The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic (6 page)

I tried to visit him in his studio every day I was there that December. The single room was dark with tobacco varnish and cigarette ash. Stacks of books like Kant and Nietzsche and James were covered in dust, books he once
read with pleasure and understanding.
Squalid
doesn’t actually cover it, more like
unable to concentrate long enough to see what was around him
. My father and I always lowered our voices when Sean came in to make coffee, spreading coffee grounds in the kitchen, talking to “Jenny.”

My dad and I knew, I think, that this was our last chance. He died the next year, just after September 11, 2001.

When he asked me about writing, I very much appreciated that he had asked me, and was moved that he had waited this long to ask. I told him I got up in the morning, had breakfast, and read the paper, then went to my studio in my sweats and rewrote what I written the previous day.

I told him that Judith Thurman, contracted to write a biography of Colette, was so intimidated by her subject that she refused even to turn on her computer for a year, and that I too was sometimes unable to put words on paper, or was unable to stop myself from putting too many words on paper and then did not know how to get rid of them. Or I stared paralyzed at the page as the beautiful thing I had in mind turned into a monster. But writing, I said, was the way I made sense of my life and discovered what I was thinking. I compulsively make notes. I spend days and sometimes months mulling the strings of events, facts, thoughts, random encounters, and journal entries to discover what binds them together. What story is hidden in them. Writing is certainly a voyage of discovery. It is sometimes a shipwreck.

I tried to find the right word, I told him, for the thing it signified. The right word is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that perfectly slips into place. The right word leads to the next right word and makes things and ideas spring to life. The wrong word—how I would learn this when I fell into
Oz—deadens and destroys. In the beginning, John’s gospel says, was the word.

I finally said that George Orwell compared writing a book to a long bout with a painful illness, hoping to make him laugh. But he didn’t, and I realized that he was thinking of my mother.

The next day was Christmas Eve, and I asked Sean if I could go with him to midnight Mass at his (Roman Catholic) church. As we approached the adobe cathedral, men were lighting votive candles in little brown sacks weighted with sand along the sidewalks and at the arched entrance.
Luminarios
, lit on Christmas Eve to make a path for the Christ child to find his way home.

We entered a dense mass of women and children and men. I remember nothing of the service except for the middle, before communion, when Sean stood up and turned to me and said, “Peace,” and we hugged each other. Then one by one, people came up to us and said, “Sean, peace be with you,” and he wished them, by name, peace back, and introduced each person to me. I stood there in the sea of my nephew’s church all around him, despite his hair, his elephants, and his voices.

My father was waiting up for us. We stood in the kitchen. Sean went out to his studio, got his guitar, and came back. He plucked out the tune while my father and I sang “Silent Night.”

Just after I visited my dad, I ended the arduous business of discerning a “call” to the Episcopal priesthood. I had been inspected, examined, dissected. I had met with a group of
four people at Trinity for a year in a little upstairs room at the church with lumpy sofas and old leaded windows that cranked open. We sat in silence, “discerning” or listening, for the voice of something other. Mark Benson, one of the committee’s members (the man who hoped his partner had gone to the zoo), said that one of the sessions felt like the movie
Poltergeist
, “with things flying around the room in slow motion.”

I met with another group in another church where I volunteered for a year. I talked with diocesan boards in Los Angeles and addressed my lack of proper credentials with seminaries and, most memorably, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—a series of statements with which you agree or disagree.

“Most of the time I wish I were dead.”

“I am afraid of using a knife or anything very sharp or pointed.”

“I hear strange things when I am alone.”

When I was finished, I felt as if I had been run through a car wash, and while the church was clear that I was indeed called to be a priest, I was not. I hesitated. I, who don’t usually procrastinate, procrastinated. Finally, after all that work and time (not only mine but so many others’), I said no. I hoped I wasn’t saying no to God (famously a bad idea). I knew I was saying no to the priesthood of the institutional church. The priesthood of the visible collar. The professional priesthood. I was clear about that no.

And a few other people were clear about the no as well. I led a retreat at a local monastery, about a year after I decided not to go to seminary, with the people from the church where I had worked during my ministry study year. Saturday evening, one of the men who had been on my
“discernment committee” at that church walked up to me, after we’d both had a beer, and said, “You sure look a lot happier than you did when you were working with us.”

“Was it that obvious?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he replied.

I was never quite sure entirely, in the end, why I stopped. The lingering question was: If I am saying no to that priesthood, to what am I saying yes? There was something on the periphery that I couldn’t make out. A door closes and another one opens, said a friend, but it’s hell in the hallway.

Vincent doesn’t go to church, but during the time I was “discerning,” he said he was not so worried about a difference in belief between us as he was about the demands of the professional priesthood: he did not see himself as a minister’s wife. And he was not so sure it was the right choice for me: when I worked in the soup kitchen at the church, he pointed out, I came home light and cheerful. When I came home from a church meeting during the year I was discerning the vocation to priesthood, he said, “You are full of planning and intrigue.”

“I know you can’t do it without me,” he said one day, “and I don’t wish it for me. But it’s also not what I wish for you.”

As I traveled down the road toward the vestments and the collar, the evening meetings and the Sundays taken over by church events, the gulf between us widened. But one night I led a service of Taizé, from a community in France that has formed itself around simple songs sung in Latin and a lot of silence. The leaders there devised these liturgies to reach the thousands of young people who come to Taizé speaking different languages.

The church was dark. Vincent decided only at the last
minute to join us. Afterward he said he liked it. It was to him, a combination of “Quaker and Catholic.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I can’t sing ‘Lord, I adore you,’ but I can sing
Adoramus te domine.
” That night I began to see, dimly at first, then more clearly that part of the reason I had decided not to be a priest was because of words. Partly because of being a writer of words.

I preached on and off during the years of discernment, and one Sunday in Santa Barbara, one of my closest friends, Jodie Ireland, came to hear me. Her mother had just died. She told me later she began to cry at some point during the service. Churches are one of the few places left where you can publicly and honorably cry.

“Then you stood up,” she said, “and started saying, ‘I believe in God the Father, and his only Son,’ and I didn’t believe it, so I stayed put.” (She didn’t come back.)

She was referring to the Nicene Creed, which begins: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son. I believe that he came down from Heaven …” I had been standing up and saying the creed since I joined St. John’s Cathedral. I can recite it like the poems I memorized in the fourth grade. But I took note that Sunday that one of my dearest friends found the words of the creed the thing that divided her from the other people in the church, and from me, when she had, moments before, found a place to grieve.

Shortly thereafter I was at breakfast one morning at an Episcopal monastery in the hills above Santa Barbara, and I asked a table full of priests what they thought about the creed. Three of them said they only
mouthed
parts of it. One of them, a young man from Los Angeles, said he was entirely frustrated with it because on Sunday morning
he didn’t have time to explain to the new people who might be there out of deep need or longing or because they had experienced something they didn’t understand, that the “Virgin Mary” in the Nicene Creed was a metaphor. I thought of Jodie.

“The church is better at telling people what the church believes than at eliciting from people what they believe,” said Gary Hall, dean of the Washington Cathedral in Washington, D.C. “I think that anyone who gets themselves and their family up and goes to church in the face of so many attractive alternatives must have access to some deep truth or experience of God that they are seeking to make sense of in community. The church responds by boring them out of their minds and telling them what we think is shameful.”

The words of the creed were written down in Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, in the fourth century, at a meeting organized by the Roman emperor Constantine, a new and opportunistic convert to Christianity. Constantine wanted to bring some order to the many stripes and communities that made up this now-popular religion. And because of that, a lot of things changed:

“In the changed world of the fourth century, … when Christians ceased to be liable to occasional persecution and became instead
the favoured cult of the Roman empire
, the character of their Eucharistic worship also changed,” says Paul Bradshaw, an authority on the Eucharist (communion). “Celebrated now in large public buildings, it took on the style of imperial court ceremonies and incorporated features drawn from the pagan religions around, of which it saw itself as the true fulfilment.”

Before this meeting at Nicaea, there had been no creed, no special buildings for worship. There had been instead gatherings of people in houses, around a table.

The meeting at Nicaea and the creed itself were the beginning of the large map of Christianity. It was an effort to gather up disparate strands, different stories, a ragtag band of men and women who were following what was a memory and to make them into One. Out of Nicaea came the ideas—“God, the Father Almighty,” “Jesus Christ, his only Son,” “He was born of the Virgin Mary,” “He ascended into Heaven.”

What had been a messy group of followers on a road of discovery suddenly became the empire’s religion, linked, fatefully, to a state, to power, and to conquest.

It is the map that people outside the church think all of us inside the church believe. They think we believe that Jesus is God’s only son. They think we believe that his mother was a virgin. As the Red Queen says to Alice, “Six impossible things before breakfast.” After all, that’s what we stand up and say Sunday after Sunday. Not being able to swallow these rather hard-to-take ideas, they turn away. And wonder how otherwise intelligent people could believe such things. “You’re smart,” said the dean of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, her tongue firmly in her cheek, to the performance artist Anna Deavere Smith, “How come you’re religious?”

Jesus never said a word about being God’s
only
son, nor made mention of his mother’s sexual history. These are the words placed in his mouth by those who wished to smooth out a fragmented story, a bumpy road, pointing, now I see, in an entirely different direction.

In my travels, I talked to sophisticated Christians in
Georgia and, in Berkeley, to yearning secularists. A young couple asked Vincent and me to preside at their wedding; another asked me to baptize their baby boy, outside, by the ocean, not in a church. People were in need, I could see, and sometimes the church filled it (where else was my nephew welcome?), but many times it did not.

I kept going to church, one foot inside it, one foot outside, and on the talk circuit, trying to find the words that would reach those inside but not sound too crazy to those outside it. I tried to explain that there were a bunch of us who went to church who were not filled with passionate certainty; nor were we stupid. We knew, for example, that the gospels were written long after Jesus’s death; that Paul’s letters came first, before the gospels; that scholars had figured out, more or less (mostly less), at least some of the words that might authentically be those of Jesus and those that were attributed to him hundreds of years after his death.

All this fascinating information—the historical Jesus, the time lag in the writing of the New Testament, the Gnostic gospels—was not exactly trumpeted from the rooftops in churches. It was, rather, whispered in the back alleys. The church, once it drew its large map, worried about what would happen to the laity’s “faith” if we knew too much.

Now I lay in bed with medical terms mixed with fragments of the old words of the church’s prayers, hoping they would lead me away from fear and into relief. I had no experience with what was prayer and what was not prayer. What floated into the middle of this heap of words was a strange image: frogmen, swimming in my eyes, were working
very hard to link together cables, like those huge things that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge. (I have not yet discovered where this image came from.) I was entranced. They swam, seemingly without my assistance: pulled, captured a stray strand, linked it to another, bolted it in.

What is in charge of healing? I thought. How does the body know what to do?

What followed the frogmen in my mind was the line from “Suzanne”: “and when he saw for certain only drowning men could see him.” I’ve drowned, I thought, but there’s something in the water with me. And then I thought, Will I see him?

I
N THE MORNING
, I started what would be the routine for the next three days, adapting overnight, as human beings do, to complete change. One day I was going to work, driving, writing, producing. The next day what had been on my calendar was replaced with one appointment: Dr. Burks’s office, IV. I had talked about stopping my bizzy, crazy life. Now it—I—was stopped.