by Mary Rakow
Easter and Christmas, umbrellas and folded palms and blood and trucks and water and cement and plaster and grass and chain link all assembled into a web of meaning, into a world. Lawn chairs, a planter made of stacked rubber tires, a watch dog, a torn couch, all of it a hymn.
Holding fast to the particular, Mary thought, as energy seeped from her body, this great hymn of the ordinary is what God needs. This is what he has always needed. And with that, angels and seraphim with six wings, she projected forward and stepped out of time.
47
Jonah in the 21st Century
SOMETIMES HE STILL feels revulsion toward himself like he did in the days of Nineveh. At worst, it comes like an affliction that staggers him, washing over with such force that he has to hold on to the wall or the arm of a chair to steady himself, sometimes the arm of a stranger. “I am a man with an ice cream cone!” he said out loud just yesterday. “I am just a man with an ice cream cone!” But it slayed him nonetheless.
When it passed and he’d finished his ice cream and almost felt calm again, though exhausted, he remembered the mariners who, despite their distress and terror, did not want to cast him into the sea, but rowed valiantly trying to reach shore. He wanted to be like them then and wants to be like them now. Their smooth, blue features, their clear vision and simple hats.
IT WAS A relief when God let him go and Jonah stepped out of his diamond suit. His wife and child, both happy to have him back, loved him so ardently that on some days he actually felt worthy of their love, felt almost like those sailors, even though they had their gods and he no longer had his. Sometimes he would tell his wife, “I really am a sailor!” and dance with her around the room. He feels it even when his affliction comes, now, two thousand years later, and feels it this afternoon as he sits in a room hearing confessions offered by the faithful.
THE SECOND TEENAGE boy has left the confessional and wakes a woman asleep on her chair. When she stands, he holds the door slightly open for her, which surprises her, so kind and unexpected. She begins in an uncustomary way.
“You might have to help me do this,” she clears her throat. “I don’t remember all of the words. It’s been more than thirty years since my last confession.”
Inside, in the dark pocket, they see each other through the screen. She lowers herself to the worn wood kneeler and sees that what was once three compartments is now all one small room with a narrow passage by which she could step around the screen and speak to the priest directly. To do that, she would have to stoop slightly and walk a few steps to where he sits quietly on a very low stool, vested and still. She feels his deep regard for her, startling in its sweetness, so that she stays composed but only with effort. The dark wood lit by a short candle on a table next to his stool. Like being in the body of a great fish, she thinks, the church its sea and beyond that, the vast sea.
SHE DIDN’T EXPECT to cry when she volunteers that she has been all these years in an argument with God because he let things happen that never should have happened.
“I want to believe that he loves the world. And I want to believe,” here she suddenly can’t continue, which she also did not expect, as she’d rehearsed this in the cab hoping to be concise, which is not her strong suit. She wipes her cheeks, which are wet now, because she has come to the center of things. “I want to believe that he loves even me.”
SOMETIMES THE SIDE of his face is to the screen, his eyes closed, his hand holding his chin, and sometimes he turns and looks directly at her and she looks at him. The stool is so low that when they do look at each other, even though she is kneeling, he is still below her slightly so that he looks up to her, which feels intentional and respectful, that he is perhaps there in the service of one thing, which is mercy.
She could live here, she decides, for the rest of her life. Close to everything important, but hidden. She hears the heartbeat in the fleshy walls.
He waits until she has finished and finds he empathizes with the woman on the other side of the screen.
“I don’t feel I’m committing a sin that I can’t believe in God anymore. I can’t will it. What happened, happened. But I really wish it would change. This is why I came.” She wants her integrity and her faith, both at the same time, and Jonah smiles, the breathing of the whale, the constant flow of water around his face and body, water in and out through the baleen, seaweed tangled in his hair. He wonders if, on one day at one hour, she yelled the same thing at God, “Let me go! I’m no longer your prophet! I want to be a sailor.”
“It’s not a sin to refuse to believe in a God who’s too small,” he replies and his certainty touches her. “To doubt the God you believe in is to serve him. It’s an offering. It’s your gift.”
SHE KNOWS PEOPLE are waiting on the cool, hard chairs but she does not want to leave.
“Are you sorry for your sins?” he asks with a clean directness that brings her back to the matter at hand. She sees sorrow is what now matters to him and she remembers that it is part of the formulary. That he has to ask her this, the hinge on which the sacrament rests. She is sorry for her fear and how it leads to other things in her life that she regrets, impatience, lack of kindness, judging others, and so she says truthfully, “Yes.”
He recites the words of absolution with an ancient authority that comes to her through his thick Filipino accent, his extremely soft voice. He speaks the words of absolution on behalf of the God she cannot see and cannot believe in as she once had. Standing, his palm raised, through the screen, the ancient words come over her like water, “God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen” she says, crossing herself.
“I’m glad you came,” he tells her. “Do you know the Hail Mary?” She answers that she does know it. “Say it once, slowly, and receive your forgiveness. If you commit a mortal sin,” he says and this shocks her, thinking murder, theft, adultery, “come sooner. Otherwise, try to go to mass every Sunday and come back to confession in three months. This is April. So come back in July. Can you do that? Three months, not thirty years,” again, he smiles.
WHEN EVERYONE HAS come and gone and dusk settles on the roof of the church and the rectory, he emerges through the narrow door, which each person also entered. In the sacristy he removes his vestments, kisses the altar and retires to his small apartment at the rear of the property.
Just inside his front door hangs the first of a series of nautical maps that circle the walls. On the kitchen table, by the toaster, a small collection of maritime paraphernalia that he likes to hold until they warm in his hands, a compact telescope, a brass pulley, a short piece of rope he ties into maritime knots, halyard hitch and cat’s paw, doing it absentmindedly the way another person might handle prayer beads, waiting as the water heats on the stove. On the coffee table, next to his Bible and crucifix, a small scrimshaw carved on whalebone shows the image of a sailor. Made in the nineteenth century, the sailor wears a striped shirt, a necktie, and a neat jacket with buttons. He is surrounded by a wreath of leaves and under the wreath an anchor. Since it was carved before 1973, he reminds himself, whenever his eye falls upon it, that it is legal for him to possess it, which is important as he thinks of himself as a simple, law-abiding priest.
THE WOMAN LOOKED up at the high dome before leaving, having said one Hail Mary thoughtfully while kneeling on a pew. She didn’t show the priest her book, hadn’t even thought of it, and put it inside her purse. Come back in three months to see if I’ve improved, she writes on a small paper, like a doctor’s appointment, and then the priest’s final words, which were, “Be happy! It’s Easter!” even though today is Good Friday, which surprised her again. Good Friday, when all the evidence of God’s presence is removed. The day of God’s complete aba
sement. Not Easter, the day Christ was risen, but the day he was crucified. But this also seems fitting and true. That something good would come from the future, and that it already has, wrapping itself around her, radiating backward three days from Sunday to where she now stands, at the bus stop, squinting into the sun.
Notes
I.
Cain and the Dream of the City | words of the snow king are here adapted from the oldest known Scandinavian hymn, composed in the 13th Century by the Icelandic chieftain Kolbeinn Tumason, purportedly written on his deathbed. Music was composed 700 years later by Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson. Performed with full English translation at www.onbeing.org/blog/an-icelandic-hymn-transports-us-all-video/6746.
Isaac in the Field | the phrase “protecting veil” from “The Protecting Veil (for Cello and String Orchestra)” by John Tavener. Sony Classical Recording.
Moses and the Burning Bush | Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam (Pity me, O God, according to Thy great mercy), words of the Latin antiphon said or sung at a Roman Catholic Solemn Mass in all liturgical seasons except the Easter season and Palm Sunday, based on Psalm 51. Set to music by Allegri and gorgeously performed by the Choir of New College, Oxford at www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Y_ztEW1NE.
The Queen of Sheba | here attributed to the “voice of reason” heard by the Queen of Sheba are lines taken from the Hungaroton CD “Magyar Gregoriánum, 2, Gregorian Chants from Medieval Hungary, Advent, Christmas, Pentecost,” performed in Latin by Schola Hungarica, 1978, particularly the hymns “Ecce carissimi” (Lo, my dear ones) and “Alleluia.”
Jonah | “basilica of bones” adapted from the line, “Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones,” by Jack Gilbert in Refusing Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
II.
The Annunciation | Adapted with permission from The Memory Room. Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 2002.
The Visitation | “hail of stones”—see The Guardian, online edition, Thursday, 8 July 2010. For 21st-Century human rights violations, death by stoning, see www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2013.
Joseph’s Decision | the title “Queen of Galilee” from “The Cherry-Tree Carol,” a Christmas folk song sung since the 15th Century, the story derived from the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew written c. 600–625 AD. Of the many current recordings see www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5DSEeqnwjE or www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOTM_ZLPfDM.
The Nativity of Jesus | for the doubt of Joseph see “The Nativity of Christ” in The Meaning of Icons by Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982; for “the transparent structure of the world” see Henri Cole’s poem “Gulls” in Blackbird and Wolf. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Mary Loving-kindness | for “understanding things about which I have no empirical knowledge,” see Henri Cole’s poem “Birthday” in Blackbird and Wolf; for the incurability of suffering see “Icons of Loving-kindness” in The Meaning of Icons.
The Murder of Zachariah | see “Elizabeth and the Infant on Seeking Refuge in the Mountain from the Pursuing Soldier,” Yaroslavian Icon Painting, by S. I. Maslenitsyn. Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishers, 1983.
Elizabeth | the “elongated face indicating a preacher of penitence,” see “St. John the Forerunner” in The Meaning of Icons.
John the Forerunner in the Wilderness | see “Scenes from the Life of John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” Yaroslavian Icon Painting.
Legion | “. . . love is punctured” is a variation on “Plato, for whom love has not been punctured,” Henri Cole, “Birthday” in Blackbird and Wolf. Also from Cole, “Today is flaring up” is a variation on “. . . Wednesday is flaring up” in “The Erasers” in Blackbird and Wolf. “I see a bloodstained toad instead of my white kitten,” from Cole’s “The Tree Cutters,” also in Blackbird and Wolf.
Veronica | Reprinted with permission from The Memory Room.
Mary Magdalen at Golgatha | “But, Mary, look at me and see. It isn’t true that you were never loved,” adapted from Cole, “It is not true, after all, that you were never loved” in “Self-Portrait with Red Eyes,” Blackbird and Wolf.
God | “Take him, he’s yours,” adapted from “‘Oh, let him be,’ God is saying, ‘I made him,’” in Cole’s poem “Dune,” Blackbird and Wolf.
Joseph of Arimathea | “chaos of mercy and the swiftness of revenge,” adapted from “the chaos of revenge and the smooth order of forgiveness” in Cole’s “Persimmon Tree” in Blackbird and Wolf.
Zaccheus | see Gimpei’s disdain for his feet, his body like a monkey, in Yusunari Kawabata’s The Lake. Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1974.
John on Patmos | reprinted with permission from The Memory Room.
The Dormition of the Virgin | tradition concerning the last days and death of the Virgin Mary is based on the teachings of Dionysius the Aeropagite (d. 107 AD), first Bishop of Athens later quoted by Ambrose of Milan (d. 397 AD) in On Virginity. See www.pravoslavie.ru/english/48309.htm. For the hymn of the ordinary, see also Jack Gilbert, “What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds,” in “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” in The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Jonah in the 21st Century | “To doubt the God you believe in is to serve him,” Christopher Bollen speaking with Joshua Ferris about To Rise Again at a Decent Hour in Interview magazine, May 2014.
Acknowledgments
THE JOYFUL, IMPOSSIBLE task. But to begin. I am grateful for,
scientists and rationalists of all persuasions who push outward our understanding of the real world and to those who, by their example, show that it is more honorable to abandon an idea of god that is too small than to honor it;
Sunday School teachers of all times and circumstances who fearlessly take upon themselves the task of introducing to three-year-olds the most ambitious literary text of Western Civilization;
members of cloistered communities in all faiths who rise in the dark of night to pray for the brokenness of the world while the rest of us sleep;
designers, architects, composers and artists of all kinds who, through their work, bring into the physical world what at first they alone could see, making our world more dense with meaning, more transparent and more deeply human;
my children and children by marriage, Augie, Joey, Madeline, Ikuko, Rana and Roman, through whom I learn that unconditional love is not only a noble idea but is also real, abundant and free; and to my five grandchildren who, though very young, ask ethical and religious questions of their own accord, reminding me that to be human is to be unlike every other living thing;
friends who keep me on the high ground from which all good work comes: Jeremy Foss, Arch Getty, Leo Harrington, Enrique Martinéz Celaya, Jim and Jane Sherry, Scott and Jeannie Wood; and to writer friends, Julianne Cohen, Sam Dunn, Janet Fitch, Jody Hauber, Ilya Kaminsky, Rochelle Low and Rita Williams who read the early work and refused to commend it when it was horrid yet pointed me toward what might be good—for their candor and kindness. And particularly to David Francis and Garth Greenwell who, over years, turned from their own splendid work to give extraordinary attentiveness to mine;
Whale & Star and Lannan Foundation, particularly Jo Chapman, for giving me a generous Literary Fellowship and writing residencies without asking anything in return and without receiving anything for many years, thus showing me what patience and faith in another person looks like;
LaunchPodium, particularly Bridie and Mike Parsons, Robert Shabazz and Marielle Sedin who energetically brought their expertise to my world, extending the reach of this text into the ever-changing digital environment; and to Radu Cautis who first conceived of this and helped put it into motion;
and for Counterpoint Press, Rolph Blythe, Megan Fishmann, Matthew Hoover, Megan Jones, Corinne Kalasky, Claire Shalinsky, Diane Turso, Charlie Winton, Sharon Wu and the entire crew who gave this new text its home. And most particularly for Jack Shoemaker,
who kept and keeps The Memory Room in print for 13 years without earning a dime, silently and staunchly maintaining in his person a barrier between art and the bottom line, thus providing writers with that perfect and priceless habitat in which to feel meaningless, to graze, to rise up and then to run.
