DARTON - LONGMAN + TODD, 2006

Density

As I sit quiet1y in this country place, I think of the adventure of those two months. It was primarily a mental adventure, but I know it to be real by the not inconsiderable concrete experience of going to the places that were a part of it: to Paris, to Krakow, to Auschwitz, up the stairs to Milosz's apartment, down the streets with Maciej and Ghislain. I fee! a large store of something new within me as a result of having so traveled in mind and body, but I am hard pressed to say what it is. Yet I want badly to know. There was such density to those days. I need to understand them. I want to do something or make something as a response. But what? And must I?

Design

There is a room in a house on the Via San Domenico in Rome where I am sometimes able to go and write. Like every part of this house, this room has its special genius, a neat1y and precisely defined space with its own mood. Where I work it is uncluttered and filled with a wonderful light which spills in through the tall window on my left. All the details of the house are Danilo Parisio's designs, and every bit of it is handsome and fine. The proportions of everything - they are so learned, clear1y fitted by one who knows what he is doing.
Out of this window, as I turn to rest my eyes and my mind from the work of composing at the computer, I can practice what I read the other day in Milosz's poem called "This Only." He spoke of wanting "only one most precious thing: to see, purely and simply ..."
What makes the garden beyond the window such a joy to see from here is the way in which the window frames and holds what I see. It seems an odd thing to utter enthusiastic exclamations about, but I want to keep crying out in appreciation, saying, "The proportions! The proportions! "
The mimosa tree, whose trunk is well beyond my sight, sends its bright yellow branches over for display directly before the window. Whether I turn to it directly or not, its yellow comes silently into my white room; and all through my day of writing, consciously as I turn to look, subconsciously as I turn back again to write, I am tinged within and without by the first colors of the spring. I am in a great house where, comfortable and warm, I work with all that is outside close around me.
Now the tree's branches are still, and the light is waning. During the course of the day, the branches, heavy with their bloom and with the frequent rains, would bounce slowly up and down under the impulse of the soft and occasional winds. I would catch the movement out the comer of my eye and turn toward it as if in answer to a summons. What a worthy distraction! Or was my work the distraction? In any case, the pleasure and beauty of the scene was enhanced by my seeing it through the noble proportions of the window's frame. The frame, utterly still and firm. Strong tall white lines with their comparatively narrow cross-width - and in the open space beyond, the bouncing heavy laden branches in their varied movements. Alive, alive, alive - the whole world is alive and moving. Not just me and the tree, but also the house and the room and the window. Also the clouds and the sky behind and above the tree, the roof and the dull red tiles that I espy through the live thicket beyond. We are all alive together and bound into varying constellations by the live numbers of the proportions through which we see and touch each thing and the next.

Devil

Nicolas Steinhard was carted off to prison in Romania in the worst period of the communist regime. His crime: intelligence, culture, class. In prison he became a Christian and after his release, a monk. Re has written a remarkable book, full of little and large wisdoms, the English title of which would be Diary of Happiness. Re says there that the evils of the twentieth century are patently clear to anyone, and so it is plainly demonstrated that the devil exists and is near. Consequently, he continues, these times are the most prepared to become Christian. Such claims earn at best a kindly smirk and would be considered naive in comfortable American suburbs and academia. But in the mind of a central European who has lived through a good part of the twentieth century, it is the scoffers who seem naive. What should be patently clear to anyone is not clear to them.

Dignity

There is a sense in which (also and always) we see ourselves from the outside and so make a certain impression on ourselves. For this reason it is very important always to conduct oneself with dignity and grace, even (and perhaps especially) when alone. It is when we are alone that we probably make the strongest impression on ourselves. If I pull out dignity and grace only when I am with others, how authentic or full can it be? I am always making an impression on myself, and so I ought to be careful. I am always making an impression on myself, and this is the same impression I should make on others.

Directions

I am willing to be directed by my faith, and so I pause to get my directions straight again. The Bible teaches me that I am made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and so why not look to whom I am an image of to understand myself? Concretely, this means I can look at Jesus, "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15) and so come to understand myself. And the converse is true: if I do not look at him, I do not know myself.

Dying

I have this intuition about my death and how it will occur - not its circumstances but rather the framework in which it will unfold. It will be my entering into that bright darkness of Jesus' own dying in which he experienced an abandonment by the Father and yet from its depths expressed his own abandonment into the hands of the Father, calling out his name, "Father," to the very last. So would I die; and I pray, "Jesus, grant me this grace."
It seems to me that perhaps every death moves in varying proportions between these two poles, the sense of abandonment and the trustful invocation; and for myself, I do not know in which direction I shall be inclined more to lean. In one sense I feel strongly the desire to let my death be a joyful offering, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit ..." And yet when the time comes, it is difficult to know how it will be. Christ may ask of me some deep sharing in his own sense of being abandoned; and if he does, I must count it a privilege. My heart has been practicing, forced to it by circumstances of life, by lesser versions of darkness. But even if I am called to a death like his, I will have one thing which I know Jesus did not. I will have him with me, and I will have the knowledge of resurrection, accomplished and already tasted, as my hope and guide.
I would like to think that in my dying I could be a good example to others, even a beautiful icon of the Lord himself, as Abbot Bonaventure was to all of us when he died. And yet I may become frightened, scared, unsure, invited so deeply into the mystery of abandonment that my death would be a fearful agony. But I hope that no matter what, it could be said by any who might see me die, altering the words in St. Mark's account just slightly, "Seeing that he thus breathed his last, they said, 'Truly Jesus is the Son of God.'" (Mark 15:39) May my thus be like Jesus' thus.