It’s just so hard to imagine “the poor in spirit” achieving very much.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
I was eleven years old when my mother was killed; I mourn her still. I mourn for more than her, too. I don’t feel “comforted”; not yet.
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
“BUT THERE’S NO EVIDENCE FOR THAT,” Owen told Mrs. Walker in Sunday school.
And on and on:
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.
“BUT WILL IT HELP THEM—TO SEE GOD?” Owen Meany asked Mrs. Walker.
Did it help Owen—to see God?
“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus says. “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
That was always something Owen and I found hard to take—a reward in heaven.
“GOODNESS AS BRIBERY,” Owen called it—an argument that eluded Mrs. Walker.
And then—after the Beatitudes, and the sermon by the stranger—the Nicene Creed felt forced to me. Canon Campbell used to explain everything to me—the part about believing in “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” bothered me; Canon Campbell helped me see beyond the words, he made me see in what sense “Catholic,” in what way “Apostolic.” Canon Mackie says I worry about “mere words” too much. Mere words?
And then there was the business about “all nations,” and—specifically—“our Queen”; I’m not an American anymore, but I still have trouble with the part that goes “grant unto thy servant ELIZABETH our Queen”; and to think that it is possible “to lead all nations in the way of righteousness” is utterly ridiculous!
And before I received Holy Communion, I balked at the general Confession.
“We acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness.” Some Sundays, this is so hard to say; Canon Campbell indulged me when I confessed to him that this confession was difficult for me, but Canon Mackie employs the “mere words” thesis with me until I am seeing him in a most unforgiving light. And when Canon Mackie proceeded with the Holy Eucharist, to the Thanksgiving and Consecration, which he sang, I even judged him unfairly for his singing voice, which is not and never will be the equal of Canon Campbell’s—God Rest His Soul.
In the entire service, only the psalm struck me as true, and properly shamed me. It was the Thirty-seventh Psalm, and the choir appeared to sing it directly to me:
Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:
fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil.
Yes, it’s true: I should “leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure.” What good is anger? I have been angry before. I have been “moved to do evil,” too—as you shall see.
4
The Little Lord Jesus
* * *
The first Christmas following my mother’s death was the first Christmas I didn’t spend in Sawyer Depot. My grandmother told Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred that if the family were all together, my mother’s absence would be too apparent. If Dan and Grandmother and I were alone in Gravesend, and if the Eastmans were alone in Sawyer Depot, my grandmother argued that we would all miss each other; then, she reasoned, we wo
uldn’t miss my mother so much. Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving—Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who’s not home.
Dividing my time between my grandmother’s house on 80 Front Street and the abandoned dormitory where Dan had his small apartment also gave me my first impressions of Gravesend Academy at Christmas, when all the boarders had gone home. The bleak brick and stone, the ivy frosted with snow, the dormitories and classroom buildings with their windows all closed—with a penitentiary sameness—gave the campus the aura of a prison enduring a hunger strike; and without the students hurrying on the quadrangle paths, the bare, bone-colored birches stood out in black-and-white against the snow, like charcoal drawings of themselves, or skeletons of the alumni.
The ringing of the chapel bell, and the bell for class hours, was suspended; and so my mother’s absence was underlined by the absence of Gravesend’s most routine music, the academy chimes I’d taken for granted—until I couldn’t hear them. There was only the solemn, hourly bonging of the great clock in the bell tower of Hurd’s Church; especially on the most brittle-cold days of December, and against the landscape of old snow—thawed and refrozen to the dull, silver-gray sheen of pewter—the clock-bell of Hurd’s Church tolled the time like a death knell.