High Drama in Law Books

I love reading.  A good murder mystery late at night.  Gripping YA stories.  Favorites from my childhood, like The Black Stallion and the Little House books.  An hour with a good story is better—hands down—than eating a fresh brownie and creamy coconut ice cream.

But today I’m setting aside fiction for history.  Today’s rich entertainment comes from an oversized tome entitled Calendars of the Proceedings in Chancery, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth.  Printed in London just over two centuries ago at the command of George IV from the originals in the Tower of London, it is mainly a detailed list of all cases in Chancery Court during the glorious years of Elizabeth. 

Boring?  Here is history at its most gripping.  No need for embroidery and imagination.  Take, for instance, the case brought by William Penteney v. Alianore lady Lovell, widow, “Complaining of outrages committed by the Defendant and her servants, and praying redress, &c”:

Shewyth wt all humylite your povre servant William Penteny, how that Dam Alianore lady Lovell wydowe, wt oon Richard Graunt…wt many other of her servauntes and affinite, the xxiij. day of Juyll…come to the toun of Pokebroke in the shire of Northt’, to the hous of the said suppliaunt, and there forcibully an ironbound cart, seven cart horses, and all the dowbull harneys longeng to them, and vij. kyne there being, took and ledde awaye, and the same Alianore wt hir meyny longe tyme abode there in awayt to have slayne your said suppliaunt; also the said Alianore the day of decollacion of Seint John the same yere, forcibully wt. C. psones and moo, coom into the feldes of the said town, and there C. acres of barle, pesyn, rye, and whete, growying on the lond of the said suppliant, mewe down, and x. cartfull of hey and iii. cartfull of tymber….also the said Dame Alianore ymagenyng more grievance, hurt, and dissese to the said suppliant, and knowing that there was no creature as man ne woman in his hous, comaunded oon of hir men to cast a chekyn in to his chaumbre at a window which stode opun, and that a nother of hir men shuld lat hir hawk fle therto, to that entent that she might have a colour to entier in to his hous aforesaid, and so it was doon, and thane she made breke up the dores and the wyndowes of the same hous, and so she made fecche out hir hauk….

I see a gaunt and hawk-faced old woman in her ruffed collar and severe black gown, arriving in Pokebroke (modern-day Polebrook) with one Richard Gaunt and other servants, in the heat of an English July.  She drives off all of William Penteney’s horses (taking with her their double harnesses), along with seven cows that were kept on his place.  Later she arrives with at least a hundred persons, tramples down the barley, peas, rye, and wheat growing on Penteney’s 100-acre fields, and then lies in wait for him, breathing threats of murder.  Later, the “auld wydowe” of Lord Lovell creeps up on Penteney’s manor house, when no one is home, and has her servant throw a chicken through an open bedroom window, and then sends her hawk in after it (can you imagine the blood and feathers?).  This gives her an excuse to enter the house to retrieve her hawk, breaking doors and windows in the process.  All to harass said William of Penteney.

Now what would have caused such vindictiveness?  Was Alianore Lovell a hag from hell?  What did William Penteney do to inspire this vendetta?  Were there unpaid debts?  A land dispute?  Broken promises?  Was everyone afraid of this woman, and so she could get away with it?  Or did everyone dislikeWilliam Penteney, and were they glad to see his comeuppance? 

We have only one side of the story here, it’s true—just William’s words, no rebuttal by the hawk-faced old widow.  There is just this man’s pitiful plea for justice in the Chancery Court.

Ah, the stuff of mystery and high drama found in the dusty ledgers of the law.  

Suffering

Yesterday, over a cup of coffee, an old classmate told me about the death of her friend from ovarian cancer, and her own father's long struggle with Alzheimer's. Eyes wet with tears, she held her mug tightly and asked the questions that plague most of us at one time or another: "Does God know what he's doing? I can't make sense of this. My father wanted to die quickly; he could see what the disease was doing to him. My friend wanted to live, to stay with her husband and children. What was God thinking?"

I could offer nothing in answer. Those are very good questions. They are the hard questions.

Her questions make me think of something that happened earlier this year. My husband and I had just returned from vacation, and I went out into the back yard to check on the garden Along the wooden fence I saw something fluttering almost midway down It was small and brown. I went over for a closer look.

The dried-out carcass of a sparrow hung, swiveling in the wind, head down One foot had caught between the close-set spokes of the fence. One wing hung down, misshapen and broken. On the ground below the plants had been flattened--evidence of our cat's persistent efforts to reach the frightened, trapped bird.

I thought of the pain created by the twisted claw, the exhaustion of constant fluttering to stay upright, to get free. The knifelike pain of the broken wing. The eventual thirst. The slow, torturous death. I felt sick and went back in the house.

As I worked in the kitchen, I could not rid myself of the poignant image of suffering, still fluttering from our fence. I felt deeply distressed.

"All right," I said. "Why? Why did you show me this? It hurts. I can't stop thinking about it. All I can see is that bird. What cruel suffering. What do you have to say about this?" Why are you making me look at this? Why did it happen?

I stopped washing dishes and listened.

In the silence, I became aware that the answer to my question was too big for me. Or that I was too small for it. But, still intent on listening, I heard a voice, thought not audible. It was the voice of someone I know and am learning to trust.

"Do not think that I do not understand suffering. I will not tell you the reason for this bird's death, for your own suffering, for the pain of others. But remember and think. I myself understand suffering. I placed myself at the very deepest point of it. At a point where I could feel and carry in my own self the pain of this sparrow, the suffering of an abused child, the grief of a husband and wife being torn apart by death, the fear and pain of terminal illness, the torture of a lonely and guilty spirit. The grief of betrayal, of a great and gaping aloneness, of all things wrong with the world. I have been there, and carried it all on myself. I know pain, much more than any other living being. I know suffering."

This conversation did not give me understanding into others' suffering. It did, however, give me understanding of the one who loves me. He chose to enter suffering. He took the knife point of the world's pain and aimed it directly at himself. He did this out of a great and deep love, and out of the understanding that things could not be fixed--ever--if he did not do this.

I do not know how that suffering felt for him. Neither do you. We can only know the small particles of suffering that fall on us and threaten to overwhelm our lives. We cannot know how it would be to carry all of those particles at once. What we do know, from an eyewitness, is that the anticipation of this suffering caused the Son of God himself to weep and sweat in fear.

This is a mystery to me, why he had to suffer. And I still do not understand why the people in my life must suffer in the ways that they do. All I know is that, as I meet in solitude with the one who loves me, I am slowly being changed as I see him and as I listen.

There is an icon that paints the living Christ rising from the grave, clothed in blinding white. His right hand grasps Adam, and his left, Eve. They are being pulled out of the grave with him.

I think I understand this much: He endured every particle of pain for that moment.

Easter Vigil

I was in the darkness of the tomb last night. The Catholics know how to do it. For almost three hours we stood, sat, kneeled, much of it in a dark cathedral with only one light—the Christ candle—to illumine the tomb in which we came to sing and pray and listen. And wait for light.

Adults, children, infants, teenagers—all were patient, silent, attentive. After the lights went on, the baptismal water splashed on three converts, dripping, running down their noses and cheeks and shirts and sandals. It was sprinkled on us who stood, waiting. The incense made me cough. The music at times made me wince. The liturgy made me profoundly glad that the Catholic church still is here.

I gave thanks that I knew most of the liturgy by heart, as it was too dark to read, and I didn’t want to be taken for an outsider. This was, after all, the family of God, of which I am a member—a kind of distant cousin from the Calvinist side of the family.

The darkness of the tomb is not a bad place to be. It is a place of waiting, a place of doubt tinged with hope, and of hope tinged with doubt. It is a place where the smallest flicker of light catches the eye and holds it. Standing in the darkness with all those people, I was glad we were all holding vigil together.

So it has been, and so it will likely continue to be. Throughout the crises of my life, others have stood with me in the darkness, waiting for light to return. The creed says that, after dying, Jesus was placed in the tomb and descended into hell. So he too has been with me in the hell of my dark, tomb-like waiting times. I was glad to have held vigil in his tomb last night, along with others who revere his name and who owe him their lives.

The weak ones

She walked into the sanctuary just as the choir was warming up for its pre-concert rehearsal. Taking her seat in the front pew, four rows behind me, she clasped her hands up to her chin and sat, rocking with pleasure at the warm-up exercises. When the warm-up was finished, she clapped and called out, “Bravo! Bravo!”

I went over and sat next to her as the choir ran through the opening measures of “My Jesus, My Savior, My Song in the Night.” Excited, childlike, loquacious, she expressed amazement how God had brought her here just in the nick of time to hear this choir rehearse.

“I am a lover of music. I love music. I love singing. This should have been me, forty years ago. My mother wanted me to be a concert pianist. After eleven years of lessons, I told her I didn’t want to do it any more. I wanted to sing. But I married a man who said, ‘No more singing.’ That was hard. But finally he left, and now I live with four cats, and I want to sing again. I will go back to school for it. This choir is fantastic. I can’t believe God brought me here just in time to hear the rehearsal. I can’t stay for the concert; I have a play to go to. But this is so awesome. That should be me up there….”

After rehearsal, she followed the choir into the fellowship room, where pre-concert supper was laid out for us. She had a program in her hands. Waving it above her head, she approached each table, asking for autographs. At each table she told her life story, her diagnosis of bipolar disorder and her determination to succeed in spite of it, her artistic longings, her need to go home and feed her four cats before going to the play. At each table she clasped her hands to her chest and shouted, “You are awesome! You sing like angels! God brought me here just in time to hear you!” Joy shone from her eyes.

Each table treated her with quiet toleration, signing the program and nodding, not looking in her eyes, not asking questions, smiling but not speaking, hoping she would leave soon to feed her cats.

Our table breathed a collective sigh of relief when she moved on to the next group. It was difficult to be bombarded by such intensity of feeling and by an imbalance of boundaries and social etiquette. Throughout the rest of the meal, eyes rolled and mouths twitched when she was referred to. There was an implicit understanding of humor, pity, and disdain.

I wanted to weep.

I wanted to stand up and say, "Do you know who was just at our table? This woman is God's special care. The weak ones--they are his special love."

I wanted to say, “Do you remember whose name you carry? Are you the people of whom the Bible says, ‘You have the mind of Christ’?”

I wanted to ask, “So do you think this is how God acts toward us when we come in front of him with our weaknesses, our petty demands, our list of failings, our dreams for the future, our craving for love? Do you think he kind of looks away while we're talking, embarrassed, hoping we'll be done soon? Does he roll his eyes after we leave, and all the angels around the throne snicker?”

I didn’t say any of that. I kept my silence.

It is easier to write about it in a blog here, than to frame words to confront people I don’t know very well about a violation of God’s heart. A violation I freely confess that I have participated in during my life, many times over.

Who was the hypocrite: they or I?

But the pain I felt, sitting at that table, was I think a small, bitter slice of the pain in the heart of God.

Breaking Self-Obsession

Several people whom I love dearly struggle with mental illness. I have noticed one characteristic in each of them: an obsession with self, a life focused on themselves.

It is not a positive focus. Negative voices surround them, and they feel, for the most part, quite bad about themselves.

This obsession does not mean they are selfish. The people I know are tender, loving people. When not in crisis, they are often sympathetic, quick to express empathy and concern.

Yet their attention is focused relentlessly on their struggle to survive emotionally, on their fears for their future, on their inadequacies, on their unfulfilled desires, on their loneliness and alienation from others. They are number one in their day, number one on their agenda. Perhaps it is out of need, perhaps it comes out of the illness itself. But it is an obsession that leads them deeper into illness.

Mental illness has many components and is tremendously complex. The biochemical piece of it is unique to each one who suffers—exacerbated by diet, allergies, stress, genetic predisposition, and triggered by the body’s physical response to anxiety, fear, trauma.

But who can separate the physical from the emotional and spiritual? What fine line divides body from spirit, brain from soul, cognitive thinking from the heart? If the deep hunger for connection and for unconditional love is not met, who knows what unbearable and deadly stress it places on a weak and sensitive mind?

Often those who struggle with depression, multiple personalities, paranoia, schizo-affective disorder, and the like do not experience close and life-giving connections to family and to God. Yet their hunger for that is huge. Their self-obsession comes perhaps from their fear that no one else will satisfy their craving for attention and love, so they must give it to themselves. Self-absorption is part of their attempt to survive. But it has great destructive power (see Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell).

Loneliness—a sense of separation from others and from God—is painful and works great harm on the human spirit. A man named Heman the Ezrahite wrote this to God thousands of years ago, to express the pain:

You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest dungeon.
Your wrath lies heavily upon me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;
my eyes are dim with grief.

If you have such friends or sisters or brothers, pray for them.

But also encourage them to volunteer. A close family member who is coming out of severe depression and multiple personality disorder volunteers to pray with anyone who comes to a prayer tent at the weekly community farmer’s market. He has found profound satisfaction in doing this, and it has engaged him in other needs besides his own. He writes with excitement about positive comments received, prayers that have been answered. I hear life in his voice again.

Your friends could volunteer in a soup kitchen, at a cancer organization such as Gilda’s Club, hospice care, a homeless shelter, a center for women and children—anywhere there are people who are suffering. It will draw out their compassion; they know the meaning of suffering. It will enable them to focus on someone else’s problems. It will let them know they are not alone in the struggle. It will give them a reason to get out of bed. It will bring satisfaction from being useful to others. It may create a life-giving connection to another human being, and eventually to God.

And, if it's so good for them, why not try it yourself?

Do not be afraid; it is I.

My dear husband fears financial ruin. (A bit melodramatically at times, but yes, he does fear it.) I am afraid that my lifelong habit of procrastination will sabotage my attempts to serve God. I fear that my writing is mediocre. I fear the power of darkness over friends I love. I am afraid of getting fat. I am in terror of sticking my foot in my mouth when trying to be well-meaning or friendly. And I fear other things as well, too numerous and deep-rooted to mention.

Well, this world is full of things that make us afraid. What I fear is peanuts to what some others face.

I am not normally a fearful person. Most days I am filled with confidence and hope. But at times I have been completely overtaken with fear, and I remember those times. Following is something I have written to work my way through it:

You are not alone. This is a big storm, but you are not alone. What is this fear? It is a block of wood in your chest that keeps you from breathing. It is your heart beating like a hammer. It is a wave that has risen suddenly over your little boat, a vicious wave, a wave that can drown you. Yes, there are things in this world that can drown you; they are evil. They intend evil for you. This wave is one of those. What if what you fear the most really happens? You look at the wave, and think that there is no way out. But listen, listen. Take your eyes off the wave for a moment. Take your mind away from it. Listen with all you are worth. Listen to save your life. There is a voice: "Do not be afraid." This is a command, spoken by someone you love. Who is it? "It is I." There is no need to ask who; you know this voice. It is the voice of the one who made you. Somehow, in this mess of fear, in this mess of your life, he stands. There, you can see him. The wind still buffets you, the wave still towers over you. But listen to what he is saying. "Yes, the worst can happen. The worst may happen. But I have dealt with the evil things. You are safe. Do not be afraid." Trust this voice. Remember his name. Emmanuel, God with us. You are not alone.

The things I fear the most are the things I have the least power over. Do I have power? No. Does Christ? Yes. I can make the decision to rest, to let go, to breathe. He allowed the powers of hell to do their worst to him, so that they would not be allowed to do their worst to me. It is the voice of that one who says, "Do not be afraid."

We only ever had six children

We only ever had six children, three of whom survived to childbirth, and live and thrive to this day. Three died untimely in the womb, and as a mother I am very much looking forward to meeting the other half of our progeny within the next forty years or so (speaking of time from a human vantage point).

Our youngest, in her mid-twenties, is at home yet, a student and artist. But our large old three-story, five-bedroom home lends itself to hospitality, and three years ago my husband found a way to bring more temporary “children” to join our breakfast and supper table. He volunteered us to host international graduate students enrolled in an English language program.

I remarked to my husband a while back, “It’s like having adult kids who are really polite, entertaining, educational, and respectful, who never talk back, and who always bring their dishes to the sink. And they pay all the groceries.” He nodded. It’s a thing only parents of grown children would understand, perhaps.

I suppose another nice thing about this is that we don’t feel responsible for them in ways that we would for our own children. If they don’t go to school, if they don’t study, if they don’t eat right or get enough sleep—well, we offer advice, but we don’t agonize or stress over it. They have real parents who do that.

Yet we become family for a while. The laughter and conversation around our mealtimes attests to that, as does the evident mutual affection, the hugs, the e-mails.

Our own children are ambivalent about this situation. How could we give up their bedrooms to strangers? How could we ask them to share mealtimes with someone who doesn’t speak English? It takes a certain amount of inner strength to say, “Well, it’s our home and our life, and we enjoy this.”

So through our home have come students from Mexico, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Turkey, Korea, Japan, Gabon, Brazil, and other far-flung countries. Some are as young as sixteen, some as old as mid-forties. Some stay for a month, some for over a year. Phil is the Papa, and I am Mrs. Edi. And, with few exceptions, we have enjoyed welcoming these young adventurers into our family.

Our current Arabic student has been with us for six months. The second son of a professor and his wife in Riyadh, he is a bit atypical of students from Saudi Arabia. He studies conscientiously, disciplines himself to work out daily at the gym, dresses conservatively (and sometimes wears his robe and headdress to class), converses with vivacity, and throws back his head and laughs with delight at all my husband’s jokes. Thoroughly Muslim, by culture and by faith, he helps us navigate the sometimes murky waters of politics and religion in Saudi Arabia.

Abdullah is as a son to my husband. Lizandro was as a brother. Chia Yi was as a daughter to me.

Yet for all the closeness, we know this is not a permanent family arrangement. They do not hold the same place in our hearts as do our own children. When they leave, we release them to the world and to the God who watches over all.

Reflecting on this, suddenly I am glad that God has decided on adoption, rather than on having temporary houseguests. I am his daughter, by birth, by legal standing. His is one house I will never have to leave.