Permanence

So much for permanence. The house is gone. The driveway that wandered south where Holly Place turned north remains. But the asphalt is going fast to gravel and the gravel is going fast to grass. The house is gone entirely.

The porch where Grandpa sat in his aluminum lawn chair and tended the ice cream machine is gone. The great spirea bush outside the bedroom window is gone. I didn't venture into the woods to look for the rope swing we would ride out into the air as the hillside fell away below our kicking legs. If it's not gone, it's going.

Mark Strand's lines come to mind:

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- from "Keeping Things Whole"

It was as if the air had moved in to fill the spaces where the house had been. And perhaps, in the process, things were kept whole. Strangely, I had a sense that they were.

It helped, no doubt, that the house wasn't much in itself. A clumsy addition and the awkward tie in of the house roof to the garage suggested that this building was not evolving into a higher form. It was time for a clean lot and a fresh start.

Which helped orient me to the real holiness I sensed or supplied on the day of my visit a few weeks ago. The fact that the house was gone made plain to me that the sacred lived not in a building or even in a persons, but in the interractions and exchanges that were always happening in some present.

The pleasure of peach ice cream was far more complex than it's sweetness on the tongue. The latent goodness in the soupy ingredients, the slow grinding of the motor and its increasing effort as the stuff got thicker as it froze, the lingering stickiness on our fingers all contributed to the pleasure that was passing through our lives on those fine summer evenings. Goodness was always in motion through our lives and to stop it would be to kill it. Goodness preserved would be like a butterfly stuck through with a pin.

So it made a kind of sense that the house had to pass away too. That's how goodness, holiness, the sacred makes its way through us. It can't be preserved alive.

I think St Paul's famous insistence that most things pass away but faith, hope and love abide was meant for a world in which houses fall down and wildness creeps back in even before memories have much faded. Before we get too sentimental and nostalgic we should also note that the dark side of this truth is the promise that the sins of the fathers are visited on the third and fourth generations. But Paul's good news is that faith, hope, and love will outlive even our sins.

The house is gone but something endures. Something subtler than memories. Something of that strange and lovely group of porch dwellers, whose bodies left us only a little more slowly than the melting ice cream of a muggy August evening. Something abides. In me. In my children. Perhaps somehow even in the abandoned lot that the persistent wildness of the earth is making its own once again.

Something, beginning with just the air, has filled the spaces where that house, where those bodies had been. They have moved, but things are kept somehow whole.

Liturgy's Allure

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the truth about laboratory mice is made plain. What the book's hero, Ford Prefect, discovers (during the adventures that follow the unsettling news that the Earth is to be razed to make way for an interstellar highway) is that the world's laboratory mice have been conducting an experiment on humans all these years.

We were the folks in the lab coats holding the clipboards. But the mice were in control, researching how humans might respond if they were to run around in little mazes, and ring bells. (Below is the cartoon in the New Yorker's most recent caption contest. Submit your entry if you find such contests alluring.)

Michael Pollan took this notion a step further in complete seriousness when he suggested that apple trees and tulips and marijuana plants and potatoes all get us to do the work necessary for their survival. They entice us into being their slaves through our desires for sweetness and beauty and intoxication and (the potato isn't so obvious) control (see his Botany of Desire).

We're not used to thinking about being allured into doing what we do and being who we are. And ever since Eden we've been conditioned to be suspect of and resist the alluring fruit or woman or handmade Waterford bicycle fitted with Campagnolo Record components throughout.

But it seems to me that we're always responding either to duty or allure. Both duty and allure prod us or lift us out of complacency.

I think my own movement into a liturgical tradition had something to do with an attempt to right a religious worldview tipped heavily towards duty. Worshiping among robes and chalices and soprano descants was powerfully alluring to me. And more importantly, I felt allured but not manipulated.

Kneeling, bowing, standing, making the sign of the cross, all of these movements and gestures were drawing me into something happening among that little crowd of peculiar Christians at Grace Episcopal Church on Mt. Olive Street in Siloam Springs.

Now Episcopalians can be a fairly heady group--sometimes pretentiously so, I'd say. To our credit, I think, a broad swath of belief and opinion is tolerated and voiced. What we don't tolerate so well are folks who don't think toleration is the chief virtue. This is to our detriment, I think. But that's a topic for another blog.

More than the Episcopal church's supposed "open mindedness", it's the allure of liturgy that drew me in, even if I was looking for a place where my opinions were more tolerable as well.

While traditional liturgy can look mighty contrived and controlled with all those read prayers and rubrics telling everyone when to kneel, stand, or sit, at its heart liturgy is a letting go. How often do you let yourself say what you're told to say (verbatim) and assume a posture you're told to assume?

For some, joining the liturgy may be a matter of duty. The prayer book says do a cartwheel, so I will do a cartwheel. Or, most people do cartwheels at this point in the service. So I'll do jumping jacks.

But for most, I think, it is the liturgy's allure that we respond to if we respond at all. We let go of our own prerogatives for an hour, and let ourselves be drawn into something larger than ourselves.

I still find myself surprisingly moved by the sounds of the great organ at Christ Church ringing through the nave. Or by the voices of 150 people as they stand and say, "We believe in one God..." Or by the bodies of those same people as their heads bow as a flip-flopped acolyte carries a cross past their pews. For reasons I can't adequately explain, I find it all terribly alluring.

But to be alive is to be allured, isn't it? To be alive is not to be completely in control. Whether we're subjects of a grand rodentine experiment or being seduced by tulips, or apples, or potatoes (I'll leave cannabis alone, or leave it for the comments to follow), or whether we're being drawn into the drama of the liturgy, we let ourselves go a little because we sense that it's desire that draws us through life. And maybe it's desire more than duty that sends our lives towards God.

We're always responding to something's allure. Maybe living well is about deciding how and when and before which allure to let go.