Thanksgiving 1999

Forgot to get the garbage out on Friday morning, which was the one thing needed to push me into doing a dump run. It had to be done anyway, since the recycling area of my kitchen was starting to lose its amateur status. So I loaded up the car with cardboard and newspaper and plastic and my one bag of Legitimate Garbage, and headed out through a landscape in which autumn is being oddly diffident this year.

At coffee on Wednesday with two writer-friends, we'd talked about how being a writer means having a sort of seine net in the water at all times. We fish for dialogue or interesting bits and pieces that we can weave into their work. (I still remember breaking up, walking downtown with one writer-friend: I noticed a particularly gaudy truck, and she snapped back "I put that in my book!") I trawl too, but differently. They're after real voices; I'm just trying to figure out what the heck I'm supposed to be working with this week.

So I was doing that as I drove, half intent on the road and half sifting through what was going on alongside it. A flock of sheep out near the turnoff to Oxford Mills; a field with two bay horses cosied up to each other (why do horses do that?) and some calm black-faced cattle. A little girl walking home from school, lugging her backpack. One of the Down's Syndrome people from the sheltered workshop in his shiny satin blue jacket. A guy at the dump who was poking with a stick, in a leisurely sort of way, at the accumulated black garbage bags, while his truck idled (something that drives me a little nuts sometimes). Gulls overhead, arguing with a stiff southerly breeze. And, in someone's front yard, a giant pumpkin, as weirdly impressive as an emu or a moose or a Galapagos tortoise. People around here grow giant pumpkins in a happily competitive spirit, and this was a doozy.

And it struck me, as it frequently does, how much of this life is both rich and irritating. I love home-schooling my younger kid, but it also wears me out. I thoroughly enjoy the long, mind-stretching conversations I have with my older kid, and I find them exhausting. I love being in relationship with my bloke, but he can also drive me up the wall. My life feels deeply satisfying, and yet I want nothing more than a good long break from it. Life's like that pumpkin, extravagantly ripe and big and golden, but also lumpy.

Why is this? I think it's hard-wired into incarnation, this weird and peculiarly humandivine state of things. If we're going to get the glory part, we have to have the lumps too. Does this have to do with our Fallen Nature as Miserable Offenders? I haven't the slightest idea. I have known for a good many years that nowhere on my birth certificate does it say that life was ever going to be easy or simple. Whatever the cause, it's simply the way things are.

I know also, by observation, that a person can decline to do the lumpy part - can simply refuse to encounter the Shadow-side of his or her own soul, or of life itself.. The mind has all sorts of interesting tricks for declining to deal with unpleasantness: dissociation, projection, denial, psychological numbing.... Someone once described it as the lust for innocence. "If I can keep it all neat and happy and uncomplicated, I won't have to cope with the lumps."

Psychological numbing is an emergency measure in overwhelming trauma - like the body going into shock when it's wounded. But if you try to live that way for long, the price gets steadily heavier. You can't learn anything in a dissociative state. You can't experience and process normal, natural emotions if you refuse to feel, and that can lead to a sort of weird immaturity. Cutting yourself off from all pain turns you into a plastic doll.

But how can we bear it? I was cutting the grass yesterday, the last lawn-mow of this millenium for this place. A frog sprang safely away from the lawnmower blades, but what other living creatures did I maim or mutilate in that brisk half-hour? Should I refuse to be aware of the possible harm I do in my ordinary dealings? No, but I can't be crushed by that knowledge either. We're all given pain to deal with, some more than others - some intolerably more, and I don't know how they can walk with such a burden. Not because God is cruel or incompetent, but because God doesn't mess around with biology, physics, or human free will.

It's just part of being incarnate. To be able to smell perfume, you also have to be able to smell the dead squirrel squashed on the road. Lose the squirrel and you lose the frangipani too. Lose the ability to feel pain and anger and you lose the ability to feel joy and real peace and the deep loving relatedness that is our best foretaste of heaven. We're not asked to choose between Placidly Happy and Unplacidly Unhappy; we're given the choice between being Fully Alive and being more-or-less Numbnuts. Thus it has always been, and given human hard-wiring, I suspect it always will be too. It's just the incarnational way of things.

But even with all the lumps in this life, it's still such a mass of glory.... When I woke this morning, the sun was out, and the northeastern maple had abruptly turned the most spectacular green-gold I lay in bed for a lazy, grateful half-hour, watching the branches toss against a sky of that intense deep blue that you only see around Thanksgiving, hereabouts.

Okay, God, I'll buy the deal.

for JMW
here ends the fourth series of Sabbath Blessings