Darling

by Richard Rodriguez

  I found this in an old geography I was looking through the other day (Man and the Earth, Joseph Bixby Hoyt): “The desert has a strange fascination for many people, strange in that it is largely irrational . . . in the sense that the desert has little value for man, our interest may be considered irrational.” The Bible and the Koran are deserts, irrational. The Bible thirsts for a promised land. The Koran thirsts for heaven. God yearns for his creation.

  My brother is now seventy. His hands are burled with arthritis. Some days he walks with difficulty. Despite his present aspect, because of his present aspect and condition, I remember him as beautiful—my beautiful brother—which is the way our mother saw him, always. He was her favorite—and why wouldn’t he be?—the firstborn, the son who made her laugh, even when she refused to smile.

  When I was eleven or so, I went to the Monday-night wrestling matches every chance I got. A wrestler with woodpecker hair named Red Bastien used to climb to the top rope of the ring (as if despite audible huffing and puffing and manifest corpulence he had vanished into thin air) in order to leap down upon his opponent. I saw Red fly dozens of times. Until the year I saw Red Bastien, hair still red, leaning forward on a cane, as he hobbled across the lobby of the Memorial Auditorium. Red had retired from the mat to become a promoter. I was thirteen years old. I saw, as clearly as I would ever see, that the world passes. Red and I had been young together.

  Jesus took three of his disciples—Peter, James, and beloved John—to the top of Mount Tabor. In the presence of the three disciples, Jesus was transfigured, passive construction; Jesus was revealed to his friends in something more wonderful than His earthly aspect. He shone. And standing to each side of Jesus was Moses and Elijah. They conversed! Peter suggested the disciples make three tents on the spot—one for Moses, one for Elijah, one for Jesus. Peter had no sooner conceived of an eternal moment than a cloud overshadowed the disciples. Within the cloud, the disciples heard a voice that frightened them, so they huddled together—all of a sudden, a warm-blood club against the supernatural. When the cloud dissipated, they saw only Jesus, the man whose smell and smile and hammered thumb they knew. Jesus told them not to be afraid. He said they must not speak of anything they had seen. They must all return to the valley floor.

  In the Hebrew Bible, much of history is associated with life on the desert floor. Heroes become old men. Old men beget sons; sons lay their fathers down into the earth. Some sons find favor with God; some do not. On the plain in Canaan, the favored son, Joseph, is betrayed by his jealous brothers. He is sold to some passing traders, bound for Egypt.

  I do not believe I was ever jealous of my brother. I acknowledged the justice of his preferment. My brother moved with such delightful ease. Where had he learned the secret of charming girls? Always girls.

  My brother sits today at his computer and pounds, literally pounds, the elegantly argued e-mails (political argument) he posts to an electronic community in darkened rooms across America. (I imagine darkened rooms because correspondents are anonymous and because so many of these colloquia are nocturnal.)

  My brother’s politics are left wing, Democrat, in an easy-going way; lots of saints (FDR, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson). My brother’s faith is that technocrats will lead us through a sea of red tape and partisan obstruction to the Shining City on the Hill. My brother’s mind has long since turned against religion, particularly Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, and the Evangelical Protestants he calls “Christo-Republicans.” My brother is an atheist, though that drab noun hasn’t nearly enough pixels to portray my brother’s scorn. He calls himself an “anti-theist”; he called himself that one Christmas evening, at the holiday table, as if he were the tipsy, freethinking uncle in a James Joyce short story; as if he were James Joyce himself.

  In his senior year of high school, my brother announced he was going to enter the seminary in the fall. In those years it was not such an unusual thing for an idealistic Catholic boy—the class president, the football captain—to aspire to a life of heroic spirituality. Ah, but he’s giving up so much, people would falsely lament—falsely, for they all knew there was nothing much in the great so-much. They meant he was leaving the mortal desert of sex and dirty dishes and the morning commute to climb, to begin to climb, the mountain. The inspirational climbers of that era were Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain), Dr. Tom Dooley (The Night They Burned the Mountain), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (I have been to the mountaintop.)

  My brother had been at the seminary for two years when, in his weekly letter, he informed our parents that he was coming home. A few weeks later I returned from school to find my brother’s suitcases in the hall, his boxes of books. My brother must have given an explanation to our parents, but I never heard it. It was highly unusual for me not to ask, for I was the question man. But that is the curious thing about families, isn’t it—how much one knows about parents and siblings, but also how much one will never know. Without losing any noticeable stride, my brother went on to college and law school and beautiful women.

  During this period, my brother and I became rumors to each other. We could not have said, one of the other, on any given day, on which side of the country we were living, or with whom. We might see each other at Christmas, my brother affable, handsome, quixotic. My brother mentioned an important court case coming up. I told him I would pray for him. (Irony mixes fluidly with piety in our family.) No, don’t, he said.

  That’s my brother the lawyer, at the wheel of his Porsche: His passenger is a stewardess from Lebanon. She is laughing; her languid arm drifts from the window as the Porsche pulls away.

  • • •

  A journalist friend assures me I don’t know the first thing about deserts when I say I yearn to hike through the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. My friend lived for several years in Saudi Arabia. The first thing about deserts, he says, is sand. Not sand as metaphor, but sand as irritant: Sand in your underwear, sand in your shoes, sand in the rim of the Coke can. He says to walk into the Empty Quarter is to journey into inchoate being. One feels dwarfed by emptiness, he says, as, he imagines, an astronaut must feel. “How could there be more than one God in such a place?” he says. My friend is an atheist.

  This same friend also lived for a time in India. Such is India’s comic fecundity, he says, that if one spits the seeds from a melon along the side of the road, then returns to the same spot the following year, one will find a constellation of golden fruit—dancing gods, he calls them—among the greenery springing from the ditch at the side of the road.

  • • •

  Several months ago, my brother sent me an e-mail concerning the Council of Trent, convened by Pope Paul III in 1545. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you what transpired at the Council of Trent. I noticed my brother sent copies of his e-mail to his nephews and nieces, as well as to our siblings. The wonder is not that he knows so much about Church history, but that such matters continue to preoccupy him. Why not let it go? The procession of our family continues, oblivious of the Council of Trent; there are baptisms, First Holy Communions, confirmations, weddings, funerals. My brother, the anti-theist, is always in attendance. That is he, photographed in a church pew, smiling. Next to him is his son. Me? Oh, I wasn’t there. Out of town. Too distracted by my book on religion to show up for a grandniece’s baptism.

  I wrote to my brother a few years ago. I told him I was bored with his e-mails about religion. Bored with his scientific perspective, as he calls it. Bored with political faith. I asked him to stop.

  Maybe the spirit of the times is to recoil from a mullah’s absolute or a bishop’s absolute, and to call that recoil atheism. Yet atheism seems to me as absolute as the surest faith.

  As a Christian, I have so long sheltered in the idea of the God of the Jews, I would never think to call myself a theist. Too much abstraction is implied. I have buried both my parents “marked with the sign of fait
h.” After September 11, I started describing myself as “Judeo-Christian-Muslim.” Though I attend weekly Mass, I am struck by how often the priest, in his homily, must remind the congregation what we believe.

  This year, the Catholic Church in the United States began using a new English translation of the Mass. The translation we had been using dated from 1973. The 2012 translation reverts to arcane English in an attempt to be more faithful to the Latin diction and syntax of the fourth-century Latin “vulgate” translation (from the Hebrew, from the Greek) of Saint Jerome. Why? I don’t know. Why did Pope Benedict favor an eighteenth-century pattern for chasubles, as I have heard? And why did Vatican watchers raise their eyebrows at a Pope who favored an eighteenth-century pattern for chasubles? The Vatican must be more like a Ronald Firbank novel than we imagine.

  Catholic journals blazed with controversy throughout that fall and winter. Many American priests, theologians, liturgists, and laymen objected to the new translation, particularly to the grammar of the Eucharistic prayer, which has taken an exclusionary meaning.

  What I started out to tell you is that Sunday Mass has become a confusion, a bad lip sync. Some in the congregation continue to recite the 1973 translation—not out of refusal, but because humans are creatures of habit, and most of us have long since committed 1973 to memory. Some in the congregation resort to missals in the pews and follow the new translation scrupulously. Others, like the man who stands behind me, continue to pray in Latin.

  The Creed (which comes early in the Mass) is the point at which everyone stumbles. We used to recite the Apostle’s Creed—rather, a version of the Creed closer to the Apostle’s Creed, which dates from the first century. Now we most often recite the Nicene Creed, which was formulated in the fourth century as a refutation of the Arian heresy. The Arian heresy had to do with the divine nature of Jesus. The remembered lines are embellished with a few Latinate formulations that weren’t there before, so we trip.

  What is important to me is how important it is for me to be told what I believe. I could not, on my own, have come up with the two thousand years of argument that has formulated an evolving Christian theology. People who say of Catholics that we are told what to believe are correct. We are.

  We are, most of us, not theologians. I borrow an excellent passage from an excellent pamphlet that was passed out to prepare American Catholics for the new translation. I cannot credit the author or the authors of the pamphlet, for there is no notation as to authorship or committee. The passage: “The Creed, or symbolum, is the symbol of our profession of faith; it is not the faith itself. We believe something because we first believed someone and that someone is Jesus.” But before we get to Jesus (or Abraham or Moses or the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha) there is probably someone else. Mama. Papi. Miss Nowik. Nibs. Rabbi Heschel. Brother James. Jim Downey. Robert McAfee Brown. Flannery O’Connor. Father Costa. Andy Warhol.

  My brother and I have, after many years, achieved our importance to each other as a difference. Because it is sometimes difficult for my brother to climb the steps to my apartment, he will often come by and we will sit in his car and talk. We quite enjoy one another’s company. My brother is no less a good man for not believing in God; and I am no better a man because I believe. It is simply that religion gives me a sense—no, not a sense, a reason, no, not exactly a reason, an understanding—that everyone matters.

  The congregation does not believe one thing; we believe a multitude of hazy, crazy things. Some among us are smart; some serene; some feeble, poor, practical, guilt-ridden; some are lazy; some arrogant, rich, pious, prurient, bitter, injured, sad. We gather in belief of one big thing: that we matter, somehow. We all matter. No one can matter unless all matter. We call that which gives matter God.

  The moment of matter arrives with the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus instructed, “This is how you should pray: Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”

  The prayer takes about thirty seconds to recite, to join, in the present, the Christian world of centuries. It is the first prayer most of us committed to memory as children. It is the prayer most of us will say as we die. It is the prayer others will say over our bodies. The prayer makes no attempt to say what God is, but only what we are, what we need: We are hungry; we are sinners; we fear evil. It is the prayer that most easily takes us out of ourselves and joins us to centuries of people who have gone before, centuries of people who will come after.

  That woman—five rows ahead on this side, red beret—her husband died of kidney cancer last year, yet here she is. The world ends. He is gone. She is here. I pray for him, her husband. What can that possibly mean, that I pray for him? I mean in a feeble, childish, desperate way (because there are people I believe I cannot bear to lose, and I imagine that woman feels the same, yet she has lost), I ask the hope of Enduring Love I call God to accept the man that was and to console his widow. Because the man who was is yet part of this day insofar as he is missing and she is here in her brave little red beret. Love is real. I have felt it, but I do not know how to live in love, once and for all, nor do I know if that is possible, though I have met people who almost seem to.

  None of this happens as a forgetting of a day in summer, or winter, though there is that. I didn’t leave the coffee pot on, did I? Shall I stop at the bakery on my way home? There is all of that.

  The truest, most sublime vision of the Catholic Mass I have ever seen was in a Terence Davies movie called The Long Day Closes. The camera tracks over the heads of an audience in a movie theater, following the beam of blue light from the projector toward the screen, passing through the screen, then over the heads of the congregation in a Liverpool Catholic church, the congregation kneeling and rising as, all the while, on the sound track, the voice of Debbie Reynolds sings “Tammy.”

  This confraternity of strangers—the procession of the living with the dead—is the most important, most continuous confraternity in my life, though unpronounced except by rote prayer. I take my place in a pew as I would take a seat within a vast ark. Going where? We don’t know. All we know is that one Sunday we will not be here. We know that nothing will change for our absence. Those are the names of the dead under the stained-glass windows and on all the tombs and plaques and rooms of testament and so forth, and so what? That is the consolation I take from the Mass—that I will join the obverse, which is represented to me by a lantern in a corridor that leads behind the altar. That I will join, for a while, the passive, prayed for. And then I will be forgotten. The procession will go on; it will emerge from the other side of the altar.

  But not forgotten by God, please God.

  And will there be an other, an active, present, everlasting love? Eternity—which is a thought outside of time, isn’t it?—need have no duration at all, I tell myself. Cannot, in logic. But that, too, is desperate.

  And it doesn’t matter a fig whether we say “worship” (1973) or “adore” (2012).

  3. The Cave

  In Israel, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, one need only gaze up to see caves that were once chambers of an ancient sea—dry, riven sockets that seem to watch. The eye of the cave, however, is not the regnant metaphor. The mouth of a cave is what we more often say. The mouth of a cave is an image of perdition. We are organisms that sustain ourselves through our mouths. Indeed, we are caves ourselves. Since we eat, we fear being eaten. But we like the idea of secrets in the earth, of emeralds, rubies, sunless seas, for the womb is the cave we are born of.

  Girls are taught early by their elders that their bodies are sacred caves, that they are, therefore, priestesses of some sticky magic and that boys are after stealing their magic. Boys are taught by their elders to mind the fact of their compulsion by Nature to enter that cave; that therein resides the meaning of manhood. Human innocence is calculated according to knowledge of the cave.

  Mysteries and oracles abounded in the caves of the ancient world. Hindus and Buddhists revered caves as sacred sites, carved ch
apels in them and painted the walls. Because of the cave’s long association with the esoteric and the supernatural, Plato took the cave as an allegory of unreason, of false apprehension. The prisoners of Plato’s cave became unfit for any greater reality, content as they were to face away from the light of day and to consider only shadows.

  Iegor Reznikoff, a musical anthropologist who has studied the resonance of cathedrals throughout Europe (by singing in them), has also explored the resonance of prehistoric caves. He has noticed that resonance in caves is often greatest or most pleasing in chambers with paintings on the walls, which suggests to Reznikoff a correlation between paintings and music. Caves were probably chosen for their resonance; probably they were used for chanted worship; probably they were painted commemoratively because they were places of ritual.

  The book of Exodus, chapter 33, is nearly an inversion of Plato’s allegory. Moses begged God to show him His glory. God refused—No human can see Me and live. But then God relented somewhat: I will place you in a cleft of the rock, and screen you with my hand until I have passed by. So it was that Moses withstood an experience of the ultimate reality by turning his back and shielding his face, much like the prisoners of Plato’s cave.

  A section cut away from the wall of a cave to reveal what is inside (like an X-ray view) became a prevalent conceit in early Greek-Christian iconography. Within the cave, the dead lie buried like bolts of cloth, or we see the hermit solitary at his prayer or we see the scull of Adam beneath the crucifix at Golgotha or we see the manger of Jesus.

  The stable of Christ’s birth was probably a cave that was used to pen sheep or goats or donkeys. The venerated site of the nativity in Bethlehem is the remnant of a rock cave. At the nether-end of the Christ narrative, six miles away, Jesus’s broken body was laid on a shelf of rock in a cave, and it was there—in the darkness of that tomb—that light or voice or pulse or rush of wings found and raised him.