West

I am re-reading C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces after nearly two decades.  I am pleased to say that my recollection of it as masterpiece is verified a hundred fold.  I urge anyone and everyone to read it once in their lifetime.  It is not a hard read: it is at the same time a fairy tale, a philosophical treatise, a myth, the story of a soul (very literally, of Psyche -- and we are all Psyche), and a damn good story.

January, in Ordinary Time, strips things down to the essentials.  No superfluous light or growth or heat.  I think it helps me see clearer.  I took E. to the bare beach, almost brutal in its beauty with the hail and the flickering sunlight, in her bright plumed wool suit and saw the roots of eternity.  Candlelight, warm coffee, bacon shrinking in the pan, snow on the mountain ... it all means more in the stark season where we carry our kindling inward.

I listened to Father Mike Schmidtz's Sunday homily about home; in short, that "we don't belong here, but we have to live here."  Like Daniel in Babylon, who oriented himself to God three times a day.  I think about a friend's reflection about the Woman Clothed in the Sun, about the Platonic ideal and the "real Narnia."

I'm reading about Psyche in Till We Have Faces, the night before her ritual sacrifice, talk to her sister about "going home" -- home to her real country.  And when Psyche says that in her greatest moments of joy she longed for death, I feel that.  I feel that hard.

I was born looking west -- perhaps I should say, "true West."  For when I was in the US, I felt myself pulled toward Hibernia and Albion, both of them fixed in the inconstant sea.  The stories and culture that formed me, that first introduced me to Faerie, came from there.  And now that I am here, I am looking west still.  West to Snowdonia, to the sea, to Anglesey.  To Ireland, Iceland, to the very gates of Avalon, like a lemming driven to the sea.  More west than west.  It's a beautiful pain to know that I will never get "there" in this lifetime.  And yet I can't stop moving toward it.  I hear the call, the siren song, feel the exile in stillness like water just before boiling.

When I'm on the wild, raw beach with E. in her her curry-color wool suit, with the rain and sun passing over us; cozy indoors with friends with whom you sync so completely you say nothing and everything, and it's all just a delightful discovery of those whom your soul already knows; when you end a conversation with a mentor on peak of utter peace, frustrated all the more for having missed it -- because for a moment you stepped into the person of God.  When I worship God the Bread and God the Wine.  And I think about Saint Augustine and his mother, how before she died, they experienced communion with the Divine Being, and I think about love -- how it is a joyful out-looking at someone Not Oneself.  And I realize how much I still have to learn, and how chasing after God, as he dances and sings ahead of me in the person of the Christ Child, always one step ahead, but darting back to catch me as I stumble, before taking off again, urging me onward, this is joy.  

Tolkien said the euchatastrophe is when tears come because it is a joy so like unto sorrow.  I look around the world and I see sorrow everywhere, deep-down pain in its joints and marrow, and it doesn't touch me -- or rather it does, but when it does, it is transformed.  Because the joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin.  And when one is acquainted with Aslan, one doesn't fear the tears anymore.

+JMJ+