“It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.” -Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse
Books have a way of finding us exactly when we need them. Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is the most recent example of that for me. The title grabbed me right away. Who is this cheerful man? What is he refusing? Why is he cheerful? I started reading just as summer began to heat up with political conventions, protests, and bombs being lodged into our hearts from the news of the world.
I read the majority of Enger’s book while sitting beside an outdoor pool while my kids had their summer swim lessons. In a time machine, I sat there under the bright red and blue umbrellas. Frank Sinatra, crooning “That’s Life” from the pool speaker. Over the next hour, day after day, I dove into the story of Rainy. He lives with his wife, Lark, “two blocks off the water” of Lake Superior. They lived so close, sometimes they could feel under their floorboards “the waves standing up high and ramming into the seawall.” The exact time frame isn’t spelled out, but a near-future quasi-apocalyptic situation is implied. We read at the beginning of the story that “the End was on everyone’s mind.”
***
I find it annoying to talk about the weather. I usually associate doing so with small talk and awkwardness, and our inability to gather the courage to ask deeper questions. But what I’ve come to accept is that we talk about the weather so much because it affects us so much. Dry heat, humid heat, drizzle or downpour, freezing with sun or freezing with clouds, the same gray clouds going on for days, or cloudbreaks every day around 2pm. If there is one thing that really does affect us all, it is the weather.
You might have heard this before, how our emotions are like weather patterns passing through us. I find some comfort in that. Knowing that I’m not completely bound to my emotions. Even more though, for the Christian, is a deeper sense of the movement of the Holy Spirit moving in and through us, and an evil spirit that is opposed to us, coming against and passing through us at times. Depending on the lasting impressions, St. Ignatius of Loyola would call these Consolations and Desolations.
***
“The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow.”
Rainy’s friend, Labrino, pounds on his front door one night. Worried about the upcoming news of a comet, he’s afraid it could bring more disaster.
“‘These comets never bring luck to a living soul, that’s all I know,’ Labrino said.
‘How could you know that? Besides, they don’t have to bring luck. They just have to show up once in a while. Think where these comets have been! I’ve waited my whole life to see one.’
He said, ‘You know what happened the last time Halley’s went past?’
‘Before my day.’
‘Oh, I’ve read about this,’ said Labrino. Whenever things seemed especially fearsome to him, his great bushy head came forward and his eyes acquired a prophetic glint. ‘Nineteen eighty-six, a terrible year. Right out of the gate that space shuttle blew up. Challenger. Took off from Florida, big crowd, a huge success for a minute or so–then POW, that rocket turns to a trail of white smoke. Everybody in the world watching on TV.’
I told Labrino I was fairly sure Halley’s Comet was not involved in the Challenger explosion.”
Labrino goes on to tell Rainy about all the other crazy things that happened around that time, wondering if they’re signs and wonders, desperate to find hope. I know what this is like. It’s not hard for me to live in a desolate land. Margaret Silf, an Ignatian author, characterizes this world as one that:
- Turns us in on ourselves
- Drives us down the spiral, ever deeper into our own negative feelings
- Cuts us off from community
- Makes us want to give up on the things that used to be important to us
- Takes over our whole consciousness and crowds out our distant vision
- Covers up all our landmarks (the signs of our journey with God so far)
- Drains us of energy
The signs are nowhere to be found. We are flooded and overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and dryness, apathy, impatience, compulsion, anxiety, fear, boredom, bondage, self-rejection, shame, exaggeration, and a belief that God has turned his back on us. We have forgotten where we belong, Despair has become our friend, and there is no end in sight. But could you blame us? The End has been on our mind.
***
I have a special place in my heart for Anne of Green Gables. To me, she is the epitome of letting her despair be known. In giving voice to her despair and desolations, she gives voice to hope. Early in her eponymous book, she asks her adoptive mother, Marilla, “Haven’t you ever been in the pits of despair, Marilla?” Marilla replies, “No, I haven’t, child. To despair is to turn your back on God.”
None of us can actually avoid spending time in the pits of despair, and pretending we haven’t will only postpone and amplify our grief. Naming our let-downs, our unmet expectations, and our frustrations with life, is to have the faith to ask for help.
We don’t need to look very far to find the people in our lives, or the ones we hold at arm’s length, who spin conspiracies and speculations. On the surface, it may look like craziness, but what if underneath all of that lies a “perfect graveyard of buried hopes”?
***
Rainy thought twice before he decided not to say anything to his friend, Labrino.
“I opened my mouth, then remembered a few things about my friend. He had a grown son living in a tent on top of a landfill in Seattle. A daughter he’d not heard from in two years. His wife had enough of him long ago, and he was blind in one eye from when he tried to help a man crouched by the road and got beaten unconscious for his trouble. That Labrino was even operative–that he ran a decent tavern and hired live music and employed two bartenders and a cook who made good soup–testified to his grit.”
With one compassionate question, the door to consolation was opened in Labrino’s heart.
“‘Is there anything you’d like to hear, Jack?’”
“He lifted his head. ‘Yes, that would be nice–I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be such awful company. It’s just the times. The times are so unfriendly. Play me something, would you, Rainy?’”
With a steady, simple bassline, Rainy plucked his five-string Fender Jazz bass and soothed his friend with deep calming tones.
Later in the story, we see him doing the same. Except it is not for his friend, it is for his enemy. The story’s antagonist, Werryck, is holding Rainy and several others captive aboard the medicine ship, Posterity. The ship oozes with desolation. Werryck finds out that Rainy can play bass and asks him to come play for him at night. You see, Werryck hasn’t slept in forty-two years.
“He was in his twenties when he lost his sleep and ever since missed dreaming. ‘You barely remember them anyhow, but then they’re gone entirely.’
I asked how it happened–the end of sleep for him. He said only that he had traded it away.
‘For what?’
‘What do you think? The usual. Revenge, dollars, influence. In my case,’ he said, thinking it over, ‘mostly revenge.’”
Rainy asks Werryck if he’s succeeded in his revenge, and Werryck replies, “Of course. Revenge is nourishing. It is for me anyway. Obviously once you’ve accepted terms of this kind, it’s self-enforcing. Once you choose, you’ve chosen.”
How often do we hold ourselves captive with illusion? Chasing our tails in a cycle of anxiety and fear. Rainy has traversed horrendous waters. Both literally, on Lake Superior, and figuratively, through death and loneliness, chasing something quite different – hope. The possibility that his wife could still be alive.
One evening, while Rainy is playing a blues shuffle in E for him, Werryck reminisces: “I met your Lark, remember? And liked her. Truly. I liked her rogue bookshop, her smoky voice. Her birthmark like war paint. Who could resist that alluring little world? So yes, I liked her.
This “alluring little world” is Rainy’s only hope. Lark’s arrival in the beginning of the story is one of surprise and joy – “gusting into the kitchen like a microburst…laughing and breathless.” Even in her wake, Lark leaves reverberations of consolation.
When we are living out of consolation, Margaret Silf writes, we are living out of a place that,
- Directs our focus outside and beyond ourselves
- Lifts our hearts so that we can see the joys and sorrows of other people
- Bonds us more closely to our human community
- Generates new inspiration and ideas
- Restores balance and refreshes our inner vision
- Shows us where God is active in our lives and where God is leading us
- Releases new energy in us
But what is it that brings us to such a place? Hope in and of itself is an essence. What makes up the earthy matter? Who makes it real?
I can tell you, without a doubt, the only thing that has helped me stay and return to consolation is sitting in Centering Prayer, with the loving gaze of Jesus upon me. So many times in Scripture, He meets the eyes of the one in front of him with eyes of love.
What do you want me to do for you?
Where does it hurt?
Such simple and straightforward questions to guide us into being secure and loved no matter the outcome. Even in our questions, He is our great Rabboni, our great Teacher. We are wholly detached and wholly indifferent. Meaning, with a fair amount of wrestling with our Savior and ourselves, we understand the difference between who we are, and what we have. We are wholly detached from the outcome, free to be affected, and free to hope.
We are beloved. Born out of a loving relationship within the Trinity. This is who we are. We are baptized in Christ, who died, was buried, and rose again. As Paul reminds us, we are always carrying Christ around in our bodies – this ongoing death, burial, and resurrection. That is how we are invited to live in the world. In our churches, neighborhoods, schools, and voting booths. At the end of the day, we just fill in that bubble with a blue or black-inked pen, and let the rest be. Knowing that all of this will be soot and ash one day, and the buried hopes in our graveyards will come “gusting into the kitchen like a microburst.”
Even in Jesus’ wake, He leaves reverberations of consolation. The End might be on our minds, but in our souls there is freedom and encouragement, flexibility, connectedness, deep peace, increased faith, joy, strength, quiet, self worth, and genuine sorrow. It is an inner faith that says God loves me and is near. Even though I may not see Him, I know He is near. It is Object Permanence in action. We are free to lead and work among people with deep differences in peace and put away our swords. This is how the world can look at the Church in bewilderment – like a comet bursting across the sky, a mysterious incarnation of Christ cheerfully refusing.
