Old Enough

[Cross posted at Mormon Mommy Wars.]

I never felt “old enough” to be a missionary and for sure never old enough or adequate to deal with the violence and trauma of the lives we encountered—people flailing about for help, desperate to grab anything, even us kids. I also never quite felt up to the challenges of companionship and mission leadership. I had barely started to figure things out when I was sent home, and that after a year of training others how to do it! I've been home from the mission eight years and the feeling hasn't changed—I'm not “old enough” to deal with the trauma of my students' lives, the challenge of being an adult member of a family, the difficulty of serving in the Church. I imagine I'll feel the same about spousehood and parenthood.

I guess it was a cherished delusion from my youth, but I sort of figured that the people above me growing up knew what they were doing more than I did by the time I got to their position. I was shocked by how often my initial response to issues was “I have no idea.” I never figured we would live so close to the edge of our competence, the edge of our faith.

But, we did it: breathe deep, pray hard, try to shoot straight, then go home and pray it all works out despite our “desperate inadequacy,” and then go and try some more. Sometimes it worked out—miraculously. Others it didn’t, and that was very hard. This, I gather, is part of life, part of love.

As I look back with the “flickering lamp” I console myself “with the rectitude and sincerity of [my] actions.” When they were insincere or “un-rect” I repented. But, I think there is better consolation than “I tried.” The Lord “know[s] the end from the beginning” (Abr. 2: 8). He knows both where His lost children and His servants are. As missionaries we were often “lost”—meaning we didn’t know where we where. But the Lord did and we often found prepared people when we were “lost.” I also observed that many of the people we taught had been taught before and the majority of those we baptized had been taught many times and had many experiences with the Lord and the church and the saints over the years. We were just another few in a long train who had nudged and guided along the way. I have hope that many of those experiences I call failures will one day be considered just another step along their way home.

I should point out that making peace with apparent failure does not depend on all things working out in the end (and I mean the end-end, not just the end of mortality), because it doesn't and they don't. It only all works out (in the "end-end") if we have faith and choose righteousness. Many people exercise their agency and don’t, all the way to the end. The Lord weeps and so do His servants for the sufferings and wickedness of men (e.g., Moses 7:28-41, John 11:35, 2 Ne. 33:3). How the Holy Ghost can comfort us in the face of such real failure is beyond my comprehension, which is probably why it is called, “the peace…which passeth all understanding” (Phill. 4:7). Somehow Christ can make us okay when, in His justice, He does not change the outcome of events.

There is one other thing I learned about failure through my mission (I don’t say “on my mission” because I didn’t figure it out till I returned). It is an extension of the idea that the Lord knows where everyone is and what they need. That includes me. He knows who I am and what I need. That might include struggling with an investigator or a companion for months, even though the Lord knows they are not going to “make it,” at least while I am around. I feel like I have failed because I did not “save” them, but the Lord had no intention of me “saving” anybody—He does all the saving anyway. He wanted me to grow. I think it is like one of my cousins wrote from his mission: sometimes the Lord puts mountains in our paths that we can’t get around so that we grow big enough to go over them. Sometimes we grow enough without ever getting over the mountain, and then He takes us off or moves it.

Ancestor Angst

When I began blogging last week I said I would "inflict myself on the...public." I now come to the business of inflicting in earnest by posting some of my join-me-in-the-ambulance-on-the-way-to-the-mental-hospital poetry.

Having been born of goodly parents, as they before me, I am a follower and a student—mostly of spontaneous exemplifications and explanations tucked into the so-called "teaching moments." For my grandparents these moments have now stretched and multiplied into teaching lives that are pulling taut on pre-numbered days. I have of late come to feel that my time with them grows short—or rather that it has always been so. I might have written something less ambivalent since I feel so completely that our sociality continues after death and that the resurrection is real. In fact, all the whining I am about to do deals only with the interlude between our respective deaths and only because our visitation rights will be restricted.

And whine I shall: it appears that in the teeth of anticipation I am not immunized against fear. It is not fear of death or what dreams may come and not even concern over my grandparents' pain, but fear of what happens after that dreadful rustle of the curtain falling shut in front of me—when I am left alone awaiting my turn. I fear my response to the burdens of discipleship and separation.

I depend on my grandparents for guidance, reproof, encouragment, and role-modeling. There is a story about an eagle raised by chickens; I feel like a chicken raised by eagles. As long as I am with the eagles they lift me up; I have serious concerns about my ability to continue in the right path and to soar without them.

Even more patheticly: In my selfishness I would rather they bury me—they who are experienced, having already buried their own grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, grandchildren. What is it about godliness that we must learn in all this separation? Is godhood so painful that we must practice suffering? (I think, perhaps, that it is joy, even in the face of pain, that we must practice; I dread the lesson all the same).

Enough wallowing in my prose; let us wallow in my verse.

Ancestor Angst
09 Nov 2004 – 28 Jan 2005.

The services were well attended
and we all went, until they ended,
of course—we had nowhere else to go.
Now it's over. It wasn't slow.
At Act Two's epilogue
the grass is cut and birds are singing,
confound those cursed bells still ringing
tolling for me, for me, for me
as we toss young, decapitated roses
on a gilded door that shuts, then closes
in a hole. That hole: lovely, dark, and deep,
filling up with snow-white hair
and corpses. Would that I not wish
so desperately it not so—
that I not rather you rot
than leave me here below.

Some source texts are here, here, here, and here. It's hard to beat line 8 as an indicator of pathological narcissism.

On Grandparents Not Yet Dead
09 Nov–15 Dec 2004.

I'll not stay you longer:
go fly away. Catch falling stars,
stir flights of angels,
drive those mighty horses home.
Go. Go and feed the roses.
We will water them, the dew and I;
we'll not stay you longer.

Some source texts are here, here, here, and here. "Rose feeding" is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Dirge Without Music" (l. 9-12):

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Circle the Wagons and Dance

The evening of 16 January 2004 I ran the few hundred meters up the hill to a friend's place for a casual get-together. It was raining quite delightfully—very "Texan": big, steady, heavy, but not cold and with water flowing up to my shins almost the whole way. I ran barefoot in somatic joy, my feet plunging through water—cool at top and warm at bottom—down to warm asphalt and then back with each step, while the breeze and rain and exertion caressed the rest of me. My friend was kind enough to take in stride my being soaked and on her couch.

The company and food were great. The conversation swooped and swerved pleasantly and rewardingly; the tone was a comfortable and friendly "light-hearted-but-sober-minded"; "a great time was had by all" and the evening was a smashing success.

Two years later I remember running in the rain far better and far more fondly than the party (my journal provides the impressions cited above). It seems I attend quite a few gatherings like this—light hearted affairs with a type of joy but nothing deep or permanent. The associated relationships are commitmentless except for remembering faces and names and being pleased to re-encounter.

I wonder how these casual acquaintances and meetings fit in with eternal joys.

Sometimes, on our way to Zion, we circle the wagons and have a dance. For the dance to "work" you need a certain number of folks having a good time, but it doesn't really matter who they are or whether you'll be anything to them tomorrow. Sometimes we are "fortunate enough to be never without partners, which was all that [we] ha[ve] yet learnt to care for at a ball" (Pride and Prejudice, I.3:15).

I have "learnt to care" for more. As I age I observe that polite society brings me less pleasure—or more precisely, that the inevitablness of separation tinges the pleasures of union. To my perception these soirées have become more nakedly a matter of being good sports and scratching each other's respective social itches; tomorrow we'll be elsewhere and still be good sports with social inclinations so we'll do it all again with whomever is around. The relationship joys I find in these scratchings are "real" as far as they go, but in the continuum of such joys, they are rather in the shallow end of the pool. I would swim in deeper water, and that requires a degree of permanence capable of transcending the accidents of time and place.

After 400 words I managed to say I want deeper friendships. Assuming I find them, what becomes of social acquaintancing? On the road to Zion we may circle the wagons and dance, but what about once we get there? Will we, on the other side, have casual get-togethers where it doesn't matter who is there (besides your spouse) as long as all are amenable to a pleasant event? It would seem that if there is a continuum of joys that a "fullness" would include the spectrum and not just the deep end, but maybe not. Will "casual" events disappear in favor of weightier matters? Will there even be anyone we only know casually?

Also: Of all the folks I meet "casually," with whom should I maintain contact? Do I brush them off as "not-family" and forget about them after the moment is over, singing, "On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd; / No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet / To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet" and who cares if we are strangers in the morning? (Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," III.23).

Wuv, Twoo Wuv

It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit,
Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit
That woman’s love can win, or long inherit;
But what it is, hard is to say,
Harder to hit,
(Which way soever men refer it)
----J Milton, Samson Agonistes, l. 1010–1015

The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul…
----EB Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, VII

But this, all pleasures fancies bee
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee.
----J Donne, “The Good-morrow,” l. 5-7

It was as if the gods themselves had first laughed, and then spat, in my face.
----CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces, I.21:21, p. 243

Once upon a time a young man tripped and fell into a puddle of hormones, pheromones, and neuroses. He liked it and called it love, but what it is and how it fits into the big picture I am not particularly sure. “Wuv, twoo wuv” has turned out to be in practice a confoundingly complicated and painful mess with chapters and chapters of dull, frustrated pain illuminated with ecstasy, punctuated with tragedy and terror (or at least their distant cousins). But there is a scent of happiness: the words (so far) are a tragicomic farce, but the paper and ink smell of joy.

I am hardly late for marriage except in Mormon culture where I am approaching old fogyism: “Every man not married and over twenty-five [or 18, or 27, depending on who you ask] is a menace to the community.” I'll be twenty-nine here shortly; the tragicomic romantic breakfast has of late leaned heavy on the pan and light on the cake—none of which is to say that I haven't had an enjoyable and productive ride, just that none of my relationships to date has survived the iconoclasm of life. Send in the clowns. Perhaps I should entitle this, “Wishful Dreaming, Bitter Disappointment, and Jaded Cynicism,” but it wouldn’t fit as well on the page.

It could perhaps be said that I am unlucky in love, but I think not: it has been my privilege to associate with wonderful women who blessed me when we were whatever we were and who continue to bless me through the growth I experienced with them. I think my wife and I will one day be grateful for these essential developmental experiences. Besides, I don’t think luck had anything to do with it.

It might also be said that my standards are unrealistic. Again, I don’t think so, and this because God gave me sisters—I know by my own experience that a woman can achieve in young-adulthood the beauty that “transcends all measure / of mortal minds.” What might more appropriately be said is that it is unrealistic for someone like me to expect such a woman. I only hope not.

Maybe I am blind like the step-family in Aschenputtel (Cinderella)—I dream of what I presume to be a “foreign princess” and never once think of Aschenputtel, right here, close by. I am blinded by the ashes. I think I see the Beauty in my mother, aunts, and grandmother, but I haven’t figured out how to rewind the years to know what to seek in someone my age. I also think I see it in my sisters and sister-in-law and cousins and cousins-in-law, but haven’t figured out how to see it without the magnifying glass of the existing family relationship with its security, intimacy, and comfort.

So there you have it. I AM SINGLE. HEAR ME WHINE! Happy relating or hunting to you, according to your current status.

Appearing with One's Pants Down

A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down.

(Edna St. Vincent Millay to Mrs. Cora B. Millay, 25 May 1927. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. AR Macdougall. Harper & Bro., NY, 1952. p. 220.)

I now inflict myself on the unwilling and unwitting public. Conversely, I inflict the public on me. Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I doing it to you? The responses, in reverse order, are: You pulled the trigger; I accept no responsibility for doing anything "to" you; and: I am scratching my neuroses--there is no "why."

Actually, there is. My Bloggernacle Pathologies are 2 and 3, but that only explains why I lurk and comment. I'm starting a blog as an experiment in social development by baby steps. I am, by most informed accounts, emotionally incompetent, socially inept, and slow at just about everything except annoyance; appearing in public with "my pants down," as it were, induces severe wigging-out on my part (I'm blogging to improve my social interactions, for crying out loud!). On the other hand, I enjoy words and am Mormon. My theory is that if I write about things Mormon, etc. the necessities of regularly producing content and of interacting with commenters will force me to think, feel, and relate faster. Eventually the skills and confidence I acquire in cyberspace will spill into meatspace. Of course, it could all backfire and I could retreat to my cave.

Here goes: Hello, World. My name is Edje (pronounced similar to "edgy"). Check out this tan line...