Penance in a Two-Room Carriage House

Saturday January 31, 2004

The kids are with their mother, and I am in a two-room carriage house, separated, alone. The pipes have frozen in the winter chill. I wash my face with cold running water and ease back into the chair, draping my Denali expedition sleeping bag with its three pounds of down over me.

I think this is it. I’ve hit rock bottom. I can do nothing but pop another dollar rental video from the library into the VCR for the third night in a row. Such addictions of escape are in the making because there’s nothing else that I feel like doing.

WHERE ARE YOU? I suddenly cry out, like I did on a hike at that state park along the Illinois River, alarming her in front of our kids. What good are you towards whom I scream prayers only to be met with dispassionate legal steps in the drawn out continuum of divorce…and silence?

I give up. I am sorry. I really am. All she had to do was forgive me. But she couldn’t.

I think of the wonderful places I’ve been, the events I’ve witnessed, the thoughts and feelings I have had, and try in desperation to have these remembrances mitigate my feelings of loneliness and despair. There was a soothing bath, for instance, in the hot spring leading up from Kaweah Canyon below Mt. Whitney during a contiguous five week solo journey from Giant Forest to Yosemite without leaving once to replenish provisions. There was the refreshing spray on my face from Multnomah Falls along the Columbia River Gorge and puffy white clouds banging into Mt. Hood up from Camp Howard in which I taught high school kids to interpret nature for sixth graders at my soil resource station. Oh, and there was that bubbling creek sending sparkling drops flying below Mt. Goddard in the terrifying “terre incognita” of the south fork of the San Joaquin River. And I remember late night epiphanies at coffee counters in Sambo’s and the Big O Restaurant during my town freak days in Corvallis, Oregon, such as during an eight hour stretch reading Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript for the first time.

It is winter, and it is dark. So I think of light, waiting for the light. I think, for instance, of the “aha” light of sudden understanding in the faces of so many students over the years. Then what occurs to me is a centuries-old corn cob I found lying on a floor in an unexcavated Anazazi granary in Canyonlands and the heart-stopping sunlight striking the deafening silence of the canyon bed below it. I remember details of the light reactions of photosynthesis that only a fitful dream while sleeping beside her in my early years as a teacher could piece together correctly for the benefit of my Biology students. There are also the brilliant washes of pthalocyanine blue and alarizon crimson on the 100% cotton rag of my watercolors, now in storage.

We all have an innate understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Do not steal, for instance. Everybody knows that. But the penniless will steal to feed their families. The true oppressor that must be vanquished is hunger. So it is right to steal, sometimes. Forgiveness depends on the case. The movie Magnolia I am watching tonight, for instance, depicts a cop who judges the fitness of each case for forgiveness on his beat, letting some people off, even helping them make restitution, and busting others. The law, both secular and divine, is not black and white. Becoming one flesh that no one is allowed to tear asunder, for instance, cannot be taken at face value.

You call everyone to yourself. You are relentless. If nudges don’t work, then you use a two-by-four, a friend in Oregon told me recently. The stronger is the temptation, the blunter is the two-by-four. “Knock, knock. Do I have your attention yet?”

You came to seek the lost, those who would become as children and would respond like children of a parent. A child is helpless, weak, lost without the parent, rather, a guiding Teacher, as Kierkegaard wrote in that treatise. Failure can conjure up in men and women the teachable child at their center. So you do lead into temptation, situations involving right and wrong that demand a choice, in order to carry out your divine purposes, don’t you? My Oregon friend told me I am being tested. You are testing my soul, aren’t you? She said I have been called to a graduate seminar.

My friend spoke of an acupuncturist/healer who takes in internists. To work with him is a privilege, she said. I told her of the student teacher who, after observing me, said that she had yet to observe a teacher “of my caliber” in any other classroom. So I was an excellent teacher. I treated teaching as a calling. I loved it and used everything to achieve success at it. But my church challenges me to consider that there are only two divine callings: ministry or marriage. My calling had really been my marriage. Teaching was an interesting way, a way of "right livelihood" that made use of my interests and talents, to effectively put food on the table in order to feed the object of my true calling.

So here I am In my little hovel in despair, reaching rock bottom, not knowing what to do with myself. I can’t read. So I feel. I cry. I write. It’s the heart that keeps count, not the mind, right? Wait and watch. Lord God, heavenly king, the father, the almighty. What are you going to do now?