I have been blessed all the years of my life by the self-giving love of an English nanny known to us all as Mrs. O—for when I was a baby I could not say Mrs. O’Connell. Despite the name she acquired when she married a handsome Irishman, she never left anyone in doubt that her nationality was English. I was always comfortably certain that she loved me, but it was a typically Anglo-Saxon love which did not indulge in demonstrativeness. She did not, as I remember, kiss me at bedtime when I was a small child. One of our pleasant jokes, after my marriage, was Hugh’s attempts to give her a kiss; despite much laughter, she managed to avoid the kisses. Nor was she ever a handholder.
Last spring she was ninety-five, and for the past several years has been in a home for elderly nuns, the Convent of Mary the Queen. Two of her three daughters are nuns, Sister Miriam Ambrose and Sister Anastasia Marie, and it was because of them that she was given her pleasant room and bath. During these years of her old age I have been called three times to her deathbed, and each time she has surprised doctors and nurses by recovering. It isn’t that she is clinging to life, like a brown and brittle leaf clinging to the tree; she is very ready to go home. When she has been on the road to recovery she has each time remarked with good-humored resignation, “Well, God doesn’t want me and the devil won’t have me.”
The Sisters call me regularly to report on her condition, and we all try to go see her as often as possible, and to bring the little girls for a state visit once a year. This spring she became very weak, and her mind began to wander, but the Sisters urged me not to come. “If there’s a day when she’s alert and will recognize you, we’ll call.”
In August I suddenly have a tremendous urge to go to her, and my friend Gillian says she’d love to take a day off from work and drive to the convent with me. So when Sister Ambrose calls to say that her mother seems a little stronger and might recognize me, we decide to go.
It is a brilliant summer day. There has been a lot of rain, so the leaves are a lush, rich green, not dry and dusty as they sometimes are in August. Gillian and I have shared much during the long years of our friendship, death and pain as well as birth and joy. There’s nothing we can’t talk about, and we’ve journeyed far together in our attempts to understand life and death and the increasing hope of a God of loving concern and faithful promise.
When we reach the convent I fall silent. A voice calls upstairs on a loudspeaker to announce our visit. We walk through a long room with two rows of rocking chairs where ancient Sisters sit to watch television. When Hugh comes to the convent with me it is an added glory for Mrs. O, for not only do the Sisters watch his show, but most of the nurses, and many of them come hurrying for autographs or simply to shake hands with ‘Dr. Tyler.’
Gillian and I go up on the elevator to the fourth floor. Mrs. O’s room is just around the corner where she has been able to watch all the comings and goings on the floor. It is hot in the summer, and we have wanted to give her an air-coonditioner, but she won’t have one because she’d have to keep her door closed and thus be isolated from the life bustling around her.
Wherever she is, she has always brought with her the gift of laughter. The nurses on the night shift say, when they are tired or discouraged, “I think I’ll go to Mrs. O’Connell’s room. She’s always good for a laugh.” The orderlies and cleaning women love her; whenever there has been a crisis in her condition there have been tears, open and unashamed. Perhaps she is being kept here on earth for so long because her gift of laughter is desperately needed. Ill and difficult patients may well be treated with more tenderness because of Mrs. O.
Never very large, each year she has become smaller and smaller. But there is today a startling change since my last visit. She has eaten nothing solid for three months; a little tea, a little thin soup, the Holy Mysteries; on these she has been kept alive. But there is nothing now between skin and bones. The body on the hospital bed looks like pictures of victims of Belsen, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück.
When I first bend over her she does not know me. I wait while she makes the slow journey from the past to the present. I put my hand on hers and say, “It’s Madeleine, Mrs. O. It’s Madeleine.” Suddenly she is fully with me, and she puts her arms around me as she would never have done in the old days, and says, “Oh, Madeleine, my Madeleine, oh, my Madeleine,” and I no longer see the ancient wasted body. I have my arms about her so that I am holding her sitting up, with the fragile body leaning against me like a child’s, and yet she is still holding me; we are both child, both mother.
She moves in and out of time. We talk in low voices and she asks me how the children are, does Bion still have his nice girlfriend? how are the little girls? She hasn’t seen Gillian for at least fifteen years and yet she is completely aware of her presence and who she is, and asks about her family.
Once she gets lost in chronology and asks me, “Are you downstairs in your carriage?” But the next moment she is back in the present and says, “How’s the boss?” (Her pet name for Hugh.) “How could I have forgotten to ask about the boss?”
I stay for an hour, much longer than I had expected, but we are in kairos, Mrs. O and I, in God’s time, free, for the rest of the hour, from chronos. “And the extraordinary thing,” I wrote in my journal, “was the electric current of love, powerful and beautiful, flowing back and forth between Mrs. O and me. Gillie had expected to step outside and write letters, but she too felt the lovely light of love which was uniting Mrs. O and me, so she stayed, remarking later what a privilege it had been for her to be present. I cannot set down in words the strength and joy of that river of love; it was something which can happen only in kairos; it was a time of Transfiguration—and in the octave of the Transfiguration, too—I just thought about that.”
So we are given our glimpses of what it is really like, how things are really meant to be. There in that wasted body I saw at the same time the transfigured body, something visible to the spirit and not to the eyes.
These glimpses of reality are the foundation stones of faith.
12 … The Day Is at Hand
The Michaelmas daisies are purply blue in the fields; the goldenrod is tall. We come to Crosswicks only for weekends. The long weeks after Pentecost stretch out and it seems odd that schools and colleges have started, the house is emptying, and there are still six weeks till Advent.
Hugh and I are often alone on weekends, and we enjoy our companionable solitude. In the bedroom with the four-poster bed there are three rocking chairs, as well as the ancient chest across the foot of the bed, so that when the household gathers upstairs for a nightcap there will be plenty of places for everybody to sit. But now there are empty seats.
The big chest holds the sheets, the eiderdown for winter. It is often a receptacle for anything I feel like dumping down until I find time to put it away, and in the summer everything is casually swept to the floor if someone wants to sit there.
There was one spring when it was regularly an altar. A bad fall had me off my feet and in bed for six weeks. I was allowed to go, on crutches, to the bathroom, but otherwise I was not to get out of bed. Not easy for anyone as used to being as active as I am. It was late spring, and Alan and Josephine were free to be in the country, and Hugh’s schedule was at that time fairly flexible, so that he could be more in Crosswicks than on West End Avenue, so I managed to talk the doctor into letting me be driven up.
The drive was typical. I sat in the back of the car with my leg on pillows and two dogs somehow or other stretched across me—one, a collie (Tim’s predecessor); the other, half shepherd, half golden retriever (Jo’s and Alan’s first dog). They made a lapful. The cat perched on the ledge by the rear window. We stopped for something to eat, made the mistake of giving Thomas, the cat, some chicken, which he threw up, messily, before we’d gone another five miles. Much scrabbling for tissues and paper towels, with Josephine leaning over the seat and trying to help and Thomas crouching into his setting-hen position and feeling sorry for himself.
When we finally re
ached Crosswicks there was the problem of getting me upstairs. I had been warned that I must not touch my foot to the ground. Trying to go up the narrow front stairs of a New England farmhouse, facing forward, and on crutches, proved to be impossible for me, particularly because we were all laughing so hard at my efforts that it made me weaker than ever. I finally made everybody go away and leave me alone, sat down on the steps, facing downstairs, with my leg stretched out in front of me, and went up, step by step, on my bottom, and finally got into bed, no worse for wear.
Dinner was brought up to my room so that I would not have to eat alone, and at bedtime Alan looked at the top of the chest, which was fortunately clear of debris at that moment, and said thoughtfully, “I think I’ll set up for Mass.”
That became the pattern during those weeks when the house was frequently full of visitors. Anybody who was up in the early morning felt free to come in while Alan celebrated Communion; anyone who felt like sleeping in was free to sleep. And I was part of the Body, not isolated by being shuffled off in bed, but a full part of the community.
That belonging remains with me as I call the dogs and take my staff (a stripped young maple from a grove in need of thinning), and stride alone across the autumn fields.
Michaelmas. Summer is ending. We sniff the wind at night to see if the tomatoes and other tender plants in the garden need covering from early frost. The dragon which Michael fought brings frost with him, but it is not the natural frost for which the countryside is preparing and for which we sniff. The rich earth needs the long fallow months of winter, and the deep blankets of snow, known locally as poor man’s fertilizer, to prepare for the full glory of spring.
A Deeper Cold once clutched this land. Even in the New World, where Crosswicks, nearly two hundred and a quarter years old, is young compared with the dwellings of the Old World, there are hints of a time beyond man’s memory. The great glacial rocks I pass on the way to the brook are evidence that ice pushed across this land, inexorably grinding down palm trees and great ferns which stood as high as oaks; elephants fled before the coming of the ice, and other animals we glimpse only as rarities in zoos, or in the glossy pages of the National Geographic. Time is old, and our memory is lost down its winding labyrinths.
And so we tend to limit ourselves to the near past. We talk of Christianity as being not quite two thousand years old, and forget that the Second Person of the Trinity was, in his full glory, before time was made.
But we human creatures are in time, acted on by time, changed and dwindled and in our mortal aspect finished by it. The time that we ‘tell’ is as much an agreed-upon fiction as lower math; serviceable, but not very real.
The dwindling of our language reflects the assults of time. I am sorry that we no longer tutoyer in English; my little knowledge of French gives me glimpses of how this enriches relationships. When you becomes only you, we open the door to sexism; and we are taking thee and thou away even from our public worship. In some of the contemporary prayers I feel that we are speaking to God in much the same way that people used to call black servants ‘Boy’ and I don’t like it any more with God than I do with his people.
In the beginning of Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm, Rosmer and Rebecca West are on stage with a third person, and they use the formal you. When they are left alone on stage they switch immediately to thee and thou, and there is no question for the audience as to the depth of their relationship. There is no adequate way of getting this knowledge across in English. To have them call each other dear or darling does not do it; we are all deared and darlinged at the drop of a hat nowadays.
When we lose the ability to convey intimacy in speech, then it becomes easy for us to turn creatures into things; the English language knows things, unlike the Latin tongues, where there is nothing without gender. Maybe there are some who would prefer thingdom to gender, but I’m not one of them. And even the word thing has been changed and distorted, so that it no longer makes sense to speak of ‘these Holy Things.’ Or perhaps it makes the only and complete sense! (Remember the phrase “that holy thing which shall be born of thee” referred to Jesus.)
The Welsh say, “She is casting rain,” rather than it is raining. In French, snow, too, is ‘she.’ And it has always amused me that in Spanish a woman’s dress is masculine. But on the whole the male and femaleness of gender makes considerable sense in these so-called ‘Romance’ tongues. In the old days when one said “She is casting rain,” one was referring to a goddess who had power over the clouds. And this is closer to the truth of love than our “It is raining,” where it is simply part of a blind force over which we have no control. If we truly thought of the earth as Mother we could not do to her some of the things we have done. And if we think of everything in the created order as good, because God is Creator, then gender in rock and rose, tree and turnip, sea and seed, is a form of thanks and praise.
Alan told me that in Chinese folklore there is a mythical bird who is only half a bird: one eye, one wing, one leg. In order to fly, a left-hand bird must find a right-hand bird. Alone, they are earthbound, flopping clumsily about; together they can soar across the sky.
Interpret this Freudianly if you will, but that’s only part of it—though it is a part. But it rejoices me to take it beyond that, into an understanding of a deeper wholeness. There are the two Chinese birds within each of us, seeking each other for completion.
How long ago was it that we were sundered from each other, and sundered from ourselves? so that dark, night, earth, mystery, intuition, all became feminine; and light (it’s feminine in French!), day, sky, fact, intellect, became masculine? It’s achingly sad for the male of the species that he has been taught to repress his intuitive side, his tears, his gentleness, his ability to grieve. When the ability to grieve is repressed, the ability to love is often repressed along with it—except in the roughest act of rutting which has little to do with love.
In interpreting myth and fairy tale, many psychologists see the mother of the hero as standing for the unconscious. The appropriate behavior for the hero is to outgrow this ‘fairy tale’ or unreal world, and move from the dark into the light. The longing for what the mother has to offer is a longing for the inertia and lack of consciousness of the fetus.
But this is a partial explanation at best. The unconscious aspect of the personality is anything but inert, and this is why it is so fearsome. The hero must fight tooth and claw for what the psychologists call his ego-consciousness, but this ego-consciousness is only a partial consciousness-full consciousness comes only when the ego can trust the subconscious enough to embrace it instead of doing battle; only when nightside and sunside are mediated instead of separated, and so become a whole.
When we limit ourselves to our ego-consciousness, then we close off that part of us which is capable of true prayer, poetry, painting, music. When we embrace the monster it may indeed devour us, and this is the genuine risk. It may also turn out to be the handsome prince or the beautiful princess for whom we have been waiting all these years.
It is only as we recognize and call by name all that we have relegated to the dark side of Mercury, to the deep black waters of the subconscious mind, that we have any hope of wholeness. All those moral virtues I was taught in my Anglican schools must be unlearned, because most of them were neither moral nor virtuous. And many of the things which I was taught to consider bad and nasty are bad and nasty only because we have made them so. For instance, a ‘nice’ woman, a ‘lady,’ was not supposed to enjoy sex; she was to do her duty to her husband, and bear children for him, but she was not supposed to enjoy it. The grandmother and great-aunt of a friend of my mother’s were baptized Patience and Submit, which gives one a good idea of the frame of mind of their mother. Only the lower classes were supposed to enjoy the natural acts of love.
Even in this supposedly enlightened day and age, a young friend of mine, going to maternity classes when she was pregnant with her first baby, and planning to bear her little one with her husband beside
her, and to nurse their child, reported with shock that more than half the young mothers in the class were not going to nurse their babies. One said, with considerable pride, “My husband is not going to have me going around with my boobs exposed.” The language may be today, but the attitude, I had thought, was yesterday. But it isn’t. Satan still manages to make us look upon that which is natural and beautiful and good, as perverse and ugly and nasty.
All that God created is good. It is only we who have taken this good, succumbing to the wiles of the Destroyer, and seen it as bad. All the things which we have shoved down into the darkness of the subconscious were created to be good. The darkness itself is good, but we have distorted so many things within it that the Destroyer has taken it over and made it a power for evil, for the breaking and destruction of God’s creatures.
I was mercifully spared some of the distortions I would otherwise have had to struggle to unlearn by the most negative aspects of my childhood. Because I was rejected by my peers, and had to accept to myself that I was unlike them, I found myself within, rather than without. Had I been happy and popular in school I would not have plunged deep into the archetypical world of fairy tale and myth, where the night is as important as the day, the dark as light, where there is acute awareness that male and female, when evil powers intrude, battle and struggle and try to possess, but that fulfillment is only in participation. I would not otherwise have devoured George Macdonald and so absorbed, without realizing it, some of his loving theology. One of my books, long lost, was stories from the Bible, and of these stories one of my favorites was Joseph with his coat of many colors—and his dreams; Joseph, the one the others didn’t like, the one who understood the dark part of the personality. I would not otherwise have read the fantasies of E. Nesbit and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, so that the larger world of imagination and intuition was not closed off for me as it was for many of my contemporaries.
The Irrational Season Page 23