Faith and Trust on a Sunday

by Lucy S.

In Standing By Words, Wendell Berry writes: 

And I do not believe that it is possible to act on the basis of a 'tentative' or 'provisional' conclusion. We may know that we are forming a conclusion on the basis of provisional or insufficient knowledge – that is the tragedy of our condition.  But we must act, nevertheless, on the basis of final conclusions, because we know that actions, occurring in time, are irrevocable.  That is another part of our tragedy.  People who make a conventional agreement that all conclusions are provisional … characteristically talk but do not act. Or they do not act deliberately, though time and materiality carry them into action of a sort willy-nilly. (29-30)

Yesterday I pulled the last post (“’I Am a Mother’?”) off of here because I decided I didn’t like some of it. I told my oldest son Justin, who had read the post, and he said that if I was going to have a blog, I could not do that. He said that once I’d put something up and sent out notices to some people that it was up, I could not just make it disappear or people would lose faith in the blog. “And anyway,” said Justin, “why would you pull it? It’s a good post.” I told my friend Amir and he said it was fine, not to worry about it, and that there’s nothing wrong with posting something that one might later find doubts with. He said everything we say, write, and think is always in development, and that we don’t need to hide that process. He said it’s okay to have flaws and imperfections and to not need to apologize for them. So I put it back up.

I try to reconcile contradictions in my ideas about faith and trust. Is it telling the truth about something that happened or my own thoughts at a given time? Is it having the grace to stay quiet about something that happened or my own thoughts? And what is the truth about something that happened?  How am I to make sense of people in their complexities, myself included? Is it keeping promises, or believing in someone enough to give that person the benefit of the doubt when the promise is unkept for whatever reason?

I often do not know how to reconcile what might potentially be my forgiveness for one person’s harshness and the effect that it has on another. (Sometimes as I try to sort out what to feel and do, I myself am in one of those roles.) If I represent any of that in writing, I inevitably frame particular moments and leave out so many others which complicate the portrayals. These contradictions cannot be reduced to notions of holding people accountable or not. Units of currency (or even expressions that carry their echo) do not pay for irrevocable actions, including speech actions, that help or harm. We might try to stay safe by expressing only kind things, but in a world in which horrific things are done to many, this can be a horribly unkind betrayal. We cannot only speak as if we were greeting cards. And making an effort to have some kind of authentic relationship with another person requires honesty, which is its own kind of trust.

I wrote about Tom, my aunt’s second husband, in the last essay. I wrote about how much I disliked the word “enabler” in another recent essay. I wrote about William and Rose in yet another, and mentioned that they as well as Rose’s mom and younger siblings were homeless at a particular time. Rose is the granddaughter of that aunt; her mother is my cousin – my aunt’s daughter – her only child. All of these essays were efforts to get some events and thoughts down on the page, knowing that in various ways, oppositional events and thoughts also exist.

How does the story change if I add that at a certain point in the past, my aunt finally told her husband that she’d used her credit cards so many times to pay for her daughter’s and grandkids’ living expenses that she was almost $30,000 in debt? She’d held off telling him for some years, moving balances around, taking out new cards when they sent her offers, but finally nothing more could be done. They kept their finances separate. He had a lot more money than she did and could afford to take on the large debt, but he was not rich. And he had already been angry at her for years for coddling her daughter and grandkids, especially Rose. She feared he would divorce her. But she told him, and he shocked her (and me) by paying off the entire debt, though he was deeply hurt. He forgave her, but he lost a great deal of trust in her. He was also an alcoholic and went on one of his worst binges after that.

There was a time before then when he and my aunt went on vacation for a week and he let Rose and William stay in their house while they were gone. He couldn’t stand them there when he was home, but he figured since he wouldn’t be there and they had no permanent place to live, he’d let them have that week there. He had an old El Camino which he loved and only drove occasionally. At the time, it was in the garage with the oil drained out of it for some reason. He said he left them the key to it in case the house caught on fire, so they could move it. (I later thought: would they really think to hurry and get his car out if the house were on fire?) Under no other circumstances were they to drive it. But one day midweek, Rose decided that they needed something from the (faraway) store, and so they drove it, and they destroyed the engine. After that, he couldn’t stand Rose and didn’t want her in their home even for short visits.

Some years after that, and after William had been murdered, Rose was driving another vehicle (one she’d been given permission to drive). Like Tom, she too was an alcoholic, and she’d been drinking that day. She turned a corner too fast in the foothills outside of Lancaster and rolled the vehicle. A 15-year-old daughter of a friend was with her whose back was broken in the crash. Another girl was injured, but not as badly. Rose’s 3½ year old son, Anthony, was not with them. Not wearing a seatbelt, Rose was thrown from the vehicle and slammed down onto her back. One of the girls claimed that she said, “Take care of my baby” at some point in this disaster. But she died quickly, before anyone else arrived on the scene.

Another aunt on my dad’s side of the family (those I am speaking of here are on my mom’s side) called to tell me early the next morning. They knew I’d take it hard. Soon, I was on the phone with one of Rose’s brothers as he made the short drive to his grandmother’s (my aunt’s) to give her the news. While he told her, he put me on the phone with someone else. Then he had me talk with my aunt. I only remember her saying, “Lucy?” and sobbing, though we talked for quite a while. At some point, Rose’s brother got on the phone again and said that when he told Tom, Tom said, “Well, I never had any use for her anyway.”

I know that my aunt has never been the same. And I have not, either. A big remnant of something (too?) carefree in us went away, some naïve thought that everything would work itself out, that people would finally be okay. I knew this was not true in any large sense anyway. And something was damaged in the relationship between me and my aunt. She’d called me every week to talk about the never-ending crises for years. I had given her hours each week, and given Rose hours as well. I was the blunt one, the one to tell Rose she was wrong, that she was acting selfish, that she needed to look for a job, but I was the one to talk out plans with her and cheer her on.  I was the one to tell my aunt that they had to learn how to live in this world.  But my aunt was devoted to Rose. They craved my bluntness, but maybe even that somehow “enabled” them. Through it all, I tried to help them come up with ideas for the crises at hand and larger solutions that would transform their ways of living. But Rose died, and her son was put into the custody of Rose’s mother, who’d abused her children in the past. And I could not stand to hear any more from my aunt about those crises. I could not bear to respond to the shifting stories anymore, the excuses. I am far away and can do nothing but talk with them. And I am sick of words. Yet it is always more complicated. Perhaps I have failed to trust and be trustworthy. 

Wendell Berry also writes:

The difficulty is that marriage, family life, friendship, neighborhood, and other personal connections do not depend exclusively or even primarily on justice – though, of course, they all must try for it.  They depend also on trust, patience, respect, mutual help, forgiveness – in other words, the practice of love, as opposed to the mere feeling of love.  As soon as the parties to a marriage or friendship begin to require strict justice of each other, then that marriage or friendship begins to be destroyed, for there is no way to adjudicate the competing claims of a personal quarrel.  And so these relationships do not dissolve into litigation, really; they dissolve into a feud, an endless exchange of accusations and retributions.  If the two parties have not the grace to forgive the inevitable offenses of close connection, the next best thing is separation and silence.  But why should separation have come to be the virtually conventional outcome of close relationships in our society?  The proper question, perhaps, is not why we have so much divorce, but why we are so unforgiving.  The answer, perhaps, is that though we still recognize the feeling of love, we have forgotten how to practice love when we don't feel it.  (139, Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community)

I want to know how to better do what he says, not just how to forgive and practice love, but how to do so wisely. I want to more fully know what this looks like in action under difficult circumstances with such flawed people (myself included). Our irrevocable acts propel us into the future – changed – deliberately or “willy-nilly.” We need faith in ourselves, our efforts, and one another. Simultaneously, we need to build a foundation for trust.  How?

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes of the returning spring:

In a pleasant spring morning, all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only the atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing from his gnarled rind and try another year’s life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant.

This passage sometimes makes me cry. Thoreau makes us see not only the capacity for change in ourselves and one another, but that this capacity is a kind of innocence, an innocence that can be recovered. In his spring, the traces of our pasts with their own more open futures come bursting through again. This is the hope for humanity - this re-creation of the world, always ready to unfold in each of us. This is where my faith and trust ultimately reside -- in this spring of Thoreau's - this spring that is always upon us or on its way, even or especially on this snowy Sunday in March.