my father if this day had come before the stained glass windows were broken.

            Rick coughs on the dust.  I keep staring into the deep, shining blue, bluer than the sky ever used to be.  Bluer than the stained glass of Jonah’s whale or Mary’s robe.

            “Isaac, do you accept the challenge and responsibility that is taking this woman to be your wife, being faithful to her in the face of hardship, persecution, and death, faithful to her always as God commands and this ceremony professes?”

            His eyes don’t leave my face.  “I do.”

            A yell from outside.  His hands tense in mine.  Rick’s thumb twitches on my shoulder. 

            “Rebecca, do you accept the challenge and responsibility that is accepting this man as your husband…”

            A crash muffled by thick dust tells us that the lock on the door didn’t buy us much time.

“…trusting him and being faithful to him even in the face of hardship, persecution, and death…”

Several heavily booted feet clump purposefully across the dust-covered concrete.

“…faithful to him always as God commands and this ceremony professes?”

The door to the room makes an indent in the wall as it is kicked open, revealing three rifle barrels and more behind.  We can’t see the eyes of the men who hold them, their faces hidden by their all-seeing goggles.  They spread efficiently and mechanically into the room.  Like black cockroaches searching for food. 

None of us have moved.  My eyes are still locked with his.

“This ceremony is illegal under federal law!” the black-covered man who appears to be the leader barks out.  His voice is forceful enough to echo despite the dust.

No one moves.  Only Ben even looks his way, his hands passively at his side.  I know he is thinking about the gun on the shelf in the storage room, realizing that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.  Hopefully realizing that it would have been out of place, would have defeated the purpose of today.  Realizing it would have made them lose the fight. 

“Do you understand the implications of your action in breaking this law?” the commander spits out, sounding more than annoyed at the lack of response.

I never take my eyes from the deep blue.  “I do.”

“If you stop now and profess your allegiance to the government, you might get off with a long prison sentence.”  His tone lets me know that he thinks any smart person would do as he suggests.  I wonder how many others he has discovered, and how many of those have taken his offer. 

I look at Rick.  His eyes tell me that he is ready.  His eyes tell me that this is worth fighting for.  His eyes are full of hope.

“Hey!  Are you listening?  I gave you an option.  Answer!”  The commander readjusts the butt of his gun against his shoulder.  The other men shift nervously.

I turn my eyes back to Isaac.  I know what he’s thinking.  I’ve always been able to read his thoughts.  He’s telling me that he loves me.  And that this was worth, is worth, fighting for.  Meeting my eyes, he squeezes my hands tightly and smiles another small smile.  This time, I smile back.

Rick’s voice cuts through the dusty silence.  It rings strangely in contrast to the voice of the police commander, like a trumpet in the distance.  “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

The air is full of popping sounds, but I don’t care.  I lean into Isaac and our lips touch as we fall.  We have won.

            

Stained Glass Attitudes: The Relationship Between Eros and Agape in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength

The experience of love serves as one of the oldest mysteries of human existence.  The loves of a friend for a friend, a parent for a child, a husband for a wife, man for God and God for man have been described as being at once both the most natural reactions of the body and most divine feelings of the soul.  The love between a husband and a wife most clearly displays this natural and divine duality of the true loves.  A marriage must embody both eros, romantic and sexual love, and agape, the self-sacrificing love evident in the person of God, in order to achieve true unity and life-long endurance.  In the novel That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis uses the example of a married couple, initially distanced from each other and from God, in order to illuminate the relationship necessary between eros and agape for the complete fulfillment of both marital relationships and an individual’s relationship with God.  Through the characters of Mark and Jane, Lewis not only shows that eros itself can be the means by which an individual approaches an understanding of agape, but that an understanding of God’s love is necessary for a full realization of all the blessings of eros.

            The experience of eros as a means of approaching an understanding agape can be seen primarily in the progression of Jane’s conversion.  Through the words of the Director and the response of Jane, Lewis reveals his view of marriage as a relationship with complete unity, but not complete equality, and how that perspective leads to an understanding of the love of God.  The character of Jane longs for a world and a marriage in which she is valued, not for qualities inherent to her femininity, but for her equally intelligent and independent status.  She believes that in all marriages people have equality “in their souls” (“Strength” 148) and that therefore she should be considered completely equal with her husband in all ways.  The Director corrects her by introducing a new perspective concerning her relationship with her husband: “That [marriage] is the last place where they are equal.  Equality before the law, equality of income—that is very well.  Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it” (“Strength” 148).  Lewis reiterates this view in his book The Four Loves, referring to a husband and wife as “a god and goddess between whom there is no equality—whose relations are asymmetrical” (“Strength” 104).  For Lewis, unity does not exist when the parts of the whole are equal, but rather when the parts remain distinct and assume their proper places within a greater hierarchy.  The wife, as the distinctive feminine part of the marriage relationship, submits to her husband, while the husband, as the distinctive masculine part, lives sacrificially for her just as Christ gave his life for the church (“Loves” 105-106).     

As she begins to realize this necessity of difference and hierarchy in her marriage, Jane also begins to recognize her marriage as an image of a greater, universal hierarchy:

But she had been conceiving this world as ‘spiritual’ in the negative sense—as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away.  Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent.  How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated—but in ever larger and more disturbing modes—on the highest levels of all? (“Strength” 315)

In this way, Jane eventually connects the idea of unity through hierarchy to her understanding of the spiritual world.  Though it seems at first to her to be “nonsensical” and “indecent and irreverent” to relate her marriage to Mark with “religion,” Jane comes to understand that religion is not the issue, but rather her unwillingness to give up her independence and equality for a personal relationship with both her husband and God (“Strength” 317-318).  For Jane, this realization not only means a sacrifice of her belief in independence and equality with Mark, but also a submission to a God with whom she could never consider herself an equal.  One can never know the agape of God unless one has acknowledged dependence on and inequality with God, a recognition that Jane is only able to reach as she begins to understand true unity in her relationship with her husband. 

This ability of eros to lead to agape by means of similarity is addressed by Lewis in The Four Loves: “This love [eros] is really and truly like Love Himself…His [eros] total commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise towards God and Man” (109-110).  Through Jane’s gradual understanding of this paradigm, commitment without the expectation of equality, one can see the small-scale example of agape that eros provides through its representation of necessary sacrifice within a unified relationship.  The marriage relationship, in its small part of the hierarchy of the universe, becomes “the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle,” a miniature of the sacrifice of independence required and the unity desired by God in a relationship with Him (“Loves” 115).  In the words of Lewis, romantic love becomes “a sort of explosion that starts up the engine” but remains “the pie-crust, not the pie” (“Behavior” 32).  The “pie” is that the top of the hierarchy himself revealed agape to the world by relinquishing his throne in heaven and coming to earth to die even for those who mocked him, not to grasp equality with God, but to show His love for humanity (Philippians 2:6-7, NIV). Jesus died so that we could have unity with Him, a magnification of the hierarchy of service visualized within human marriage.  In the words of Lewis’ Screwtape the demon, “the Enemy [God] wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct” (“Letters” 46).  Though she finds a small example in her marriage to Mark, Jane realizes fully the nature of true unity only when she grasps this infinitely radical picture, accomplishing Lewis’ goal of asserting the ability of eros to be a means of approach for agape.

To examine the reverse relationship between the loves, C. S. Lewis demonstrates his belief in the necessary subjection of eros to agape through the change in Mark and Jane’s understanding of their sexual relationship.  Jane becomes the first to begin the change when she encounters Perelandra or Venus, the goddess of sexuality, in the garden of St. Anne’s (“Strength” 304-305).  Later hearing her account of the experience, the Director explains the intensity of the meeting as a result of Jane having “rejected” the goddess and because she saw Venus separate from the hierarchy, the rule of God, to which Jane had not yet surrendered.  Venus, figurative of eros, remains “raw,” “untransformed,” and “demoniac” when she serves as a deity without subjugation to the control of agape (“Strength” 314).  Jane’s experience epitomizes Lewis’ understanding of the relationship between natural and divine loves: “when natural things look divine, the demoniac is just around the corner” (“Loves” 102).  Here Jane’s encounter with raw eros shows that though eros can speak “like a god…it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God Himself.  For Eros, speaking with that very grandeur and displaying that very transcendence of self, may urge to evil as well as good” (“Loves” 108).  Through Jane’s example Lewis asserts the fact that romantic relationships, even marriages, fail to know complete love if eros is the only type of love present.  It is the presence of the authority of agape over eros, tempering and transforming it, that directs it into what it was created to be.

When agape takes control of eros, lovers understand their obligation to give up individual pride in order to love the other person selflessly, as can be seen most vividly in the transformation of Mark.   As he makes his way to see Jane after their long separation and his final defiance against N.I.C.E., Mark considers the “clumsy importunity” with which he has handled the gift of Jane’s love during in their marriage:

…all the lout and clown and clod-hopper in him was revealed to his own reluctant inspection…How had he dared?  Her driven snow, her music, her sacrosanctity, the very style of all her movements…how had he dared?  And dared too with no sense of daring, nonchalantly, in careless stupidity!  The very thoughts that crossed her face from moment to moment, all of them beyond his reach, made (had he but had the wit to see it) a hedge about her which such as he should never have had the temerity to pass. (“Strength” 380-381)

Here Lewis gives the reader a picture of a lover who has been humbled to a newly-discovered understanding of his beloved’s virtues by an experience with agape, which Mark describes as “the normal” or “that which is sweet and straight” (“Strength” 299).  When he decides to desire the good more than he desires acceptance, Mark finally understands the fearful gift of eros that Jane has given to him and appreciates it for the first time, demolishing his previous pride.  In Mark, one sees that “God, admitted to the human heart, transforms…not only our Need-love of Him, but our Need-love of one another” (“Loves” 133).  Agape shows Mark how he should view eros in his marriage.  Through Mark’s example Lewis also asserts, however, that “the Divine Love does not substitute itself for the natural—as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold.  The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were” (“Loves” 133).  The natural love of eros becomes the love through which Mark expresses his new humility towards Jane and demonstrates the new agape love present in their redeemed relationship (“Strength” 382).

            Jane also experiences a change toward humility in eros through her encounter with agape.  Her pride first becomes revealed to her through the words of the Director when he relates her grip on independence to both her marriage and her relationship with God:

…your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier.  We call it Pride.  You are offended by the masculine itself: that loud, irruptive, possessive thing…which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness…The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level.  But the masculine none of us can escape. (“Strength” 315-316)

This passage depicts the Director exposing Jane’s unwillingness to submit her independence to either eros or agape and names her pride as the cause.  Concerning her sexual relationship with her husband, the Director even asserts that “obedience—humility—is an erotic necessity” (“Strength” 148).  If she is to love either her husband or God, Jane must find humility.  This humility only comes after she realizes she was “made to please Another and in Him to please all others,” an epiphany after which “the height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air” (“Strength” 319).  Through the transformation of Jane, Lewis demonstrates his view that even “the most lawless and inordinate lovers are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness…Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness” (“Loves” 122).  Jane would be closer to an understanding of true eros if she had idolized it instead of repressing it completely out of the fear that she will have to give up her pride.  The example of agape in Christ shows that though humility can lead to suffering for love, eros must attain the humility of agape and shed self-protectiveness for care of the other if it is to be true and complete.

Not only does the sovereignty of agape bring about humility within eros, but it also allows for the flourishing of the beauty and pleasure of eros.  In the view of Lewis, those opposed to God and His love “always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable” (“Letters” 49).  This is evidenced in the example of N.I.C.E., which believes in the eradication of all things sexual in order to purify humanity (“Strength” 173).  On the other hand, under agape, eros finds its full celebration and fulfillment.  Jane observes and resents this fact during the beginning of her stay at St. Anne’s:

Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey formalized one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained glass attitudes.  That was the antithesis she was used to.  This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like. (“Strength” 316)

Jane recognizes at St. Anne’s the beauty offered by romantic love when “formalized” i.e. placed under the authority of, and therefore enhanced by, agape.  Mark also comes to recognize this beauty of eros submitted to agape, though he is bitter that he has not understood earlier: “He was discovering the hedge after he had plucked the rose, and not only plucked it but torn it all to pieces and crumpled it with hot, thumb-like, greedy fingers” (“Strength” 381).  Jane’s love, previously of no meaningful value to Mark, now becomes related in his mind to a beautiful flower crushed by his lack of proper appreciation.  This change in the perspectives of Mark and Jane portray clearly the views of Lewis on the nature of eros, sexual love, within Christianity, the lifestyle of agape: “Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians.  If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once” (“Behavior” 27).  Romantic and sexual love, Lewis asserts, was created by God and therefore should be celebrated by Christians like all other good gifts from the Creator.  As instituted by God, the restrictions placed upon it are not to make it less enjoyable, but rather to place it within a context where it can reveal its full beauty, because “Eros, of himself, will never be enough—will indeed survive only in so far as he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles” (“Loves” 110).  As Jane and Mark both come to understand, agape does not demonize eros but rather allows it to come into its full power without becoming a demon, the key to the true fulfillment of its nature.  The Creator of both eros and agape reveals Himself to be “a hedonist at heart…He has filled His world full of pleasures” (“Letters” 122).  The story of That Hideous Strength ends with a celebration of a redeemed marriage and two individual relationships with God through the consummation of eros by the couple (“Strength” 382).  Through the changed perspectives of Mark and Jane, Lewis proclaims the redemption of the rose that was crumpled and celebrates the beauty of stained glass windows.

             Through the characters Mark and Jane in That Hideous Strength, the perspectives of C. S. Lewis concerning the relationship between eros and agape loves gain new clarity as the reader follows the growth of the couple’s marriage relationship.  By detailing the changes of the ideas of Mark and Jane, Lewis asserts the indispensability of the connectedness of these two powerful love experiences.  Eros can provide a vivid example of the type of love demonstrated by God through agape, though eros cannot function or be made into a god on its own without running the risk of becoming a demon that destroys all true love.  Eros, placed under the control of agape, can be a love that flourishes and continues to grow as agape encourages the humility of the lovers and reveals the beautiful and pleasurable nature of eros as it was created to be.  Above all, That Hideous Strength demonstrates clearly Lewis’ belief in God’s sovereignty over all things, most especially the loves.  The relationship between eros and agape, while still mysterious, becomes less mysterious when one recognizes their common source in the Creator of the universe.  Like Mark and Jane, one can see they must submit all of themselves to God, both in the natural reactions of the body and the divine feelings of the soul, in order to understand any part of love.  All love only becomes true love when it remains in Love Himself.  

                                       

Works Cited

Lewis, C. S. . Christian Behavior. 5. Binghamton, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1945.

---. That Hideous Strength. 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction Ed.. New York,

NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996.

---. The Four Loves. Reprint. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1991.

---. The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast. Reprint. New York, NY: The

Macmillan Company, 1961.