So I look back without too much nostalgia on those days when our children were young, but with gratitude for the experience, which helps me look to the future knowing in my blood and bones what Christian Community is about. We really did try to minister to each other, to pray together, moving through self-consciousness and embarrassment to freedom, and at first I was paralyzed with embarrassment. If one of us mothers was having a difficult pregnancy or had grippe, two or three of us would go and clean house (and I hated this job as much then as I do now and I was more often on the receiving than on the giving end, but I did try). We took turns taking the children, bringing in meals. Hugh rode the tractor in the summer to help a farmer friend with his haying and came home sunburned and streaked with honest sweat. In the autumn the women canned and froze vegetables together because we were going to need that food in the winter. We moved from house to house, working together, and surely my friends gave unstintingly in helping this city girl who had never before pulled a carrot from the ground, or plucked an apple from a tree. The land on which Crosswicks stands once gave all that was needed for life. Now we have only the orchard, the berries, and a mammoth vegetable garden. We do not render our own soap or dip our own candles. But the fertile land, the great beams of the house itself, cause me to remember—not just the community, which was essential for survival two hundred-odd years ago, but a glimpse of something unbroken, and of which we are still a part.
We were very loosely organized, our little group centered in the spired church, but we were organized by love.
Several years ago when all the rooms in the house had been wallpapered by us with paper we had carefully chosen, I announced that I was too old ever to hang wallpaper again, and if things got too shabby we’d have to bring in a professional. But a couple of years ago I started on the second round, and as I struggled with shears and wallpaper paste, I realized that I was still part of that community which physically was broken by time and distance long ago.
It is once again the joy of memory, for those days are real, and are mine to dip into. I do one of my rare cleaning out of closets and come across a baby’s shoe; a little girl’s sweater which I had washed in water too hot for it, so that it shrank so small that it was used for dolls; a small stuffed animal with one torn ear and one lost eye which I had once upon a time thought I was going to fix.
I cannot go to the bookshelves and pull out The Secret Garden without remembering a rainy weekend when it was our turn to have everybody at our house and I kept a charm of children quiet and happy by reading aloud until I was hoarse.
Our children all quickly grew used to being in half a dozen houses as freely as their own. When the father of one family was striken with an acute form of cancer, his three little ones were already used to being in other houses, and during his last days they moved from house to house where they were already at home. Death was no less premature and shocking, but the children were not taken from familiar surroundings and sent to strangers, and I think the loving but calm concern given them did help; it helped us, too. I didn’t know much about intercessory prayer then, but I do know that our prayers during that period brought healing for all of us, and it seems somehow appropriate that I was listening to Handel’s lilting spring cuckoo concerto on the clear winter morning when the phone rang and someone told me that death had come at last.
There were joyful experiences as well as sad ones. On a night when I woke up early with labor pains, Hugh took our sleeping daughter, drove five miles to neighboring farmer friends, and put her in bed, still sleeping, beside her friend Chucky, and drove off without disturbing anybody, even the cows.
When Josephine woke up in the morning it would be in a familiar room, among people she knew and trusted. And everybody in the household would know that the new baby was on the way. Another friend among our community, who had left nursing not long before to stay home with her baby, simply announced that she was going to the hospital with me to be my special nurse—knowing that babies do not birth easily for me. Over this baby’s birth she was on her feet for forty-eight hours straight, and that was as much a part of our church life as the Sunday services or the choir practices.
You can tell they are Christians by their love.
It wasn’t until our full-time days at Crosswicks had been behind us for a number of years that as I looked back with the blessing of memory I saw that for nearly a decade I had experienced the kind of love described in the Acts of the Apostles, despite all our human flaws. The early Christians quarreled, and so did we. Once Hank got so mad at me during choir practice that he threw a hymnal at me. One wife came into the store one day at noon looking a bit dazed and said, “I just broke a plate over Stephen’s head.” But despite it all, we were there for each other.
There, in all our particularity. Just as my concern for the victims of starvation across the planet is awakened by my awareness of the hunger of my neighbor, who has a face and a name, so is my love for all humankind awakened by my love for any one part of it. My Christian God is not the exclusive God of the Christians. He is Lord of the Universe, and he notes the fall of the sparrow in every part of his creation, and he counts the hairs of every head, not just Christian or Jew. I learned something of this wider compassion when I lived with my friends in the country who were, except in our ministry to each other, often so different from me that we did not always understand each other. My rejection slips did not seem very cosmic to anybody but me, and I felt that most people thought that I was simply not quite good enough to be doing what I was doing. The things which were cosmic to them were alien to me.
That decade of community was important to me but it was not idyllic. It was for many reasons one of the most unhappy periods of my life. But I did experience Christian community, and it was this which kept much of what happened from being totally destructive.
There was nothing idyllic about the fact that four of our most intimate friends died within three years of each other, and that by the death of one couple we inherited a seven-year-old daughter, and on the same day that she came to us, we found a seventeen-year-old ex-baby sitter huddled in our garage, pregnant and unmarried and certain that we would not throw her out.
There was, for me, nothing idyllic about struggling to raise our children; trying to keep house in drafty old Crosswicks where the washing machine—once I had graduated from doing the laundry in the bathtub and had a washing machine—froze during the winter months at least twice a week, usually full of diapers; and we were never warm around the edges.
There was nothing idyllic in the violent conflict between Madeleine, wife and mother, and Madeleine, writer. I struggled to write under the worst possible conditions, after the children were in bed—that force field of concentration would have been a dangerous idea while they were awake and active. Like most young mothers I was constantly tired. Added to fatigue was struggling to cope with failure, which looked as though it would have no end. I was trying to develop as a writer, but I received from editors nothing but a long stream of rejection slips, mostly the impersonal printed ones, although I had already had several books published, and with moderate success. Theron, my agent, was worried that too much failure would kill my talent, and perhaps, in the end, it would have. I’m not sure how strong I am, and what would have happened if the chill rejections had never stopped.
The failure to sell my writing was coupled with failures within myself, as wife, mother, human being, faltering Christian. Failures must be accepted now, too, in the very different communities in which I find myself: in the Crosswicks summers, full of comings and goings and occasional days when I am completely alone with the animals and the garden; in our winter community in the city, the community formed by Hugh’s work in the theatre and my community at St. John’s Cathedral—it’s a good combination, the theatre and the church, and an evening of friends from both communities works marvelously, and is full of stimulation and laughter.
The church in our village offered me community and so redeemed my failu
res as wife, mother, writer, and if our village church is different today, that does not change what it gave to me then, or say that the change is not as good as what was. It is simply normal change. And I, too, am different.
Our communities are joyful and creative for me only when I can accept my own imperfections, when I can rush out with my sins of omission and commission and hang them on the cross as I hang out the laundry.
If I could not hang my sins on the cross I might tend to withdraw, the responsibilities of community are so great. And far too often I have taken on myself a responsibility which is not really mine, because my faith is not strong enough, and I tumble, splat, into the do-it-yourself pit.
It is only when I am able to put the subtle whispers of the tempter behind me and accept failure that I am free to be part of a community, and part of that freedom is to accept that the community itself is going to fail—at the very least it is going to change, and it may die, and this, in worldly terms, in Satan’s terms, is failure.
I think of my granddaughters learning to find it difficult to say, “I’m sorry,” to accept having done something naughty, and I remember seeing the same thing in my own children, and I still struggle with the same error in myself. We are taught early, very early, to set up false expectations of ourselves, and when we fall away from the pearly-pink perfection we have supposed to be our ‘real’ self, and are faced with what is in fact our ‘real’ self, we alibi and rationalize and do everything we can to avoid seeing it. And far too often we succeed, and struggle unsuccessfully to live with a stranger who never was, and then we are like my psychiatrist friend’s patients who are afraid to remember, because if their memories are true, then their present lives are false.
Charlotte, our younger granddaughter, used to withdraw completely into herself when she was scolded, even if it was just an “Oh, Charlotte!” as the milk was overturned for the fifth time, retreating as completely as though she had gone into another room. She stayed deep inside herself for however long she needed to accept, to herself, that she had been careless, that she was a child capable of overturning a mug; then, in one spontaneous burst, she returned to the community, flinging her arms around father, mother, grandparent, whoever was nearest, bursting with love.
On one of these occasions one of my children reminded me of something I had forgotten: there was a week when they were little when at least one glass of milk was spilled at every meal, and I finally got so irritated that I said, “Whoever spills the next glass of milk will leave the room.” Shortly after which I reached for something and knocked over my glass. I left the room.
Our two little granddaughters have a sense of community which many adults have lost; people have developed less a sense of community than a loneliness which they attempt to assuage by being with other people constantly, and on a superficial level only. In both the literary and theatrical worlds Hugh and I are occasionally required to go to enormous cocktail parties, one of our most unfavorite activities (and I have now been introduced to the ecclesiastical sherry party). The cocktail party says something about affluent America, and reveals tellingly that affluence can blur the sense of joy in interdependence which is behind all true community. The loneliness, the namelessness of cocktail-party relationships surrounds us. We meet, but even when we kiss we do not touch. We avoid the responsibility of community.
But it is always a changing community.
The old four-generation Crosswicks community died with the death of my mother and the purchase of Jo’s and Alan’s house, aptly called Little Gidding. There is much going and coming between the two dwellings; the doors are open and the wind blows through and sometimes I am bold to think that it is the wind of the spirit. I sit lightly to denominations, but I am Anglican enough to think that our frequent house communions have done much to keep our communities living and loving.
There have been times, especially during the summer, when I have longed for solitude, and it took some hard lessons for me to learn that I needed to be what I had thought was selfish; that I needed to take time to myself to write, to go to the brook, to be. When I was able to accept the imperfect Madeleine who could not function without time to work, time to be alone, the summers became rich and Trinitarian for me.
After one of them I wrote
MRS. NOAH SPEAKING
I suppose under the circumstances
there’s really no point in complaining
but really! Noah and I had just got accustomed
to living alone and having some peace and quiet
and fixing up the house the way we wanted it at last.
I brought up three boys, wiped their runny noses, changed their messy
diapers,
washed, sewed, cooked, saw to it that they had the proper advantages,
We got them safely married
(though if I didn’t know it before I know it now:
their wives leave a great deal to be desired).
We liked having them come to visit us on the proper holidays,
bringing the babies, taking enough food home to feed them for a week,
and Noah and I could go to bed in peace.
And now look what has happened!
Sometimes I think it would have been simpler to have drowned
with everybody else—
at least their troubles are over.
And here we are jammed in this Ark—
why didn’t the Lord give Noah enough time to build a big enough ark
if he wanted him to build one at all?
The animals take up almost all the room
and Noah and I are crowded together with Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
their slovenly wives and noisy children,
and nowhere to go for a moment’s peace.
Noah, of course, has hidden several elephant’s skins of wine somewhere,
and when the rain and noise and confusion get too bad
he goes down to the dirty hold with the beasts and gets drunk,
sleeps it off on the dirty straw,
and then comes up to bed smelling of armadillo dung and platypus piss.
Not that I blame him.
It’s my daughters-in-law who get me.
They insist on changing the beds every time I turn around.
They won’t use a towel more than once, and they’re always getting dressed
up
and throwing their dirty linen at me to wash.
The washing is, easy enough—we’ve plenty of water—
But how do they expect me to get anything dry in all this rain?
I don’t mind doing the cooking, but they’re always coming out to the
kitchen to fix little snacks with the excuse that it will help me:
“You’re so good to us, Mother Noah, we’ll just do this for you,”
and they never put anything away where it belongs. They’ve lost
one of my measuring cups and they never clean the stove and they’ve
broken half of the best china that came down to us from Grandfather Seth.
When the babies squall in the night, who gets up with them?
Not my daughters-in-law.
“Oh, Mother Noah’ll do it. She loves the babies so.”
Ham’s wife is always stirring up quarrels, playing people off against
each other. Shem’s wife, who never does anything for anybody, manages
to make me feel lazy and mean if I ask her to dry one dish. Japheth’s
wife is eyeing Shem and Ham; she’ll cause trouble; mark my words.
Today that silly dove Noah is so fond of came back with an olive twig
on his beak. Maybe there’s hope that we’ll get out of this Ark after all.
We’ve landed! At last! Now we can get back to normal and have some
peace and quiet and if I put something where it belongs it will stay there
and I can clean up this mess and get some sleep at night and—
Noah! Noah! I miss the children.
When I think of the phrase The Coming of the Kingdom it means to me the restoration of community, the healing of brokenness which will enable us to rejoice once more in being one—not a solitary, isolated one, but whole, body, intellect, spirit at peace; mind, heart, intuition in collaboration.
There are those who do not want this wholeness, who want to continue the process of fragmentation, and this has to be fought, with Michael and his angels by our side. If we care about wholeness, about unity in diversity, we are in battle. But it isn’t the same kind of warring which confused our children when they were little: ‘But I thought the Germans were our enemy? Why are they our friends now?’ ‘But I thought Russia was our ally? Why are we frightened of Russia now?’ It isn’t like the kind of warring which polarized the country over Vietnam. On the news not long ago I heard about firefighters who are spending the Fourth of July weekend in continuing to fight a brush fire in California which has already destroyed several homes and threatens to destroy more. The fight against the Powers of Breaking has more in common with these firefighters than it does with battles over national boundaries. It is a hard fact that since Christendom wars have been far worse than they ever were before, but I don’t think we can blame Christendom for the making of bombs and bayonets; it is the Destroyer who is at work here, and he has had to work all the harder since the coming of the second person of the Trinity to share in our lives.
Men and women are often happy and fulfilled when they are at war, when the community of warriors holds the life of each one in its care, but I’d guess that effectively stopping an out-of-control forest fire brings the same kind of community, and evokes as much bravery and far more satisfaction than wiping out a city.
I’ve always been ambivalent about the Fourth of July, that national holiday which falls early in what used to be the Trinity season. As an American, I need to take it seriously, because our forefathers did have a dream of community, of wholeness.
I miss the symbols of fireworks, and it would seem that the occasional injuries from carelessness with fireworks (not firecrackers and noisemakers, but the works of light and beauty) were minimal compared to the injury to personality caused by sitting in front of a television set, the Great Baby Sitter (yes, I used it too; in a world of the small family unit and no servants it is almost unavoidable), and learning passivity. When our children were little the Fourth of July meant a kind of fairy-land beauty, because even the little ones could hold a sparkler, and in the first dusk we would have a procession of a dozen or more children plus their respective parents, weaving through the apple orchard with the sparklers like a skyfall of stars.
The Irrational Season Page 21