by Lori Smith
I felt soft and light as I left Oxford the next afternoon. The whole world was beautiful, or my mind was just in a state to see beauty everywhere, like poet James Wright said: “If I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.”1 The sun shone on the trees and on the vines that grew over the train tracks, and four trains—first to Reading, then to Ash, Aldershot, and Alton—took me from commercial Oxford into the hills and wheat fields of the green countryside. I was thrilled to be on my own—gloriously alone—me and my sixty pounds of luggage and my rail pass.
My mind was full of goodness, of a tremendous confidence I cannot articulate—of Jacks regard, of my respect for him and his worthiness of it. I am sure I love him, though I'm afraid of using that word. I've never felt so sure of anything in my life. I'm not so silly as to begin to speculate about exactly what it will mean, though I wonder what form it will take, how long it will take to meander through casual dinners to beach trips with friends and holidays with family, to its perhaps inevitable conclusion.
When you deal with regular insomnia and fatigue, you reach a point at which your sleeping and waking selves are very much alike. The main differences being that when you are “sleeping” your eyes are closed, and when you are “awake” you are ever so slightly more coherent. Such was my state of being this morning. On these days, I have trouble eating anything, and a flight of stairs can seem insurmountable. I find myself in a kind of stupor where time acts out of character—I may be doing nothing but daydreaming or looking at a book without actually comprehending words or shutting my eyes to pretend to rest, and hours pass in the space of what should be fifteen minutes.
Jack's small words had been incredibly kind that last day in Oxford. He wished me good morning—such a small thing—more than once, with so much energy and attention, with such a kind look that if you saw it, you would forgive me for feeling it to be significant. There's a way couples talk to each other, and Jack started talking to me, looking at me, that particular way. To be so far at the end of myself and to be met with this affection made me feel warm and loved.
But I knew (and felt rather spitefully) the insecurity of all the looks and all the good mornings. There was still the girl in North Carolina. We were still officially just hanging out, whatever that meant. I knew there was nothing solid to back up all of these small goodnesses, and so I did not always reply in kind.
I'm afraid at times I gave him little meannesses in return.
Generally though, I was guarded, attempting to be stalwart Elinor and not betray the depth of my feelings. We sat drinking tea at a patisserie on our way downtown to meet Spencer for lunch, and I told Jack that he and my roommate would probably have a lot in common in a teasing way that could have implied I'd like to set them up. I was almost daring him to say something, to tell me with words what his actions and looks had been saying all week. He was not entirely functional this morning either, but he didn't slip. He said nothing substantial, nothing to give me false hope.
When we were alone close to St. Mary's, he looked at me and said, “Well, it's been great hanging out with you this week.”
So than it,I thought and then said, with far less warmth than I felt and with a chilled heart, “Yeah, it's been great.”
When it came time to actually say good-bye, I left them both on a little overgrown road outside of Oxford, in front of the place they would stay overnight tonight before heading out tomorrow. Spencer kissed me warmly on the cheek and gave me a close hug, talking about how wonderful the week was and how we would definitely have to get together when we got home and how I must meet his fiancée. And then he made himself scarce—getting his luggage out of the cab, I think—and I turned and saw Jack leaning over to kiss me on the cheek.
His bending down to meet me was so rare for this week of falling into something like love that it startled me, in the best way. We barely touched all week, Jack and I, but I remember him putting his hand on my back once, making sure I made it across the street, and our legs touched briefly by accident as we sat listening to Baroque music in the corner of candlelit Exeter College Chapel. But that's it.
So for a moment I felt lost in him, in this simple closeness. I threw my arms around him and buried my face in his neck and kissed him just there, wherever my lips happened to be, awkwardly and spontaneously. My heart danced. My tongue was stilted as usual. I couldn't say even half of what I'd said to Spencer in genuine friendship. Jack didn't do much better. He told me we'd get together when I got home and, as I went away, called out something about not working too hard.
There is one particular scene in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice that may be my favorite. I sometimes have to go back and watch it again, even though nothing happens. Elizabeth is at the piano, helping Georgiana, and Darcy—Colin Firth—just gazes at Elizabeth for a moment, with complete adoration. That's it. One moment, the best possible look on his face. I never thought to be looked at that way. I mean, it's a movie after all and a Jane Austen movie at that. How many guys just sit back and give a girl adoring glances like they are wholly entranced—in a way that's more than just wanting to get her into bed?
But when I left, Jack had the best look in his eyes—like he couldn't smile enough so it was coming out everywhere else. It was more than happiness. For those few moments I was adored, and the feeling was so strong as to be tangible, sending me off with the confidence of something I didn't dare put into words.
And then I was alone with this great goodness, this thing that no one around me would ever guess.
My welcome to Hampshire was soft and quiet—the dusky air, the green trees overarching the stone buildings of Alton Abbey. There are many kinds of love, and what I needed most now was not captivating and energetic romance, but the quiet kindness of hospitality, which I found here in abundance. (It was just as well, this being my state of mind, that I was staying in a monastery, where they were well-equipped to lavish me with the one and could never begin to approach the other.) My elation and certainty waned; my exhaustion began to take over.
My cab pulled into the parking lot at exactly the wrong time, around ten to eight. (“Right. Jane Austen. So you're American, yeah? Always the Americans and the Japanese too, tourists, coming to see Jane Austen stuff. Don't understand it myself”) The brothers were in the chapel praying or meeting. Dom Nicholas, the guest master, heard my car and came to meet me, slightly bent, feet moving fast beneath his ankle-length black robes.
“Mrs. Smith,” he called me. I guessed he might be somewhere between sixty and seventy, though which end of that I am not sure, with whitening hair and softening skin. He was about six feet tall, on the thin side, and carried my terribly heavy bag up the stairs before treating me to a half-whispered tour with his Irish lilt.
My room spoke of solace: terribly clean, a worn parquet floor, two twin beds with duvets, a large window overlooking the wide lawn and rose garden. The monks’ quarters were down the hall, behind a closed door.
The abbey itself is big and meandering. It's what you would expect: simple but lovely, with a beauty in spite of its more functional practicality. It must feel small to the six or eight men who live here—the abbot has been here forty years. Still, it took me awhile to get my bearings. The hall and wide stairway outside my room have windows looking out on a central stone courtyard, with benches and water plants and a fountain. Downstairs there's a huge great room, with five or six couches,bookshelves, and old-fashioned bay windows looking onto the garden. Next door in the dining room, our meals would be taken in silence. Around the corner and down a hall is the entrance to the church, which forms one side of the seemingly square structure.
I feared that I would inevitably do something to offend the monks. Their goal is to welcome all as they would welcome Christ, and I knew I was welcome, yet they live by a strict code with which I'm largely unfamiliar (aside from my reading Kathleen Norriss The Cloister Walk). I wonder how often they experience a tension between their Benedictine way and their ignorant guests.
&nbs
p; Dom Nicholas showed me the bathroom down the hall, still in an earnest whisper, charging me to remember to leave the rubber shower mat out to dry on the edge of the tub, rather than on the heater where it would melt. He graciously brought me three towels since my own was dirty and asked several times to make sure I had soap.
I joined them in the church for night prayer. These are sort of formal dances of prayers—psalms read responsively, almost chanted, in a strong monotone, a few simple melodies with no accompaniment. I was raised not with this but with the most casual kind of verbal freestyle with God, which I still use. I've grown to love the more formal prayers because they often remind me of things I cannot remember myself, a strong rope of what perhaps in some cases may become rote, but to me helps bind my heart and my faith when I don't have words of my own, when I can't entirely remember exactly what I believe. I feel tied by them to generations of Christians who prayed the same words, thought the same things, had the same doubts.
Three English women were also staying at the monastery on retreat, so the four of us sat in the first row. The prayers brought me a sense of great peace and comfort, and I felt like I had met with not only clean towels and a shower mat that must not melt, but with the hospitality of God. I was welcome here. They welcomed me as Jesus would welcome me, and Jesus would never turn me away. We sang a hymn as the day closed and the sky darkened, and then the monks filed out, raising the hoods of their robes. They would not talk to anyone until morning.
The other guests—Susan, Lane, and Catherine—invited me to join them for a cup of tea, but what I wanted more than anything else was to be alone. So at the end of the day I sat in the narrow ceramic tub, full of the sense of peace, feeling as though I had entered the silence, though sure to put the shower mat back in its proper place.
I struggle to know what it means to trust God—the God who gives both beautiful and terrible things. The church that morning was filled with the musky sweetness of incense, thick fragrance pouring out of the abbot's swinging censer, overwhelming the small space. I thought I would throw up, then decided instead to try to drink in the scents, like the grace I desperately needed. I often choke on the grace of God.
The day became a lost one, a day to recover. I needed rest. I prayed that God would heal my body and comfort my heart.
I had gone to church without showering, in my T-shirt and jeans and hiking boots, thinking it would be just the four of us like last night. Of course, it wasn't—there was a full congregation in their Sunday clothes, looking at me, I felt, a bit askance. I determined not to think about it, that this would be one more instance of grace given, if reluctantly.
Dom Andrew spoke on patience and trust. During prayers, the abbot repeated, “Lord hear us.” And we all replied, “Lord, graciously hear us.”
It was just what I needed to pray. Dom Anselm was terribly kind and encouraged me to sit in the sun and sleep and read while I was here.
I woke to a noise in the middle of the night—someone going down the hall to the bathroom. I was jarred by the realization that there was no lock on my door and turned on my light for a minute although I knew that would push me into waking. Everything was more awful and terrible and wonderful then, all of my certainty and uncertainty about Jack. For hours after turning the light off, with my eyes closed, trying to sleep, I dreamed and feared, afraid and full of wonder at what my heart already knew, that my life could change so much and so suddenly.
I had prayed that I would meet someone. I had hoped I would. But I'd never imagined it would be like this—so sure.
Susan said that being here on retreat can bring to mind things one doesn't usually think about. She was mourning her brother, and Catherine was mourning a sister who'd committed suicide years ago. Somehow, in all the quiet, it was the grace of God that overwhelmed me, like my challenge here was to be able to accept good things from his hand.
Somehow Jack's goodness and God's goodness became all tied up together in my head in a way I could not entirely untangle. But the truth was, I couldn't count on Jack.
What I knew for sure was that he wasn't sure he wanted to get married—“Someday perhaps, but now?“—and that he'd just started sort of dating a girl from North Carolina and that officially we were just hanging out.
It felt like so much more than that.
I was convinced he felt the same things I did. He never said as much—like Willoughby, it was never spoken but “every day implied.”2The way he looked at me, watched me walk down the stairs, or just paid attention to what I said. He made sure I was next to him. When we didn't have time to talk about everything, he would tell me that he wanted to hear more about what I thought later. He carried my backpack and walked on the outside of the sidewalk wherever we went, in that protective southern way.
So there was that communion, those myriad unspoken signs that exist between two people, that claim them as each others. If he was talking to someone else when I walked in the room, I immediately had his attention. Or when I pulled on my white hoodie between classes, he reached over and rescued one of the ties that had gotten stuck inside— taking care of me, putting me right. When I'd said good-bye to Paul, I saw Jack watching while trying not to seem to be watching, to see just how close we were, like he imagined there to be competition.
People who didn't already think we were engaged assumed we were dating or that we would be soon. Everyone believed it—believed in us. Other guys noticed and kept their distance. Perhaps my active imagination generated this impression, but that was how it seemed.
So why did he send me off with this kind of uncertainty? I could only assume it was because he was uncertain himself and that I couldn't entirely trust what I felt.
Whether or not I can count on God is another question entirely. (And I feel sacrilegious just thinking that thought.) I'm not sure why the goodness and grace of God is so oppressive to me here.
The great and embarrassing disappointment of my life thus far has been the not getting married thing. Embarrassing partly because I've not been asked, never been adored like that, and partly because even in this feminist age, I still want it so much. And if that sounds crazy to some, since I'm currently thirty-three and still very marryable, it may help to know the expectations in the conservative Christian world in which I was raised. Girls were supposed to grow up, go to college, and get married. Nearly all of my friends did just that. Two of my best friends got married before our senior year in college.
So as the years went on, I worried about trying to catch up to them and their growing families and gradually came to realize—contrary to popular American Christian belief—that God does not always give you what you want.
The American Christian mentality can be a dangerous one. We are so successful, so rich, that we begin to equate these things with the blessings of God. They are great blessings, to be sure. But in some ways this leads to a faith that evaluates God's work in our lives and the lives of our friends by the amount of stuff we have received. When things work out—marriage, children, 401(k)—God is clearly present. When things do not work out, we tell ourselves and others to hold on, that God will surely come to our aid and act quickly on our behalf, bringing us what we want/need/desire/cannot live without. This is not entirely untrue; God loves to give us good things. And yet what we end up with in many ways is a faith focused on all of our riches, a faith that works only in America. Just thinking about trying to encourage Third World Christians the way we talk to each other belies the fact that these “truths” we hold on to are not universal.
Through the window of this great disappointment, my unmet longing for someone to share life with, my eyes were opened to the other side of God—the withholding side, the hard side, the side that could smite the Amalekites and keep someone in the greatest want.
I chose to believe that this harshness was still love, was still somehow for my best and would work for my good. Of course, I loved the freedom of my life. Nothing but my bank account and my calendar could stop me if I wanted to escape
to the other side of the world. And truthfully I was thankful not to be responsible for a gaggle of toddlers. But somehow through this loss I grew to associate God's love with something harsh and difficult, with things that didn't feel like love at all.
As I sat on a bench under a willow tree, by the lily pond at Alton Abbey, I was immersed in sun and friendship and something like love. I felt like God was asking me to believe once again in his actual goodness, in his ability and desire to give me things that not only are good for me, but will feel good as well.
I believe that Cassandra—Jane's dear sister—would have understood my struggles with the seeming harshness of God. In one of the defining moments of Cassandra's—and by proxy, Jane's—life, her fiancé, Tom Fowle, died of yellow fever in the West Indies. He was on board a boat that belonged to Lord Craven, a friend and distant relative who had gotten him the position, who said later that he would not have allowed him to go had he realized he was engaged. The whole venture, on Tom's part, seems to have been only to help him earn enough money so he could marry Cassandra. They had been engaged for three years and were only waiting for Tom to have a better income. Lord Craven was expected to give them a comfortable church living when a position opened up. It took months for the news to reach Steventon, so in the spring of 1797, when Cassandra was expecting her dear Tom home, she learned instead of his death and burial at sea. After waiting almost five years to be able to marry, Tom was not coming home, his body sewn up in a ship's hammock and dumped over the side after what was likely a brief and perfunctory service.3
Because of Cassandra's careful nature, her emotions would not have been extreme. Jane said she “behave[d] with a degree of resolution & Propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation,”4 but she mourned Tom deeply and after that never seriously considered anyone else. Perhaps in part it was this tragedy that encouraged the girls into the garb of middle age sooner than was actually necessary. Jane clearly believed in marrying for love; it seems in this, as in many of her other ways of thinking about the world, she was encouraged by her sister. I wonder how her loss changed Cassandra's view of the world, her view of God. Early death was so much more common then, so much more expected, that perhaps it was not as much of a shock as it may be to us now when we hear the story retold. But Cassandra seems to have felt too strongly the harsh hand of divine justice, and I wonder if that is not a trend that started with Toms death.