by Joy Kogawa
As the days go by I am sitting with him while we wait for the action of the church. My loathing has been replaced by a terrible pity and sadness, and a shared dread. I do not know how Father is to come to understand what he has done, and how the boys and their families were affected and how their minds were scarred, unless the people themselves tell him.
In my dream this morning, all the trumpets had sounded and all the gates had opened wide and all the welcoming sounds of laughter filled the heavenly skies. It was then that the little ones, perpetually saddened, rose to block Father’s view of paradise.
“It pleaseth Him that knoweth temptation,” said the speaker of my dream, “not to continue with stories that are altogether lost.”
“Oh Father,” I cried, “you think you are lonely now. Consider the great loneliness yet to be unless the price is paid in understanding.”
I tried to explain the dream to Father.
“Do you know, Millicent,” he said, “I have begun to think that death must be like a very sound sleep. I find it a comforting thought.”
“Your hope in eternity has become a hope for oblivion?”
“You might say that.”
This afternoon, while Father was out, I went on my own search for more understanding. His study in this house is much smaller than the one in Juniper. Spilling out of bookshelves and in a cabinet and in boxes along the walls are piles of cards and correspondence—requests for prayer, for advice, intimate stories of pain and grief. I felt like a thief prowling through his private papers. “Thank you for your gift of a chicken farm. It will feed the village for years to come,” said one beautifully handwritten letter from India. “Through knowing you I have touched the heart of love,” said another. I opened his rolltop desk and saw a small alabaster figurine of Socrates in a crowded cubicle with little boxes of paper clips, rubber bands, stamps. Along the back were a few stacks of old correspondence neatly wrapped in red ribbons. Ah, the red ribbon that I saw on the fireplace hearth. One corner of the desk was empty, swept clean. This area must have held the papers and envelopes that I saw burning. Unfinished little stories going up in smoke.
Beside the silver-framed photograph of Granny Shelby on top of the desk was Mother’s large-print Bible, and propped alongside it her old bookmark with a poem inscribed on it in Father’s youthful hand. So often I had seen Mother caressing that bookmark, her clouded eyes no longer able to see the words.
The poem was signed, simply, “Your husband.”
For Meredith
As to love and alteration
Let me say this:
Love alters that which
Love in constancy binds—
No, no, not binds, but
Beckons constantly, as to a
Prisoner Love would
Set free
For Love that is constant
Alters me, which is to say
I speak not of the human
But of the Divine, not of
The known, but of mystery.
My final word is Father’s word. Mystery. It continues to be a mystery to me that Father, who spoke so much about the infinite power of Love, was a slave to such depravity. Perhaps the power of love is limited by the power of lies. Perhaps it is because he did not choose to walk in the way of truth that he was not sufficiently altered by the One who beckons constantly.
Although I am no closer to understanding Father or the ways of the universe, I do know where I, Millicent Shelby, stand. I am still the easily deluded woman I have always been, but I have faced the truth, I have spoken the truth, I have earned my passage.
As the bishop and the lawyers and the committee meet to contemplate their procedures against Father, I am ready. We are to stand together, he and I, under the harsh and merciless light of the newspaper moon. It is not so much that I choose to be with him or against him, or to be with or against the world, but that the Goddess beckons through the fire towards life. While all this that I have most dreaded is upon us and the flames of loathing rise, this is the grace that is granted: the Presence of Mercy, the promise of Abundance. The journey will lead into the abundant way.
Ultimately, my father’s soul is not mine to defend or condemn, to save or to slay. It is the Great Mother who birthed us all, who holds to her breast the child who at best will go often astray. With weeping and mourning she watches as we venture on our wayward wandering. She awaits us all as our envoy and angel in the midst of the consuming flames. There in the red-hot lava of her tears, all judgement must be dissembled and dissolved.
And now, to those who seek the merciful way, there is granted this sure knowledge: that the seeds of mercy are planted in the human condition, within each of us, between and among and towards us all, men, women, children, majorities, minorities—all people who know betrayal and enmity. We are to water with our tears the hidden seeds lying dormant in the spirals of our hearts, till they grow and flower and spread truth and healing over us. Thus shall we inherit the earth.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
To every story there is an after-story, and to every life an afterwards. Beyond each punctuation point, each period, are further questings and more bends in the road ahead than we can imagine.
It is five years now since Father died.
In these, my after-father years, I have found a new world, dense and sweet as honey and friendship. Life is dramatically different these days, but the mystery of Father remains. I did not understand him before and understand him no better today. The thief who came in the night, dressed in black, was darkness camouflaged in darkness. But he was also carried on the wings of a blue-veined light.
It is all so much more than my efforts to describe can manage. I faced the stone-throwers, silent and vocal—those who blamed me for inaction, those who found me guilty by association, those who could not abide any closeness to me and who felt safer by erecting walls to shut me out. I survived it all. I continue to survive. If I could discover the precise steps to my new and growing freedom, I might try to show the way. I could hold up a placard and shout, “This way! This way!” But I can hardly fathom, let alone explain, the change. New friends here at the Ontario Juniper Centre comment on my equanimity, and I say, “It hasn’t always been so.” I have tried a few times to speak of my journey but ended up sounding idiotic or, I thought, deranged or, even worse, false. One person concluded that the Goddess of Mercy was “a magnificent fiction, but still just a fiction.” Perhaps that is so. Perhaps it is not. If our truths, in the end, are what we are compelled to believe from the evidence at hand, then love, for me, is the way, the truth and the life. I know no other hope. And all I can do is declare these facts: once I was weak, once my body was wretched and ill, once I was a woman in flight; now I am well. I am more than well. This is all that I have been given to know. But I keep learning, as the journey continues, that there are deeper untransformed truths waiting to come to the light.
The seed, it seems to me, is more powerful than the flower in bloom; the stories that are hidden from us, more powerful than the ones we tell.
I waken this morning to the sounds of birdsong and laughter, the Canada bird singing, its patriotic “Oh Ca—na—na—na—na—na” announcing “the true north, strong and free.” Outside in the tent, not far from my open window, I can hear the children’s rollicking shouts. The lone bird, clear and unperturbed, maintains its piercing two-tone call.
Elsewhere inside this rambling old Juniper Camp lodge, the whoosh and gurgle of plumbing signals a morning stumbling awake. It’s going to be a busy week. Registration for the day camp begins at two o’clock tomorrow. The familiar comings and goings of my childhood, the full and flowing music-filled days are back once more. I am happy in this. The staff’s do-it-yourself breakfast is in an hour, at eight in the screened porch of the lodge overlooking the lake. We’ll all have a picnic lunch later at the beach. Yesterday, Kate phoned at noon to say she’d be coming for a month this fall. I can hardly wait.
I firs
t met Kate Middleton, Archdeacon Kate Middleton, in Ragland, about six years ago, a little over two months after my frantic flight to see the bishop. Father and I had been expecting we knew not what—a letter, a summons—some sort of communication. Yet week after week nothing was happening. I was beginning to feel that things might continue as they always had. After all, the church had known years before. Then there were two long-distance calls—one from the church, one from the press. The first was expected; the second was not.
I was tidying the living room when the first call came. Long distance. A prim-sounding voice asked for Canon Shelby.
“He’s resting,” I said. “I’m sorry. Is there a message?”
“Archdeacon Middleton,” the diocesan secretary said crisply, “is driving to the coast and expects to be through Ragland the week of the twelfth. Would Tuesday be possible?”
Promptly at two o’clock on the appointed day, there was a rather tentative knock. I had imagined a male cleric, tall perhaps, thin and austere, and was surprised when I opened the door. The archdeacon was a woman, middle-aged, more stocky than plump, round glasses, her white dog-collar stark and official against her navy blue. She stood, hands together, as Father, his shoes polished, wearing his second-best grey-green suit, shuffled into the living room to meet his interrogator.
“Archdeacon Middleton, this is my father.” Her nod was, I thought, curt.
Father eased himself onto the edge of his armchair. He did not lean back. Neither did she, as she sat opposite him on the couch, her back straight. If Father was surprised to see a woman archdeacon, he did not let on. His eyes were wide, childlike. Whether by intent or not, trust and innocence were declared in his open gaze. After a brief moment of small talk—the view of the mountains, the plants in the sunroom that she could see if she turned—she directed the conversation to other topics. She knew Eleanor, and had met her recently again in Calgary at a conference on reconciliation. In her childhood, she’d often heard “Shelby Selects.”
“You’re a living legend, Canon Shelby. You have many admirers.” Father shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the carpet.
We knew why she had come. If Mother were present, she’d be saying as she so often did, “Cling to God, Barnabas. Life can be so punishing—so cruel. But that’s when we must cling the hardest. Cling as if your life depended on it.”
Archdeacon Middleton, mercifully, was not an imposing figure. Her efforts to put us at ease were not wasted. I offered her tea. Perhaps it was her lopsided homey smile, or the ordinariness of teacups, milk and sugar—or perhaps it was the sun on my arm and Boots batting a dustball at my feet—that made me begin to feel almost relaxed. No chilling staccato of violins to signal anything sinister.
“I am here—you know that I have come to talk with you about—your problem.” She was quietly earnest. She asked, as I had, about his childhood.
Father responded in one-word sentences, his head bowed.
“You were accosted by the neighbour, you say, just once?” She was frowning as she took out a notepad. It seemed impossible that a single childhood sexual trauma could account for a lifetime’s perversion. She shuffled through what looked like several pages of notes. I wondered how much the bishop had conveyed to her.
“We understand so little,” she said. “Perhaps you could help us, Canon Shelby.”
Father could not help. He could not say the words. It was as if that part of him that remained in civil company could not bridge the gap. Nor could I. The pauses were long as she waited patiently for Father to speak. Had he been sexually oriented towards children all his life?
I could not tell what the intention was for the visit, and what she had been sent to do. It occurred to me briefly, as she glanced back and forth through her notes, that it might be my sanity that was on trial, and that she had come to verify my talk with the bishop. But the thought passed. Clearly, she was trying to understand as much as she could. Beneath her quiet questioning, I could not detect any emotion—neither loathing nor pity. She could have been asking the time of day.
“How do you think of your sexuality—if you, say, compare it…?”
I doubted that Father ever thought of himself as so different from others. One’s sexuality was a private matter after all, was it not? People did not talk about such things.
She did not press for more than he could say. She turned to me and her voice was kind as she asked, “You must have thought about all this so much, Millicent. How do you see…?”
“How do I see the contradictions?”
“Yes. The contradictions, if you like. How do you see your father?”
“I—yes, I have thought about it—and my guess is that—Father, that—that you’re still—in so many ways—still just eight years old. You’re still locked in that first trauma. Hooked by it.”
“Hooked?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “Hooked. I think that’s the word.” There was something so genuinely childlike in Father. He was trusting, excitable, contagiously enthusiastic and so wholehearted. I’d often thought of him as a child in a man’s body, a Peter Pan, a boy who never grew up and who spent his lifetime battling Captain Hook in his own never-never land with other lost boys. Could this be Father’s story, I wondered aloud—Peter Pan hooked in Captain Hook’s embrace, attempting to reconcile an irreconcilable experience?
“You’re suggesting that Peter Pan is Captain Hook? And Captain Hook is Peter Pan?” Kate Middleton looked at me quizzically, and at Father, who appeared to be as puzzled as she.
“I—I think I’m saying something like that.”
She considered this for a moment, then shook her head slightly and said, “But that’s not the story for every lost boy, is it?”
This was Eleanor’s point over and over again. “Not all children who are molested become molesters,” she’d said. This was the chorus sung in unison by the lawmakers, the justice seekers.
The weight of the argument was a stone in my chest. I would never be able to expel it, however deeply and often I might sigh. It remained undeniable. We are creatures of choice. Where one person sees pearls, another sees pellets of dung, as Father himself used to say. Not all lost boys would choose to become Captain Hooks.
I had spent a lifetime looking for excuses. I was still looking. It had become a way of being.
Father was searching our faces, his eyes beseeching.
Kate Middleton put her notepad and pen away, then quietly, as if to herself, she asked, “In your private devotions, Canon Shelby…where do you suppose…where was God?”
Father, hands folded like a schoolboy’s, his brow arched in perplexity, lifted his gaze beyond Kate’s prayerful face, out past the window, beyond the walls, beyond the hills.
Where was God?
This one great timeless question. Where, for my father, where, for the children, where, for the victims of everyday crimes and crimes unimaginably horrible, was God? And where, today, for the countless children of Abraham who war with each other in rivalry and rage—Christians—Protestants, Catholics—Muslims—Jews—where for the children of poverty and the criminals of wealth, where for the unfeeling hordes of us and the unseen vast legions of the world’s victims, where today in the great unforgiven and unforgiving world is God?
In the seeking where there is no finding, in the knocking where no door opens, in the absence where the cry for love is met by betrayal and in that great terrible silence filled with a suffering that knows no solace, where is God? Where are You, my God, my Goddess, at such times, in such places? Where, in the mystery of the absence of love, are You?
Merciful and Abundant One, I know You as the Friend, hidden but not absent, who walks steadfastly with us through the conundrums and mazes and terrors of our unknowing, and through the porous walls between worlds. You lead us as surely as the North Star guides the sailors of the seas, beyond our time-heavy travel to the places where You are. You carry us there, You carry me here, now, to the moving of Your steady, still, wonderf
ul light, Your luminous, warm, becoming everywhere light. You are where love is, as it resides even within our creaturely crookedness and our so strange and bent encountering and in our recognition of our hunger for You. You cry that impossible cry within us that the ancient psalmist cried.
“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
Merciful One, You know our utter despair. That cry anchored in the depths of the human heart forms the structure of the bridge between us and You. At the heart of the impossible, in the doorways that lead nowhere, in our incomprehension and in the extremity of our abandonment, You are. In all that is lost, in all that suffers, You are. In the silence more than in the speaking, in our dread and our weeping, You are. Beyond what I could have dreamed possible, You are.
Beloved Friend, I know You in the love that shone through my wretched father’s life more than in Charlie’s or Eleanor’s righteousness and judgements. I know You better in the sinner than the saint. I glimpse You on the city streets where the homeless ones lie, and in the dying woods and streams I know You. And more dearly, more nearly, have I known You in my plea for mercy than in the great good call for justice. I know You in the world’s many wondrous stories of compassion as I know You in the One who came as Love and who died, forgiving and forsaken and broken. In all the hoping, praying, dreaming, trusting places where light and shadow struggle, You are. And now in this my every-morning new day, as on that afternoon six years ago when Father and Kate Middleton and I searched the skies asking where You were, the question bearing no judgement, the silence filled with trust. You were there. You are here.
Kate Middleton’s face was peaceful as she acknowledged the healing balm within the meditative listening that greeted her question.