"Beautiful city, we must part," part 2: The Groans of August

It's time for my yearly post on the month that obsesses my imagination.

This is the first time I've spent my favorite month outside of New York City in many years, and August in Appalachia, at least in my corner of it, has nothing at all in common with August in New York City. Back home in the city, the alert observer could perceive the shift in the position of sunlight and the not-unpleasant burning smell in the air that marked the change from high summer to summer's end, and all the uncertainty and the promise of newness that this strange, shifting time -- the real start of the New Year in New York -- brought with it. Here, there's no sense of change apparent, at least to my senses, which were developed and trained under a different set of circumstances: except for the mist rising from the mountains in the early morning, high summer continues.

I'm still walking around in heartbroken longing for my old city and for many parts of the life I once lived there, but it occurs to me more and more that walking around in heartbroken longing has been a constant in my life at least since adolescence. And the truth is that August, far from being a month worthy of commemoration, has traditionally been for me a month of awful loss and absurd failure. This brings me back to my old dilemma: does God want us to be happy? Or does he perhaps ask those of us who are inclined to grief to suffer it for Him, offering that suffering up for others in the expectant hope that He, in the strange efficacy of His economy of mercy, will use it for their healing and their joy? I know, in spite of all the self-esteem propaganda and New Age relativism I absorbed that told me I was essentially a good person, that I am not in fact a person who deserves joy, and the individuals for whom I most often consciously choose to offer my grief are probably not either. But I think some people need joy in order to live and heal, and I pray that God will give it to them, because He loves them so much.

As anyone who's read this blog for a time knows, I'm a pretty egregious sinner who's made some irrevocably bad decisions that have had dire consequences on the lives of others, as well as on my own. Every day upon waking, the prayer comes to my mind that God might use me for good. But how might He do this? Can the leopard change its spots? I am still that person, that egregious sinner, that, for want of a better word, raging diva. But somehow, since the moment of metanoia that changed my heart in 2002, I'm also a different person. I want to trust that God will find a way to use the raging diva that He saw fit to reform for the purpose of demonstrating His unfathomable mercy to other egregious-sinner chicks like myself. Hopefully He'll make His ways somewhat clearer to me as I walk around, hearbroken with longing in August in Appalachia.

Above: "Dining Room Overlooking the Garden" by Pierre Bonnard, an image that has always looked like August to me.

Emptying Sorrow

This morning my three-year-old was crying about a helium balloon that he lost at the Memorial Day parade, and it crossed my mind to worry that he may have inherited from me a long memory for sorrow. I began to wonder what the uses of sorrow might be. Sorrow can be an effective teacher, but is rarely a compassionate one, and I can see in my own life how it can settle over you like a gossamer veil, subtly coloring everything you see and do.

While sorrow is a necessary ingredient in penitence, it must be tempered through long reflection into something else, even, perhaps, into its opposite. The desolation that God allows us to descend to gradually becomes filled in with other things. Even if we accept the proposition that time is non-linear -- a proposition which, if we believe in God, we are on some level required to accept -- and that thus all things, including the dreadful and the sorrowful, are happening now, we are not required to mourn forever. The Bible prescribes a period of mourning for the bereaved, staggered into three phases: seven days for what's known as shiva, followed by thirty days, and an additional eleven months if one is mourning a parent. But even David, when his first son with Bathsheba died, "arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped," explaining, "While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again?" and soon after, conceived Solomon with his wife.

We cannot bring back the dead, including those who have died to us figuratively, and perhaps, when our prescribed period of mourning has passed, we are required to take up the hard work of our lives again in joy. We must drop everything, including sorrow, to imitate the kenosis of Christ and receive His sometimes strange and ineffable healing. The poet Jane Hirshfield writes, in a poem called "Late Prayer":

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.