Yesterday, when I could have been
writing this piece, I was instead reading a review of a new novel by a woman
who attended college with me, and who also worked in publishing. It’s her first
novel, but her third book. She writes for the New York Times, she speaks on NPR. While reading the review, which
was very positive, I was simultaneously listening to a podcast of a
conversation between this woman and the editor of the New York Times Book Review. I suppose, in their barest facts, my
life and this novelist’s life were reasonably similar: the aforementioned
college, publishing careers in New York, and both of us now in our late
thirties). But she worked in publicity while I worked in editorial, which, when
I was swimming in the navel-gazing puddles of NYC publishing, seemed like a
world apart. And she is very skinny and very pretty, neither of which I am. She
still lives in the city, something I gave up over half a decade ago. She is not
married. She is childless. I am married. I am not without children.
It’s so easy to go
down this path, and you all know where it is taking us: she has time, hours of it every day, to devote to her art, and the
result is she publishes three books. And she can travel to author events, book
signings, conferences and podcast tapings because she doesn’t have to feed
anyone dinner, or give anyone a ride to school, or change anyone’s diaper. She
is free, her life is a wide open and glamorous expanse. But I am bounded on every side by obligation
to others. She rises to the glorious, fabulous heights of the literary atmosphere,
and I sink beneath the weight of soccer practice and laundry.
It feels good and
true, at first, this kind of simple math: no kids + New York City = art,
freedom, the better life. But then, it doesn’t. Because this is fuzzy math
indeed: many assumptions, few proven statements.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended
an interfaith discussion on “religion in the public square.” It’s rare for me
to go out on a weekday evening, but a good friend was moderating this panel,
and it was being held all of five minutes away, at the synagogue in town.
Up
on the stage there sat a rabbi, a Presbyterian pastor, an evangelical minister
from a nondenominational Christian church, and a Latino minister from a Baptist
church (I know, it sounds like the set-up for a joke). The rabbi and the
Presbyterian were casual in hippie sandals and windbreakers. The evangelical fellow
looked very 90s-alternative: gelled spiky hair, thick black-framed glasses,
goatee. The Baptist minister, in contrast, was tiny and trim in a grey suit.
There was an air
of bonhomie and relaxed friendliness, although almost immediately, the rabbi
and the nondenominational minister got into a long, windy back and forth on
Paul the Apostle. I itched to sneak out my phone and check my email, but
resisted the temptation. My moderator-friend managed to untangle this
digression by posing a question to the four, on the topic of invitation. The
panel was one of several events being hosted by the synagogue to mark the fall
harvest holiday of Sukkot. I don’t know a lot about this holiday, but it is
centered on the building of a hut called a sukkah, and it is traditional to
invite others into the sukkah to share a meal. It is a welcoming holiday. So,
my friend asked the men on the panel, whom would they like to invite to the
table during this Sukkot holiday?
The Presbyterian pastor
was in his thirties, with John Lennon glasses and shaggy hair. He was relaxed
in his fleece vest and Birkenstocks. I could see his toes. He said that he had recently
learned about an historical figure named St. Julian, a fourteenth-century
Christian mystic, so she was the person he would choose to invite. He explained
that she was an anchoress, which means she lived in a cell attached to a
monastery—a cell she never left for the rest of her life after she entered it. In
fact, “Julian” was not her name—she is called that because she was enclosed at
the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. We don’t even know her name. We know that
she had visions, and wrote about them in a work given the lovely title Revelations of Divine Love. This is
generally considered the first book written in the English language by a woman.
This, I believe, should be a generally more well-known fact than it is.
The pastor spoke
aloud the lines Julian wrote for which she is remembered the little that she is:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be
well.” I reminded myself that these words were written by a woman living alone
in a dark, cold, bare stone room, with no human contact. Given the
circumstances of her existence, this seems to be a remarkably sunny outlook. The
pastor then noted that Julian also wrote movingly and passionately about her
belief that the relationship between mother and child was the closest approximation
available to us of the relationship between Christ and the believer. The bond
between mother and child is the only earthly relationship that comes close to
approximating the bond between Christ and the Christian. “Julian believed that
the mother’s role was the truest of all jobs on earth,” he said.
This pastor, whose name was Ben,
reminded me of Father Mike, from the Catholic church I attended until I was thirteen.
Father Mike played the guitar, and insisted that we call him “Father Mike,” so
he was somewhat cool, as Catholic priests go. Father Mike was friendly in an
unforced way to us awkward Catholic thirteen-year-olds (is there a more awkward
demographic?). So I was already inclined to feel warmly toward Pastor Ben,
although I did not and still do not quite know what Presbyterians believe. But
between his casual, open demeanor and his admiring words about a female
medieval saint, I was attuned to everything else he said that night. Eventually
the talk shifted more overtly to the theme of the night, “Religion in the
public square.” Pastor Ben made a point about the superficiality of how
religion, and religious squabbles, are portrayed and often portray themselves
in the greater social consciousness. The squabbles and seemingly changeless
back-and- forths between different denominations brought to mind, he said, a
line from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” But,
according to Pastor Ben, a more accurate translation would actually be “vapor.”
As in, “all is vapor.” Transitory, ephemeral, ultimately without weight, it
leaves nothing of value, nothing at all, behind. Later in that same passage in
Ecclesiastes, the speaker moans, What has been is what will be, and what has
been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a
thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the
ages before us.
As I listened to the novelist chat
with the editor through the tinny speaker of my iPhone, the novelist living my
imagined perfect life, I felt my lungs collapse, my breath constricted by the
weight of my jealousy.
Letting go. It
sounds so easy, clean and pure, light and fresh like laundry billowing on the
clothesline. Just let it go! There it goes! Good-bye!
But it’s hard
work, hard and necessary work. St. Julian did the work, the way she interpreted
it. Think of all she let go of: a family, a home. The touch of another human
being. Sunlight.
“Letting go” is an
active process; it’s no coincidence that the verb is a present participle, an
active word, ongoing. I stopped reading the review of the novelist’s new book;
I paused the podcast, and then deleted it. I reminded myself, Vanity and vapor, that’s what it is. All is
vanity, all is vapor.
As I write this, the sun is shining, and my baby is
napping. I am still letting go of the envy, of the too-easy regret and magical
but pointless what-ifs and if-onlys, and I know I will need to let
go of them again tomorrow, and all the days after that. But I am doing the
work. I am diving deep into the dark waters, and every time I manage to kick my
way to the surface, I take another breath.
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