fiction

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.

George MacDonald

I can’t say I knew what would happen… In this life, I-could-see-that-coming and I-couldn’t see that coming both amount to the same thing, because in neither case did you make a difference. What happened next I didn’t make happen.

This is Happiness, Niall Williams

For seven, yes seven years, I’ve been searching for this quote from George MacDonald. You might say the quote was saving me at a time. I had the quote handwritten and pinned to a small board next to my office desk before I retired. I read these words every day and I longed to release the fear that kept me from following this truth. It’s a wonder to have a man write words just for me to find 150 years later.

The story doesn’t end or begin with that posted note. I have a long history of coming upon the restlessness of “what next” instead of seeing what is right in front of me. For those few years George’s words sat next to me, I struggled to attend to the moment, no matter which way I might want to time travel for a different view.

While George MacDonald was an old Scotsman, Niall Williams is a companionable, contemporary Irishman. Two of his books, This is Happiness and The Year of the Child, are linked by the characters of the imaginary village of Faha in the far west of Ireland during the 1950’s and 60’s. The characters’ lived experiences are far removed from my own, but I know them inside me.

In both of Niall Williams books, he weaves together the lives of neighbours and strangers who are doing as well as they can. What happens to them in the present floats between the past and future in ways that make them seem as one life continuously lived, one day at a time.

I find myself doing a lot of remembering lately. Where I am now, I couldn’t have imagined in those days I’m recalling. There is also another set of stories that colour my world: the stories I create in my mind that are full of woe and occasionally wonder, the conversations I replay that unjustly perceive or unconsciously heal, and the actions I silently assess that shape my responses. I might wake up fraught with stories I made up out of fear: the what if’s, the carefully crafted judgements, perceived solutions that cause me to miss opportunities to do what I’ve been given without second guessing or trying to figure it all out. Is foregoing all that tangle of thought what “giving myself the least trouble” means?

How can I learn to rest between glimmers of hope and the truth that I am not in control of “next,” no matter what comes?

Just like Noel Crow, the 78 year old narrator of This is Happiness, who remembers the summer he turned 17. As Noe reflects on a transformative turn that began when he stopped at the local chemist’s door. (I don’t want to give too much away so you can read it for yourself.) He had no idea how this spontaneous visit would turn out. He didn’t know that there would be times in life that pass but “retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still.” When that same helpless longing to make things turn out alright, would see him “into and out of all the unscripted tumult, joys and mistakes that constitute a lived life.” When he opened the door he had no speech prepared, only that shining. Ready for what came next.

It seems like the best books I’ve read lately are, at there core, about abandonment, sorrow, and how our hearts ache. And yet, the hearts of the people in those stories also break open with love that defies understanding. All My Puny Sorrows and The Summer of my Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews and The Color of Water and Deacon King Kong by James McBride are stories of redemption and living the lives we’ve been given in great Love.

We all have “holes in our lives,” Miriam Tower writes, and “people like to talk about their pain and loneliness in disguised ways.” Maybe it is that we (I) really can’t honestly say what our holes of longing are but we get a lump in our throat or tears that stay in our eyes, or heaviness in our heart when we encounter that empty place. Pay attention to those tears, or whatever physical manifestation gets your attention.

I wonder if that is what happened to me the other day. I was retreating into an episode of “Escape to the County,” a twist on those house hunting shows. Except in this one I glean a bit more. I learn a little more about the United Kingdom where the episodes are filmed and, instead of the focus on finding the right house, the host explores the features of a community and offers the seekers experiences to get to know the locals. The goal seems to be to get a glimpse of what their life might be like in that place.

In this case, the life change seeking couple were invited to the community Waffle Restaurant where “good food and doing good go hand and hand.” The owner explained that the thrust of the business was to reach out to the lonely and promote opportunities for people to come together, to chat with people they might not otherwise encounter. A sign on the wall of the establishment featured a quote from Mother Theresa, Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. The poster reminded those in the place about their ‘waffle work’. The locals in this community call it “wafflin” a play on the words ‘talking everyday talk’.

I think it was when the owner said, “reach out to the lonely” that the tears in my eyes disguised a hole in my life. Perhaps that is what we all long for, a place to belong and be ourselves. Perhaps, I wished to be part of a community of people that met each other intentionally with that kind of reciprocal care.

Both Miriam Toews and James Mc Bride spin stories of redemption, finding goodness in unlikely places and circumstances, seeing people as God must see them. Or as a member of the street community where I live said in a local documentary, “Sitting with Grace:” “You’d find so many of our negatives would fall away because you’re utilizing our strengths instead of going after us for our weaknesses.”

I believe I did that, maybe, in my life as a teacher; finding the strength and interests of some who were only seen as someone to be fixed, remediated, turned around from whatever path they seemed to be traveling that others didn’t understand or bless. I have a little more trouble giving that acceptance in the general population, to those who might have obvious advantages or even members of my own family. Perhaps, I don’t sometimes give that grace to myself.

In The Color of Water, James McBride concludes that “at the end of the day there are some questions that have no answer and then one answer that has no question: Love rules the day.” In McBride’s Deacon King Kong, the goodbye often used with members of Deacon’s local congregation, “I hope God holds you in the palm of His hand,” is painted on the back wall of the church for the world to hear. Maybe I don’t have a better way to fill our holes.

I hope God holds you in the palm of her hand. And I know what a capacious hand it must be.

Attentive to Joy

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

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