TOP DOG PRESS

Light

by Skian McGuire

[This essay was written in response to one by S. Bear Bergman, called Blessings. I offer this with gratitude to the one who inspired it.]

    I have been trying and trying to think of what it means to me, to bless someone. I can’t say I believe in God; I can’t say I don’t believe, either. Usually, I see the deity as a Goddess, though rarely as a mother – more like a capricious lover.  And being who I am (I’m Irish; the irrational is my birthright), I try to serve Her best I can. This is my geas, or one of them, set upon me by fate (another name for Her and Her sisters)  -- to spend my life serving a deity in whom I do not believe. But blessings? Individual blessings, on people I care about?

    I can hardly ask blessings of Someone whose very existence is up for grabs. And even if I could, it might be like asking a blessing of Eva Peron or Bette Davis or Mata Hari; there’s just no telling what you’d get.  There are blessings that the Irish say, in their own language or English, which involve the good Catholic God and maybe Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and all the Saints, too, but these aren’t my blessings, Catholic though I was raised, and Irish as what surrounded me.  I can look up the gaeilge ones in a dictionary. I could say simply, “God be with you.” I remember my Grandmother asserting that some good person would get their reward in Heaven, which is pretty close to a blessing, as the Irish know better than to expect their rewards on earth. (It’s no surprise that the Goddess in her many forms lurks, still, in Irish Catholicism, however politely concealed in the Virgin Mary and Saint Brigid. They knew what a strumpet She could be, too – ask Cúchulainn.) None of them are as natural to me as the Hebrew blessings are to any more-or-less observant Jew. I simply do not believe, and not only that, I spend too much time wondering what kind of fool a man might be, to ask blessings of the same God who played shell games with the devil over the fate of poor old Job and at the end of it asked him, Who are you to question? The closest I come to any such thing is a practice I have come to in the company of Friends, of holding others in the Light. I can do this, even without knowing what the Light is.

     I’m happy among Quakers, even if I’m not one, really. I feel like a fraud sometimes, not believing in God in the midst of a Meeting for Worship, but they don’t mind. They take me in with open arms, literally. It was among them that I finally became more-or-less comfortable with hugging. The Society of Friends is a big enough vessel to accommodate people with all manner of Christian belief, as well as some who aren’t Christian at all. One of my closest friends among Friends calls himself a pagan. Jews have sat with us in silence and been married in our Meetinghouse, and one I know confesses having gone there, alone, to find refuge in our empty building. (Or – well, at least there were no people there. I have been there myself to do my share of the cleaning, when no one else was present, and have never felt that the building was empty.) In general, Friends believe that the Bible is only one window into that which might be called Divine, and even that opening can be dispensed with. Friends believe that there is that of God in everyone, and to find Him/Her/It, we need only look within. They believe there is that of God in me, even if I’m not so sure myself. And they are happy I’m there. I am deeply grateful for my gentle and accepting Friends.

     I have tried to believe. I sit in silence and seek the Light within, even if I don’t know what it is. I have given myself to the Peace Testimony, in such manner as I can, being born a predator among predators, with an inner life that is as red in tooth and claw as any canid. My second geas comes inadvertently from the Testimony, with a little help from a pair of pigs named George and Martha: that I may not eat anything I could not kill myself. (I am not as bound by geasa as the ancients were; when I break one, I only feel as if my doom were about to come upon me.) I can kill fish; I could never kill a horse to eat. In between is a roster in ascending order of difficulty. I hope that before I die, that page will be blank, and there will be nothing on the list of creatures I might bring myself to slaughter if I had to. It hasn’t happened yet. (Yes, Lord, help me be virtuous – but not just yet.) But someday. “Wear thy sword as long as thou may,” George Fox told William Penn. Someday, I will lay down the last bit of my animal nature. Not yet.

    But the Light is something I go back to, again and again, understanding it or not. I love light. I love summer’s long days. I love the light through trees, like shafts of gold, the light from under water, diffuse and fractured, the light gleaming blindingly off snow, the light that is the first creeping hint of dawn. Even the merciless light of a concrete city August. I love it all. I know it’s the fashion among some, to seek out the dark – to turn toward that which is hidden and despised in our selves and embrace it. I don’t reject the Shadow. I know how deep it is, and how much of our nature resides there. I give it my deepest, most formal bow. Of all people, I know how much power it has: most of my childhood is imprisoned there. I respect it, and seek to learn from it whenever I can. But I do not love it. Darkness can be refuge; being hidden is being safe. I have spent enough of my life hiding. I would rather bask like a dog in the bright hot sun, and never hide again. So I love the light.

     Quakers don’t pray. That is, they don’t ask God to give them things, or be on their side, or keep some bad event from happening – that seems to them something like hubris, to presume to know the mind of God, or at least to know what’s best. There’s a classic joke about the old Quaker who was asked, “What color is that barn, Friend?” as the distant structure was pointed out. His answer was, “It’s white – on this side.” Quakers would rather not presume to know anything unless they can attest to it themselves, and even in a court of law, being asked to tell the whole truth and nothing but, they still refuse to swear. To this day, Friends being called to the witness stand are allowed to affirm that what they say is true. Swearing seems too close to blasphemy, and Jesus himself forbore it. We can’t know hardly anything, we humans, not even what’s in our own hearts, with complete assurance. If God has mapped out a course of action that doesn’t suit our fancy, who are we to ask Him to alter it for our convenience? Surely this must include blessings -- if God has not already  bestowed them upon the being or activity or object in question, who are we to second-guess Him?

     This is not to say that Quakers are just Muslims without the Quran, bowing to the will of God. One of my favorite parts of Catholicism was that we humans are the body of Christ – we are His hands. His feet, His eyes. The Church – the human members of the Church, which constitute it -- is his physical embodiment on earth. I think Friends see it that way, too. It’s not enough to sit back and say, “Insh’Allah,” our job is to figure out what the will of a gentle and loving God is, and do it. For that, we sit in silence, and open ourselves to the Light.

     And so I sit, among Friends, wondering what the Light is, anyway. Jesus is the Light of the world, the Gospels taught me. Even if I don’t believe, I was raised in the Church. The Gospels are the language my heart speaks to my soul, and why I find myself sitting quietly among Friends instead of counting breaths with Buddhists. (I did sit zazen for a time, but I could not find a home for my heart there. It was an attractive venue, since Buddhists don’t need to believe in any deity whatsoever to be perfectly competent practitioners of the Eightfold Path. The silence was just too empty – or too crowded with my Self, I don’t know which.) The Gospels speak of the Light within, also – the light that we’re not supposed to hide beneath a bushel.  And the Light of the Holy Spirit, that shone above the disciples’ heads at Pentecost. God brought forth the Light to shine upon the deep, and the light was good. I like that, all of that; all the poetry of it. But I’m not faithful enough, in the Friends’ sense, to give myself to such holy light. I have too much doubt and too much Self and too many neuroses and too much plain ordinary cantankerousness. The nuns – and Thomas Merton, too – wanted us to aspire to be saints, so that even when we fall short, we’ll still be a good bit further along the road to righteousness than we would be if we only settled for “not half bad.” Me, I’ll settle. My light is just as likely to be under a bushel with a blanket thrown over for good measure. And if Jesus was the Light of the World, he was also a fuckin’ bug-eyed nutcase. But I mean that only in the best possible way, of course.

     Quakers don’t pray, but I’m not a very good Quaker, either. I don’t believe in God, and yet I pray. It’s an involuntary thing, most of the time, brought on by the stress of some problem I can’t do anything else about. It’s what Catholic children are taught to do, after all. Even the bursts of verbal frustration heard in the average Irish-American household –“Oh, God! Jesus Christ! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Oh, Holy Mother of God!” – are considered to be forms of prayer. Very short ones, called ejaculations. Which makes very good sense to me, as it does tend to be what I say when I’m coming.  But there was one horribly cold winter when all I did, from the moment I began my mail route to the moment I was done, was pray, “Please Lord don’t let my jeep break down. Please, Lord don’t let my jeep break down. Please, Lord...” Like the Pilgrim who followed Paul’s injunction to the Thessalonians, I prayed without ceasing. But I only wanted mercy for my jeep – my soul, I could give a crap.

     Prayer seems to me to be something like a drug, or some other vice; maybe spiritual masturbation. Half the time I pray to the Lord, or to Jesus. The other half I’m whining at Her. It’s entirely self-serving and incredibly trivial. I want to get done before 5. I want the package to fit in the motherfucking mailbox so I don’t have to go to the door. I want the “check engine” light stay off long enough to get my car inspected. Cutting myself a little slack, I think my prayers to the Lady tend to be a little deeper. Please, Lady, let those people come back to their closed-up car before the dog collapses (as I sit in the parking lot, my TV Dinners melting, waiting to make sure). Please, Lady, let old Mrs. Silva not have cancer. Please, Lady, let my sweetie get home safely.  I just can’t stop doing it. No matter how hard I try to squelch the “gimme,” prayers happen. 

    I make deals, too. I make deals that are explicit: if you make Nemo well (I tell Her), I’ll keep this horrible job and see him every day that I can until he dies of old age. I make deals that are implicit: eating every bite of something that died for me, hoping to mitigate the sin I feel in eating a creature I may well be too much of a candy-ass to kill, if it came down to that. I’m as shameless as a bazaar rug trader. I want to get as much good stuff as I can for as little effort. I carefully consider what I would give up – a career as a best-selling writer? Ten years of my life? The two upstairs cats I don’t feel as much affection for as the downstairs ones? My sweetie? My left eye? and throw down my chips. Desperation is an ugly thing; luckily, the Deity (if there is one) is either compassionate, or a Three-Card Monty dealer.

    I also ask questions, just like poor old Job, even if I’m not as righteous as he was.  I want to know why God gave us hearts only so we can break them and why dogs have such short lives. I want to ask, if she loved me, why has she thrown me away? I don’t want to know the meaning of life; figuring out the meaning of life is my job as a human. I just can’t help asking, sometimes, because, like Job, everything just seems so senseless, and asking questions is, after all, more like a prayer of gratitude than a palm held out to the Almighty. I don’t expect answers. I wouldn’t mind getting tomorrow’s lottery numbers, though.

     Sometimes I write poems that are prayers, and even though I don’t believe in prayer, I believe that poetry is the truest, deepest response to the impulse to pray that I will ever have. I have been writing my Litany for years now, adding bits here and there, shifting bits around, tidying things up. I imagine I will keep writing it until I die. I have written a Credo that is similar, trying to own up to the things I actually believe no matter how irrational or inconsistent. I wrote one prayer/poem trying to imagine God for a dog, and I muse on holy things in words that are sometimes lyrical and sometimes funny, and they seem like prayers to me. I’m a writer; this is what I do. If our job as human beings is to figure out what we’re for by understanding what we’re good at, as a tool is defined by its utility, then it makes sense to me that I should worship by using the skill I have, which was given to me as a gift. A singer is given a beautiful voice to use it; a stonecarver carves stone; a teacher teaches. So the songs (if they are good to listen to) fill the heart of the listener with the singer’s love of life (and therefore God) even if they are low-down dirty blues, and the stone carver uses her skill to glorify the beauty the stone holds by itself, which is God’s beauty. And a teacher teaches a student to love not just knowledge (wherein God resides), but that he should also love himself, the knower, because that of God is within him, too. That’s what they’re for. That’s what humans are for.

     So I write.

     But blessings?

     If all I can do is use the gift I have, then I should write for you, whom I want so badly to give something back that is as loving as the blessing you say over me while I sleep. At the very least, I should write to you and for you and of you, your great heart and practical desires, and all your very concrete love. I should tell you, and everyone who loves me, how grateful I am that you are part of my life – because, after all that is what prayer really is. I have tried to find the source of the Rabbi whose deathbed utterance told his students the meaning of life, but I found that my memory was wrong, and the bit I remember actually comes from the Talmud, “that the world exists for the sake of three things and three things only: charity, study of Torah, and prayer.” (from “How to Pray: Reverence, Stories, and the Rebbe’s Dream,” by Ben Birnbaum, in The Best American Essays 2001, edited by Kathleen Norris, Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Translated for gentile use, it becomes this, or so it seems to me: that we exist so as to give to others, to learn everything we can, and be grateful. I give what I can, hoping that what I give by writing may sometimes speak to someone besides myself, or get someone’s juices flowing, at least. I do what I can, minding guinea hens and getting cars fixed and putting a check in the mail, always conscious of how little I can do for anyone I care about, bound as I am by work and too selfish to give up more of the time I allow for writing. I learn everything I can largely because I am interested and not because it is holy. But gratitude – that I can do. I feel it helplessly, knowing that I don’t deserve all the blessings I’ve received.

    I am grateful for everything. The kindness of the people who love me and the people who don’t but are kind anyway. The enormous good luck I routinely find myself the recipient of, like car breakdowns that always seem to happen only at the most convenient times, and the people who always seem to be there to rescue me when something goes wrong. The joy of living in the company of dogs. The woods I dreamt of escaping to, when I was a child, that are at my doorstep now. Good health. Good beer. Warm beds. And the people who love me, just for themselves alone. I have been blessed more than prayers can ever hold, by love.

     I can’t find words enough for all the gratitude I feel. Sometimes I feel a traitor to that gratitude, when my misery is so large I stagger under the weight of it and only want to escape. I feel like a traitor to all that my life has been full of, because I still can’t accept that life itself was a gift rather than a mistake. I’m a bedraggled bit of merchandise, to stand before the divine with empty hands, trying to be as grateful as all my blessings deserve. I would be glad to offer blessings back, to call the goodwill of the Deity down to the ones I love, awake or sleeping. But I can’t. Having given up the Church of my grandmother, having turned myself away from the Mass I loved, having stripped from myself that heavy and beautiful raiment, I stand naked of ritual, now, among my plain and equally naked Friends. I have no prayers that aren’t tawdry, for the ordinary glory of life. I have only my empty hands, and Light.

    Light is something I can picture. I can imagine its warmth on my skin. I can hold everything I know and love about a person in my mind, and bathe it in that light. I can hold them in my mind with great tenderness, giving my entire attention to them in the present moment, opening myself to them. Perhaps this is the moment when I take the bushel off my own Light, too, letting them shine on me as I shine on them. Letting you shine on me as I shine on you. Holding you in the Light.

    Even that doesn’t seem enough, sometimes, and I’ll confess that I sometimes feel compelled to embroider upon it. Not just Light, but light through the hemlock boughs, golden shafts of light and the tree itself, deep-rooted and strong, and reaching toward the great nourishing sun, for the friend who has need of such strength and hope and peace, wrestling with her demons, and I can imagine it whether she ever knows it or not. And again: not just Light, but light shining on the face of the perfect sea, and a bright clean beach, and air that smells of salt, for my friend who loves the water. I can imagine the water cradling him and rocking him, lifting him up and washing him clean of all his cares and grief, and the light shimmering above and below. I can do that even if I never told him about it, feeling silly to occupy my mind with such a new-age-y (I believe the word was “wifty”) thing – quick, what have I done with my Birkenstocks? And maybe it has no effect on the real world, maybe all it does is incline my own self toward love, like all green growing things turn themselves toward the light. It still doesn’t seem enough – nothing seems enough – but it’s all I have.

	

 

Ó Skian McGuire 2005