Sun House, page 34
It was when Señor C spoke of Demetria’s request for safety, and promise to give it in return, that the gates opened. He began to breathe in a quick, quiet pant, like a woman in labor. “La Familia was sleeping when my child was taken,” he whispered. “Though it was daytime, and Demetria and I were out working, they were sleeping. If they had not been sleeping, such an accident could never have occurred.”
He labored in silence for a time, unable to speak his next thought. Then:
“El Santo Niño is a baby and cannot be blamed. But I cannot forgive Joseph or Mary for sleeping as the bolt left the jet and started down through the sky. Her faith in them was so total.” He was panting terribly now. “To divert the bolt would have been so easy. They had a blessing to bestow, a protection to give. I was so angry at their failure that, several times, I attempted to destroy the holy infant.” Gasping for breath, he picked up El Santo Niño and told how, on the worst sleepless nights, he several times sat by a candle holding El Niño closer and closer, trying to set Him ablaze while Joseph and Mary watched, that they might feel what he felt when Demetria collapsed on the ground. Then his panting stopped, his head fell forward as if his neck had been broken, and he murmured not to me but to the trio in his palm, “Pero tampoco puedo perdonarme a mi mismo por el hecho de que estaban durmiendo.” (But I can’t forgive myself for the fact that you were sleeping either.) “Porque si yo hubiera dicho el nombre de cualquier de ustedes antes de salimos para azadonar el campo por la mañana, yo os lo hubiera despertado a ustedes y nuestra Demetria habría sido protegida.” (For if I’d said the name of any one of you as we went out to hoe the field, I would have awakened you, and Demetria would have been protected.) “Pero no dije sus nombres. Ni los pensé. Mientras azadonábamos yo me perdí en mis pensamientos. Así que ustedes santos continuaron dormir.” (But I did not say your names, or think them. I was lost in my own thoughts as we hoed. So you Holy Ones slept.)
I was making sounds now, Jervis, stifling sobs. And me losing it caused Señor C to regain his equilibrium. He even smiled. “You’ll be a fine priest,” he said with impossible kindness. “You learn.”
“What have I learned?” I blurted. “I have no idea! Please tell me!”
Speaking extra carefully to be sure I followed his Spanish, he said, “You have learned that, when the padre comes and says of someone’s lost loved one, ‘It is God’s will,’ this is blasphemy. But when the sufferer says of their lost loved one, ‘It is God’s will,’ this is faith.”
When a blast of head-to-toe agreement shook me, Señor C smiled yet again. “See?” he said. “You learn.”
I nodded grimly.
He said, “You’ve learned that, even in public, when all eyes turn to the padre to try to understand a loss, it is sometimes the whole truth to say, ‘I don’t know why this terrible thing has happened.’ To say it happened for a reason, unless you truly know the reason, turns you into a heartless parrot trained to caw ‘God loves you’ at every suffering person it sees.”
More grim agreement from me.
“It also seems you are taught, you priests, to defend your God, but never to blame Him. This is a mistake. When we blame God, two things happen. One, He becomes present. He is now there with the sufferer, taking blame. And two, why not blame God? He’s God. He can take all the blame there is! Go ahead! Blame Him! It keeps Him with you!”
My turn to smile. Who was this beautiful broken man?
Taking hold of my hand as if I were a child now, and speaking with a sincerity that widened the walls and raised the ceiling even higher, he said, “You have learned there are no strangers when death occurs. You and I are friends now because death has occurred. This is a small good. But again, the padre is in no position to mention it. Only the one who has suffered the loss can ever mention it. Do you understand?”
I nodded. And he kept hold of my hand. And we sat on Demetria’s bed as we had on his broken steps, two friends fallen back into silence. But this silence was anything but peaceful, Jervis. When the strange panting began again, I realized my friend was literally in labor. He was in such pain that—I couldn’t help myself—I began panting with him. Holding his hand like a midwife, a birth coach, a husband, I labored with him, feeling that if I too panted and coaxed, the burden he carried might be delivered into the world and his agony might ease. Sharing this shattered father’s labor was the hardest work I’ve ever done. By far the hardest. And when his panting at last stopped, it seemed an actual newborn had entered the room. It looked like nothing at all, this infant, but it was palpable, and it had a name.
Its name was Grief, Jervis. Grief successfully delivered. And in the presence of this dark newborn I felt completely, clairvoyantly, that something enormous was about to change. Then it did. Señor C released my hand. Turned it over. And into my palm dropped the tiny Joseph. Exquisite Mary. El Santo Niño. I just stared at them for a moment, thinking he wanted me to examine their qualities as I had the other dolls. But he wanted much, much more than that:
“For you, Padrecito,” he said. “These muñequitas are for you.”
Like a fool, I said, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly take these.”
Señor C, bless him, became wild. “You must take them!” he cried.
I was stunned by his vehemence, but also pleased. That he was being crucified by the loss of his daughter in the presence of her dolls, but still had such fight in him! I felt something had descended from above to meet him, helping him fight back through his demand. “When I remember the pleasure La Familia gave my daughter,” he said, “I know I could never separate or destroy them. But when I think of my family’s deaths, I know I can’t keep them. The time has come, Padrecito, for you to truly help me. You must keep them. And you must care for them just as Demetria did. This is a very difficult thing I ask of you.”
For the first time in my life, the only time, I fell into a place in which I knew not through thinking but through every cell in my body what it means to be a priest. I stared at the Joseph, Mary, and Jesus in my palm, listening to Señor C not with my mind but with my body and blood.
“I ask that each morning,” he said, “you tell the Holy Family your hopes for the day, as my child did. I ask that each night, you tell them how your day went, as she did. I ask that you touch them with clean hands only, kiss them with dry lips only, place them near you before sleep, ask them to guard you, and vow to guard them in return. You must guard, love, and forgive them as I cannot guard, love, or forgive. You must find a way to say their holy names with complete trust, as Demetria did and I cannot possibly do. If you are able to do this, Padrecito, I believe La Familia will protect my child even now. And may also protect you. And perhaps even me. Yes. If you can do this, they might protect me. For as you must know, I no longer wish to live. Perhaps, in caring for my daughter’s muñequitas, you and they will change this.”
I have not shared a fact up to now, Jervis, because until now it may have seemed silly, and I couldn’t bear for anything about this man to seem silly. The name of the father asking me to care for Demetria’s Holy Family is Josef. And three times, as he was making his request, he reached down and touched each of the dolls in my palm. And the last muñequita Josef touched each time was Christ’s earthly father. He then raised his hand and touched his heart. And you know how completely I am not given to vision, brother. But the third time Josef touched tiny Joseph, then his heart, I beheld the father of Jesus as clearly as I have ever beheld anyone in my life. Sitting so close beside me on Demetria’s bed, La Familia was being given to me by Christ’s earthly father. My body and blood, the hacienda, Joseph’s face then opened unto mystery so great that I thought, Who am I to think I can accomplish this task? Yet who am I to refuse it? There was no choice in the room. Gazing into the eyes of Christ’s father, I said, “I will attempt this, Joseph. I will do my very best. But now I too have a request.”
He dropped his eyes and inclined his head to listen.
I said: “You have charged me with caring for La Familia as Demetria did. I will give it my all. But it’s a long way to El Norte, where we’re going. I worry, as Demetria may have worried, about Mary and the infant. And I see two donkeys in her collection. One, I believe, should come with us on our journey, so the holy Mother and Child can ride.”
I swear to you, my brother: fool though I be, I am, as I write to you, the blessèd recipient of the completely broken, completely loving smile of the father of Christ. And nothing has ever made me so impossibly happy. As Joseph handed me the donkey he said, “You, Padrecito, have become my family’s true priest. Family living or dead, our true priest.”
Weeping as I smiled at him, I slipped infant, mother, father, donkey into my black Jesuit shirt pocket, and stuffed my kerchief in over them so they couldn’t fall out. Joseph nodded his approval. Task given, Familia accepted, Joseph melted away and I faced Josef Cabrera again.
I felt certain, as I stood to leave, that Señor C and I will not see each other again in this life. I also felt certain that our connection is endless. In the door of his hacienda, when I turned to him, we neither spoke nor embraced. His eyes simply dropped to my breast pocket, rose to my face, and he nodded just once, so brokenheartedly yet so lovingly that no embrace could add to it.
I stepped out into the night then, and oh, Jervis! The little dirt yard, broken steps, stone fence, unforgivable sky, had all gone beautiful. I remained immersed in this beauty every step of the way to the parsonage. I remain immersed as I write this account. I am immersed each time I tend to and talk with Demetria’s Familia. And this immersion has finished me as a Jesuit. Why? Because the commission Christ’s father placed in my body and blood is ordination enough, and more than enough. Were I to go beyond it and perform the weary wonders priests duplicate like xerox machines, I would again be reciting platitudes on the lip of Demetria’s grave. La Familia insists I serve her from now on by kissing the good dirt her body has rejoined.
I have not found God, Jervis. But I’ve discovered an element in the Periodic Table that is, for me, the supreme element, and it has nothing to do with xeroxing old formulas. That element is: love-at-the-very-moment-it-strikes-us-clean. Nothing more. Anything more is too complicated, too abstract, too knowing. Thérèse of Lisieux said, “To find a hidden thing, one must hide oneself. One’s life must then be a mystery.” In seminary, as I was being trained to appear knowing and never to hide, Thérèse’s words drove me crazy. The same words sing in me now, because nothing I’m saying is being said through my knowing. It’s all being said through my loving. When I tried to console those at Demetria’s grave with scraps of knowing, I insulted love. Defiled it. I no longer know! It’s all mystery now and I love, blame, and thank the supreme element for that! A Holy Family standing under my lamp just watched me remove a black shirt and white collar for the last time, and don the one non-Jesuit shirt I brought south. In the window reflection we now see an ignorant, lovestruck man who looks a good bit like you, brother. That man is about to write a note, to be delivered after I leave in the morning, telling his crucified friend to feel, morning and night, for the prayers this new man and La Familia will never stop sending him and his daughter. This new man is going to say, “You’re right, Josef. I learn. Amar a alguien o algo, en cualquier lugar, es la única iglesia.” (Loving anyone or anything, anywhere, is the only church.) We five, counting the donkey, are coming north for as many heartbeats as we’re given, dear brother, with no purpose but to love as secretly, faithfully, and long as we can.
Teej
X. Tiny Joseph Gives Big Jesus the Speaks
(Portland, October 29, 1989)
Be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
—Jalal al-Din Rumi
There is a state of reality…in which we actually are nobody and we don’t have anything. This sounds very bad. It sounds like total failure, but it is the most beautiful truth that we can ever witness…There is a consciousness in each of us that is nobody…Not American, European, Tibetan, or Chinese.
—Anam Thubten, The Magic of Awareness
You shall love the nothing. You shall flee the something.
—Mechthild of Magdeburg
We ought always to remain in a certain nothingness and
annihilation, as one who has nothing, who can do nothing,
who knows nothing, and who does not have any power. All
salvation consists in this nothing.
—anonymous Beguine author of The Beguine Pearl
THE NEXT MORNING, on the forty-ninth day of his brother’s coma, TJ McGraff stood beside Risa for a moment, staring wordlessly at Jervis as he lay, emaciated but still breathing. He then closed his eyes and began to nod his head. Risa noticed, and turned to hear what he was about to say. But when TJ said nothing, her reborn respect for him ran so deep that she trusted his silence more than any conceivable speech.
What had dawned on TJ was an unprecedented course of action. For seven weeks he had desired one thing in all the world: for Jervis to wake so they could reunite and share the rest of their lives. He’d prayed for this without ceasing till he’d collapse from exhaustion, rest oh-so-briefly, then start praying for it again. But by so doing, he realized, he’d blocked a more radical option. Jervis was lost in a nothingness from which TJ’s endless prayers had utterly failed to coax him. What if he stopped trying to coax? What if he tried, instead, to fall into a nothingness in which he gave up all desire for any particular outcome and just sank, sank, sank into what is? Would a surrender that self-annihilating bring Jervis spiritually closer whether he lived or died? TJ had no idea. But after seven weeks spent trying to pray his brother back into the world, the possibility of sinking below consciousness, where Jervis was dwelling, set him to nodding.
TJ gave Risa a quick kiss on the cheek, taking care to make it a dry one. He then left the ICU, walked the Burnside Community hallways till he found an empty waiting room, entered it, and left the lights off. Taking a chair, he placed his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, turned inward, and with all his concentration began moving toward the nothing-place he’d felt, all these weeks, in the utter inertia of his brother’s hand. Time passed on the hospital clock. Earth flew through space. Saving no thought, no yearning, no hope, letting mind and desire fall away, TJ kept journeying till he ceased to be himself at all.
He became an animate nothingness. Time stopped. All objects and all space became abyssal. But the body housing the nothingness had certain habits. Those habits stood nothingness on its feet, enabling it to slowly leave the room.
Nothingness passed people in hallways, passed elevators, and was drawn to open by habit an EXIT door. Climbing an echoing concrete stairwell to the hospital’s fourth floor, nothingness strode down the hall to a double door made of thick wood, grabbed the handle of the left door by habit, stepped inside, and found itself in a chapel. Three worshippers seated, alone and far from one another, in the pews. One apparently praying. Two just sitting.
“So be it,” nothingness whispered. Taking a seat in the backmost pew, it wiped its hands by habit on a clean kerchief, pulled a little silk bag out of its shirt, opened it, poured a tiny Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and donkey into its palm, dried its lips on the shoulder of its shirt, and carefully kissed each doll, donkey included, as an eight-year-old named Demetria would have wished. Returning Mary, Infant, and donkey to the purse, nothingness dropped them back down the neck of its shirt, picked Tiny Joseph up between thumb and index finger, held him up like a tiny candle, rose to its nothing feet, and started toward the front of the claustrophobic chapel at the regal pace of a priest leading a holy day processional through a mighty cathedral. Time remained stopped. All objects and all space remained abyssal save one very small thing: Tiny Joseph.
As nothingness paraded forward it twisted Tiny Joseph between thumb and forefinger, allowing the diminutive periods that served the doll as eyes to peer this way and that. Joseph took in two windows of drab gold glass to each side of the altar, behind which fluorescent lights rather than sunlight shone. He took in a beige carpeted floor reeking of Lysol, a low tiled ceiling, the three people hunched in sterile oak pews. Bearing Tiny Joseph before him like a candle in a cave, nothingness reached the steps leading up to the altar and did not slow. Stepping up to the base of the huge crucifix, nothingness turned its back on the Big Jesus suspended there but spun Joseph 180 degrees so the tiny doll faced Big Jesus. Nothingness then closed its eyes and kept them closed, maintaining immersion in the vortex of itself, till it found these words:
“Tiny Joseph. To know you just as you are—six-colored rainbow vest, blue sombrero, black trousers, yellow wire hands and feet—has been as important to TJ as knowing his brother Jervis. Even during these terrible coma weeks, you’ve been a solace.”
The three worshippers looked up. Two of them—a middle-aged Caucasian man, a young Asian woman—were alarmed to see and hear an exhausted-looking man who was obviously not a cleric trespassing on the altar.
“As you know, Tiny Joseph, TJ loves Jervis beyond reason, the way he loves you,” the man said, “and he has prayed for Jervis without ceasing. But after forty-nine days Jervis is skin and bones, overloaded on antibiotics, blood stagnating, every part of him atrophied. And TJ has fallen into despair. You know why. Demetria, her father, and now TJ’s brother, either dead or in agony, like your Son. He has tried to pass the best words he can find on to a greater Father, and that his prayers have gone unanswered he accepts. But in this chapel the prayers feel worse than unanswered. They feel trapped. Actively smothered. Even violated somehow.”
The altar trespasser’s over-intimate speech aimed in their direction caused the Caucasian man and Asian woman to stand, glare at the fellow in his madness, and march out of the chapel. But the worshipper who’d been praying—a very old, green-eyed woman whose unlikely name turned out to be Rachel Goforth—saw how the young man was holding a tiny, brightly colored object in his raised thumb and finger. A Mexican trouble doll, perhaps? And he was speaking not to his God or to the dreadful crucifix behind him but to the doll! Why did behavior that repelled two worshippers captivate a third? Who can say? I only know that antique, green-eyed Rachel Goforth avidly watched and listened.
