Thomas Larson

Spirituality and the Writer


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anthems or recite the Lord’s Prayer as legions do? First, such practices by artists or by mass assent do not exclude each other: transcendentalists like Thoreau stayed away from church, while Emerson adored the pastor’s perch. Second, the surprising glimpse resists the verbal; it neither stops nor forbids inquiry. Writing to occupy the Holy Spirit found zealotry in the four gospel authors, in Paul, in Augustine, in the medieval visionaries Hildegard von Bingen and Richard Rolle—all sought God’s grace by taking up their pens. Third, Collins’s worry, that spiritual intuition and poetic verity are antagonistic, reaffirms the necessity of metaphor, which pushes one “to turn toward other terms” when translating the ineffable. Such descriptive fury ignites John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. God is a lustful tart, whom one poem’s narrator accuses: “You ravish me.” In kind, God makes the narrator think his hunger to be loved should be validated by pain: “Batter my heart,” “bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” The believer is prey, his faith the fate of a prisoner. Locked up, he “wisheth himselfe delivered from prison.” But hauled from his cell by the hangman, he “wisheth that still he might be imprisoned” and escape the terror of execution and God’s judgment. The associations writers uncover and fertilize are limitless.

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      DELVING MORE deeply into the Zaleski volumes, I locate at least one desert bloom: “Who Am I, Lord, That You Should Know My Name?” by Bruce Lawrie.6 This three-page piece, published in Portland in 2009, is among the most indelibly spiritual essays ever penned. It is directed to the author’s “severely mentally retarded” son Matty and involves Lawrie and a God who, in the writer’s imagination, afflicts the most innocent and promises them heaven as their reward. Every night when Lawrie puts the boy to bed he sings him praise songs (the title is a line from one), cherishes their touch, and hopes the act soothes the boy’s condition.

      I start singing the next song in our nightly rotation as I brush his hand against my whiskers, first his palm and then the back of his hand. He explores my face with his fingertips and then he covers my mouth gently. I sing into his palm, imagining the reverberations vibrating down into his little soul. How does he experience me? What am I in his world? I don’t know. I may never know. (114)

      The essay’s final paragraph (of ten) is a wish for Matty’s coming life in heaven. Lawrie whispers to the boy that his ordeal will end: “Soon, Matty. Soon.” Before this dark wish, Lawrie describes the heaven where Matty has “a healthy body and a lovely wife,” a son of his own, where father and son drink a beer and the author invites Matty’s son, Lawrie’s grandson, to “fall asleep in my lap, a sweaty load of spent boy pinning me to my chair on the deck.” But none of this wipes out Matty’s punishing operations, “the straps tying his hands to the hospital bed rails so he wouldn’t pull the needles out,” a boy clueless “why the people around him had suddenly begun torturing him” (115). (We never learn his specific “retardation” or his treatment.)

      A brief list of sour apples torments Lawrie. He remembers “all the other things [Matty’s] been robbed of. Meeting a girl. Playing catch. . . . Making love.” Matty’s heaven is the reverse of this one—where he will get what most of us here already have: romantic love, losing that love, and finding it again. The result is that he, the father, keeps the hope of better times alive when the boy’s pain will end. As will Lawrie’s pain, too. When Matty dies, he’ll awaken healed; his father will be there, too, and, Lawrie writes, “God will carve out a little slice of eternity for us; our own private do-over.” “Soon, Matty. Soon” (114–15).

      Lawrie keeps reporting on and imagining Matty in these contrasting states—in the boy’s richly intimate but agonizing actual life and in the dream home his father insists the boy will one day occupy. His earthly life “comes at him as if blasted from a water cannon,” thick with an “indecipherable roar” and “white noise.” The specifics grind to dust our sense of a child’s due. Matty is “unable to walk on his own,” is “legally blind in one eye,” has endured “operations,” “IVs,” “needles,” and “countless blood draws,” among other pains—according to Lawrie, all these weigh, slab-heavy, on “his little soul.” Yet Matty is loved and he “loves”—prizes his routine, “craves” its “repetition,” and routinely toddles “off to sleep.” Just before that moment, Matty “lets out a sigh that tells me [Lawrie] everything’s right in his world” (113).

      “He finds the cool sheet safe, slings a skinny leg over the bed, and hauls himself up on top, moving rapidly before the bed can escape. He lies on his back rocking back and forth in bed, body rigid, a crease-eyed smile lighting his face, letting out an ecstatic aaahh” (114).

      It’s a heartbreaking essay, the narrator twisting between realms real and dreamlike. Does Matty feel his father’s cherishing him, and yet also sense his dad’s craving for him to be a “normal” boy? Does Matty grasp the gap between the human drama and the supernatural fantasy? The human drama is universally felt; the fantasy conjures up a Christian cosmos. Heaven is where all beings are, if not copacetic, then fixed. Heaven, where wishing the boy healthy is granted, where there’s a new Matty, the saved or the corrected or the replaced Matty: the deity makes everything right, including movie dates, a first kiss, a first night of passion, arriving unblemished after life. But not during.

      In the not during simmers the hurt. The more another boy is wished for, the more the boy in the bed is unchanged and the more the father despairs. Worse, Lawrie has to balance the affection he has for his boy against the future “version” of Matty he obsesses over. That version of the self which suggests we have no say in the random nature of our punishments, a tune also sung by Job: “For he breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my wounds without cause” (9:17).

      That Lawrie has called upon God to give Matty the brain he should have had because—you guessed it—God dealt him the bad hand, the endless surgeries no child should endure, is irrational, if not absurd. Doesn’t Matty’s condition suggest, at least, in Lawrie’s mind, that God will fully heal Matty only when Matty is removed from his dad’s care? Why doesn’t Lawrie abdicate his conviction once he discovers the petitioned one is the abuser? Or is he? Perhaps Lawrie should, but he doesn’t. Giving up on heaven is not in the author’s nature, nor in his boy’s interest. Besides, what father abandons hope while his child suffers?

      None does.

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      READING LAWRIE ping-pong between what is and what will be, that is, the will be that should have been, arouses feelings in me of the darkest hue. Just consider the essay’s chafing facts—the boy’s torture, the father’s piety; the boy’s physical burden, the father’s sorrow; the boy’s velvety prison, the father’s holding its bars in place. More disturbing is the chamber opera of false hope. How it must upset Lawrie to stifle the fact that Matty’s time on earth has been robbed while he, the father, sings him their bedtime song! To have it boil down to Lawrie wishing the boy dies soon, sooner than the father wants, and loving the boy’s pleasures still seems utterly hopeless.

      What I find frightening in this almost mockingly Christian Christian essay is that merely acknowledging the boy’s suffering exacts the death wish. That Lawrie allows it. That he doesn’t apologize for it. That he makes fervent his hastening it: “Soon, Matty. Soon.” A loving execution.

      Such is spiritual? Yes. It arrives, first, in the glimpse, the surprise of Lawrie’s executioner’s ardor. It is apparently an option, and so off-putting that Lawrie can only state it and turn away. The hope that Lawrie might grant his son’s death when God will not I think of as malevolent. But it is also supernal, not unlike petitionary prayer. This death-dream invites a truth about what God won’t decide but will defer to us. That truth would have remained submerged had Lawrie not pushed the essay to press the desire of heaven against the ludicrousness of fate. Lawrie presses anyway. The idea is made more profound because it is succinct. The conciseness scares everyone and forces the whole responsibility for the boy’s mortality onto Lawrie’s shoulders. What’s flummoxing is that Lawrie wants what he can’t have and can do nothing about what he feels he’s steering himself to do—hasten the end of Matty’s life so Matty might have his heaven.

      Pico