Reading Obedience

On birdwatching, nuns, books, and desire

For the past several weeks, the weather hasn’t been able to decide who to be. One morning I go out and find Jack Frost’s light marks iced over my windshield; the next, it’s warm and the air feels heavy and smells like the ocean, though we are in the middle of landlocked, corndust Iowa; my first sunburn of the year blooms over my nose and cheeks after a long walk one afternoon; another day, huge winds drop branches along our street; in the space between the extremes, tornados brew.

I cannot fault the weather for its variety, I think, as I cross a street and look up at the sky, today a full-bodied blue, clear, but decorated here and there with wispy copses of clouds. The sky is blue today, and I too am full-bodied with joy. I can feel it pressing up against my ribs and the thin bones at the top of my feet, buried in my sneakers. I am full of joy, so full I feel it trying to get out, as if the blue sky called it forth and summons it still. There is no reason for me to be happy—no particular reason, I mean. It’s the sort of day when I notice things more, when a net of intensity seems cast over every mundane thing.

It won’t last. I can’t blame the weather for its variety, for in my own heart, things tumble around and change, faster than the frost and sun. “Her sorrows, her joys knew no moderation,” I repeat in the spaces between extremes. And there are spaces; most of my life is space, in fact: the days where I am simply “here”, trying to live cheerfully and work well, sometimes (often) grumbling or frustrating, but neither filled with joy nor pressed down by sadness. Simply “here.” In Diana Wynne Jones’ novel Fire and Hemlock, her hero Polly finds a pair of carved stone vases in a rose garden. The word nowhere is written on both, but when turned, the word is glimpsed in parts: Now Here, Where Now, Nowhere. I am Now Here, but is it really Nowhere? I find myself asking.

It is Lent. I have done badly all the things I meant to do, as always. I mean to winnow, I mean to listen, I mean to receive, and yet all my intentions slip off like fish flashing away above a muddy riverbed. As soon as I dedicate some area of my life to God, my old self wakes up and loudly demands it back. I take on the smallest disciplines, all I can handle, and even those become battlefields in which I am pushed back to my own trenches.

God and I have been talking lately about my desires. Or rather, I’ve been talking. I ask; no answer. I give an ultimatum (why can’t you either give me what I want or take the wanting away entirely?) and He strands me in this middle state, the dead air in between storms. We’ve been talking about my vocation, my “calling”, from the Latin vocare, and it is this calling that lies at the center of my wrestling with God, because He won’t give me the name I want. If we did things my way, it’d work like this: I want something. It hurts to live with wanting it. I hand it over to God, the desire disappears, and I go on my way, carefree and freed to serve Him in singlemindedness. Or He only gives me desires that I can pursue to completion, vocations that lie wholly under my control. I love wanting to be a writer; wanting to be a writer is easy; all you have to do to chase the desire is sit down and write. I suspect that’s why writing governs all my career choices: in order to do it, I don’t have to wait on anyone else or trust the tenuous net of God’s timing. There is only the paper and I, and both usually go with the grain of my desires.

Not so with the rest of life. Like I said, God and I are in a long conversation at the moment. We push and pull, like the currents of warm and cold air that swirl into early spring storms. I am the tip of a magnet and He the other stone, sometimes drawing, sometimes flipped and flinging me away, disoriented. Either give me what I want or take the wanting away. It seems easy enough, right? And yet I’m left in the Now Here, the Nowhere of space between longing and rest.

On the blue days, I take long walks in the woods by my parents’ house. I keep a running list of all the things I see. The white-tailed deer, which let me watch them for a long time if I stand still, until they at last dash off into the cornfields which touch the treeline. The chipmunk, acorn-colored and shaped like an acorn too, round at one end and slimming to the sharp point of his nose, who catches sight of me and flings himself into the hollow underneath a felled tree; I take a step forward and try to catch another glimpse; at the same time, he pops his head out to see if I’ve left—a comic mistake on both our parts, my step timed with his sudden reappearance, which scares him off entirely. But it’s the birds I really love to watch: the phoebes, the tiny creepers, the mourning doves and huge ravens, the robins, and all the many I can’t name.

Today, I wandered off the path, drawn into a clearing by the sight of a large burr oak. Last week, everything still wore its winter brown and the creek still carried ice in the curves below its banks. Today green has devoured it all: tiny buds fleck the trees like celadon shards, while the thick sheaves of grass have begun to break ground. I wanted to go sit at the foot of the huge old tree, amongst the green. I made it to the knobby roots and had just sat down, wrapping my arms around my knees, when something struck my leg. I started and brushed it off, expecting a bug, but found a flake of bark instead. Above me, I heard a light tapping sound and looked up in time to see another chunk of bark swirling towards my eye. I stood and walked backwards, head tilted so far back I was in danger of falling as I watched the little black-and-white shape tiptoe up the branch. The woodpecker tapped his beak into the wood and jerked his head from side to side, digging for bugs, and every time he did this, he tore a piece of bark from the tree, and it floated through the air in front of me like shredded tissue paper. Birds are the pulse of life, I decided; the quiet beat beneath the wrist of the world. They seem so fragile: small, cuppable forms, the size of your fist. And yet they contain such great energy compact in their tiny bones, at any moment ready to fling themselves in the air and take flight. Children are like that too.

This is what I’ve been doing this Lent: walking and watching birds, and also reading. In March, I finished Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch and The House of Brede by Rumer Godden: different novels, but alike in that both portray people who are in-between—people in the Now Here of unfulfilled desire. If there’s one kind of character Goudge loves to write, it’s people who by all earthly measures should be unhappy: parents who have lost children, spinsters who never leave home or widows who never build one, spouses who married for convenience and have fallen out of love; people in poverty, people who are lonely, people who wrestle with depression and despair, who know, as I do, how quickly the soul’s weather shifts.

What makes Goudge’s stories so remarkable is that her characters are not unhappy—or at least, not defined by a state of unhappiness. In her stories, she portrays what Evelyn Waugh called “the operation of grace on a group of individuals.” Her characters all share in this operation of grace, even when their desires aren’t fulfilled. Like Dean Adam Ayscough, who considers his marriage to Elaine to be his greatest failure, who can’t enact the reforms he longs to see in his beloved city, whose great callings and projects—his book, his civic ideals, his chance to be a father—are all left unfinished. He was a man who understood that middle space between longing and rest. He lived the “status viatoris”, the pilgrim state of being Now Here. None of the Dean’s own desires play out the way he wanted, but he becomes an instrument of operating grace. The Dean is the steady center of a wheel of activity in the cathedral town and his small actions and prayers set in motion the stories of those around him. He never finishes any of his own projects, but he builds friendships, he calls forth gifts, he weaves God’s net around those he loves.

Just so, in Rumer Godden’s novel, the nuns at Brede must offer their own desires to the communal rule to truly serve the monastery. Beautiful young Cecily, a novice, is constantly turning between vocations, caught between two names: a wife or a nun. In the end, she decides to remain at the monastery, and finds herself “glad of those last few desperate and unhappy weeks, because, “I did not know the price,” said Cecily, know what it meant to give, as Dame Philippa had said, the whole orchard. But blossom and fruit? No children! And then into Cecily’s mind came other words said centuries ago to Anna in the temple. “Why do you weep? Am I not more to you than many sons?” For a further moment Cecily knelt, then, “Amen, so be it.” She whispered, got up from her knees, dusted her habit, and straightened her veil.”

Cecily’s struggle lies at the heart of every pilgrim’s journey, regardless of vocation. Knowing the price, do we still give everything over to God? He will have all of us, nothing held back. We all have desires that we hate to hand over; we think that they need to be cradled, that giving them to God will hurt them—and hurt us, because they are so much a part of us. But He demands it all, with the expectant intensity of fire, which consumes everything without distinction. When He demands our desires, he asks not only for their objects, but for the wanting itself. The end of the pilgrim’s way is the ring of flames at the mountain’s spire, and there, like Abraham, we are asked to offer everything on the altar. And sometimes, perhaps, we go on wanting just so we may go on offering, over and over again. In Eliot’s words, “We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.” It’s a lesson I’ll never wholly learn, how to live with the wanting, and the offering, and within the fire, but I’ve been hearing it a new way this Lent.

Meanwhile, in my Now Here, I’m teaching myself the names of trees. I am not a naturalist, so the work goes slowly, slowly, but every time I walk, I choose one kind of tree to look for in the crowd. I begin to see it around me—an elm, for example—and notice how its bark differs from the trees beside it, or how its trunk is slim and straight, where others bend. I can’t name all the trees, and I’m almost certainly misidentifying some. What changes is that where I once saw a mass of brown trunks, all identical, I have begun to see individuals, distinguished by bark pattern or branch structure. To invert the old saying, we often miss the trees for the forest. Like Dean Ayscough, I am learning to let go of the forest. And I am beginning to see the trees.