Tyrannies and Victories
TYRANNIES AND VICTORIES
There are many things people want to be liberated from, many kinds of tyranny from which we would like to escape, but one of the inescapable ones is the tyranny of change. (I didn’t make up that idea. I got it from Paul, reading the Phillips’ translation of Romans 8:20, 21.)
Most of us are ambivalent about change. We say, “Let’s do this for a change,” or “I’ve simply got to have a change,” and in the next breath we moan, “Oh dear, how things have changed! They’re just not the same anymore.” Lots of people do things purely for the sake of doing something different. And one of the ironies (tyrannies are full of ironies) is that things don’t necessarily turn out to be all that fresh and original after all.
A group of young intellectuals got together on a farm near Boston and began growing their own fruits and vegetables, milking cows, and building rustic houses in which they could live together simply and study without the distractions of the Establishment. They were fed up with hustle and bustle, and just wanted to be themselves. There was a lot of sitting around on floors and stairs, a lot of discussion and reading and dancing under the stars, some trips to Boston for lectures or concerts.
They all had a great interest in Eastern religions, and some of them were followers of a strong-minded woman who thought it was high time members of her sex were liberated and allowed to speak their minds about a few things. Most of the people in this commune believed in nonviolence. Peace was what they were after. They liked long hair and long beards. Spontaneity was a great word in their vocabulary and “doing things in crowds” was their idea of the good life.
But the blue the men wore was not jeans. It was tunics. Some wore something called “plain brown holland.” The lectures they went to were not on racism but on antislavery. The commune I am talking about was Brook Farm, founded more than a hundred years ago in an effort to find a whole new direction.
I was thinking about that effort, wondering how many times in history it has been repeated, when my aunt happened to give me a box of old family papers. I love old stuff like that and can hardly keep away from it. Here were personal letters from as far back as 1817, old pictures, diaries, house plans, and newspaper clippings. I found myself reading everything, even the advertisements on the backs of the clippings.
A column from The New York Journal of Commerce, written by my great-great-uncle and dated July 19, 1864, has this list of things for sale on the back of it: Common shippers oak timber plank; Sycamore Lumber for Tobacco Boxes; Patent Portable Sectional Houses (I had just read about modules last week and thought it was quite a change in building technique); Black Walnut library shelves; Tar—Thick, Thin, and Rope; 150 bbls. Spirits Turpentine in prime shipping order; Cudbear (I had to look that up—a purple dye made from lichens); 500 bags Singapore pepper; 60 kegs choice Dairy Butter; 75 bales New Orleans Mess (porridge? I’m not sure); French and Dutch madder (the dictionary says a red dye); and a lot of other things like smoked unbagged hams (were they better than bagged ones?), fire crackers, carb ammonia, re-reeled Canton silk, and whortleberries.
It sounded to me like a list of things to do without. But take any similar list from the advertising of today. A magazine that came last week has Oriental porcelain, a lion skin, a $725 crystal koala, and some fifteen-inch potted fig trees. More things I can deny myself.
But there we are again—a lot of effort and study goes on in the advertising business year in and year out. They’ve improved the presentation of ads, certainly—all those colored pictures (those gorgeous sweeps of lawn, those intimate, elegant living rooms), the catchy, understated text, the catch questions (“Is seepage disturbing your loved ones?”)—but they’re still up to the same trick, to make me think I ought to feel a need where I felt none.
One entirely predictable thing about life is that there will be changes. Some of the changes are themselves fairly predictable—birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, suffering, old age, death. We rejoice and recoil when we think about these things. If only there were some safe place where we could halt the progression exactly where we want it.
One morning recently I read in the paper about a prisoner, just released after sixteen years, who asked to remain in prison. He was denied the privilege, so down he went to a tavern, phoned the police to report a robbery, and waited patiently until he was arrested as the thief. Back in his cell he explained that he felt at home there, that he wanted to finish an art course he had started in prison, and that furthermore things had changed a lot in the outside world, and he didn’t like it.
I wondered if he saw the cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker that same week, showing a guard complaining through the bars to a man in the striped suit, saying, “Take me now. I’ll go home on a packed bus, find the wife in tears over some crack a neighbor made, listen to a depressing newscast, bawl the kid out for a lousy report card, eat an underdone casserole, hassle over what TV show we’re going to watch, find somebody else has taken the last beer in the icebox and finally settle into a fitful sleep punctured by a neighbor’s hi-fi.”
The prisoner in the cartoon is slumped down on a bench, hands clasped behind his head, listening to all of this and looking very pleased. People have different ideas of freedom, and they get out of one kind of tyranny and fall into another. The man in the news story wanted the kind of freedom which order, security, and sameness afford. Iron bars didn’t bother him as much as change.
I understand that man. I don’t like change very much. I am not always moving the furniture around. I don’t want any “bright new taste surprises” for breakfast. I want the sofa where it was yesterday and the black coffee just the way I always make it.
It was reassuring to me to learn that C. S. Lewis also liked monotony and routine. Urged time and again to journey abroad to lecture, he stayed home and smoked his pipe and lectured where he felt he belonged. He also wrote wonderful things and remained content with familiar surroundings, able to draw on deep inner resources. Andrew Wyeth found enough to paint in two towns in Pennsylvania and Maine.
The ocean can teach us very many things. Change is its essence. It can be counted on ceaselessly to change, and this is the source of its beauty. The waves roll in, sweep the shore, suck out, and roll in again. It does this in almost the same way each time, but there is something endlessly fascinating in watching how it happens. The swell and the crest, the break and crash, the glass-green turning to milk-white, the cream, the foam, the bubbles, the thin sheet that slides back so smoothly and disappears so suddenly—who can take his eyes off it? But each change is in perfect harmony with the nature of the ocean.
We need not be always seeking something different, something other, out of mere restlessness. There are enough changes we cannot stop, which are of the essence of this life and are meant to be. They are meant to drive us to God.
The world of creation, said Paul, has, in God’s purpose, been given hope. “And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God.”
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Among the treasures in that box of old family papers was a series of letters from a great-aunt who was serving as a hostess in a rest house in Virginia during World War I. She was a lady unused to working for a living, but her husband dropped dead one day at the bank where he worked, and she had to find a way to support herself. Soldiers and sailors came to the house, some of them terribly homesick, some of them just back from the front with permanent disabilities. The wives and mothers of men who had been killed sometimes arrived at the door in the middle of the night, having just received the sorrowful news. The great-aunt took care of them all.
Her letters to her brother “Chigsie” (Charles Gallaudet Trumbull) are full of cheerfulness and compassion. She was busy helping others every minute of the day and night; as I read her vivid and often humorous accounts of the daily routine, I remember the background of suffering against which she wrote her own suffering (she could hardly bear to think of returning to the house where she and her husband, Jack, had lived) and that of so many others. But doing everyday duties for the sake of others saved her.
People who have themselves experienced both grief and fear know how alike those two things are. They know the restlessness and loss of appetite, the inability to concentrate, the inner silent wail that cannot be muffled, the feeling of being in a great lonely wilderness which both emotions can produce. They are equally disabling, distracting, and destructive.
One may cry out in prayer and hear no answer. The heavens are brass. One may search Scripture in vain for some word of release and comfort—there are plenty of such words, but how frequently they seem only to mock us, and a voice whispers: “That’s not meant for you. You’re taking it out of context,” and no such word reaches us.
Faith, we know perfectly well, is what we need. We’ve simply got to exercise faith. But how to do that? How to exercise anything at such a time? “Pull yourself together!” With what? “Cheer up!” How? “Think positively!” But that is a neater trick than we are up to at the moment. We are actually paralyzed. Fear grips us tightly, grief disables us entirely. We have no heart.
At such a time I have been wonderfully calmed and strengthened by doing some simple duty. Nothing valiant or meritorious or spiritual at all—just something that needed to be done, like a bed to be made or a kitchen floor to be washed, one of those things that will never be noticed if you do it, but will most certainly be noticed if you don’t. Sometimes it takes everything you have to get up and do it, but it is surprising how strength comes.
Ezekiel was a man who witnessed many strange things and prophesied great cataclysms and splendor. He told us little about himself, but in the twenty-fourth chapter of his book there is a powerful parenthesis:
The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, behold, I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke; yet you shall not mourn or weep nor shall your tears run down. Sigh, but not aloud; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your shoes on your feet; do not cover your lips nor eat the bread of mourners.” So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as was commanded.
God asked more of Ezekiel than any human being would dare to ask, but he knew his man. He was asking him to “put on a front,” to act normally, not as a mourner. To put on turban and shoes and eat his usual food—what extraordinary commands to a man who has just lost the delight of his eyes! But Ezekiel had had plenty of practice in obedience and it was not his habit to bridle. “My wife died . . . I did as I was commanded.”
It sounds simple. But not easy. It was heroic, certainly. There are other incidents in the Bible where the doing of very ordinary things helped people out of deep trouble. When Paul was sailing as a prisoner to Italy and was about to be wrecked in the Adriatic Sea, everyone on board was terror-stricken, sailors were trying to escape, the soldiers and centurion and captain were all sure they were doomed and paid little attention to Paul’s assurances of faith in God. But when he suggested that they eat, and actually took bread himself and gave thanks for it, “then they all were encouraged and ate some food . . . and when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, throwing out the wheat into the sea.”
Terror had disabled and disoriented them. In their panic they thought only of desperate measures which might have saved a few. But where Paul’s faith had had no effect on them, his common sense—“Let’s eat”—restored them to their senses. Then they were able to see clearly what the next thing was to be done. From panic came peace. The result was salvation for everybody.
I never noticed until recently that the beautiful story of the woman with the alabaster box of perfume occurs between the high priests’ plot to kill Jesus and Judas’ deal with them to betray him. The Son of Man knew exactly what he was going to Jerusalem for. But in the face of those tremendous facts he moved with perfect serenity through each day’s activities, walking, talking, sleeping, and eating. He even had the grace to sit at supper with his dear friends in Bethany (one of them a leper) and to accept the woman’s oblation of love.
He moved on into the Passover with his disciples, taking it as next in order. The Jewish Passover was a feast he had always kept. He would keep it this time, too, as usual. Had we been in his place we would surely have said, “What’s the use? Who can go to feast at a time like this?” But our Lord did not halt all activity to brood over what was to come. He was not incapacitated by the fear of suffering, though he well knew that fear. To the question, “What shall I do?” (so often, for us, the cry of despair) he simply answered, “This,” and did what lay in his path to do at the moment, trusting himself completely into the hands of his Father. This was how he endured the cross.
We can better imagine the utter paralysis of grief and fear that overcame the disciples of Jesus and the women who loved him in that worst hour when he drooped dead on the cross. No one could think of a thing to do. It was over. God had left. The last shred of hope that God might intervene or that the physician would heal himself had gone. There hung the mutilated corpse, the blood dried by now. But “a good and righteous man” named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea had the presence of mind to think of a few practical things that needed to be done. He went and asked for the body, took it down from the cross, wrapped it in a new linen shroud, and laid it in his own new tomb.
Emmi Bonhoeffer writes in The Auschwitz Trials, “From the very moment one feels called to act is bom the strength to bear whatever horror one will feel or see. In some inexplicable way, terror loses its overwhelming power when it becomes a task that must be faced.”
Joseph’s action gave the women the courage and vision they needed to see what they, too, might do. I imagine that the darkest of Friday evenings was made endurable for them because they had work to do for Jesus.
They prepared spices for the body. They rested on Saturday, according to Jewish law, and it was, I believe, a peaceful day for them even while they sorrowed because it held the promise of a clear-cut task next morning. What a morning it turned out to be! But they would have missed it if they had abandoned their common work and given themselves over to grief.
Thomas Carlyle said, “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action.” There is wonderful therapy in getting up and doing something. While you are doing, time passes quickly. Time itself will in some measure heal, and “light arises in the darkness,” slowly, it seems, but certainly.
According to a poem, the source of which I have been unable to find (can any reader help?), there is a Saxon legend inscribed in an old English parsonage, Doe the nexte thynge. “Do it immediately,” says the poem, “Do it with prayer, do it reliantly, casting all care.” I know it works. I have been hauled out of the Slough of Despond by those four words. And in the doing of whatever comes next, we are shown what to do after that.