As I said in my last entry, I’m really an idiot. I’m not digging for compliments and I don’t think that I’m insulting God’s creation by saying so: God didn’t make humans essentially smart. He made us essentially loved. And when I compare my intellect to that of someone learned in the faith, I find myself looking pallid and dim—let alone if I were to compare my mind to God Himself, or any of his magnificent angels.
Among many dumb things I’ve done, I turned away from the faith for quite a while. I didn’t practice for nearly seven years, with only a brief flirtation with Episcopalianism for a semester of college. (And when I say flirtation, I do mean it: I had it bad for a priest.) My lapse in faith was a gift of stupidity that continues to give, since it means that as I’ve cultivated friendships with beautiful, devoted men and women, they are all head and shoulders above me when it comes to what they know about the faith. I was lucky to have an excellent religion program at the Catholic high school I attended, and my undergraduate thesis in literature dealt with theology and mysticism, but other than that I find that my mind for God is a little thin, besides what I can eat up in my free time.
But God has an excellent sense of humor, and He knows me: I fear, above anything else, being or looking or sounding stupid, so He gave me a reversion experience that schooled me hard on how I am exactly that. Moreover, my call to return to God was delivered to me, I think, by angels—that is, pure intellect. Badum ksh.
I was living very childishly. I had gotten into a graduate program in poetry that had been a profound disappointment, and I couldn’t find a way to deal with that, because I didn’t know God then, and that He makes all things exultantly beautiful. I was confused and sad, like, all the time, but inescapably, there God was: I was living in an apartment a few blocks away from the cathedral in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I began to go to Mass every now and again, because I had the sneaking suspicion that that was where I was supposed to be. At the first one I went to, the Gospel was about Christ healing the deaf man, and the moment the priest read, “Jesus took him aside from the crowd, by himself, and put His fingers into his ears—” I felt such pain and pressure deep in my own eardrums that I had to bury my head in my hands and squeeze my eyes shut to keep from crying out.
Here’s the kicker, and why I’m the stupidest woman to ever live: that still didn’t get me back. “Huh,” I thought to myself after Mass. “That was odd.” It reminds me of this time in college when I had such a crush on a friend who had told me he wasn’t interested in dating or hooking up with me. One night, we got tipsy together and he kissed me. “Ugh,” I thought to myself as we kissed, “doesn’t it suck how he doesn’t want anything more with me than friendship?” We ended up dating for a few months. Obviously you don’t kiss someone that, um, you’re not interested in kissing. This is the level of density God’s working with here. “May You be blessed, Lord, who put up with me for so long!” Teresa of Avila wrote in the book of her Life. Amen, sister.
But listen: God didn’t come to call those who are already holy; He came to call sinners. And I feel it must follow then that He didn’t come to teach the already-pretty-smart; He came to teach people so stupid that most would be frustrated enough to forsake them. Thank God I’m dumb.
I think he best poets in the world understand their own stupidity quite deeply, because it is really only in the stupid state that glory or beauty or truth can be revealed. John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” begins,
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk …
It’s one of my favorite poems: it’s dreamy, transportive, watery, inky, hallucinatory. It’s not a rational poem. It has a kind of self-generated logic, as all decent poems must in order to achieve epiphany, but it privileges a kind of imaginative work that I think is often frowned upon in intellectual circles. Its triumphant revelation that our sorrows are not our end—“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”—is only possible when the speaker (sorry, that’s annoying MFA formation at work) has departed from his mental faculties. And he never really gets back there, either, even with his solace and truth; the poem ends, “Do I wake or sleep?” It is in stupor (note the etymological twinship with stupid!) that our minds can be made new.
Remember Zechariah? He was in the Temple before the Ark of the Covenant when Gabriel, the Messenger, appeared before him to bring the good news that his wife, Elizabeth, would bear a son who would prepare the way for our good God to come into this world. Zechariah was a pretty smart guy. He said, “Uh, what? I’m, like, very old, and so is my wife, so …” And Gabriel goes, “I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day when these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time.” I always thought this was sort of harsh. It seemed like a pretty reasonable concern and like the punishment was disproportional to the offense—but it occurred to me, in the time when I was turning back to Christ, that it wasn’t truly a punishment at all, but rather a consequence of Zechariah’s attempts to apply human logic to Godly designs. We can’t outsmart Him. We are muted by our own refusals to hear the news, the prophecies that render the future an event that, on God’s time, has already transpired, and will come whether we use our given ears to hear Him or not. Here’s a really fun little pithy way to put it that you can shout me offstage for: our smarts make us dumb. And of course, because our God is a God of inversions and paradox, it was Zechariah’s dumbness that returned him to his good sense. Here was his saving grace: that the first words he spoke when his unlikely son came into the world were to call him John. He redeemed himself by that gift God gave Adam to designate each created thing according to its end, restoring that act to its purpose: to call all beings by that which will make us lift our heads, having been summoned from our deepest sleep by name.
There was one decisive and life-changing night when everything crystalized for me in this awesome and terrible way, and since then I’ve not been able to look back—but it’s too late to write about it, and I feel my head starting to swim. I will leave you with something that occurred to me at Mass tonight: it is beautiful that the word “alleluia” requires that we say it, like Keats’ nightingale, in “full-throated ease.” And think about it: when we say it, our mouths mimic what they do when we drink water. That we need water is a truth even idiots know: we understand it primordially, languagelessly, in both body and soul (and that is partly, I think, why we draw such quick parallels between the rabid and the demonic—but I digress). So the most earnest word of our praising gets us practicing the simplest and purest thing we need to live. Alleluia, merciful God: I’ve been thirsting.