Absent antecedents. How much of our lives are shaped by past events about which we have little to no awareness? Sit with the question for a little while, and you realize what a quagmire it becomes.
Begin with ‘antecedent,’ something that comes before. If an event in your life happened before, in the past, then it happened to you. It is lodged in your tactile being. It has impressed its physicality into your flesh. Yet, an absent one is like no event at all. It seems not to have happened. You have no awareness of it. You may remember describable actions but you have no container in which to hold it or narrative through which to make sense of it. It’s a gaping absence that shapes through its nothingness, not a speak-able presence that can be shared or known, with yourself or with your community(ies). Even that description fails, as we have little concept of absence except as a presence that is not there. How do you think of emptiness? the Buddhists would ask.
My original question arose because an absent antecedent made itself present this week, tectonically re-organizing how I experience my own life, its governing narratives, its potential, its substance. It was like being a Russian doll, with others nested inside you, only to belatedly realize you were nested inside a whole larger doll you never saw. Looking at such a doll from the outside, you think you have one beautiful figurine, but then you notice a seam and so you twist it to see if anything is inside. Unexpectedly, you find a slightly smaller version of the exact same doll. Then you notice a seam, and so you twist it… How many times you “notice and twist” depends upon how large the original doll is, of course, but usually there are about five dolls. You can then line them all up, tallest to smallest, and enjoy the artist’s skill. Tradition and human perspective have it that we begin with the largest doll and explore until we find the smallest one. The Artist, in contrast, begins with the smallest doll, building each successive doll slightly larger to cover the smaller ones. The Artist, in my case, simply showed me the next larger doll within which I had nested…or have been nested. (Ah yes, the question of theodicy and will, which will not be addressed in these reflections).
It is probably too early to write about any of this without salacious (and eventually unnecessary) detail, but the cascades of revelations these ten days require signposts if I am to cherish them all in the years to come, to honor the One and the many in whom I have been given life beyond measure. So I beg your patience at the incomplete and formless poetics and the overly-dramatic prose that follows. Perhaps this will someday become a theology I can give back to the One who gave these stories to me. As Reb Zalman has taught through the agency of others, “Theology is the afterthought of the believer.” I say whole-heartedly, newly aware, I believe. Ironic, with the Reb’s Jewishness, but I know the Risen One intimately in the things that follow. My Beloved is always alongside, even when I can't imagine or sense it. Right now, those are the only things I can say with any certainty. My prayer is that such belief & knowledge will be enough, for a time. Dayenu, some say.
First, a portion of poetic images, the antecedent…
“We have pound-cake to tempt you,”
He said to her in the Ann Taylor nines.
“Vanilla for this side,” slapping her ass.
“Chocolate for that one.” Ass-slapped again.
He looked around the church for others
To join the fun. Only a young girl across
The table stared back at him. She vanished
In place, there but not there. A hole where
A heart had been. The other shell of a woman?
She walked out alone. Her husband, the pastor,
Was everywhere, so nowhere. Wounded too,
Though absent. Pain for the journey had come.
From the outside, one thinks such an event could never become an absence. It is so picturesque, after all. Poundcake. A church coffee-hour. Ass-slapping, not only once but twice. The preacher’s wife, no less. If it weren’t so de-humanizing of everyone involved, you might think of the Three Stooges or a bit of slapstick Charlie Chaplin. But no version of polite-society religion has either the depth or the stomach for this pictureseque pain in a cartoon frame. As a matter of fact, there is no palatable frame at all, and without a frame, the picture disappears. Absence is all that’s left.
Even now, on the other side of this event and its oncoming revelations, everyone has absented themselves, even me. The husband-become-pastor was faithful to his calling. He was never there, and shouldn’t have had to be. Six years after the event, after no systemic response of any import to it, the young woman who is now well beyond where she was then remembers herself not there, having learned about it "from others." I remember her distinctly, and the look-and-avoided-look we exchanged at the humiliation shared in an instant. Human memory is a funny thing, of course. Facts matter, but are often not the point. The point here is not whose memory is more accurate, but a reining absence. I have what I have. She has what she has. What I have says that one way a young girl broaching adolescence could potentially deal with such an affront, in a supposedly sacred community, is to make herself disappear. Be not there. When we finally confronted the pound-cake perpetrator, six years later, it had never happened to him. For understandable reasons of age, generation, culture, and more, he denied it, absented himself completely. His wife concurred with his denial. Unimaginable. But then she cried.
Hell, even I absented myself for six years. Seeing it in prose and poetry in front of me, I struggle to articulate the injury that was mine. I can see the young woman’s face, though she does not remember herself there. I now know my husband’s anger, shame, and regret, after living with it in silence for these many years. I know the splinter of it all in our marriage, which was blown open and forced to make room for an intimate ‘third’ who never should have been allowed in at such compensatory depth. But my own injury? Why have I struggled so to name my own rage, shame, embarrassment, humiliation?
Shock, for one. Perhaps this would all be naught had I taken a slice of pound-cake and smashed it in his face. But surprise and shock won out. So did the fear, loneliness, and mistrust living in an overwhelmed marriage during a new pastorate. I honestly didn’t think I or my marriage to the pastor (not my husband at that time, mind you) would survive a contest with the congregation. We had just bought a house, and we needed both our jobs. Any truth-telling could jeopardize his job. It didn’t hurt physically, after all, so it couldn’t be painful. How thoroughly I learned to minimize it, belittle it, say it doesn’t matter. The unpredictable and potentially vindictive power of a grieving and fearful congregation looms larger for pastors and their families than anyone can imagine. I disappeared, in plain sight.
But then, six years later, two friends sat on a bench in a little Lourdes-esque grotto, listening to life and looking for the little groundhog that lives by the wildflower bed. One shared a wife’s propensity to hold onto regret about a splintering-intimacy, a potential betrayal, though the husband had long since (and several times) assured her. It was an assurance she could never seem to receive. The other responded, “Ah, so there’s an inner betrayal you’ve not yet released.”
Inner betrayal? What in the world? Nonetheless, a Passover prayer of freedom was tendered on a wall of post-its—for freedom from ‘inner betrayal’ and ‘regret’—knowing the latter but still with no sense of the former. Wisdom drew husband and wife into answers, unsuspecting depths, and voila! Revelatory pain and an absence made present. An absence, in relief. Ground against figure, figure against ground. So much pain, still there holding its gifts, its multiple levels. A public humiliation of the preacher’s wife in a sacred setting. A young woman, there but not there, moving into a world where women still struggle for voice. A young pastor, less than a year into his ministry, faced with choosing between being an outraged husband or a reconciliatory pastor—a lose-lose, mind you. The young husband, unable to share his emotions with his intimate partner. A young wife, faced with being a devoted spouse, silenced and shamed, or the seed of un-riskable consequences, with voice and vision. A woman, a writer shamed and unable to speak.
Then, a bit of book-providence, poetic image:
We are highwater marks of living streams.
Human frailty can hold just so much,
Did not Eliot teach? Class begins when
Students are ready and the professor arrives.
The other side brings its glimmers, you see.
Sitra achra, say the mystics. Closed to wisdom
And divine lore, we live on this other dark side
Of division, separation. Opened to wisdom,
Insight sparks. We break open to one and all.
“When the kelipot nogah is illuminated,
It is made transparent, a glittering shell,”
It is taught. All human beings can glitter,
Promises of One and many, I am, all in all.
Strength beyond measure, new life unveiled.
Righteousness released, of pain so familiar,
Vows fulfill all, hidden in plain sight.
All human beings do glitter. Pain hurts, but it need not become (or remain) suffering. There is no excuse for the behavior named here, man to woman, but then there is little deserving in anyone’s finite humanity. We are sparks of the divine and shells of fearful separation, division. Separate from one another, we injure one another, sometimes with intention, often without. Opened to wisdom, we glimpse a better way. A truer way. A way fully human, with sparks of divine lore shared between us in deepest intimacies. When unavoidable pain is welcomed, invited to speak its piece, it can usher in the strangest companionships, compassionate connection and a sense of the Whole for which human beings yearn, seek, find, lose, find again.
I now think antecedents—past-events, hidden in plain sight—go absent when no one is able to face that some of life’s most significant moments are excruciating, senselessly dehumanizing, and then, always, potentially redemptive. How much more offensive could it get, to learn the bottomless depths of grace and compassion in a care-filled stewardship through six-year-old pound-cake during Holy Week? On the other hand, how else and exquisitely theological could it be? When just one can face it, then all in all may break in, illuminating what had been dark, darkening what had been light. A light-and-dark may then attest the One to hold us all—in yearnings well-met, undying love made real.
There will always be more to learn, and more to write. For now, I’ll conclude with a smile and say: Life seems to be one fell swoop down an old fire-station pole. You gain momentum the longer you slide toward your final destination, and regardless of how careful you are, you get splinters in vulnerable places. Those in the most intimate places remain lodged the longest, perhaps, but even they can be extracted with perseverance and grace. None of this need obscure the reality of how exhilarating and what an adventure it is to slide down an old fire-station pole. Firemen do it every day. Children long to do it, though perhaps with rightful fear. More of us should venture forth into such things, with a sense of adventure attuned to its necessary discomforts. We may learn more from them, after all. That said, this splinter has served its holy purposes long enough. It’s time to say farewell to it. And to any readers who persevered this far, fare thee well, one and all.
Holy Saturday
April 23, 2011
