Nanowrimo - 5

I pad around the house quietly in bare feet, letting the smooth cold floor shock my soles. I like that sound, that muted clap, of feet touching wood floor and hearing the boards creek in response. It’s like a conversation between house and habitant.

It’s so quiet. I like to keep it that way, hang onto the mellow silence as long as possible before that early glow rises to a hearty shine and draws forth all the noise makers and peace interrupters meant to find me today. I have neither radio nor television. It’s never made sense to me to invite the voices of strangers into one’s home and allow them to chatter on at will. I merely find a window by which to sit in the silence and observe. I observe moments passing, breaths going in and out, and every nuance of a world rising to meet the day.

Outside winter birds chirp on the branches of the fruit trees that I had planted when I moved in …how long ago… 20 years? They dine on suet balls that I’ve left suspended in the limbs like some strange Christmas decorations. The chickens I insist on keeping have emerged from their roost and inspect the remnants of my vegetable garden. With their beaks they throw back the dead leaves I put down for protection last fall and ferret out worms for breakfast. In their turn they leave a deposit from the non-beak end, which will also favor my garden. I have some feed for them which I’ll take out later, when I’m done, when I’m sure that I’ve scanned, been present to, and adored all that which surrounds me on this day. After hundreds of years of noisy streets, of quivering flesh, of revolution and counter-revolution, it is wonderful to come home to this quiet.

After the first eighty years one’s disposition takes on a certain calm quiet. No matter what comes to pass the chances are good that, in some form or another, I’ve seen it all before. This is typical of mortals, too. The difference being that at eighty a mortal’s body is mostly giving out if not gone. Their wisdom, spoken too softly for the young to stop and hear it and sometimes misunderstood, is lost like the shapes of clouds on a windy day. They are drowned out by the hot words and windy emotions of youth. Preoccupied as they are with love, lust and the self centered fears steering all actions in mad directions, they miss the silent message of wisdom that comes when one is too weak to run any more and must pause.

I have the advantage of age and action, often mistaken for a sense of spiritual devotion. It’s merely that this alertness has afforded me a relationship with the world around me that few mortals have the longevity to enjoy.

After feeding the chickens I come inside to make a start on Sunday’s talk. I would like to talk to my congregants about what fears keep them awake at night with the aim toward practicing a Hawaiian healing ceremony. People come into my church wanting some comfort the memories which make them cringe and haunt them with guilt. Even old memories of stupid things they did in elementary school can make a mature adult crimson.

We start by calling them forth and making the old hurts present. The fire alarm rang while you where in the gym locker room changing back into your clothes. The teacher yelled at you so you went out as you were. Everyone laughed. Or the time you put your doll down by a tree so you could play on the swings. When you returned after playing the doll was gone. You had harassed your older sister to give you that doll just weeks before. You never told anyone that you lost it or how. Just let it slip. For everyone there are countless buried cases of relationships whose ending went all wrong in the most unpredictable of ways. Yet here they are sitting next to someone who seemed like the safest option to marry. But the passion is gone. There’s the many tiny thefts we’ve committed either of property or peace of mind.

After these are firmly enough called into memory as to give us a twist in the belly, we turn and look at the person making the mistake and the person who was, perhaps, our hapless victim and tell them, “I’m sorry”. I’m sorry for not thinking before I acted. I’m sorry for forcing you to do what you didn’t want to do. I’m sorry for remembering you in such a bad light all of these years. I’m sorry that I was too ashamed to let you meet my family.

Next I have them ask for forgiveness. Please forgive me for ever seeing you as less than having been the right and perfect person (or situation or whatever) for me at that moment. Please forgive me for treating you so selfishly. Please forgive me for holding onto this thing that has been a barrier between us for so long. Please forgive me for thinking that you were the only source of love in my life and for bleeding you dry.

“I love you.”

“Thank you.” Thank you for showing me how strong I really am. Thank you for showing me that what I need is really very simple. Thank you for being the right person at the right time.

At first the crowd full of Iowans sends me some pretty skeptical looks when I tell them we’ll do some Hawaiian ceremony whose name they certainly will not know how to repeat. I know. I see the looks cross their faces, the sideways glances that see if everyone else will go along with this and measure the distance to the door. But they’re Unitarians, so I figure they’re on board for some measure of crazy! By the end there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Even I, with my icy, undead heart cry. When you spend time each day being conscious of your surroundings a point comes where the invisible realm, the fields of energy put out by thoughts and feelings, become tangible. I can feel the waves of emotion roll in, and I can feel them roll out. I feel each individual at their own low tide, inspecting the newly uncovered, sad and debris strewn parts of themselves. And the waves roll in again, as a salve as a rush of tears.

“Tears are the bathwater of the soul.”

And that’s what we try to do. Heal. It’s not easy to keep the seats filled when you don’t have a hell to threaten people with. If they don’t wish to come to services, well that’s their choice about who and what they would like to be and express in their lives. They know there is no devil tempting them, nor a God intent on testing and punishing them. How do you cuddle up to a god for comfort who really expresses no preference either way for the turns of human affairs? What do you do with a god who does not pick sides on a political debate or damn those who have clearly done “wrong”? What do you do with a god who refuses to express justice on the level of your own, inner, injured fourth grader? The god I offer these people is merely a mirror, always telling them it will support them and supply them in any intent they announce. But they must first choose and when they choose inconsistently or weakly this god can only reflect back upon their lives their own inner confusion. For centuries mortals have been all to willing to believe in a devil dragging souls into torment, in the possibility that one’s soul could be sold to this devil through witchcraft. Their misunderstanding has lead many willingly into believing the most abhorrent nonsense about their own nature and many more to rally behind such beliefs to make a pretty effective mob. Words are said after sneezes, upon seeing a cat, after crossing a street, seeing a woman who might be menstruating or salt cast on the ground all to protect one from the ever present activity of demons. But tell them that they are truly powerful creators? Tell them that they are surrounded with good and have been sent only angels? Tell them that they are innately divine? That the god they seek lives inside their very selves? In the wrong place at the wrong time, they’ll have you on a stake in no time flat.

The irony of a once born, those who are famed to be in league with Satan, trying to lead mortals out of the hell of their own feeble thinking is not lost on me. I tell them hell is any place where they are blocked from the presence of God, usually located between their own ears. Some can hear that, some can’t. Sometimes, after watching generations, over and over, I feel very far from any God. Perhaps that is the damnation we truly bear if we’re not careful. I try to be careful about my thoughts. But I am truly tired of the effort it’s taking to block out centuries of precedent and hold onto hope.

Do they get better? Or just different? That’s the debate I always come back to. Mortals yell and howl about what they ‘traditionally’ do to the end of pointing angry fingers at the fool who proposes to make any improvements. There is only one tradition that I have ever surmised to remain steadfast through all eras of mortal existence: revolution.

“Ach! Come back!” I drifting again. Lost in the forest, I call it. I know from hearing the steady ticks under my thoughts that it is already nearing 10 am. Eileen, the assistant to the minister (me) will be at the door soon with the latest list of community concerns. She’ll have a list of seniors who need visiting (those are my favorite), a list of sick, an envelope full of prayer concerns, and a pad of paper full of the latest goings on with the board of directors. Five board members have left in the past year, citing philosophical differences. That’s a lie, but they don’t’ know it yet.

I know what they see, though, and how it shapes what they expect. And everyone expects a middle-aged, woman minister to go through her life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. No one expects her to start throwing things back. Their desires for more rules and control based on self centered fear do not belong to me. I throw it back to them quite promptly. And I’m not sorry.