Holy Week

The days have unspooled quickly in this early part of springtime. My interior life has been not in turmoil but in flux, an almost palpable ebb and flow, and through all my misgivings and doubts and ragings and grim, silent musings, I have felt like some sort of antenna, unmoored but still grounded, with invisible signals popping and whizzing around me during my hours.

A good friend, who roves across much of the same rocky spiritual landscape I do, recently mentioned in passing how he just might be holding onto a hope that he will one day believe again. That sentiment sang in me like a tuning fork when a certain note is struck on a piano. My angry prayers and ravings at a silent God have over the past weeks subsided into a sort of exhausted waiting period. In tumult, amid rough waters, I have drifted into what feels like a quiet cove.

Feeling adrift from my fondness for the Roman Catholic faith (not the church, I will point out firmly), I anticipated nothing significant with Palm Sunday and the approach of Holy Week, a stretch of time in recent years usually accompanied by a low-wattage joy, for lack of a better term. This past Saturday, our region was buffeted with terrible winds — a neighbor told us that she has lived here her entire life and never seen anything like what we received on Saturday. The gale pulsed and pounded from noon on, and I was unable to relax, eyeing the tall trees that surround us, nervous as the proverbial cat, my eyes unfocused on an unread page, my head on a swivel while sitting on the back porch. The wind finally began to die down as evening approached, and at exactly six o’clock,  there was one last enormous gust, and then the fury was gone. Mrs. Orr announced that she was going inside to begin supper preparations. I looked up for some reason at the power pole that stands near our north fence, and noticed that two power lines were broken and swaying in the strong breeze. Huh, I thought. When did that happen? At that moment, my wife came back outside and told me that she’d heard a loud pop and that we had lost power. I got up and walked down to the power pole to examine it and the nearby lines, and when I came around the side of the house, I stopped in my tracks, poleaxed, and tried to discern what I was seeing.

The enormous, multi-trunked pine tree just outside our bedroom window was sprawled across our fence, limbs as thick as my torso waving in the air. A narrow channel between the tree and the house looked like a matter of inches, though I later measured it at nineteen feet. Nineteen mere feet between destruction and near destruction. I called my wife and we stood in mute shock, the near-miss draining us of speech and focused thought. We returned to the house and Mrs. Orr called the power company to report the downed lines, and she also sent a message to the wife of the neighbor whose cows prowl the pasture where hot, downed lines now lay. The power company lady, who was very kind to my wife, advised us that there were tens of thousands without power and that it might be quite some time, Monday night perhaps, before the lines could be repaired and power restored.

So my wife drove down off the mountain and got us some supper from a fast food joint and when she returned, we settled down into the natural, non-electric stillness that seems so unnatural to moderns such as we. Candles (wax and battery-powered) were lit, the dogs were fed, and we turned on our little emergency radio and prepared to wait the situation out. The weather was mercifully mild, so we didn’t need to build a fire. We talked into the late night hours, the topic always returning to God and faith and the uncertainties of belief and hope, and how these things keep getting batted up against the stone wall of disappointment and disillusionment and life’s vagaries. While we were talking, I found myself realizing how weak and vapid so much of my faith has been for my entire life. Just before sleep, I lifted a mental prayer. Show yourself merciful to us. Do not leave us in silence. Help me understand some things. And then we slept fitfully, listening with one ear each for the sound of utility trucks approaching. But they never came.

The dawn did, though, and we arose, somber and bone-weary from the slow drip of adrenaline that stress induces. Mrs. Orr and I went out to assess the damage in the morning light, and while we were staring and sighing and speculating, our nearest neighbor stopped by to commiserate and discuss the local situation with all the power outages. While we were chatting, a service truck from the power company arrived at the power pole down the hill (the pole to which the lines on our pole had been attached). They were trying to use a long, telescoping tool to reach up and turn off the juice, but they were having difficulty. I gave them a few minutes and then drove down and introduced myself. They were very nice fellows, and gave me an update on the local situation. After they were finished there, they drove up to our house and walked around and noted the position of the pole and the lines. “We have separate crews out working, and the first thing will be a crew to repair the lines. Then a crew will come and turn the juice back on.” He smiled a weary smile (I found out later that the crews had worked until midnight the night before, and had resumed their duties at 0630 that morning) and said, “We’ll do our best, but y’all might not get power back on until Monday night.” I thanked them and they left, and my wife and I went back inside to begin the long wait. Mrs. Orr went down into town to get some ice and some carryout breakfast for us, while I fetched the old generator a friend’s widow gave us years ago and which I’ve never used. I finally found the manual for the thing and immediately realized that I was in over my head. Grounding wire? Copper rod? High risk of electrocution? Sign me up, please. So I back-burnered the generator for the time being, and we ate our sausage biscuits and took everything we wanted from the fridges and packed the food  in ice in the coolers, leaving the freezers closed and insulated by our hopes that things wouldn’t start to thaw before the power was restored. We sat and tried to read, but we were distracted by nerves and by the chilliness of the house. We decided to wait until evening to build a fire, so we went and sat in the sunshine in the back yard, wrapped in our jackets, and talked quietly about how much the tree service would charge us to remove this massive fallen thing, and when we could have it done, and how the stitching of our plans was again becoming unraveled and..

And then the most interesting thing happened.

The young fellow who owns the pasture adjoining our property arrived to check out the fence, since the tree had crushed it down. His cows were wandering around by the downed tree and the downed power lines and he wanted to check the safety and status of all. I went outside somewhat reluctantly and greeted him.

I say “somewhat reluctantly” because he and I have not had a good relationship. We have butted heads in the past because of various things, and our interactions generally are Me Wary and Him Sullen.  I approached him and we stood together, him on one side of the fence, me on the other. We talked about the windstorm and then about the fence. He mentioned that he would really like to repair the fence that day because he had to be away starting on Monday. He scratched his beard and said, “I think I might be able to lift the tree off the fence with my front end loaded. I’ll go get it and come back and see if I can move it.” I told him to come holler at me if I could help, and he agreed.

So we took a drive down into town just to get out of the house atmosphere, and we frowned at the new sunlight at the side of the house, a jarring emptiness where once a vital presence stood and flexed upwards into the blue of the farmsky. We got a snack from yet another fast food place and drove around a bit, finally returning to the farm with all the enthusiasm of two substandard algebra students who were arriving at a classroom for an exam before proceeding to the endodontist for a round of root canals. The neighbor arrived with another young fellow, and I watched through the window, debating if I should offer to help. Deciding that I’d be more in the way than of assistance in the presence of two young, muscular men who were clearly in their element with large machines while I scratch my head and fret over a generator the size of a large suitcase, I kept clear of them.

They got the loader’s blade (bucket? scoop? thingie?) beneath the tree and began tentatively wrestling with it. This went on for some time, interrupted by the men chainsawing branches out of the way and securing chains to the tree to steady it. During one heartstopping moment, when they begin to try and lift the tree, it looked as if it were going to roll off the loader and across the fence towards the house. Mrs. Orr watched them…at that point, I couldn’t watch any more. Finally, with exquisite prehistoric slowness, the machine groaned and clanked and managed to lift the tree, and plunked it down on the other side of the fence line.

The duo set about sawing more branches to clear a space so they could work on the fence. I was astonished to see that most of the heavy wooden posts had survived, though one had been driven into the ground like a nail. They pulled the woven fence into manageable shape, then stapled it partially, then worked with a stretcher and returned it to semi-normal appearance. Once this was accomplished, the other fellow left, and my neighbor was finishing up alone. Just at that time, Mrs. Orr and I were sitting in the living room, talking about researching tree removal services, when we heard a beep. The furnace kicked on, the refrigerator began humming, and we stared at each other. The power was restored. It was just about six o’clock, exactly 24 hours after the tree had blown down.

With reluctance born of experience, I stepped outside. When he saw me, the young man began explaining what they’d been able to do. I apologized for not coming out to help, but confessed the truth, that I’d been afraid I would have been more in the way than anything. He smiled and shrugged this off. The first time I’d ever seen him smile.

He further explained that he was going to come back after he returns to town and work some more on the fence to ensure that it’s heifer-proof. I thanked him spending his day at my place, and asked him what I could give him in terms of payment for moving the tree. “Ah, I don’t want nothin’, ” he said. “Glad to be able to help. I needed to get it done, anyway, to make sure the fence was in good shape before I leave tomorrow.”

I thanked him again and then I said, “I’d like to ask your advice. Would you recommend any particular tree removal service in this area? I don’t know of any, and thought there might be someone you might trust.”

He thought for a moment and said, Well, you might try __________’s company. They’re good. But they’re gonna be high. Tree removal is really expensive these days.”

“I figured as much, ” I said. “I’ll give ’em a call. I’ll try to have it done as soon as we’re able.”

He rubbed his face, hooked his thumbs in his belt, scuffed his boots in the dirt. “Well, now, lemme see. Tell you what. The ground is so soft right now from all this rain. We’ll just let it be for now. Soon as the ground dries up, I’ll bring my loader back and I’ll just push it around the corner up there, behind your woods. I’ve already got a brush pile up there that needs burnin’, so we’ll just take of it that way.”

I stared at him, stunned. “Well…well,” I stammered. “That’s incredibly generous of you. But if you do that, you have to let me give you something for your time and trouble.”

He looked up and smiled his Second Smile of Our Acquaintanceship. “Sure, whatever you want to do. It don’t matter nothin’ to me.” I was glad I was wearing sunglasses and that he wasn’t looking directly at me. I’m sure my voice was unsteady, as my wife says it always is when I have strong emotions welling up.

So we chatted a while longer, and he asked me the question that had been years in coming (“So what do you do for a livin’?“) and we talked some more about the windstorm, and then he said it was time to head home for some supper. “I”d say you deserve a good one,” I said. And he smiled a third time, and we parted ways.

I came inside to tell Mrs. Orr what had happened. She was not wearing sunglasses, and so I could see the emotion on her face and in her eyes, the same emotion of stunned gratitude and surprise that I know had been on display while I was talking to our neighbor.

We reset all our clocks on our appliances and enjoyed the warm air whispering out of the vents, and we enjoyed a hot cooked meal and the fact that the freezers hadn’t defrosted one whit in the 24 hours without electricity, and I took a hot shower and Mrs. Orr took a hot soak in the tub and the dogs enjoyed a feast of a supper, and by eight pm, we were all drowsing, relieved and contented and glowing with something that neither Edison nor Tesla could ever have provided.

During the last hour before I fell into the arms of Morpheus, I pondered the events of the last two days, and I asked myself many questions and was mine own accuser.

***

What a vacillating, inconstant man I am. I bounce like a shuttlecock between the twin racquets of hope and despair, between trying to have faith and trying to flee from it. I am so different from what I once was, and this frightens me to a depth I’m unwilling or unable to fully explore, frightens me because I wonder what I will be, and I wonder if the latter end of me will be so much worse than the beginning. I don’t believe myself to be a monster, but neither am I any closer to being a saint than I was the first time the desire to be a saint entered me. Would that I could blame my rebounds on someone or something else, but to do so would be to play even more the coward than I already have. I can blame no person, no teaching, no church, no doctrine, no group, no manipulation, no system. I have read too much, thought too much, questioned too much. And now, approaching the wintertime of my life even as outside the green shoots emerge and the feathered lovelies return, I wish I had been content all along to sit quietly in my home and to keep my number of books few and my words even fewer.

And what is it I need? Forgiveness? Repentance? Regeneration? I may have been unwise in my spiritual meanderings, but they were each of them honest and sincere and heart-locked. Do I need forgiveness for having read, having asked, having explored? If so, I will try to seek it. Do I need to repent of my questions, my ponderings? If so, then Faust-like, I would cry out and promise to burn my books. Do I need a divine touch to heal my leprosy? If so, I will hope the shadow of the One Who can grant such cleansing to fall across me while I stare at the stony ground and listen, listen, listen for an honest footfall.

Yet I do not despair, and I do not pull these words from inside me for a maudlin display, to elicit pity or attention. The microscopic spark deep inside — and yes, I can see it there — still leaves the imprint of its fire behind my eyelids when I glimpse it, like the tip of a child’s sparkler on a summer night. The glimpses of this spark are rarer these days, but more precious, as when I see a rare bird or an unwary beast of the field ambling towards me.

Surely mercy has been extended towards me in these recent days. Surely something is shimmering off my life like heat on a stone walkway. Thomas Merton once mused that God’s answers to prayers are rarely anything like what the pray-er had in mind when the knees were bent and the palms pressed together in a candlelit room ringed with chants and incense. I think the monk may have been right about this. And I struggle by the hour to understand and believe what another monk told me to my face — “You must be a man of prayer, S.K….” What am I to make of this? I feel that I am so far off the path that I may wander for a long time, if not forever, in the brush and the brambles. But the desire to find and return to that path has opened its bleary eyes, and is shaking its head to clear it of the fog and the lethargy. Surely that desire is as living as the faith I’ve pursued all my life, as vital as the warmth of noonday sun on chilled skin stretched over swollen joints?

Holy Week. A week set apart. A stretch of days consecrated to a single theme, bookended by triumph and triumph, but in between containing sorrow and suffering and fear and doubt. A holy week. This seems right. As does the impulse to move back towards a valley I thought I had left behind.

The tree outside our bedroom window will never again be home for birds raising their young. The birds, now instead of perching on thick branches and aromatic boughs like their kind before them, soar through a column of air that was occupied for many decades by an immovable living being but now is open to light. And wind.

Some might say that my own history will betray me, that this is one more in a series of phases, of fads even. I do not know. I make my own self weary with my stop-starts. I hope such speculations of my fickleness are wrong, and that my interior movement back to where I was for a time is genuine and will stand up to the rigors of whatever is coming. I know the wind will return, and neighbors will have ill wills at times, and my sleep is uneasy with the too-familiar sense of walking in circles in a dark land.

Still, I will move in that direction where I feel pulled.

Saint Joan of Arc, pray for me, and by your powerful intercession, may I gain courage. Through Christ our Lord, amen.

~ S.K. Orr