Almost No Memory

PASTOR ELAINE’S NEWSLETTER

We went to church a year ago on Easter Sunday because we had just moved to this town and wanted to feel part of the community. At that time we put our name on the church mailing list and now we receive its newsletter.

Every day, almost, we walk to the post office in the late afternoon and then around by the park and on to the hardware store or the library.

On our way from the playground to the library, we sometimes see Pastor Elaine in her yard, in her shorts, weeding around the phlox near the back door, which has a sign on it that reads “Pastor’s Study.” Now we learn from what she writes in the church newsletter that she has lost most of her newly planted tomatoes and eggplants to a “night creature” and is angry.

“I was furious!” she says. She is furious not only at the night creature but also at herself for her carelessness or forgetfulness, because the same thing happened to her last year. “Why had I forgotten it?” she asks.

There is a point to her story, a lesson she wants to teach us, which is that “it is our human condition which brings us back again and again to doing the things we would rather not be doing. We are far from perfection. I forget this at times and get so annoyed with myself.”

We are often angry at ourselves, too, for such things as carelessness and forgetfulness, and things we feel are much worse.

Pastor Elaine uses the Bible to illustrate her lesson. “Paul put it so well,” she says, before going on to quote from Romans: “I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death?”

This seems too strong a reaction for the mistake Pastor Elaine has made in her garden, since she is not doing what she “hates” by setting plants in the ground without proper fencing, but we read closely what she has to say because it does describe exactly what we often do. We often do what we hate. We often tell ourselves what we would like to do, most importantly that we would like to be kind to our children, and gentle with them, and patient, and then we do not do what we would like to do, but what we hate; that is, we lose our patience suddenly and shout at them, or squeeze them, or shake them, or pound our fist on the table and frighten them. And we, too, do not understand why. Is it that we do not want to do what we so much believe we want to do?

We are sometimes aware that the ugly sounds coming from us may be overheard by the good family next door, whose younger son is an altar boy at what they call the BVM or the Perpetual. But this does not have the power to stop us.

We are not Christian but we have a Bible belonging to a church-going mother of ours, and although we are not believers, we think that if we read the same words believers read, we might also be comforted or learn something. The passage quoted by Pastor Elaine is a little different in our Bible. It begins: “For that which I do I know not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

This sounds quite like our situation, though what we do, we would not call evil but wrong. We will, we will with great determination, up in the privacy of our study, up in the bathroom, anywhere we are alone. But when it comes to performing what is good, sitting over lunch between our two children, who are not bad children, if the older one, bored, is teasing us and the younger one, tired, is fussing, our will is weak, in fact it is powerless. Then what does it mean to will, at all, if we can’t perform? All that willing, upstairs, is for nothing. It seems that we are able to will only from a very shallow place and when we draw upon all the will in us it is quickly used up and there is nothing left. Or something else, if not that, is wrong with the way we will.

When we lose our patience so suddenly, we feel possessed, as by some outside force, almost as it is described in the next lines we read: “Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing.” It is as though it were not we who were doing what we do, but some being we do not recognize. Certainly we do not recognize ourselves, in our fury, as what we have so lately been, gentle, for we can be gentle. Only, this other being does not seem like sin to us, but a living demon, and does not seem to dwell in us, but only to come into us sometimes and then leave again. Unless it is in us all the time, but quiet, and is then roused by some aggravation.

“I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,” says our Bible. But if there is another law in us, it does not seem to be in our members, in our body, but elsewhere, in our passions, raging like a storm, possessing us, and warring against the law of our mind. Unless, arising in our passions, it then spreads to our members, for we can sometimes feel that into our flesh no good thing comes: our blood becomes hot and our nerves sing, when we are angry.

A small italic c next to “in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing” refers us to two sentences in Genesis and we look through the book for those sentences. The first one we find reads: “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” The second uses many of the same words but does not mean exactly the same thing: “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” We will not say that we are filled with evil continually, because if no good thing comes into our flesh, it comes only sometimes. If we know it is not in us all the time, though, we may be able to say it is not just wrong but evil, this thing, this demon or poison that comes into us and pinches and wrinkles our features so that we are told, “You should see your face!”

“Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” the passage continues. But in our case, we often become so ashamed that we wish we might be rescued right now, in the midst of life, from this body that is sometimes so filled with no good thing and so obedient to a law that wars against the law of our mind — our sharp mind, but our weak mind. Or our sharp mind, but our weak will. Or our strong will, but our disobedient will. Is that it — that our mind is sharp and has a law, but our will is strong and disobedient?

Toward the end of the newsletter we read that Pastor Elaine will be away for some weeks over the summer and that if we should need spiritual assistance during this time we may call any elder or the vice president, whose telephone number she gives. But in this town we would not be able to go to any elder or the vice president with our troubles.

If we were to go to Pastor Elaine herself for spiritual assistance, she might point to another passage, one we have seen by chance in Galatians: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith.” How we would like to have in us this thing, the fruit of the Spirit. We read the list again and this time read it against the list of what is sometimes in us: love, joy, peace, gentleness, and goodness. We do not seem to have faith. As for long-suffering, we do not know if it is something one can have in small amounts. And now we see that it may be in the absence of long-suffering that no good thing comes into our flesh and we become vicious, as though possessed, and in the same moment lose, for a time, all love, joy, peace, gentleness, and goodness. Yet we do not know how to gain more long-suffering. It is not enough to want it, or to will it, or to will it from such a shallow place, anyway, as we do.

We take our usual walk to the post office and then by Pastor Elaine’s house and on to the hardware store to look for a fluorescent light bulb. We see that Pastor Elaine has hung her wash on the line in back, above her phlox. We see through the window that the light is on in her study, although here, outside, the sun is bright. We think how we have been with our children this day or the day before, how we have stood holding the little one, so heavy, and put out our hand to push the arm of the older one to get him out of our way or to make him move faster, or driven in the car with them in the heat, damp, with a knot of rage in us, and yearned to reach inside, or outside, somewhere, and find more long-suffering, and have not known how to do it. And we wonder: What stores of anger have we laid down in the older one already? What hardness are we putting in the heart of the little one, where there was no hardness?