mccarthyism

8.10.2018

Reading from Rowan Williams tonight, while Jenni and the children sleep behind their doors.

“You have an identity,” Williams says, “not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love.” All the disconnected, disparate events and images of our lives, Williams says, are a string “twitched by the divine observer, the divine witness.”

And then thought of Luxury, as I often do, and “Courage, Courage”:

Who painted all those ugly pictures hanging on the walls?

It says I did, I don’t remember it

What are all these pages with the corners always folded?
The cursive looks familiar, all written out in pen
I can’t read it, it makes no sense

Who am I? he’s asking. What’s all this stuff I’ve made? I don’t even remember doing it. It makes no sense. “There’s really nothing there at all.” And then his ordination to the priesthood:

They laid hands on my head to complete what was lacking
“Oh, Lee, raise up your mind! I have shown you the meaning!”
I know you did, and I remember it

My own ordination looms closer and closer, to the Anglican diaconate. Part of me shrinks back from it. It’s a new identity, a new name. It will demand of me something I’m still afraid to give: myself, whatever identity I think I’ve made. A disparate jumble of events and images, projections, demonstrations. “There’s really nothing there at all.”

Meanwhile the days are full, the nights too short. The children smile and laugh and talk; they fill me with aching joy, and with lots of self-doubt too.

We’re moving in a month, to a house across town. There’s a patio, and a lovely backyard: rosebushes, geraniums, an enormous oak tree. I'm going to build a bird feeder and put it outside the kitchen window.

posted by ethan # 8/10/2018 01:24:00 AM

mccarthyism

8.10.2018

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