Sign Of Peace
~ Journal of The Catholic Peace Fellowship
Lent 2002, Vol. 1.1
LOSING YOUR ONE SWIFTLY TILTING LIFE
by Mary Margaret C. Nussbaum
You are in a perpetual motion machine. Your hand is forever waving -goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. The loss is as regular as autumn, and it spins around as soon. You lose keys and cats and tshirts that smell of your son's sweat. You lose your mind a little and the hair on your head. You lose the friend you gushed it all to, you wonder where he is, and what he'll eat for dinner tonight. You lose the letter you read again and again and the novel you kept it folded in. You lose the French Revolution and calculus and an E flat scale. You lose your parents, you bury them. You lose your children, they become adults. You lose your way home, then you lose your home. You lose that note the fiddler was playing, the one you hoped would linger. You lose days in October, each October, and in May, you lose May. You lose credit cards and calendars and overdue books. You lose your certainty. You lose nights, meals, miles. You lose the twilight blue, you lose taste buds and sentences and your smooth breasts.
This is your one, swiftly tilting life. You will lose it.
Be still and know that I am God.
You grew in your mother's womb, the darkest, stillest, most silent place. Then, in a rush of blood and water and mucous and crying, you appeared. You've been tilting since Go!, that first slap on the bottom. You kindle and die like a Heraclitean flame, turn cartwheels like a spiral in Van Gogh's night sky.
Some days you get wound up too tight. You dance at a club named Vertigo, drink beer at a bar named Déjà vu. You're beginning to look like Mel in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, the actor who goes soft and is "out of focus"-his eyes ablur, his arms leaving tracers when they wave. Everybody's getting headaches from squinting at you. You go to bed early, take a pill. You wear contact lenses, look at airbrushed photos, and try to capture elusive things-like a moment-with a digital camera; you make the world appear to be crisply, cleanly cut. But you feel a little blurry, would like some strong, black lines; an outline to color in.
This year, in particular, you are spinning.
The sign in the subway reads, "Nueva York nos necesita fuertes," but you are doing well to stand steady, to not lose your balance and fall into the lap of a stranger.
Because no one gave you enough time for the stillness that grief demands. You were told that health was a matter of motion-pick up, move on, go shopping, "Let's roll." And you were told that wholeness requires that you ignore how very fragmented you have become. You were not allowed to stop the clocks, or cover the mirrors or take forty days for silence. You were thinking it would be good to unplug Times Square, to turn off the radio and the light in the kitchen and the iMac's blue glow and gather with your children and your neighbors-as in a snowstorm, or a blackout-and say something infinitely slow and necessary like "hello." Without these months in which to heal, you must find solace and stillness measured out in teaspoons and afternoons.
So you wash your face and brush your teeth and go to the Assembly; to be still, and known; to eat this bread and drink this wine. Who are you? You are a child of the Most High God. What are you to do? You must eat Christ to become Christ. It is such wild grace, and so you say, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed."
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
This healing is different from curing. It may involve a death.
Death's mark is on your forehead. It is a cross of ashes, an ugly, public brand. Dying people aren't supposed to think about pizza, but somehow, strangely, you are starving. All last fall-when our monuments and our skin turned to ash, when the air filled with ash and the rescue workers got asthma from the ash-when we shipped off, and flew off to burn and bomb and turn living beings and whole villages to ash-all last fall you were eating, eating, eating. Every time the news came on you would stick a bagel or an apple or a hunk of cheese in your mouth and bite and tear, to numb and fill, to remind you that you were still in your bones and your body, alive, alive, alive. Or you didn't eat at all, became weathered, wan and lean, unable to enjoy something so small as a meal.
Time has passed and now you are starving again. Only now you hunger for real meat, real drink. Only the food that fills-this perfect sacrifice, ransom, work of human hands-will do. Only this offering, His life for ours, will satisfy our demand for death and give us new life. In a day of war, in a century of war, when every war has been fought "to end war," and failed, only this bloodlet can end our endless bloodletting. And in the middle of it all, you are told to "lift up your heart."
Gaudete Maria.
You raise your palms up and open, as though to catch something.
Through this gesture you remember that there is a difference
between happiness (which, like niceness, is a smug pseudovirtue) and joy,
true joy. You find your joy in the witness of the lives of men and women
who walk on earth "shining like the sun."
They are:
Maria saying yes.
Juan Diego bringing roses.
The Hasidic Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, dancing to their deaths.
Maximilian Kolbe singing his last words out, rattling the walls and the
wardens in Auschwitz, his joy bursting and spilling.
Your mother dead, your father without his beloved bride, your father being
brave, rising each morning and eating breakfast like the living do; being
braver still, going on a date, staying out well, drinking wine, too late.
Your old friend, sitting up all night to listen, keeping you earthbound
and alive.
Nelson Mandela, leaving 27 years of prison, to tell of liberation.
The Radical Rockettes and some hopeful young punks tangoing in front of
the World Economic Forum.
Your roommate, deadly depressed, asking you to help carry his heavy load.
Coretta Scott King, her husband and motherin law murdered, calling for
the defense of life, all life, saying "An evil deed is not redeemed
by an evil deed of retaliation."
The girls around the corner, cystic fibrosis eating their lungs, taking
life in enormous, glad gulps.
Your grandmother, frail in her bones and afraid, packing her bags and
getting on a plane to come cook for you and care for you in your sickness.
Your best friend, raped all night, lied to and about, treated as trash,
as excrement, finding the skin he took with him, learning how to pray
again, how to smell that cologne and not vomit, how, how, how, to laugh
into the telephone, to loaf and lounge and be young.
The first disciples, Erasmus writes, expecting the end of the world and
"drunk on God" all the same.
The man next to you on the pew, homeless, shiftless, unshaven and addled
in the mind, praying for priests, praying for presidents, praying for
girls he knew in high school and the corner knish salesman. This man,
mostly rejoicing, praying praise, "for this day," for his birthday,
for this hour, this breath, this food, these legs, this street, this pain,
this light, this dark, this nothing, this every thing.
Dorothy Day, describing her life as many would-this "long loneliness"-but
ending it with ecstasy, "Deo Gratias."
Deo Gratias.
You are taught to pray. The best prayers begin like this, "Oh God, you are God," but this word, "God," is slippery, and so you use solid names. "Prince of Peace, Alpha and Omega, Maple Key Falling, the Resurrection and the Light, Clarion Call, King of Kings, Mother, Father, Winged Thing." The prayers change as you grow. You call out to the "Home I've Never Known, Shepherd, Dance, Liberator, Song." You call God "Lightning, Ravisher, My Love, Rock of Ages, Yahweh, Always."
But there are never enough names, so you look around for sights, fresh clues on a trail to lead you back to your home. You get glimpses of the Maker in the men and women made. You take the F train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or the Greyhound from Pueblo to Kansas City and you see them rumbling along, their faces a litany, each face only appearing once in time's long scroll. Here are his sleepy green eyes, her rolypoly body, his blotched, burned hands, her slender, brown nose, his shock of blue hair. Here is the mother nursing and the infant with the open mouth, the man bundled in all that he owns, the stinking one with his sunglasses on, the suited one reading the Times, the one with the darkest, lined, lovely eyes, sitting crosslegged. Every man and woman, unclean and stained straight through, is groan- continued on following page- ing for God. They are hobos, they are hitching, they are far from home. They can only say what the best prayers say, "be God," and "thank you," and, like a suitor in love, "how may I serve you?" "what fragrant gifts can I bring?"
Linger on the train or over dinner and listen to their stories, they will break your heart. You do not need to turn on the evening news to know that planes fall out of the sky or that brothers betray brothers. Just be present to the ones nearest you, for now, the ones that are the hardest to hear. "If you stick around long enough," the mothers are telling their daughters and sons, "you will know sorrow beyond imagining, and you will know joy so pure that you can't catch your breath and joy so pure that you feel you may burst into flames."
Satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy.
We have responsibilities. We fight for the living, we pray for the dead. We fast and we feast. We dance and we weep. We are not ever supposed to be glum, or glibly satisfied or casually, comfortably distanced. But in the same way that we may cry like Rachel, and shout like Job, shake our fists and demand some understanding, in this same way we must praise like Mary. We have a duty to delight, to be taken by wonder and unknowing, to be swept up in joy.
The perpetual motion machine, an endless circle of loss and gain, was broken across time's knee once and for all with the coming of an infant God. All the circles we draw and repeat are being made straight and will be brought to an end; a blazing arrow is shot through space.
This is our joy.
Again and again men and women court and marry while guns are shot outside their doors and as civilizations crumble at their feet. They are frying onions for dinner, the golden skins go clear. They are filling their dank, old apartment with rich, piquant smells.
They seem to live long years of tragedy, losing everything along the way. And they have heard God's silence like a roar. But they are in a comedy dreamed up long ago. It will end as comedies do, with a marriage; the Lamb will wed the world. It will end in applause and awe. They have not seen the Author's face, but they have seen the stars around His neck, such beauty makes them hunt the secret place. The glimpse of their God makes them dance defiantly, dance for joy. They dance in what seem to be circles, making straight lines all the while. They turn like this world, so quickly that they begin to feel still and sure. The women are wearing skirts that fall and gather like the night sky. The men are wearing wooden shoes that clatter and clap like rain or trees quaking. They make a joyful noise. They dwell in the terrifying embrace of the God who is with us. They sweat and they sway. They are fools, of course, and they are saints. We learn the steps from watching and, when asked to waltz, by saying yes.
- MARY MARGARET C. NUSSBAUM grew up in southern Colorado
and now lives in NYC. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame's
Program of Liberal Studies in 2001.