These happenings have served to distract me from my ambition of giving an account each week of the events that transpire and my responses to them. Now, as I try to recall these things to the present, I find everything is a jumble. I am sitting at Ted’s desk that I often commandeer since my room is too small for a desk. Ted is stretched out on a mattress on the floor beneath the window copying out a Rilke poem for our wedding. Outside, the sound of one man’s rich melodic Islamic chant competes with the street-cleaner’s truck that rumbles down the south side of our street every Monday and Thursday. Beside me is a notebook in which I sketched highlights from my journal March 24 to April 13 to give me a framework, but now it is April 26 and there is more and more and more.
Present in my mind and asking for consideration is not the beginning of my burgeoning responsibility in the house – managing the clothing room, preparing and serving meals, answering the door and telephone, welcoming guests, making decisions without consultation – the sweetness and frustration of sharing shifts with Ted and finding how differently we make decisions, the strangeness and beauty of Holy Week, Martha’s fast from words and food, birthday celebrations, becoming engaged to be married (that will have it’s own separate story!) with all the joys and fears that rush in, weeks of prayer and lectures, and strangers and friends forever at the door or in the house, and the multitude of details that shout between the lines and make all of this riotously alive.
Present in my mind is the memorial mass at St. Joe’s for a fourteen year old girl died by her own hand last week. Her father was a friend of the house. Their story is convoluted and I am confused by the little I know, but his anger and heartache rang clear as he read from his own writing at the end of the mass. And I am thinking too of the tiny woman who, just the night before had shifted from her usually mousey-meek demeanor to a bitter rage when she was asked to leave the house. She threatened that if the police or hospital were called she would kill herself and told Ted, who was trying to reason with her, that her blood would be on his hands. I am thinking too of a woman I call “Sister Job” because she would not tell me her name but kept reading to me from the book of Job, especially the end when Job’s fortune turned and he was blessed with an abundance beyond what had been taken from him. “That’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she would say, “I believe that’s God’s promise to me too. I’m kinda like Job.” And she would speak so beautifully of developing a heart of constant worship, showing how the words of the Magnificat are nearly smudged from her bible because of how frequently she reads and runs her fingers over them. Then she would shift suddenly to God’s judgment, especially how those who stare at her will get theirs in the end, coming back again and again to people who stare, “that’s rude and that’s wrong,” she repeated continually. She would say it and level on me a searching, hunted look with her dark, uneven eyes and all I could think to say is, “you’re right, it is wrong.” Then there is the ever present Angie; her new set of false teeth, her inability to keep a jacket or pair of shoes for more than a day at a time, her constant requests and sweet sociability that’s broken at times with surprising howls when something has gone wrong. I am thinking too of my seemingly bi-monthly descents into emotional tumult when all my attention becomes focused on refraining from tears until I am in a room alone, when I become critical and insecure, when I can barely stand to talk with anyone, question my ability and stability, and feel a desperate desire to flee either to the desert where I can be tried and refined in solitude, unseen, or to “home,” wherever and whatever that might be, where I can be comforted and disappear into familiarity. It was during one of those times that I read the following poem, by Rumi:
Do not ask questions about longing Look in my face. Soul-drunk, body-ruined, these two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon. Neither knows how to fix it. And my heart, I would say it is more like a donkey sunk in a mudhole, struggling and miring deeper. But listen to me. For one moment stop being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. God.And I looked out the window of my sanctuary bedroom, and sure enough, a soft breathing breeze was freeing the white petals from the limbs of trees and filling the sky with them, and so it is with the blessings that breeze into and fill my sky. I share love and life and work with a brilliant, tender-hearted man who (though I often forget it) is a wonderful mystery that I’m being given the privilege to explore for the rest of my life. I live in a house where, to the best of our ability we provide a space for the hungry to be fed, the naked (or scantily clad) to be dressed, the lonely to have companions, the sick to be cared for. I live in a house where, though we also contend and have conflict with each other, we aim to contend with oppressive forces in ourselves and in our world so that we might better love each other, ourselves, our God. Two dear friends from the Chicago Catholic Worker drove to New York to celebrate life with me the weekend of my birthday adding to the feeling that all of my families, my human homes, were in some way present with me – the White Rose, the Nees, Maryhouse, St. Joe’s, the Walkers – and that I am filled with more love and blessing than one woman’s body can hold. Trying to store it up will only make me burst; may it flow out from me and become life-giving water for those who thirst.
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