white whale

 . . . a voice from the sky, Lady, . . .

. . . Telling us of God being born

In the world of men.

-- Clive Sansom, "The Shepherd's Carol"

 . . . If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel, . . ."

 . . . I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

-- Thomas Hardy, "The Oxen"

I no longer have a problem of belief. I believe. In my way. My way may not satisfy everyone.

I believe these tropes in the way I believe King Lear, Pride and Prejudice, "All the Things You Are," War and Peace, "Paul Revere's Ride," Beethoven's Ninth, "An die Freude," Guernica, Moby Dick, Fences, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," Beloved, and . . . so on; which is to say I believe them to the bottom of my being. You cannot tell me these tropes are false, for I have gone on road trips with Lear riding shotgun, have traversed meat-markets by the guidance of Elizabeth, have sailed with hunters of White Whales, have applauded the courage of those who lead their beloveds out of slavery but then assault them. .  . . All this in a modest and obscure life. You wouldn't know it to look at me.

That's what the tropes are for, to raise grandeur from the ordinary. Thank the lord I am ordinary, until something comes out that was not in me. In the face of a universe whose enormity only mathematicians can symbolize and none of us can comprehend, there rises through art and faith an opening to act as if my life mattered, and yours. We can speak of inspiration, of synergy, of peak experience, but some poets call it Incarnation, when word is made flesh.

So likewise, don't tell me the tropes of Incarnation are false. I know otherwise. In my time peace has been made where there was no hope of peace. I have shared truth when there was nothing true about me. I have seen lights that can only shine in a darkness that I have walked, knowing that if the darkness had been less the light would not have shined. And I regularly enjoy a blessing that I did not earn.

I work in the face of mortality, pain and grief, and I bring no antidote. I cannot fix these things. And it's worse than that. My complexion is that of the doctors who infected black men with syphilis in Tuskegee. My gender is that of people who have demeaned, abused and assaulted women. A walking cipher of reasons for human suffering, born by cosmic lottery ("thrown"* as Heidegger said) into white and male advantage, I learn how corrupted is my judgment, how twisted are my intentions; and my faith group urges me to apply to myself words once reserved for the Klan, or for predators now exploding and cast into darkness.

Problem is, I have work to do. There is the work of living -- acts of value, relationships of love and justice, protection of the innocent who suffer, and support for virtues that preserve the world from savagery. I cannot do it with a hood on. I must come to you, sibling of color or sister, hoping there is something decent in me. I must assume a competence of compassion, pretending that with attention I can feel something like your feeling, comprehend your need, respect your dignity.

There is also the formal work for which I am paid a salary -- my ministry. I am ordinary, and there is nothing immaculate about me. I am born of and imbedded in structures of cruelty and injustice. I do not with any strictness deserve to do the work many clients would call God's work. My physical form connotes the pain and oppression of many. And yet I am called, and in the time when I respond to that call my faults like Isaiah's** will be swept inconveniently off the table, putting an end to procrastination. I need to do the work, and they need for me to do it, and we play together an old vaudeville, a trope that we might as well call forgiveness. What a mess.

It's the mess of being alive as a human being, not on a seminar table but progressing in bad shoes over ragged terrain as a pilgrim. Though not sufficient, my good intention is necessary. Even if I don't deserve to be good, I must act out my goodness. In showbiz they say fake it till you make it. They say it elsewhere too. And do it.

The poems say that in this season we get a gift from the uncanny. This year people came back to me from more than a life ago, who have done well and present me with their stories, in which I have a cameo. Their gifts were unexpected, but I also receive on a daily schedule.

   I report Good News in a sacred season, meaning not an otherworldly season, but a this-worldly season where, as certain poets say, God has come to us. I believe this as I believe, well, you know . . . I swear it on the mangled carcass of the White Whale.

*"geworfen"

**"Your guilt shall depart/And your sin be purged away" (Is 6:7 [Tanakh])

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superlative obscurity

. . . And I thought, I've got nothing . . . which meant, I had nothing to lose.

-- Bruce Springsteen*

You can mould clay into a vessel;

yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.

-- Tao Te Ching, 11 

I was brought up to get it right, no matter what the cost. If the assignment, the action, the long division problem, the situation, whatever, wasn't right -- well, then it was my fault: I had obviously not worked hard enough. I must go back to work right now, and must not stop until all was correct; and whoever stood in my way because they didn't understand, or thought I was wrong or untimely or misdirected, had to be set right. By me.

Great accomplishments were expected, to be attained only through unremitting effort. I was not to set the matter aside, or read a book, or watch tv, or work on a more gratifying project, or go to bed in hope of morning insight. That's what lazy people do, said the voice, and if you act like them you'll waste your talents. Anything you don't get right is worthless. And here would follow a list of people known to me who had come to nothing because they had been lazy and wasted their talents.

If you screw up enough things you might make something work in the end, and I am a man of superlative obscurity in a fourth career, disappointing the voice of endless demand, never attaining more than a middling income and often struggling for that. I've been hired and fired, but never had the power to hire or fire anyone. In these times perhaps that is a blessing.

To be a first-born son, informed at the age of eight that I had an intellect, is as much curse as blessing. My responsibility to the gift, always defined by someone else, often overwhelmed me. Perhaps in my eighth decade, right now, on this page, for your eyes only, I apply it to something of my own.

Perfectionists have their uses. They get a lot of things right. That's how they're driven. And they're alone on their faultless shore.

But some things can never be right, not the way a page of long division is supposed to be right.

And the cost of rightness, that rightness of a sum, saps not only the visceral power but the mental ones as well. Not even mathematics is tidy right. The structure of the universe depends on an irrational number. No matter how many digits you write, you can never get pi just right.

Chanticleer sang again the other night at the Church of Ignatius Loyola (so yes, now Christmas can come). They were singing the lullaby Suo Gan, and my favorite singer had a solo, and I turned to my daughter saying "That's my boy!", but before I turned back the song was done, and their so soft cadence had pounced on me, beyond right, uncanny and there was water in my eyes. I wasn't ready. That's the point.

The right of music, and the right of a poem, and the right of love, these are not to be carried and remaindered. You know when it's there, but there's no map to take you all the way. Every musician knows how to get to Carnegie Hall (practice practice practice), but no one tells you when or where to leap off the building, though you must fly part of that way or they won't let you in.

The things I've done best I had no idea how to do, and I was sore afraid, wishing I knew how to get it right. The only thing I had was a need to jump off the building. These few works, of theatre or teaching or ministry or caritas, were uncharted. Step by step and breath by breath, feeling wind on my face and shift of ground beneath my feet, I would pray for a provisional truth to reveal itself for one more day. I didn't know. I wasn't full of knowledge. I was empty. I had nothing.

The risks are real. Human beings can get it wrong, Terribly wrong, pitiably wrong, or damnably wrong. You can harm yourself and you can harm others. That's the basis of the fear, the holy terror that accompanies every truly important act. But the surest road to hell is the highway of utter safety.

And that's the beauty of this last career of mine, its anti-perfectionism. I've been forced off the island of perfection. I'm really not supposed to know, as I pass over a threshold of pain and fear, what the good news is. I'm supposed to discover it there, in that room, and name it and bless it. My usefulness is to be empty.

*The New Yorker Radio Hour, November 25, 2017.

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