Ah, yes. Potty training, toils and travails of. A subject that has no interest whatever for most, but which parents of young children can’t seem to stop talking about.

I’m in quite the situation, myself. My boy is not even two years old yet - not till September - but in certain ways he is very close to being ready for this step. He hates having his diaper changed. And today he’s begun removing his own diaper everytime he does anything in it. Everytime I turn around he’s gleefully hopping about, everything flapping for joy in the cool fresh air, with a barely wet diaper and and his pants coiled around his ankles. And he doesn’t even know the words yet that I’ll need to potty train him!

The popular wisdom right now is “wait; he’ll do it when he’s ready.” But I can’t help suspecting that this may be one of the reasons why kids are training later and later. Besides, I don’t trust popular wisdom. It’s the next thing to anarchy.

Enter my mother-in-law, who is all agog with this family who potty trained their infants and never used diapers at all. The way they did it was to sit the baby on the toilet with them, thus making it instinctive. It also involved a complex method of reading “signs” in the child’s body language, since of course a three-month-old can’t say “I hafta go”  - even if does know to let loose when held over a toilet.

Yeah…not for me, but thanks, Mom.

Next I read a triumphal story on a parenting board the other day about a four-year-old who potty trained himself “when he was ready” - that time just happening to coincide with a camping trip in which the whole family had to make regular treks to the bathroom together, because it was off-site.

And…and… I read a novel, otherwise awful, in which a sort of degraded society gets divided between those who do their business wherever they happen to be at the moment, and those who have a dedicated spot.

And it ocurred to me. The diaper, from the child’s point of view, is incidental. It’s not about diaper vs. toilet. It’s all about whether you go where you stand, or retire to a private spot. In other words, using the bathroom is a societal norm, a civilized activity. We do it because we are part of a group that does it by way of structuring our social relations.

Bingo!

All I have to do to make him see the light is to take the little rat with me…every time…oh, good grass. This is not fun at all.

Holly Brightweed and her willing beau
unspeaking wandered on the shaggy ridge
that topped her father’s strip of land
much like the tooth-torn cartilage
of a dog’s well-loved and well-gnawed bone.

For feathered weeds, mostly dead,
were mashed and crashed
through hollow and head -
all colorless, or brown, or sickly green.
Holly said it was the scene
she found the saddest all year round.

“Spring was mother-mud” she said, “until
a green mist rose up from the dale
and crept of a morning up this hill.
Green and golden days swung by
all the glancing, dancing summer.
In early fall we chased winged creatures
turned to flightlight, you remember -
everything glowed more to gold.
Now this.” She stopped and crushed
a withered leaf. They both stood still
to hear the land. The air was hushed,
harvest over, few birds left,
insects dead. “Winter’s near:”
she mourned. “The wide world seems to wait.”

Richard Healing thought her voice held fear.
He said, “But Winter’s fair.” Richard’s speech
was cheerful, even musical, like wind:
“Something in you loves the cold and white.”

Holly winced as though he sinned.

“Cold is fire inside-out” she said,
“it eats my shuddering hands and toes.
Snow’s a jail that keeps me locked
inside the house to blow my ruddy nose!
And white - it’s lovely, I suppose,
but teaches me to ponder emptiness -
empty house, empty sky,
empty rooms that throb inside.”
                                                   “I bless,”
rejoined the man, “whatever made and kept
Holly Brightweed wintry-white in soul.
Will you wear white for me one day this yule,
And taking Winter’s color, salvage what She stole?”

Halfway down the shaggy ridge they stood.
Holly Brightweed turned and looked at him,
and guessed the versey riddle. Down they came
against the autumn breeze - the light fell dim,
the wind picked up, the silent trudging pair
thought of hallow Winter that was near.
They glimpsed aloft a tiny shiny moon;
They stopped, clasped hands, and called each other ‘dear’.

In the house where Holly and Richard live
a yellow kitchen cheers a hall of brown,
a library beckons with a scheme in green,
the parlor lamp warms red, where folks sit down.
There also hangs a fluted gown of white
Where in a soft-hued room they share the night.

Holly: what a white-souled, grey-faced child.
Her feet shrink in this snow,
Her head hangs down beneath this heavy sky…
Oh that I knew why.

Richard: not distinguished, wealthy, wild,
Not anything I know.
Yet warmly does he speak to me - he makes
Of me his human kin.

Stooped in bluish pools of grief-bruised skin
Her eyes that once were suns
So feebly and so nobly fail to shine:
Not if she were mine.

And why should I not answer one made kin,
In kindness’ kind? The nuns
Do just so much. If further comes,
It comes. I’ll plan no more.

I longed for paths lit longwise from above;
But each step lights the next for humble Love.

Note: This is a new version of my most recent Holly Brightweed poem, formerly labeled XIII. There was another that should have come before this one, and I’ve just posted it here where this poem used to be in its first version. To see all the poems in their most current versions and in their correct orders, visit the ‘Holly Brightweed’ page linked in my sidebar.

Two poems are left to post and I’ve nearly finished editing them both, so this story should be wrapping up pretty quickly. I planned for ten poems but after extensive editing, rewriting, and shuffling about, there are only nine. Before I consider this cycle finished I may end up writing another that develops the winter = loneliness theme that became so important at the end of the cycle. It would, I think, have to be inserted between Holly’s conisderation of the cloister and her meeting with Richard (this poem.) Does anyone think that  would help the transition any? Or should I refrain from developing my character’s misery any further?

I suppose that all natural human loves can be images of and partakers in Divine Love. It’s only just come to me how a parents’ love really does so.

In a happy marriage there is no need of a child to bring any completion or fulfil any lack within the relationship. The the man and the woman - diverse in sex, one in nature - have found unity and completion in one another, and they make a little world of themselves. Yet that same relationship will ordinarily flow out into living offspring. In fact, when parents bring a child into the world voluntarily and out of no obligation or sense of need, but just out of the desire to share their love with their own image, to allow their love to expand, as it were, and flow out, not only to an existing object, but to an object that exists because of the love that flows out to it - that is the when the phrase “Our Father, You Who are in Heaven” has the most meaning to us.

In case someone does not understand the comparison, I am talking about the truth that God is Himself a Realm and World that needs no other world to contain or give context. In diversity of Persons, Unity of Nature, His existance is named Love. Yet he pours out love even beyond himself, as impossible as this seems, which results in the existance of creatures and the bestowing of all good upon them. This is done freely and that is the beauty of it and the Honor of the Creator.

I believe that parental love is an image of this Divine Creative Love, and I think that the more freely parents bestow this ‘creating love’ upon the child whose existence they desire, the clearer the image becomes.

On the other hand, when the bearing of children becomes an obligation, as in so many corners of Christianity, the image is forbidden this, its most essential aspect.

Obligation is what ruins so many spiritual joys and godly virtues. I’m sure that is why, no matter how much the Jewish Christians of the Apostle Paul’s day were in need, no matter how good it was for the Gentiles to contribute largely to that need, he forbore to give them any command concerning the amount (or percentage) that each was to give. For “God loves a cheerful giver” and no one was to give “under compulsion.”

In fact, although the Kingdom of God is a place of order, of God’s rule, of Law of a sort, that Law is Love, and Love is free and is freedom. The whole tenor of true Christianity is one of goodness that is not under compulsion. Whenever I percieve the urge to codify and legislate what ought to be free and the springing up of grace, I feel that I am looking at something unhealthy and not fully Christian.

I used to think that to forgive someone was to release them from an obligation they had incurred against themselves by wronging me. Such a definition is easy to formulate and fits neatly into certain rather elegant theories about right and wrong. I suppose that idea still has some meaning or usefulness in some spheres of this life. However, I think that the more bewildering is more true: what is most important about forviveness is that we are all, already, under infinite obligation to one another because of that law which says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I’m not saying that our obligation came into being when this law was first spoken as a commandement. The speaking of the command was, I think, more like a witness to a law that already existed because it has to do with what we are. As created beings, we are what we are only relative to other things that are and ultimately to the Uncreated, if we can be said to be anything relative to the Uncreated.

What I am trying to say is that when I forgive my neighbor I am the one under obligation, to suffer wrong rather than to wrong. This is to fulfill the law of Christ, which is love. If my baby, for whom I have cultivated limitless love, becomes angry with me for some baby reason, I would rather he changed his mind and came running into my arms, even if he pulls my hair and screams at me for a few moments, than that he flee from me in order to punish myself and nurture his greivance. I rejoice in the suffering of his rage if he vents it on me instead of on himself. It is better, if messier, than him giving me a dark look and retreating silently into loneliness.

When we ask God to forgive us, there is no obligation on his part. It is improper, I believe, to think of obligation when we are speaking of the Uncreated. Likewise, I don’t think we are asking for something to take place within God. I think we are asking that something be enabled to enter us. The forgiveness actually cures the sin. It absolves it, cleanses us from it, burns it, shames it into nothing. The forgiveness is more real than the sin.

My husband spent some minutes lately looking into an icon. When he returned he told me that sin doesn’t matter. That is a terrifying thing to hear from one’s husband. You think it means he’s going to sin more. Actually, acting as if sin doesn’t matter relative to one’s own pleasure is what is so dangerous. But when you say that sin is ultimately meaningless and nothing after gazing on God, that is a wholly different meaning. I’m not sure how to say what my husband told me, I’m not sure how he even told me. But it’s true. In the Light of God, there is no darkness. Sin is not the defining thing about me there. It vanishes.

This leads me to ask if whether, when we forgive our neighbor, there is not something of this grace that enters them even through us. If we merely release them from an obligation, probably not. In that case the consciousness of the unpaid debt remains forever. But perhaps if forgiveness even between creatures is of another kind - perhaps if it is the opening of my heart to their good, releasing the wrong they have done me and allowing it to vanish as my own sins do when God forgives me - perhaps then they feel some of the same health. I think what I am saying is that true forgiveness is when I see someone else in the light of God’s face. My sins, and their sins alike, are nothing there, and we are only what God has made us to be, the mysterious me and the unique him. And when I do that, maybe the person I have forgiven can know themselves a little as I have know them in that place.

All this sheds some light on a question I have long had - why we must ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. Doesn’t our forgiveness of others proceed from God’s forgiveness of us?

I still think that is true. Nevertheless, refusing to forgive others can lead to God not forgiving us. Stop. Think. Remember that in asking God to forgive us we are not asking for something to happen within God. How could we even think about such a thing? Likewise, when Christ says that God does not forgive us - either for blaspheming the Holy Spirit, or less permanantly, for refusing to forgive others, he is not talking about something that moves or changes withing God.

When I go into God’s light to have my sins washed away, when I seek to know the cleansing power of His Blood; I will see myself without my sins and I will see others in the same way. His light is infinite. It will not settle on me and close others out, no matter how much I may want it to. Either I will know forgiveness - the forgiveness that encompasses me and my bitterest enemy alike - or I will refuse forgiveness. Whether I refuse it for myself or others, I will shut myself out from it just the same.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I

White wine wonders
red wine knows
(give me Blue for the morning rose)

Fly down, Angel
with your steel nose
plant
steel
seeds
in stuttering rows.

(The democrat hardly knows
what is going when it goes.)

II

To your parents, Last,
but your sons call you First;
First of your kind,
the tall, gray, Cursed,
Son of Machine
and Ungodly Thirst:

Of whom, pray, will the Judge demand:
Why did this boy die of thirst?

White Wind wanders
Red Poppy grows
And Blue Lords topple in helpless rows.

Today I finished reading C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. I first read it a few years ago and was almost completely bewildered by it. Yet I have no doubt it helped make me Orthodox.  Now it provides endless material for cogent, deep thought.

It’s funny. You don’t really understand something; but it makes you more Orthodox. Then you become Orthodox, and you go back and the thing begins to make sense.

Till We Have Faces is food for tears.

I think it contains clues, or start-up ideas, for the answers to all the important questions, only a few of which I will inadequately mention.

First of all, the holy Mr. Lewis provides a few antitheses for our benefit. First, and most obviously, there is the antithesis between true love of one’s own soul vs. a possessive love of one’s own soul. Then, true desire to be made divine in union with God, vs. a foolish, proud desire to be made divine as mere arrogation. And, finally, the true sacrifice which God requires of human beings - that he may have them all so that they may be fitted to have Him - contrasted with the terror and ugliness of the ravening appetite of death and our constant confusions between the two. This last contrast leads deeps into winding ways in which death and appetite actually become ways and means for life and love…but I will not speak further of what I barely grasp, if at all, myself.

Making distinctions is an important art. It’s one door to understanding.

I think Mr. Lewis shows us things far more mysterious as well, which I struggle to paraphrase. Why did the human fall happen at all? If we insist on asking the question as a why, there’s no answer unless it is the face of the Lord. But if you learn to ask the question a little differently - what is the meaning of it, for instance, he seems to have some things to say.

Apparently for him, as for other orthodox thinkers, the story of mankind’s salvation is not merely one of a height, a fall, then a return to that same height. In the story, Psyche undergoes the same journey she would have had she not turned on the light too soon. Mankind follows the same basic path to God’s Purpose as we would have had we not eaten of that tree of moral knowledge too soon. Now the journey goes down deeper before it rises to the originally intended heights. But still the soul (Psyche) starts out mortal, and is eventually “godded” - yes, Mr. Lewis uses that very word - through a journey in which she has nothing to do really but confirm her love to her god through obedience. The outward or reasoning or self-conscious ”I” - as I interpret Orual - now suffers tortures of confusion and loss and anguish. But even that is saved through a mysterious, usually unconscious interchange of duties and motives between the steady, unswerving Psyche and the anguished self.

Finally, some words here lead me to contemplate once again the series of ideas by which we are led to think about our relationship to God.

At first one thinks that God is implacable. He is like a stone that cannot be moved or entreated or petitioned. He is wholly Other, wholly dangerous, wholly a source of destruction and loss.

Then one recieves like a child the saying that God repents the evil he means to do to man, and that when man himself repents of his own evil, God returns to him. When we draw near to God, God reciprocates by drawing near to us, we are told, and we learn to trust the saying. When we run from him he is angry and punishes us - perhaps forever, we hear.

But you cannot stay there forever. For it is necessary to return to the knowledge that God is changless, passionless.

At some point it strikes you that the same Will says yes or no to you depending on what you ask of it.  The same Food is lovely or hateful depending on what you can stomach. The same God is good to all - that is the deepest truth (unless you want to go deeper and say that God is beyond even good.) Ranged beneath that are the truths that we receive reward or punishment, praise or blame from God as we ourselves are worthy or unworthy. But prove him - probe the boundless with all humility - and the light dawns clearer and clearer that he is with you when you know him not, that everything is God’s mercy.

This is the point at which you want to go and write hymns to Christ - or at least to study the art of hymnwriting.

It’s not worth telling this story unless everyone understands what a very Normal family we are. We always have been normal, and we like it that way. That’s why we can’t stand the people across the street, who are not Normal at all.

That said, this story is about the evil and ferocious rooster that once inhabited our basement.

A few summers ago my parents took a three-week trip together, just for fun.

After a lot of discussing, they left my brother and me in charge of our house, because my brother had just turned 16 and they figured we could handle it. I was 15.

When the car was all loaded with my parent’s luggage and they were about to walk out the door, my mother looked at us with a frown and told us to call the lady across the street if there was trouble. My brother said we wouldn’t have to, because if there was trouble, the lady across the street would know about it before we did. Mom said that wasn’t a nice thing to say. I guess it wasn’t nice, but it was normal.

That was on a Friday. Monday morning, I was hanging out laundry on the rusty old clothesline my Mom used to use when we were younger. The clothes dryer stopped working the day after Mom and Dad left. It was very early, because I wanted to get it done before anyone saw me doing something so abnormal for a girl my age in that neighborhood. I was just pinning up my sheet when the Lady-Across-The-Street popped up over the clothesline.

“Michelle,” she said, and she sort of pinched her face all up and looked at me over the rim of her cat-eye glasses, “are you aware that A Rooster now resides in your basement?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I repeated some of her words, “rooster in our basement?”

“Woke me up this morning, with its blamed singing” she said, whipping off her cat-eye glasses and cleaning them as she spoke. I felt intimidated for a moment but then I remembered who I was, and who she was, and - well, I threw the last towel over the line and spoke plainly.

“You’re seriously admitting that there’s a rooster in my house, it woke you up - but I didn’t even hear it?”

She stopped wiping and looked at me in disgust.

“OK, whatever. I’ll look for it when I go in,” I said.

“It’ll attack you, I’m certain. You don’t exactly have a way with animals.”

“My cat adored me. Before it died.”

“Your rooster won’t. Your rooster is probably a vicious old thing with a battled-scarred comb. Your rooster is probably ugly, and mean, and stupid too. I hate your rooster.”

“Well, I don’t like when people talk about my rooster that way.”

She put her glasses back on and we glared at one another for a few seconds, and then she said, “Tell him ‘Hi’ for me.”

“I will” I said, and we went back into our houses.

Andy was sleeping on the floor in front of the TV. I shoved him with my toe, and he tripped me, but I don’t think he really woke up until I told him that we had a visitor in the basement.

He sat up, then, and said, “Male or female?”

“Um, male, I think.”

“The cool look…” he muttered, and went to the mirror. The clothes that he had slept in on the floor already had the cool look, once he turned the shirt inside out. I waited until he was done, because I didn’t know if I was afraid of roosters or not, and I didn’t want to find out unless someone big and strong was there.

“Go ahead” I said, and Andy sauntered to the top of the basement steps.
He stopped, and looked at me, coming up behind him. “You’re sure he’s in the basement?” my brother asked, suddenly realizing how abnormal that was.

I told him that it was some creature that seemed to be the sworn enemy of the Lady-Across-The-Street.

“Wow” Andy said, with a look of awe on his face. “Probably an angel or something, huh?”

We walked down the steps, looking this way and that. We didn’t see anything. “She swore he was down here” I began babbling. “Maybe I shouldn’t have listened, but…”

Suddenly this whirring noise startled me. Then a scrawny, rust-red bird about the size of a gallon water pitcher shot down from the ceiling. It landed on Andy’s head. Andy was screaming and flailing his arms around and the rooster was beating his wings and pecking at my brother’s head.

The rooster was small and vicious.

I was just screaming at first, but eventually I noticed a thin board of plywood leaning against the wall next to me, so I grabbed it and whacked the rooster across the room.

Andy whipped his head around and gave me a wild look. But he didn’t have time to decided whether to yell at me for almost taking his head off or thank me for saving him. The rooster, on the other side of the basement floor, got up and began beating his wings savagely. His neck was arched, and these long little feathers sloping down from his head all around his neck were puffed out. Like a ball gown. Only more like one of those collars you see on mean dogs, with spikes on them.

I could tell the rooster wanted to do something bad to us, because he was glaring at us with the most evil round little eyes. You notice such weird stuff at a moment like that, and I have to say that his eyes were cold, and yellow, and strangely ribbed. As if they were made of the same stuff as a tongue or a scab.

Then he was scrabbling across the cement floor, straight at us.

We saw him coming, and went for the stairs.

Now, when we were younger, Andy and I used to believe, or play at believing, that goblins lived in the basement. Whenever we had to go down there in those days, we came up again as soon and as quickly as we could.

It had been awhile, but we both found we could still make pretty good time.
After we had slammed the door and caught up on some breathing, I wanted Andy to call someone to come and shoot the bird and he said that Tyler’s Dad had a gun.

So Andy called Tyler, who was 19, and I called Tyler’s sister Ruthie and our cousin Jon because I had to tell someone and it drove me nuts that Jon got to tell Tyler. And they all came over.

I was looking out the window when they drove up - Jon got out of his car and saw Tyler on the sidewalk with his gun, loading it. He ran up and they messed with the gun for a minute. Ruthie came in and hugged me and said she hoped she would not have to look at the rooster after her brother killed it.

Then Tyler and Jon came in, all riled up about the rooster, and asking where it was. We told them the whole story and the guys started making fun of Andy for running away from “a puny little bird”.

He was trying to defend himself, but wasn’t doing a very good job. Now I hope no one will think it is abnormal if I mention that I am a little bit loyal to my family and when people make fun of Us I like to defend whichever member of Us needs it.

So I asked the boys if they wouldn’t they like to meet the “puny little bird.” Without the gun.

And this is when it started to get really uncanny, which is a word I remember from vocabulary tests at school. This is where it started to seem like that rooster understood more than was Normal for a bird.

It was almost funny the way the rooster dealt with Tyler, who was really pretty conceited, as we all remembered pretty soon. Tyler accepted my invitation, and walked down the basement stairs, boasting and making fun of Andy all the way down.

The rooster toyed with him by not making a sound or showing himself at all. Tyler stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked around. He rustled up some nerve and started poking about. Eventually he searched the whole basement. The rest of us stood on the stairs and kept watch.

Finally we were all convinced that the rooster had disappeared. Tyler began marching up the stairs, bragging even more. And that made it very eerie when a loud triumphant crow sounded from above and began repeating itself almost monotonously.

It was so unexpected that at the first head-splitting bird-screech, Tyler came leaping back up the stairs toward us and safety, and landed chest-first on the kitchen floor, hands sprawling everywhere, boasts all forgotten. (I almost smiled until I remembered whose side I was on.)

We slammed the door and exclaimed over the thing for a while, and then I looked to our cousin Jon, who was obviously thinking hard.

“I think the way you have to deal with these creatures is with your feet. We’re taller than them, that’s our advantage. I bet if I get out in the middle of the floor, make him show himself, I can kick him clear across the room before he ever gets anywhere near me.” We all nodded hopefully, except Tyler who was coughing and muttering something about being sick a couple of days ago. With a cold.

Jon said to wish him luck, then he ran lightly down the stairs, heading for the center of the room. This time the rooster didn’t even make a sound. It just flew between his feet on the last couple of steps. Jon tripped. And landed on his front.

And you know what was really freaky? I swear that bird just stood there and kicked at Jon’s head. (He only did it in spite; he couldn’t kick worth anything.)

Jon let out a horrific scream, tore the rooster out of his hair, and hurled him across the room. Then he came bounding up the stairs and collapsed on the tile kitchen floor. Andy slammed the door.

We gathered around him and Ruthie flung herself down on her knees next to Jon. She kept saying, “Oh, Jon!”

Jon grabbed my brother’s arm and pulled himself up. He panted a minute, looking at us really weird the whole time, and then he said something that totally freaked us out.

“That rooster” he gasped, “that rooster KNOWS!” It was like a movie.

Like I said, we were really freaked out, but after awhile everyone calmed down so we started eating. Jon looked happier and mentioned that his cold was getting better but he was supposed to be eating and getting his strength back.

We were discussing the whole thing (I remember everyone’s voices being kind of giddy) and we all agreed that the bird reminded us of the Phantom of the Opera, who lived down in the secret caverns and tried to kill people and stuff. So we started calling the rooster “Erik” (which is the Phantom’s name in the book.)

Pretty soon the guys went to the park down the next street to see some tadpoles in the pond, and Ruthie and I locked the basement door and cleaned up lunch and swore we would never marry.

When the guys came back, they were talking about the rooster (Erik,) and they were full of new plans for getting rid of him but a little nervous.

This is how guys work up their courage - they dare and dare and dare each other until their pride drags their courage to the top.

Anyway, the three boys decided to brave the basement again, this time as a group. They’d bought a net from a pre-adolescent they met in the park and meant to snare Erick with it somehow. Ruthie was supposed to hold the door open for them and close it in time if they had to come up quickly. I was told to stand a few feet back with the phone and call 911 on speed-dial if anything happened. Andy emphasized the speed-dial part, and even took the time to re-program it as number 1 in case I forgot and had to start working my way through the numbers.

So the three guys were kind of shuffling towards the stairs with that net under a big sweatshirt of my Dad’s, still throwing out a few encouraging dares and insults along the way. Ruthie stood in the stairwell and I watched a little further back.

And before the got past the first step the door bell clanged.

We all jumped.

Then we slammed the basement door, turned around, and walked to the front hall very quickly. (Ruthie positively scuttled but don’t tell her I said so.)

I opened the door and there was the Lady-Across-The-Street, standing on our door-stoop! Her head was hanging down and tears slipped out of her half-closed eyelids. The guys stood behind me in the hallway and stared at her.

“It’s the Lady-Across-The-Street” my brother whispered to Ruthie. “She’s not Normal.”

The lady cleared her throat. “Can I see him?” she said in a breaking voice. She wasn’t wearing her cat-eye glasses.

After an awkward silence I told her I guessed so. She pushed through us immediately, still crying, and we all followed her to the basement stairs. She went through it and shut it in our faces. We heard her walking down the stairs.

“I wonder what happens when two of - their kind - meet” my brother said. The other guys nodded.

After a long moment of silence we heard two voices screaming very loudly. Ruthie looked horrified. We couldn’t tell which voice belonged to the lady and which to the bird.

About ten seconds later the basement door flew open and the lady burst out of it. “You can’t tell that bird anything!” she shrieked, and stomped out of the house. She had her cat-eye glasses back on.

We stared at the basement door for a long time and didn’t say anything. We had very little enthusiasm left for the project we’d started.

Finally I reminded the guys that they were going to catch Eric with a net.

They fidgeted a lot but finally grabbed the net and shuffled off.

This time Eric was positively foul. He sprang upon the guys halfway down the stairs and started tearing at the backs of their legs with his hard beak. In case you don’t know, a rooster’s beak is like an upside down horn. It’s a weapon. And the guys were all wearing shorts. Ruthie screamed like an opera singer.

Well, that did it.

Hollering and stumbling and flailing, the guys came up for the last time. Ruthie wasn’t screaming anymore but she didn’t remember her job, either, so I slammed the basement door for her.

Then we heard Ruthie exhaling hoarsely behind the door, so we opened it again and dragged her out, and then shut it once more.

She drew a round, gasping breath like someone coming up out of the water after almost drowning. Then she wailed, “I couldn’t scream! Tyler, take me home!”

“Uh, guys, I have to take my sister home” Tyler said.

We didn’t push him to stay. We didn’t want to stay in the same house with Erik ourselves.

Jon was fidgety and even suggested that we stay with the people across the street, but then we told him to look out the window and he saw them all sitting motionless on the front porch perspiring in the sun (the porch didn’t have a roof.) So he invited us to spend the night at his place instead, and that is how our exile began.

We left Erik in the house and locked the doors, taking all the clean laundry with us.

We started making the rounds, staying overnight at classmates’ and relatives’ houses. The story of the “demonic firebird” was getting around to all our friends, and we got lots of invites. (I found that dramatizing the wording a little would increase the number of invites, and I was getting to be the most popular girl in my grade.)

Then, one night, Andy and I had to go home to get Andy’s baseball uniform, which was in the laundry. We ventured down into the basement, hoping against hope that the bird was gone somehow, or that we could at least grab his uniform before we were driven back upstairs. I carried Andy’s bat.

But this time we weren’t attacked.

Andy said, “Listen…” and we stood motionless in front of the wash-machine and listened. All we heard was a soft gurgly squawking. Andy whispered, “Maybe he’s dying.”

“I wonder if we injured him and never realized it” I said.

In the end we shrugged and went back to Ian’s house. But our fear was broken.

The next night, I slept in my own bedroom.

Dad and Mom were coming home on a Saturday afternoon, and we got up early on Saturday morning to do all the things that they had left for us to do. When they drove up, the house was clean, the lawn was sort of raked, there were fewer weeds in the root-garden, and all the dirty laundry was under Andy’s bed.

They hugged us and stuff, and we carried their things inside.

“You know,” said Mom, “the house smells kind of funny . . .”

Like a dingbat, Andy said, “There’s a rooster who’s probably dead in the basement.”

I glared at him. He shouldn’t have told. He should have waited for Dad to find Erik’s remains, and get wondering what in the world they were there for, and throw them out. If we got in a conversation, on the other hand, there’s no telling what they might take it into their heads to blame us for.

But Mom was already staring at us like “no way.” Any normal mother would.
I tried to laugh and said, “It’s probably just the bit of dirty laundry under Andy’s bed.”

Andy caught on, and said, “Oh yeah, that laundry. I meant to get to it but…”

However Dad interrupted and said, “What’s this about a rooster?”

So we had to tell him. And in the end it wasn’t so bad. There was a smell but we had kept the basement windows open and all the house fans were down there and there were rolled-up towels (line-dried) in front of the crack at the bottom of the basement door. Mom and Dad were glad we had at least prevented the smell from spreading too much, and they felt sorry for us because, as I heard Mom whispering to Dad, we weren’t really used to dealing with Death.

But we all had to go down together to get Erik’s remains because Dad whispered back that it was about time we started to get used to it. Mom cried when we found Erik shriveled up behind the ironing board, his feathers being ruffled by the flow from an air-conditioning vent. She said, “Oh, the poor thing!”

I didn’t feel sorry for him.

Dad scooped him into a clear plastic bag with a little plastic beach-shovel or something and we all marched outside to bury him behind the compost pile.

That’s not the end. The Lady-Across-The-Street came over while we were burying the rooster.

Her face was white, and her glasses were nowhere to be seen. She knelt down between my astounded but polite-faced parents, opened the box the bird was in, and put on some white latex gloves like you see in the Dentist’s office. And she started pinching Erik’s breastbone. At first I thought that she was thinking about eating him. But she sat up again, abruptly.

“Horrible,” said the Lady. “He starved to death!” When the Lady said “starved” Mom gasped, and we all stood there looking at him.

“What an awful way to go” Mom said softly.

“He tried to murder us,” I explained, “We really couldn’t have fed him.” But my voice sounded too loud just then and no one wanted to curse the dead.

“Himself his own destruction.” Mom said. “It’s so pathetic - almost human.”

We covered that ugly bird-body with dirt and didn’t say anything more, and then my parents went into the house. My Dad had his arm around his wife’s waist. And then Andy and I realized we were alone with the Lady-Across-The-Street.

She was standing over the grave, sobbing. We looked over at her, and my brother’s eyes were all big.

Andy coughed sort of, and then he said, “uh, you must have known him well…or…something…” But she sobbed on and he looked at me like he felt really stupid.

“It wasn’t even a person!” he whispered.

“He was my rooster, once upon a time,” the Lady said, suddenly and coldly.

(Andy looked at me sideways, with a guilty kind of look.)

“You hated him, didn’t you?” she continued.

Andy looked at me again, quite helplessly.

So I said to the Lady-Across-The-Street, “We weren’t friends exactly.”

She was furious. But Andy and I couldn’t help it if she belonged in an asylum. So we just walked away, across the lawn, with the wind cooling our faces off and long green shadows and golden streaks going with us and laying along the ground between our half-grown trees. I remember the scene distinctly, because about halfway across the lawn, we heard the Lady-Across-The-Street screeching after us.

“Everything has to feed! He was just trying to eat you!”

She wasn’t Normal, and we were. Andy and I kept walking.

By God’s creative purpose, a human being is an inveterate appraiser. Without our intent, without choice, we are people who go about saying “good” and “not good.” Whatever we look at, whether an object or a situation, whether external to us or appearing within our minds, we automatically measure it against some internal standard. 

Popular culture would define this standard as one of “right vs. wrong.” Increasingly, this system fails as less and less can be confidently classified as either.

I owe my understand of this internal standard to a long line of thinkers who say that Good is Beauty and Beauty is Good. (These two qualities, along with Truth, define one another, so that no one should claim that we are reducing Goodness to aesthetics.

Actually, the fact that conservative thought has always linked Good, Beauty, and Truth together as distinct but united in nature can be seen as a secret revelation of the Trinity. For “none is Good but God,” and we know the Father by this Name. But Christ the Word is Truth - “Thy Word is Truth” - for he reveals the Father and expressly images his person. And the Holy Spirit is indeed like Beauty, for he ravishes everyone to whom he appears, yet never appears in his own but in every object manifests his presence to those who can perceive him and influences even those who cannot.

But I must retreat from speaking of things the thought of which should stop my mouth and still my fingers.)

I think there is a general understanding that religious people should also be good people. But how long has it been since religious people seriously examined the questions: What makes a good person good?

I have an answer to start with. It’s in two parts.

1) A good person knows the difference between good and bad. When a good person looks at what is actually good he accurately judges it to be good. When he looks at something that is not good he perceives it as such. 

However, understanding that good shares a nature with beauty has implications not only for the nature of good but also for the nature of criticism. That is, discerning good and bad becomes a different process when we stop thinking of good as a particular point along a line of possibilities, and begin thinking of it as a quality, an inescapable yet elusive effusion of divine glory into created things.

When you understand what beauty is you can recognize it in a scene, a face, a phrase, a line of music, or a mathematical formula - even if you have never seen that particular thing before and been told that it qualifies as “right.” Good, beauty and truth - they have a flavor. Once learn the taste of them and you begin to recognize them in any of their endless manifestations.

Which brings us to the second thing that makes a good person good. When I say that a human being is an appraiser of good and bad, I am not saying that we are all equipped with a source of information about moral values. There is no virtue in having information.

2) Therefore a good person is one who actually prefers what is good.

I don’t think we should add up points 1 and 2 - as if someone could become good by first learning to discern and afterward disciplining himself to choose what is good. Rather the two define one another. How does someone reach the place at which his internal standard of beauty matches the objective reality of beauty? Only by loving beauty - valuing it enough to pursue it, casting aside all that hinders or falls short. Those who take pleasure in what is good are the ones who truly know its nature and recognize it wherever they see it. Likewise, those who see what is good are inclined toward it.

For human beings are not just appaisers. We are not like someone who knows the worth of a Vermeer in dollars or pounds but has no preferrence between a Vermeer and a canvass with some paint tossed at it. When we approve something we take joy or pleasure in it; when we long for something we also value it.  Both of these affections rise from one and the same motion of the heart. Deep within us is a spring from which the multitudinous streams of thought, feeling, action flow in our conscious lives. This spring involves our capacity to be inclined toward or against something. It is this power of inclination that enslaves us to sin and yeilds us to God - that makes us a moral agent. I believe it is also this power that lends us the potential for true freedom.

There is much more to be said on this subject. I mostly wanted to point out that one of our first duties as Christians is to prefer good to bad.

I also wanted to point out that learning to discern between the two is a necessary corollory to this duty.

Christians should like good things better than those things that are not good. It should be obvious. But how greviously have we declined not only to prefer good to bad but even to think about the difference between the two.

Yesterday I drove past a church built to resemble a movie theater. I was horrified. But I was nearly alone in my sentiment as other Christians around me couldn’t see the difficulty.

I won’t attempt to prove that the designers of this church did “wrong.” Such an attempt is beside the point, and it would be met with blank stares and protests about “personal opinion” anyway. 

I will say that to choose such a design instead of others that partake more of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, is truly wicked. It is a preferrence for something less good over something more good.

Architecture is a language and this building lied about the nature of God and Religion. There was no truth in it. There was little beauty - none worthy the subject of the discourse. As for Good, it seems elusive but where truth and beauty are absent I think the inner revolt can be justified.

For along with the moral quality of ourselves comes the moral quality of all our works. Everything we do speaks a language and everything we say in those languages either praises God or blasphemes him - or else it does both at the same time, which is the worst yet.

Do the Church a great service. Sit down with those souls for whom you are responsible - yourself alone if that is all - and teach yourself how to understand the language of music. Or architechure. Or images. God save us when the church is made up of people who don’t know Good from bad and led by people telling those who do to check their personal preferences at the Church door.

In the spirit of this endeavour, and of Lent, I recommend Tavener’s “Lamentations and Praises” sung by Chanticleer. I’ve been listening to it nearly every day for a couple of weeks now. It’s not good background music. It’s a serious discourse that speaks directly to your affections about things sacred and mysterious. Because is has words it also works as a sort of Rosetta Stone if you are unfamiliar with this kind of music. Give it the time of day.

One of my original motives for seeking out the Orthodox Church is that it appears to be the final reserve of ancient Christian feeling and thought. Here that which is good, true, and beautiful are honored by those who attempt to hold them in trinity, no matter how many centuries of use they have already seen.

Still, I’m not just seeking to escape Western culture. I think many of the answers for our destruction could be found in the East. I will always be greived by the long decline of the inner life and its outward consequences suffered by my people, my language, my nation, my culture, my heritage.

I have no stout theories about the future of human civilization. Will there only be the Orthodox Church 1,000 years from now? Or will faith all but die? However I do know that in each generation it is the duty of true men and women to preserve, love, protect, and embrace what is good - whatever is beneficial to human life, whatever is transcendantly valuable above all uses and purposes. So I’m saying to my fellow Orthodox Christians: please, consider in quiet careful thought what has befallen our bretheren. They confess the same God as us, the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit, the same Incarnation. But they don’t care to make a difference between Church and Theatre.

Let us devote ourselves to the Love of our God. Let us love what is Good.

“But do they teach you who God really is?” she asked wistfully. “That’s what I wish my church would do.”

My heart leapt and I wanted to simply say yes. That is indeed the pursuit that led me to the Orthodox Church.

Just as we began looking into Orthodoxy I read an article by a prominent fundamentalist. He had a new scheme for determining which doctrines are fundamental to the Christian faith.

It could have been illustrated by a series of concentric circles, with “the gospel” at the heart. The more necessary a doctrine was in explaining the gospel, the more fundamental that doctrine was to be considered. That put the doctrine of God and Christ’s incarnation somewhere off to the side. I felt I was looking at something completely disordered, from the desk of one of the most spiritually mature men I knew.

In contrast, I had begun reading Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church as well as The Cloud of Unknowing, and was immediately struck by how Orthodox theology has God at the center. Not just the doctrine of God - God himself.  All the other doctrines  flowed naturally and even forcefully from the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Yet as I trundled over dark roads in my little Ford Focus, with her at my side asking her wistful question, I could not say a simple “yes, they do tell me who God really is.”

As a matter of fact, nowhere in Orthodoxy have I been told “who God really is.” Everywhere I turn I’ve been told that’s something I can’t know. But that denial, odd as it sounds, is the most deeply satisfying assurance I’ve ever been given.

“Eye has not seen” I have long known, “nor ear heard, neither has it entered into a human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

But that statement rings hollow when you believe that God has been correctly defined and you happen to know the definition. If the human heart has already exhausted the concept of God, the best thing that exists, what is there left for him to give me that’s so hard to imagine? What place could he prepare for me that I can’t conceive of, if I can so readily conceive of its builder?  

But my Bible had long been telling me that it is he, God, who has been our dwelling place in all generations. Now my church tells me that it is in God that place has been prepared for those who love him, beyond our hearts’ conceiving. Moses, who saw his glory, called God a home and a realm. In him we all have our being and when we yearn for him we long to rest within him and not beside him.

In other words, it would be harder to define God than to draw a line around the space-time fabric. Yet it is also impossible to stand outside of him and for this reason he can descend to us, enflame us with himself, and bestow the knowledge of God upon us.

So to answer her question: while they don’t exactly tell me who God really is, they do lead me to this endless River of Fire. I step in and my heart begins to thaw. The God that I cannot comprehend, by contrast comprehends me perfectly. And I begin to know him from within - a completely different position than the one which her words imply, and the exact position toward which she yearns. 

Not only that, but they hand me a broom of sorts, and every day I sweep away false idols from my mind. As I write this, I’m remembering once again that the oldest book of the Bible is a story about a man, an innocent sufferer, who has to atone for three men who said the wrong things about God. So here I am, an Orthodox Chatecumen, learning how not to say the wrong things about God.

I wish she were here with me.

If I allow my mind to flit back to the days of my youth in search of a representative scene or day, I usually come up with a composite picture that racks me with nostalgic longing. Me, huddled by a window or on a porch swing, reading a classic novel and listening to classical music. The swing swims in a weightless atmosphere of gold and green - sunlight filtering through leaves that toss like confetti, dappling the grasses and dandelions. Every breeze, sight, sound, and smell affirm what I am hearing and reading: the world is shot through with Goodness, and the goodness is the end to which the world is tending. If only I might somehow find myself with a bought-and-paid for ticket, strapped into a seat in that Train! Train of glory, train of His robes, train of interminable attributes of the Great Mystery for which I, a small mystery, wait.

Now that I have become cozier with pop culture, I note the threshold between that and my old enculturation far more distinctly. I press “play” on the CD player and enter what I now know to be an older, different world of the imagination than the one in which I have lately become accustomed to living. There’s still no doubt in my mind, however, as to which world I prefer. Or rather, which world is Better.

Kathleen Battle, my favorite soprano, is coming to my town this month. I have a ticket. People who are not citizens of that older world of the mind I’ve spoken of like to class all classical vocalists as “opera singers.” Kathleen Battle is my favorite among them because she lacks that most irritating characteristic of true opera singers - what I call the “frog in the throat” syndrome. Her voice is clear as a bell. What’s more she posseses a disciplined version of that innate musicality that separates all true musicians from mere performers. It’s an ability to enter into the creative process of the music you are singing, shared by the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Pavarotti, and all the others whose popularity transcends their own genre.

An up-and-coming favorite is Anna Netrebko, a Russian soprano with a Cinderella discovery story. Her “Russian Album” is among my top ten musical recordings. It was pressing the play button on that album and feeling myself cross that threshhold that started this train of reflection.

It makes me recall my theory about the “Trail of Delight” that leads from each good thing to each greater good thing. Sometimes I think faith is simply the willingness to recognize that Good is good. That all Goods posess one another - that the better is the stronger is the more beautiful is the truer is the more permanant… It is in this frame of mind that you can see the good parts of the world and the bad parts, and understand that you’re better off listening to the good parts than to the bad, about the significance of it all.

As soon as I was reasonably sure I wanted to become Orthodox in my Christianity, one of the first feelings or sentiments I experienced was a new distate for religious debate. It felt distinctly impious for me to throw my new-found allegiance toward historic Christian faith into the roiling ring of present-day theological dialogue. I don’t know if that’s because I was aware of my infantile grasp on this faith or if that is the way I would have felt had I gotten a PhD in Orthodox Studies before converting.

Since then, however, everything I’ve seen has confirmed that sentiment. I’ve seen two kinds of internet debate in which Orthodox thinking has been involved.

1) The Orthodox discussion boards; Inter-Orthodox debates.

2) The blog world of protestant seminarians and theologues; Orthodoxy debating with other forms of Christianity.

Each of these types distress me in different ways.

In the first you have Orthodox Christians forgetting themselves and their duties to one another all over the place. I’ve seen sentence after sentence beginning in “Forgive me, but…” and ending in some form of condemnation, criticism, or tongue-lashing in the name of True Orthodoxy. Frequently the bullies win because they won’t back down, while people trying to be good Orthodox Christians choose to put themselves in the wrong rather than keep squabbling. In the process they unfortunately put their beliefs in the wrong, as well. Friendships, at least of the internet sort, break up in public. And the cause of it all is that people were setting their religious beliefs at one another like attack dogs.

I’ve only set my heart on Orthodoxy since last summer, but already I’ve come to associate Orthodox discussion forums with a sort of American Orthodox Fundamentalism. You know, the type that judges the genuineness of your Orthodoxy against a calendar, a head covering, an ethnic custom, a favorite author, lipstick, spanking, a certain political cause, or some other non-essential. (This is a classic hallmark of all kinds of fundamentalism, by the way, as I have very good reason to know, having been raised in a fundamentalist church.) I don’t believe that Orthodoxy is normally a very fundamentalist type of religion. So I don’t care to see the most fundamental thinking among us being the most prominent. 

 The second forum is that of debating with protestants. When I was a protestant I enjoyed getting into a religious brawl as much as anyone out there. Oh, to find someone on my level and have it out in a good clean fight - my intution, learning, grammar, ettiquete, scriptural knowledge, and theological bent against someone else’s. In the process I came to understand the world of protestant theologues rather well. I’m going to share a few hints about their arena:

a) In any given debate, the fight is won by the person with the best debate skills and the steadiest stomach, not the person with the superior theological position.

b) the discussion is almost always purely rational, which means that theology like that of the Orthodox, which cannot survive once divided from its Living context of the Church, has little chance to come out on top compared to theology that was born and bred in a seminary classroom or study.

c) ridicule is the most commonly employed means of making one’s point - in other words, any doctrine you take into the arena you expose to ridicule.

d) over the internet, at least, the beliefs under debate inevitably become an extension of the believer - you attack one, you attack the other - which must inevitably degrade the honor of a belief that in reality is attached to Christ’s whole body, rather than to a single individual.

e) No one ever changes his or her mind.

 So what is the point, my friends? For what good do we hang the historic faith of the apostles, fathers, saints, and martyrs upon the hook of our own debating skills? For what do we engage our tradition in an arena in which it cannot win? Is it right to hand over our holy faith to those who will hold it up to the ridicule of outsiders? Is it right to put it in the position of being our personal defender, and our unworthy selves its personal defender? Is it good that we seek to make it a tool of destruction, humiliation and victory over our fellow believers in Christ Jesus? And when we have done all this, even if we’ve managed to prove our point to some seminarian, making him look like a fool in the process, have we saved a single sinner? Have we even established respectful connections with separated brethren? I fear not.

What’s more, another evil has then been accomplished.

The Protestant mindset is not a coherent tradition anymore. Underneath a broad body of allegiance to the Bible swing a billion tentacles of divided belief. Some tentacles are engorged by the adherence of millions; some maintain a connection to traditional Christian belief that gives them a certain soundness; others are the slender hair of a purely individual interpretation. But the grounds by which they defend their beliefs with such apparent confidence are not entirely the same grounds by which we defend ours. Our confidence flows largely from being part of a Living Body, with an age-long self-memory. Theirs depends largely upon their individual ability to interpret scriptures and church history: the arena of these very debates. Therefore when we enter into debate with such defenders we are making our faith as if it had no more grounds than theirs (I mean, in points at which they differ from us - for we must not forget to thank God for all points of unity which remain to Christian people in our time) thus undermining our own efforts. We are putting the faith beneath us instead of above us and in us and around us, and subjecting it to the criteria of those who do not know anything about it. And the more confidently we defend it, the more arrogant we seem and the less they understand it.

I do understand that there have been great defenders and debaters among the Christians. If there is ever a time again when a blow needs to be struck for Orthodox Christianity, I hope and believe that the saints among us will know how to do it. But when it comes to witnessing for our true Christian faith, I believe it is to such as us that Christ and the apostles speak when they tell us that it is our love, our Christian obedience, our steadfast faith, and our readiness to answer inquirers who have witnessed our hope, that is required of us.

I whipped this up last night as an entry for Evil Editor’s latest writing excercise. Thought I might as well post it here as I have nothing else at the moment.

The theme is “300-word scene from end of evil overlord novel involving someone gloating over his own brilliance only to look like an idiot moments later.” Yeah, we have lots of fun over at E. E.’s place.

Henry had never believed until now. As Shortcake drew him into his garage, locked the doors, and unbound him, he realized that she really was the Strawberry Fairy.

How else could his garage have been transformed into a spotless white room filled with a mountain of the most gorgeous berries he’d ever seen? Oh, the fragrance! Although Henry had been told he was about to die, he wanted a bite. A mere bite. A mere juicy brimming mouthful.

Shortcake was glinting at him.

“Doesn’t the poet say, ‘Beware the Love of the Strawberry?” she mocked.

Henry quoted reverently:

“I walked the aisle of the grocery store
And suffered desire for luscious gore,
For scarlet gloss and spurting glory -
The sacred Berry.”

“And would you like to guess how you are going to die? No, really. Take a guess.”

“My stomach won’t be able to hold another Strawberry?” Hopefully.

“You will feed them to me one at a time. Frustrate Desire will overcome, punish, slay you, long before I’m through!” Shortcake giggled, bounced up and down and asked, “Any questions?”

“Only this: Why, Shortcake? Why?”

“Ah, my favourite question.” She bent over, whispering. “You love them more than I do. I won’t be surpassed.” Then she was giggling again. Her firm, impossibly red lips. Her slightly hairy face. And were those…seeds embedded in her skin?

“What are those?” he asked, pointing at the seeds.

“My children. Why?”

Then it was that Henry knew: he would never want another Strawberry.

Shortcake giggled between every bite of the first 500 berries. However she looked pale during the next 300, and at last seeds began popping from her face and thin red-brown sweat trickled after them.

“Die” she gasped, then ate her Last Strawberry.

Henry was only fifteen minutes late for dinner.

A little Mother called Ruth prayed to the Lord one night.

“Is it really my wrongdoing that estranges me from my fellow humans?” she cried.

She woke in the gray hours of the morning and found an angel standing by her bed.

“Who are you, lord?” she said, crossing herself as she spoke.

The angel said, “Come.”

So she followed him into the garden. She saw there among the melon vines a plant that she’d never looked on before.

The angel showed her at the end of the vine a broad, spotty leaf that trembled violently though the breeze was so slight it could hardly have been measured.

“What is this?” she said.

“Agony” he answered.

Then he moved his finger further into the vine and showed her a thick, sickly-white stem.

“And this?” she asked.

“Terror.”

Then he showed her a sound green shoot.

“This is the true desire for what is good” he said. The shoot was small but it was firm and clung tenaciously to the ground. A little stream of water flowed to it and the shoot seemed to be drinking up the water as if it wanted to form its own roots and become the whole plant.

“Is this the true plant, after all?” she asked hopefully.

But the angel directed her gaze further along the vine and showed her a large purple stem; or perhaps it was a tumor swollen on the stem. The little Mother began to trace its form among the leaves with her fingers. She never reached the end, for as she felt it she asked once more, with disgust, “And what is this?” But he never answered.

So she woke in her bed wondering.

…then at last it slipped my gasping grasp
and shot down in that white abyss
where all things go that
Could Have Been,
but are not.

My hand still held that stiff clammy clasp
around the hole it left. How this -
this outcome? How? Flat
I sagged then,
hope hissed out.

Then He came - and spoke, as once before:
“Who grasps will lose. But loose to me…”
The loss done, duty
was consent.
I writhed and

Groaned, not in regret - but I was sore.
Then I spread my hand. Aloof, He
as at some beauty,
gazed, and sent
with His hand

A streak of something bright upward.
Heaven, that I falter faint toward,
In a new star glows.
What is it?
Well. He knows.

I think grandchildren have a special vantage point. By the time we meet our grandparents, they’ve probably made most of their mistakes and learned most of their lessons. Their secret journey, unobserved by others, has imperceptibly carved itself into their faces. When a little child looks at grandpa she knows who he is…maybe in her innocence she even catches of a glance of his eternal face.

I also think that there are lives that are so whole that when they end, you realize they’ve told the story of all of our lives. Alvin, my grandfather, had that kind of life. As I knew him, he was handsome and debonair and defiant; and he had his own brand of funny. If you listened to him you found he was a deep thinker with a penetrating and progressive mind. He felt deeply, we all knew that, even though we respected the veil he often tried to put over his feelings. Most amazing of all to me, he didn’t seem the sort of person who simply let life happen to him. He was always an actor in it. We all know about the amazing amount of knowledge he discovered in the last ten years of his life alone.

Grandpa always loved good things. And I think for me that defines him most…he was someone who adored goodness. He founded a thriving, happy family, and he married a lovely, accomplished lady. He loved the good things of this life; and then when he finally stood on the threshold between worlds, and looked into that life that invisibly penetrates this one, he seemed to see, more clearly than many of us who talk about God all day long, the Good. He saw what was Good. And just as intelligently and eagerly as he embraced living this life, he then embraced the Good of the life to come.

“You can’t stop being Alvin.” That was one of the last things I said to him. And I think for those of us who love him, that might stand for the whole story. For us grandkids, for all who knew him, he’ll never stop being Alvin.

Grandpa…
May God rest your soul.
May Angels escort you to your place
May the name of Jesus be ever on your lips
May these eyes that closed in death open upon Life Eternal.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners.

 I wrote this one year ago today: February 7th 2007. 

Come, neighbor;
Breathe my perfume and I will taste your fruit.
We shall not be divided, you and I,
Since our particular roots have stretched themselves and fingered down
Through sanded clay, through dank edged dirt,
And dipped with selfsame thirsty joy
In one selfsame,
Deliberate, Resplendent, Surgent Source.

In the tradition of Isaac Watts, this rhyme is rather brittle but expresses biblical piety. Also in his tradition it conflates New Testament gospel with Old Testament song…and in my case I threw in the ten commandments.

It’s a relic of my search for true religion, about the time immediately before discovering Orthodoxy. I think it’s apparent…or at least it is to me…how I was progressing toward the Church without knowing what it was I was coming to.

In line 12 I would probably say “make” rather than “mark” now.

 Will I have eyes to gaze on God,
May I feast with all his saints?
At his judgment will I stand,
Rest within his sacred gates?

I must not gladly look on sin
Nor with irreligion play,
Speak as those who scorn my God,
Nor with liars make my way

For God beholds the paths of men
Righteous men he warmly knows.
Those who make their way profane
Mark themselves Jehovah’s foes.

O Let me reverence God’s dear name,
Hate all lying, theft, and strife
Sacrilege and lust abhor
Honor those who gave me life

In whole then, let me worship God
True affection offering
Jesus Christ will teach me this,
Cleanse me of my heart’s failing

Then when heaven’s ways I’ve learned
Walking them by faith, while blind,
I shall travel there to walk
The ways of God in a new kind

People noticed as the four friends became regular in one another’s company, and the Lower Salon Gaurds took every opportunity to stare suspiciously at their tightly-wrapped clothing for any tell-tale swellings of flesh.

Cyrulla was becoming almost ungovernably irritable at home, but took care to hide the fact from Hugo, who was giddy. Maerion felt that he was girding himself for a race or a battle. Perspice steadied herself as if for a storm at sea, and grew quiet. Within three weeks their debates had ceased as everyone found himself too nervous, distracted, or irritable to perform publicly.

“If this is it” Cyrulla muttered one afternoon, “It stinks to heaven!” Perspice sighed.

“Steady, my friends, companions, and partly-betrothed” Hugo whispered distinctly. Cyrulla smirked; Maerion looked above fiercely.

“It seems to go on and on now” Perspice said. “I wish something would happen to which we might devote our energies or attention, or that would bring about some change!”

“I wish the whole city would burn down” Cyrulla muttered.

“Come, come” said Maerion. “It’s as if we’d put ourselves into the Cage before our time! Let’s have a game.”

It was nearly half an hour later, as the four friends distracted themselves in a marbles game, that someone entered the Salon who who would induce change to an extent and of a kind none of them had dreamed of.

The doors closed to prepare for the formal presentation that meant a newcomer was to be introduced to the Lower Salon. Everyone below stood, the four friends with too little attention, perhaps. The doors were opened again, ceremonially, by two guards, and then four family servants entered, stood aside, and presented their master’s daughter.

She was a lovely girl who stood modestly, gaze downward, between her two parents, who seemed tense.

Maerion felt his mouth grow dry and something scrabbled at his innards. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and tried to look somewhere else, but then realized it would be rude. He looked back at the girl and found himself craving a ripe juicy peach. A sudden quietness above, and then a violent stirring and scuffling, signaled that the crowd in the Upper Salon was just as interested in this new arrival as those below.

“She’s out” Hugo whispered. “How unusual. What will they do?”

“The guards will certainly maim her” Cyrulla answered with awe. “She has been out unsupervised in her Heat and certainly cannot be a virgin.”

“I say she can” said Hugo. “I say there are ways to preserve one’s Virtue other than the Salon and the Cage.”

Perspice shuddered. “But the guards will see it differently. How did her parents not have the sense…?”

But that question was answered when the girl’s father presented her.

“My daughter” he said, “Sworn and protected, a virgin; Janet. Seventeen years of age.” He handed papers to the chief soldier.

“Send her up here! She’s ours” came shouts from the Upper Salon.

The guard looked at the papers dubiously. No doubt they contained a record of oaths as to Janet’s virginity. Then he was questioning the father quietly and the mother’s face grew taut in terror. Janet appeared unaware of any impending doom. Her father answered the guard, and the guard answered again; and then the father answered more loudly.

“I tell you, she is only seventeen! Do you allow maids of sixteen to enter the Salon?”

“No, certainly not” the guard answered gruffly. “Nor do we allow women out of the bud to enter this Court of Virgins. How could this city give her in marriage to one of our devoted men when she might be polluted? I do not care to tempt the Goddess.

“I swear to you, this girl has been as well protected as anyone here!” the distraught man shouted. “She grew early in everything. The Goddess so willed. That is not her fault.”

Janet had begun to seem frightened and her gaze lifted at last to the staring group of younglings in the Lower Salon. She tried to shrink back into her tight child-clothes, but the swellings of bosom, thigh and inwards could not be hidden.

“This is very sad” Perspice said, looking down at the table.

“Much sadder in light of our new questions” Maerion said in a shaky voice that cracked for the first time. “Suppose virtue is not dependent upon the Salon and the Cage; suppose the father did protect her as well as we have been or as those hoodlums above have been from their raging folly. Should she be punished whose virtue has been preserved at such cost?”

“If they do it they raise their hands against the Goddess herself” Hugo said in a violent whisper. Cyrulla stared at the unfortunate young woman.

“If” Maerion began ponderously, “If that is true - then these guards are but blasphemers and someone should, in turn, raise their hand against them. Is that not what all our education has taught us?”

Hugo looked despairingly at his slim muscles. “I would make the attempt” he said, “and believe it heroic - history would sing our names - but I doubt of our success.”

“Still, the Goddess would approve the venture” Maerion replied.

Perspice murmured agreement. “But quietly” she warned, “or you will have no hope at all.”

About that time, Janet was dragged away, followed by her stern-faced father and weeping mother, toward the Upper City.

The whole place broke out in loud discussions and exclamations. Perspice half stood, saying “If you discover where they are taking her you may find a way to help her to escape to sanctuary in the temple.”

“But there she will become a prostitute” the boys objected.

“No!” Cyrulla insisted. “Some rich man will come and pay for her hand. You can find someone!”

Hugo stood. “Then let us bid you ladies farewell” he said (here Maerion stood as well) “for we have some inquiries to make.” Cyrulla and Perspice watched them stride out of the Salon and beckon to their excited slaves who crouched near the doorway.

Cyrulla grew nearly hysterical in a suppressed, silent sort of way. “I want to burn this city to the ground, I really do!” she protested when Perspice tried to hush her. Perspice beckoned to her own slave and Cyrulla’s.

“Go home, dear Cyrulla” she pleaded. “You will endanger the boys!” But when Cyrulla stood up, Perspice and their slaves made her sit down again quickly, for there was menstrual blood on her marble seat.

Perspice’s slave happned to be wearing a red cloak which she lent Cyrulla for the walk home, and they all wiped the seat unobtrusively with handkercheifs. Then they helped her to go to the guards and declare herself.

Cyrulla’s mother received her daughter’s friend hospitably when she had helped Cyrulla into the long-anticipated clothing of an adult woman; and Perspice spent the night at their house. Neither of them slept very much, wondering and worrying about the boys and poor Janet.

Apparently I did a really poor job of this. I am leaving the post up because the comments are really good.