Sweet Unveiling

"Strange are the uses of adversity. That’s a fact. When I am up here in my studies with my radio and some old book in my hand and it is nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am and it is as though I am back in hard times for a minute or two. And there is a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature."

From "Gilead," by Marilynne Robinson

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Dear Alex,

I saw the stars before dawn. They were likely missed by most in my neighborhood. For much of my life I have missed them too - stars and neighbors. They seemed faint from the immediacy of my happenings. Behind cloud and porch, their presence dimmed.

To neighbor and soul, the mid-Autumn sky is relentless in call, luring gazes, moody with light, stooping to fiery leaves. It inflames wonder, excites doubt, dumps marvel and gloom at once all over you. Behind porch or button, your presence glows and wanes in this strangeness of creep towards daylight savings time. An hour gained in sleep or strife, solstice and equinox churning, forest burning, life in swirl to smoke. Is there a point here?

If there is a point to be made about seasons and neighbors, then “Gilead”, the 2005 Pulitzer-winning novel by Marilynne Robinson, is a grinding discovery of pointless clashes, a slow simmer of plain plots and people in plain text. I started reading the first few pages and stopped to re-read because I thought I must have missed something extraordinary on these flat pages about small-town sleeping and cooking, dying and moving. Still I could not grasp onto the points of the novel, if any, so I turned from print to audio book loaned from my online public library two weeks ago. I listened for hours to narrated images of livelihoods while working on house chores.

Then it came to me - the point of the novel, the novel pointing to no particular points and the points twisting, failing, fading into specks of an ordinary moment, day or decade, mine. I will need to re-read and revel in its strange unwinding and cry, sweetness without comfort, adversity unhinged, unknown to the reader fixated on making a point and now reducing self to a fixed, pitiful point.

Next week I will join my daughter for the first time in a college campus tour. This may well be her last October with me before her leaving home after high school graduation next Spring. I do not have any fancy gifts or points for her other than holding onto the words of Robinson about "a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand”. And when “the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am and it is as though I am back” in the nursery with this infant gurgling and restless in my arms, my roaring through mid life and looking back at the eyes of a teen now, not knowing - for a minute or two, a lifetime or legacy, pill or pillow, ink or blood - the full uses of adversity in scope yet accepting the goodness of uncertainties.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

We like to talk about adversity after the fact, which really is to talk about our overcoming of adversity and frame the bad experience in good light.

But what is after adversity?  It certainly is not the end of adversity, or the lack of adversity, or the negation of adversity.  It likely means a new, probably higher level of adversity, if we aren't adverse to the learning of lessons during the last round of descent as a way to ascend.

I say the end doesn't justify the means: that is, the end doesn't do justice to speak about the means, surely not its fuller and deeper meanings that are still unveiling, long after the demarcation line we tend to draw on the sand and mark out a moment of "resolution."

When are we ever going to resolve the conundrum and mystery and exuberance of being human?

What we speak during our adversity speaks most truly about us.  A "good resolution" shouldn't change what is fundamentally our Selves; the path we take to arrive there reveals our true fundamentals.

So yes, there is Good News, not because the Story has ended and we are now at the tail end of a Hollywood ending, beyond adversity.  Part of the good is in the unveiling of our life's meaning by the mercy and grace of a good God.

Yours, Alex