Small Steps Forward

“She’s living her life backwards... It was a curiously apt observation.  Baby Kochamma had lived her life backwards.  As a young woman she had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it.  She hugged it and it hugged her back.”

From "The God of Small Things," by Arundhati Roy

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Dear Kate,

How do we come to renounce one thing and embrace another?

Can truth be given, passed on?  It seems possible, and it's with this conviction that we teach our kids.  Even with not the next generation to worry about, when we argue we seem to say to the other person, Now you should know better the most updated state of human progress and that I am in the right...

Don't prejudge, we teach our kids, Keep your mind open.  Our children take that to heart and before we know it close their mind on any judgement they don't like and accuse the world of not opening its mind to their closed-mindedness.

No, I don't think truth can be given, passed on and taken in quite this way.  Isn't it interesting we not only can't genetically pass on our moral progress to the next generation, with even the best of intention and effort we also can't quite manage to articulate truth without finally subscribing to one shade of bigotry or another?

There is bully, and then there is anti-bully who bullies the world into submission to her truth and thus calls for another fresh round of antagonism.  Meanwhile truth remains elusive.  Despite our steady hand and balanced mind, the line we draw in sand denies us of the abiding demarcation we aim for to land ourselves on the right side of an argument, of a conflict, of history and civilization, in the eye of God.

Easter is about how we are all implicated in the grossest of injustice, that there is only one "pure victim" and he is not us, and only he alone can be the merciful, the vindicating judge.  He draws the line; we don't.  He straightens up, draws our eyes from the line, and beckons us to look at him as a way to look also at ourselves and everyone, everything else.

It's in living into this Truth that we find ourselves simultaneously renouncing and embracing all there is to life, progressing and regressing, speaking never in abstraction about our worldly experience but always in uncertain terms of our own moral certitude, quick to give and forgive, just as easy to receive and relent.

And this is truly, truthfully, good news.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

Let me tell you a secret indiscreetly. I have sketched an outline in response to your quote above, acquainted myself with its author and planned to borrow her novel from my local library - a series of serious steps forward on a purposeful course.

Where's the hiddenness? Pain is at stake in this painstaking process of pursuing a purpose which must not expose my ignorance of this book along with its context, character and creator. I have dismissed pain before it could be concealed. If you see my pain, you will see too much of me exposed.

Now let me chuck all my intentions, stop strategizing, rewrite without plan or bullet point making pointless plan because tonight hurts without words to spare. To arrive here now, I need to first wobble backwards through last week and envision the portrait of him.

Exposed was he under fluorescent lights in a room too small to contain his story, too big for him to be heard in our 30 minutes together. I groped my way in reverse through words about his past. Nodes of silence connected our language. In my stare he saw the sameness of sorrow. He exposed too much of me in discreet pain.

I hope you can move on, I told him from a distance of discretion. I struggled to speak of my pain manifested in his voice unheard.

His housekeeper looked onwards, her eyes receding in nostalgia. She recounted a few years past when they had fished at a local lake. He slumped his back against the back of his wheelchair, regressing in primal nods to spring forward with forthcoming forbearance. In his bearing of unbearably lonesome pain, he knew what had been said of his end-stage syndrome with no viable option, no living room for him.

For most of my life, I have aimed to race forth as painlessly as I could. Now I am crawling and clawing backwards in reflection to retrieve the pain forgone and forsaken, to regain the prick and pounce of pain preceding the joy in a stride forward curiously.

Yours, Kate