Sprokkelmaand: Revelation

Dear Dirk,

I am sorry, but I have terrible news to report. My sister Marleen is missing.

At first we did not know where she was. She probably sought the end by walking into the Scheldt and swimming toward death. That at least was the only plausible explanation. Her belongings, such as her handbag and car keys, were found on the riverbank.

In all likelihood Marleen stepped into the cold, inhospitable water and swam toward the distance instead of waiting for the ferry. In search of the end of all suffering. Only after two days of searching and anxious uncertainty was her body found.

The funeral went well

The ceremony was held within the family, as discreetly as possible.

Still, it involved some fifty people, but otherwise there would have been hundreds. My parents are fairly well known here in town. No one had the courage to undertake such a mass migration.

The ceremony was filled with tender respect for Marleen. I was able to say a few words. That was important for me. After the cremation I would have liked to have the remains scattered, but our father wanted to give her a gravestone, and so that is what we did. In the end it is a good thing for those of us who remain. There will be a stone.

Marleen herself would not have given a damn, because of the screw she was missing. What also helped, in the process of suffering, is that I was able to see her lying there, as she was on the day I arrived from America: not neatly laid out, but in the cold light of the refrigeration room, inside a thing made of aluminum, yet I clearly recognized her.

I came out of that cold cellar with the conviction that she welcomed death when he presented himself with a grin. That is not the same as saying that she consciously strove to die, but death promises liberation from all torment of the soul, and she knew that.

I also helped my parents to put the inheritance procedures in motion. Not that there is much to inherit, but it has to be done. We cleared out her apartment, or what was left of it. It was astonishing to see how much she camped in disorder, always ready to leave within two minutes, with the bare essentials within reach in one or two bags.

I think this is part of her mental illness. We also found papers. Among them was a piece in which she described, during the month of March, what her neighbors and what her voices were saying. It is not always clear which of the two. I was quite shocked to see how harsh and cruel Marleen is, or was, in some of those loose sheets, feuilles volantes full of poison and venom.

I also discovered a small notebook with intimate thoughts, scribbled down. It begins with her hospitalization. The date of the last entry corresponds to the day she disappeared. At the beginning of this little carnet I noticed, however, that she wrote down almost word for word the tirades she used to rattle off to my parents and me on the phone at that time.

A tape recording that was never recorded, in an endless loop of a message repeated again and again, which she kept speaking anew. Perhaps she was speaking to herself. We have agreed to give the notebooks to the service where she was treated. Perhaps science is capable of extracting honey from all this bile. May we hope that psychiatrists will understand from this what takes place in the human soul?

In her drawings one motif kept returning: a bird. Was it a bird of prey or a little owl? It sat on a twig, with very large eyes and a beak pointing downward. Disapproving, adorned with a combative arrangement of color planes. Too strong a contrast. The image of her disorder. It burst from the page straight into your face through the bizarre use of colors.

I must stop for a moment.

Kind regards,
Linda

Dear Linda,

How sad. What a farewell.

It is very good that you were able to see her dead body. It anchors the gaze in reality in a dreadful way, but it is effective. Marleen is no more. We will have to accept it.

What emotions do not come upon us after such a terrible realization? Anger and disappointment? Regret? Perhaps envy? They are troublesome affections that make the bile rise. You will probably still be able to name a few pitch-black ones. We will talk about it later. In the meantime you must face the challenges.

I will still be here later to listen to you and perhaps to help you discover the other side of the mountain. I embrace you warmly and I am proud of your cool-headedness and self-control, as if you were a little bit my daughter.

Kind regards,
Dirk

P.S. I was struck by the phrase: “The funeral went well.” A cruel title for a sinister story.

~

Dear Dirk,

The wedding went ahead

My brother’s wedding went ahead as planned despite Marleen’s funeral.

It was convenient in a way, because then I did not have to come twice from America. The atmosphere at the festive table was weighed down by a false mood of reinforced concrete, since Marleen was not there this time. Moreover, someone was wandering around in that festive setting whom I cannot forgive, and that is our stepmother, our father’s ex.

She could have spoken when there was still time, and she did not do it. She could at least have delayed the moment, without claiming that Marleen would have reached her end differently or better if she had spoken when she still could. Who knows? Perhaps Marleen might then still have attended her brother’s wedding. But I am being called away by my crying little son.

Kind regards,
Linda

~

Dear Dirk,

The baby is asleep and now I can calmly answer my emails again.

Thank you very much for your words of support. They help me greatly. That being said: do not worry too much. I am going through the normal depressive period that belongs to every work of mourning. I have too many interesting things to do to let myself sink into depression and despair.

What also helps is that I realize Marleen is better where she is now. However hard it is to say it, it is perhaps the best solution for all the parties involved. No one I spoke to could imagine a future project that Marleen might have been able to fulfill.

For instance, taking your medication regularly in order to lead a quasi-normal life. Marleen could not do it. The best we could imagine for her, we who knew her, was a life in a semi-open psychiatric institution, where she could live her life during the day but where she would go to sleep every evening with permanently trained staff nearby, without the torment of money, a place of rest where she could have painted.

Would that have helped her to restrain the symptoms of her illness? I only began to cry when I returned home to my husband and child, back in America. Until then I mostly held back the tears so as not to disappoint my parents, whose suffering is so much greater than mine.

This mourning, in all its moments, leads me to revise my point of departure. Perhaps I am guilty as well, just like our Marleen, in wanting to practice a profession that is not truly ours. It is not necessarily what we were created for, but we do it only to prove that we can.

During our attempts we hurt ourselves, and Marleen did not survive that. Do you remember the project I had in the communications sector? I am not very outspoken and rather gifted in writing. I am working on it, but I still have a long way to go. It will of course take some time before I can live from it, but we need money for the house.

Therefore I will first take a job, but only to make ends meet. I have become aware of something important when a crisis broke out between my husband and myself. I had the feeling that my emotional needs did not receive the right response from my husband. That happens partly because I trigger the wrong reflex in him.

The other reacts to you, to your body language or to the words you speak. The wrong reaction occurs when I am no longer able to listen or to pay attention to his needs. Then he flips out. I am beginning to see it gradually. In order to protect and rebuild myself, I have erected a wall around me that only my little son can break through.

My baby and my infant — though already a small toddler. That Chinese wall around my soul has more to do with the problem than with the solution, I must bitterly admit. I am working on my willingness to listen. I seize every obstacle as an opportunity to grow spiritually. I miss Marleen very much. The crater she has left cannot be filled.

Strangely enough I do not feel that she is far from me. She is near me every day, and sometimes I almost hear her in my head, or I see her mischievous smile when I do something she used to laugh at. Or when I use a trick that would not have escaped her attention.

At the beginning I dreamed of Marleen a few times, a dream in which she was dead and yet seemed alive. I was furious with her for doing all this to us. At the same time I am also dealing actively with grief by writing. I want to be heard. I am looking for an audience. I have written a letter to Oprah Winfrey, the talk-show diva who is hugely successful in America. Why not organize a show about schizophrenia and what it really entails? There is a possibility in the newspaper to submit a short piece.

I am writing, for the moment only in my head but soon on paper. That is always how it works with me, about a subject that should become better known so that lessons can be drawn from it. My little son is waking up again. I embrace you very warmly and until very soon.

Greetings,
Linda

~

Dear Linda,

This short email to tell you that I pray for you, and that time may bring healing for all wounds.

You have seen Marleen again in your dreams. I hope that eternal rest may be granted to her in the bosom of the Lord. But I am thinking especially of you. Will you get through it? All that work of mourning is very good, with its bitterness like coffee, but do not sink into despair. It is a luxury you cannot afford.

But it is good that you see her again. Do not forget that there will always be someone to listen to you; you always have my ear. As long as it pleases God. For now place your family first. Your little son and your husband. Above all listen to good music. Billie Holiday or Wagner — it does not matter.

Mozart’s Requiem is especially recommended. My very last trick twenty years ago was to put on the violin concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven. What power in that music, a life force, a will. Take a little of my life force tonight. Or seek counsel from a good and preferably dead author, such as Saint Teresa.

Until soon. I embrace you very strongly.

Warm regards,
Dirk

P.S. I myself am listening to reggae.

~

Work of mourning

Dear Dirk,

I have been back home since the end of July and things are organizing themselves a little.

You think it is a cruel title: “The funeral went well.” Yes, it is so. I was able to say a few words during the ceremony. Her ashes are in the city cemetery, something she herself would not have granted herself. I spoke with the psychiatrist who treated her. Now I understand why Marleen could not be locked up.

To my irritation and regret I also learned quite a few unpleasant things about the sorceress who manipulated us. Marleen and I were defenselessly delivered into the hands of this bat broken loose from hell, who used us to advance herself, at the expense of our father. A pale vampire with fiery red lips.

She is the only one with whom Marleen spoke in the days preceding the end. The witch herself told me about it, when Marleen was already dead. She was the only one who knew, and even after the funeral she told no one, until she confided it to me.

I remained reasonably strong until I could fall into the arms of my husband again at home in America. My parents did not need me to collapse. Later I cried more. The wedding went well, except during the taking of the photographs. Brothers and sisters together in a picture — that was a difficult moment for me. We are no longer complete. I will write more later, but my baby will not leave me alone for the moment.

Kind regards,
Linda

~

Dear Linda,

I am truly not convinced by your project as you set it out.

You will need a good two years to process this. That is why it is also better not to design projects for the time being. Believe me, just occupy yourself with your family. Tenderness, however wounded, has not been erased. First love, and only afterwards ask questions — that is the motto of Saint Teresa and of the Holy Curé of Ars.

You are there where you are now. This is the moment. Do not worry about tomorrow. I send you my prayers, hoping that Our Dear Lord and the Virgin Mother may grant you a wonderful day. You have been wounded by love and you will be healed by love.

I am very grateful to you for finding the time to describe the state of your soul more clearly, because in the meantime an exaggerated estimation had taken hold of me. I feared that you would abandon yourself to despair. I know you as a sensitive soul and a sensible mind. I can identify with you quite a bit, and I sometimes imagine that our reflexes and reactions are similar.

It is as if I can feel your pain, and I hope that I may help relieve it a little in my own way. I am full of tenderness for you, and I admire what you have done before the eyes of the outside world, and the work you carry out within yourself — your inner life — before and after the funeral of your sister.

 

The death toll of madness

What a shipwreck, the end of Marleen.

The life and death of a psychotic person. Recently a girl was missing. Another one who failed to reconcile her developed intelligence with her excessive emotional world. We will miss her.

What astonishes most of all is the inventiveness and subtlety of the sharpened mind that searches for an extreme way out. For many years the deranged madmen always manage to find an escape from disasters and other incomparable catastrophes where a normal person would go under.

They go on like that until the spring breaks and it is over — and then it is suddenly finished. Bang, crackle and crash. What elasticity, what capacity to endure they have before that point is reached! Madness can take different forms: the irredeemable shortage in the cash box in the case of melancholy, the fundamental fear in the case of persecution mania. And so on.

Some key passion takes the place of the entire emotional life and wipes out what remains of bonds and attachments. Disordered souls become unguided projectiles that detach themselves from society and sometimes end up in orbit around the earth, where they can no longer be helped, not even by great quantities of caring love and sacrifices.

These unfortunate people are constantly driven by an unresolved basic impulse to disturb their own mental well-being and that of their wider environment. The suffering they feel within themselves is so great that they never feel at peace and constantly search for a new — hopeless because false — remedy.

They flee forward and open the remaining doors. Thus they unfailingly arrive again and again at that single door that leads to even more and greater suffering. Everywhere they go, they carry their torment with them. We who loved them remain behind, bewildered and stunned, because their suffering drags ours along in its rushing whirlpool.

Our pain thins out and dissolves in their endless downfall. They are not aware of our torment of the soul, because theirs is so much greater. Perhaps that is why they depart before it is time, far too early in our estimation. They take leave long before it was necessary for us. One feels powerless. The world seems inhospitable and cold when things like this happen.

Delusion

It is cruel and meaningless.

Try for a moment to imagine that you are walking in the shoes of a delusional person. You constantly feel the inner disorder. Because of a leaking cell membrane in your brain cell you never have a stable mood. You do not have yourself under control and you often feel unwell. Day after day you sway back and forth between excitement and depression.

Or you may feel exceptionally good, but without realizing it you are out of harmony with your surroundings and you perform foolish or troublesome acts. You behave theatrically, or you become aggressive. You seem the plaything of shifting emotional states, without succeeding in bringing any overview into them.

The strange thing is that this peculiar behavior varies, changes, alternates, from hour to hour or from day to day, cyclically or chaotically. You yourself do not notice that you are crossing boundaries, or that no one can follow you anymore. You are no longer able to color within the lines, and you do not notice that others do notice it.

Delusion can be compared to a blind spot on the retina of the intellect. That is because, my beloved, certain ideas can no longer be erased from your mind, so that as a consequence a loss of contact with reality occurs.

That is, after all, what happens in delusion: reality has changed sides. Immediately the question arises: who knows what is truly true and real? Who knows who is deluded? Do I know? Who can distinguish truth from delusion? That is a lot of questions at once.

As a caregiver toward the person asking for help, I assume that I myself am not deluded, because I am paid to be real. There is no other test. In practice, truth and falsehood constantly intersect. Anyone can be deluded or tell the truth, without any label attached to them telling us which it is.

The solution is to be found in competent care, and that is the fruit of the professional development of the caregiver. With some experience you develop a nose for it when people react psychotically. You immediately notice signs that in the past would have escaped attention. It is difficult to explain exactly what gives it away.

Conversation sometimes is no longer possible in two directions, certainly when it concerns particular subjects that are emotionally charged, colored, and often richly nuanced. It is not a judgment. Many psychotic people function very well in society. They certainly do not all fail. It probably concerns, in the majority of cases, respectable citizens.

Those who do fall prey to a consuming and destructive delusion when they become deranged must nevertheless be helped, and there are more of them than you think, and not all of them find their way to care. The best thing that can happen to many of these mentally ill people is to end up in the right form of care, and that is why I plead for greater accessibility, but also for possibilities of choice and escape.

Not strangling care, where the disturbed soul is made dependent or silenced so that the disturbing behavior disappears and that is the end of it, but a care that tries to make the best of the possibilities that every human being carries within.

The aim must always be to improve or enlarge the independence, and therefore also the personal freedom, of the person. To give the wounded human being back to himself, healed, as a better person. Is that not the idea of care that lay behind the bathroom procedure? But are we reaching our target group?

Look at them walking there, the hordes of deranged psychotics, among whom Ibrahim has taken his place in the disordered ranks. They wander from one facility to another, vainly searching for care, always on guard against suffocating forms of assistance, or fleeing from the authorities in order to hide in the gaps and crevices of the urban fabric. The homeless, those struck from the rolls.

The prisons are full of madmen who do not belong there. Suffering fellow beings are everywhere where things are not right. Quite a few alcoholics are unrecognized or at least concealed psychotics. Or rather hidden delusionals. Psychosis raises its head everywhere, and a normal person would become paranoid from it. Wouldn’t I?

Characteristic of psychosis is by definition the delusion, or a mistaken representation of reality caused by an error in thinking. Delusion can pass, and in delirium anyone can have delusions, but congenital madness on the other hand is a condition without end or beginning that lasts an entire lifetime, until that life eventually stops. That is a personality disorder that never goes away.

That is the whole business of mental health care: distinguishing between a passing impulse and a disorder. Madness sometimes unleashes itself as a terrible illness that destroys human lives. The suffering that follows from it, for the person and his or her partner, brings us to caring love as the only remedy.

Caring love, my tender beloved, is our weapon and our support in the struggle against suffering and death and madness at the same time. That struggle cannot exist without care and it cannot exist without love. In the darkness of human existence the relationship of care is the only source of light.

The suffering that you carry out together will be deducted at the final reckoning. The problem lies less in giving than in receiving caring love. Few people are able to receive love; many long to be able to give it. But both sides know that no bond of care exists without suffering.

To endure that, an unshakable trust in each other is needed, and humor to get through the day. It will happen here and now, and what does not happen now is not worth the trouble. It is no longer meaningful to chase shadows.

Is there a truth and a reality, or must one simply believe everything?

Retrospect

Let us take a brief look back.

Before we conclude shortly, let us summarize our line of thought once again. First came the paralysis, and then the upheaval, ending in rapture, for all good things come in threes in classical mysticism.

Like in a kaleidoscope the images return upon the retina. They flow into one another as you lay there in February, unable to move, inside one of those hellish machines into which they put sick people in hospitals. The tilt and the spiral through which you had to pass.

After this oppressive introduction we began with purification, and more concretely the cleansing procedure in the bathroom. It was the first phase of the resurrection process, and perhaps the most pleasant. It began with removing all clothing and superfluities.

The intention is to bring the boy back to his bare essence. His naked being. His being there, without instruments or aids. His visible reality. This is important if, at the end of the journey, we wish to succeed in giving the present boy back to himself as a better person, as we have stated from the very beginning.

Secretly I call that in Latin the restitutio ad integrum, or the complete restoration of the little son, in body and soul, and in his created wholeness. Except for a transformed daughter, ex-little-prince sixteen, who forms the exception to the rule, they are incidentally all little sons whom we treat in this way, for with little daughters we can usually do nothing in the bathroom department, though much more in spiritual exchange.

The short-lived little brothers must be clean. I cannot summarize the purification more briefly than that.

Illumination

Once the boy has been cleaned, pure and wrapped in a clean bathrobe, he is placed in the light.

Observed, questioned. In this way a personal exchange always arises naturally. If the little son wishes to take the lead, that is possible. In practice the two phases of purification and illumination are naturally always intertwined.

It cannot be indicated where the washing ends and the inspection begins, since the cleaning and the examination take place at the same time, in constant interaction with explanation. The father quietly propels the process forward with the appropriate word or gesture.

The person of the bath guest, the little son in short, stands at the center. The father adopts a flexible attitude and remains widely open to son-like sighs and complaints. But that does not exhaust the matter. The word illumination evokes something else as well.

All light comes from God and God is love. For a Christian there is also the grace of Christ, the Son of Man par excellence, and the immaculate Virgin Mother. Because this is in intention a French book, we must eventually conclude with a Christian ending.

We do not wish thereby to do our Levantine little sons any injustice. Bismillahi rahmani rahim. In every religion there are figures who look kindly upon humanity, and who do so all the more when we care for one another and render good services to each other.

Of the Virgin Mother, for instance, it is known among Muslims that she always kept her simple house clean and that she never lost her chastity, and the toolbox of Saint Joseph was always tidy. Each little chisel in its own compartment, as we read in pious authors. The little Jesus himself already took care of that at a very young age by helping his foster father with the sorting.

Later in life Christ liked to have his feet washed by public women, and he appreciated it when they dried his feet with their hair. When people objected to this he strongly disapproved and called them hypocrites and whitewashed tombs.

Yes, in those days people still interacted spontaneously with one another, and that has become so difficult in our mega-technical metropolis. On the other hand we must thank the building industry of the capital for erecting the beautiful building where we now live, with electricity, and above all clean water at every hour of the day, in a quantity that theoretically should be able to put several boys in the bath every day.

Union

I pray for you, between my writing tasks, for the healing of the wound of love that has been struck, nourished by the great absence, my beloved.

The mystical goal of the bathroom procedure is union. The concept has been extensively discussed in this book. In itself the union does not have to take place every time. In reality almost all cases of actual washing in my bathroom have ended, without any union, in a conclusion satisfactory to all parties.

Virtual union is another matter, but there is no space left to elaborate. The bathroom method in practice is a funnel that stands wide open at the beginning, for all boys are capable of being put in the bath and undergoing purification.

The tube narrows in the middle, for unfortunately not all boys qualify for illumination. They fall through the sieve during the selection procedure because their mind is too dark, either because their moment has not yet come, or because it has already passed.

As for the permeability of the pipe system, in short the diameter of the pipe, the chapter of union is the narrowest. The boy does not need to know that. If something goes wrong at the beginning, I let nothing show. We simply continue as if nothing had happened. I quickly know that it will not come to union: either the boy is not suitable, or he himself does not want it.

Or he has not yet reached the right maturity. “Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts off, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15). Out of evangelical mercy I usually say nothing about it, for I do not wish to hurt anyone.

You shall not break the bruised reed. Everyone receives a fair chance, but it often happens that we part peacefully yet ununited. I then settle the matter to everyone’s satisfaction, without however being able to surrender myself to the union. I will never reveal any of these secrets.

For union, I have learned by now, surrender is necessary, and that cannot occur without the grace of revelation. How could I surrender myself to a boy who failed during the phase of illumination? Let alone if a problem arises during purification, for example if unhealthy stains appear that are difficult to wash away, or if there is a dental problem, because I cannot stand that. Dental problems! Go away! To the dentist and back! Or if the little sons have illnesses, for then it is a crisis.

Purification and illumination make it possible, in a single effort, to detect a number of illnesses and to verify whether treatment has been sought. Purification may occur frequently, illumination many times, but union is singular — to speak with Ruusbroec.

The phenomenon of union is so rare that a number of mystical authors doubt its existence. Have two people ever truly been united, or has any creature ever become one with his or her Creator?

According to optimistic authors the grace of union need only take place once in order to fill a hole in the emptiness of existence: the absence of the other, feared and hated, with his measure and measuring rod by which the dimensions of reality are determined.

Since the union took place, the drive has diminished, and in the last weeks since it happened I no longer feel the same urge, for the absence had briefly disappeared and that reduces the impulse. I can think clearly again. Because I now understand my finitude all too well, the remaining time has become all the more precious.

I had to suffer a thrombosis to come myself into contact with help and care and to ask myself whether I myself am not behaving in a disturbed way. It cannot be explained that in my life and in my practice I encounter and attract so many psychotics unless I am one myself. But then I must be a rather well-regulated psychotic.

Perhaps there are ways of dealing with a disturbance of the soul and keeping it in check. Do some people have a guardian angel? Otherwise I would not now be sitting here comfortably in my cozy loft typing this little book, while so many lost fellow beings languish in prisons where they do not belong. Or wander homeless. Or build an artistic career.

Or do something in the media in order to sink into the quicksand of generalized meaninglessness. The silent cry for help of those who commit suicide, like Marleen, is scarcely heard.

Revelation

Gone are the days when it seemed as though we carried a black hole within us.

Who still remembers the immeasurable heaviness in the pit of our soul, a darkness so hungry for light that it absorbs every ray, without ever returning any gleam or reflection, or letting any light escape?

If I was sometimes difficult with others and hard to live with, it was because this darkness weighed upon me and put my soul to the test. What matters is to turn one’s gaze away from that lowest horizon and direct it higher, toward the clouded sky, in order to detach oneself for a moment from the gravity that pulls you downward.

Look up to the heavenly bodies in their revolutions in order to become light like them. Float upward. Our soul possesses the wondrous capacity to change, to transform itself into something new, and let us hope to unfold. In order to do that one must also let go of many things, thanks to the delete key.

In my despair, searching for truth, I gladly sought my way out in literature, and in emergencies in the Holy Scriptures. Take the apostle Paul, for instance, in Hebrews 9:19: “He took the blood of calves and goats with water, scarlet wool and hyssop and sprinkled the book and all the people.” As a bathroom procedure, that counts.

It is food for the delete key. Verse 22 a little further on can be summarized rather grimly as: “According to the Law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” The apostle is here explaining the Old Law, we must add in fairness.

He does so in order to contrast it shortly afterward with the New Testament. Since then we wash with water, and if necessary with wine, no longer with bloodshed. Not that anyone today still cares what was written in Scripture, and nobody understands it anymore, or knows what hyssop is. A plant. And then it is time to become cynical again.

What matters rather is to arrange one’s own life as comfortably as possible, so that one may every day abandon oneself without restrictions to reflections and meditations on great and small matters, from the war in the Middle East to the art of tying shoelaces. And from time to time a pinch of mysticism — that is quite enough.

Thinking that leads to forgiveness and to forgetting. Musing in order knowingly to press the delete key at the end. Let us look toward the future. This book is almost finished. Only a final chapter remains to be filled in. We will receive a play with frozen images. A feeling of oppression is the final feeling that remains.

Strangulation, stiffening, sugaring, fattening, saponification. Drying out, coagulation. Dehydration from the whisky I had drunk. Hardening of the arterial walls and thickening of the circulatory fluid. Congestion in the erectile bodies. The clumping together of platelets with the help of somewhat scorched cholesterol. I think that during the frantic movements during the bathroom chat micro-clots formed in the erectile bodies, tiny ones that took the route through the small circulation toward the brain.

Paralysis

Enough. I take my little aspirin for the heart.

Where can thrombosis patients find comfort? Where can they cast their gaze in search of encouraging words or the caress of a successful phrase? Where do letters, pleasant people and reflection come together better, my beloved little treasure, the spring of my spiritual refreshment, than in the theater?

I take you with me, my dearest treasure, in soothing words, to the seventeenth century, to a Jesuit college of that time. There we meet Father Jean-Joseph Surin in the gently shining years of his old age. A kindly old man in a patched cassock. A dented psychotic patient in a time when the concept had not yet been invented.

If you do not know any better you simply see an old man with a goatee, a somewhat grimy robe and a complicated life behind him. He never saw the coachman’s boy again, but he still remembers it. That at least. The old father attracts little attention.

He shuffles along on foot and drags himself to the festive hall of the Jesuit college, with a clerical collar under his crooked chin and a skullcap on his bald head, hoping to attend the theatrical performance. At first sight, who would want to invite this damaged priest to his table?

Yet within him lives a radiant soul that forms a beacon of light for many penitents. How many people are not seeking his ear to make their confession, or striving for enlightenment of their spiritual faculties? These thirsty souls find their way in growing numbers to his listening, forward-leaning figure.

He becomes ever more famous. You would not say so, but every writing of this old confessor, be it letter, note or scribble, is read and copied, exchanged and passed on in pious circles, notably through women’s convents, from the Garonne beyond the Loire, in Brittany, throughout much of the southwestern quarter of France.

The life of this frail old man has not been spared suffering. He was ill for more than twenty years. During all that time he could no longer walk and took no part in social life. The remarkable thing is that in his later years he was healed of his disorders through the power of faith, after the spiritual suffering that we have summarized for you.

In his earlier history we find a suicide attempt in 1645. By throwing himself from a window in a retreat house for tired fathers above a river, Father Surin tried to take his own life. The estate possessed a breathtaking castle built on a cliff in the bend of the stream. He jumped from a high window.

It still ended well. Jean-Joseph crawled through the eye of the needle physically crippled but spiritually intact, and he limped for the rest of his life after the accident. Around the year 1660 he was freed both from his paralysis and from the torments of his soul through the intervention of another father who knew the right word to speak.

One day during confession the fatherly words fell from the younger mouth, that of the confessor: “You are not condemned.”

Father Surin reflects and asks: “Do you mean that?”

“God condemns no one, not even you. The Lord weighs for eternity our specific gravity according to our good actions, not according to our bad nature. The human heart may be corrupted, but the Lord is benevolent in His judgment for anyone who freely accepts all His Grace, and He has mercy on our faith and on our works.”

“You really mean it?”

“The Supreme Judge does not hold against us what we did not choose, nor what was imposed upon us as a yoke. Man stands before his Creator at the end of time responsible for his own choices during his own life and nothing more.”

Tears run down the cheeks of the old Father Surin.

“You are not condemned,” the comparatively young confessor repeats once more, speaking the liberating word. It resounds in his ears like a Sesame, open yourself. From that moment Father Surin limps and shuffles again along the roads of France, active in the care of souls for many years.

He is healed from twenty years of illness and paralysis. What a life of suffering! Devastated by madness, yet purified and brought to insight. It is in those grace-filled years at the end of his life that we present him here. The fathers have given the occasion a festive character.

 

Banquet Hall

The banquet hall of the Jesuit college is pleasantly filled with a gentle murmur as spectators stream in.

Stage performances were very common in Jesuit colleges, then and now. Acting was part of the education. Before the performance begins, Jean-Joseph Surin, in a mended cassock, carefully climbs down to the side of the parterre. The grey father is equipped with a cane, but he is near-sighted and he limps.

Fortunately a young brother supports him under the elbow. The old confessor hangs crookedly, like a broken umbrella, suspended from the strong figure of the youthful monk. He sits down among the audience: an emaciated old man without any appearance of distinction. He sits bent over and he drools a little.

Only the older people know who he is. “Father Surin.” A stumbling block according to some, a blissfully wise man according to others. A madman according to many. His principal claim to fame is still the role he played much earlier during the affair of the Devils of Loudun, described in detail by Aldous Huxley.

The good fathers saw in theatre an excellent means of bringing sacred texts to life as spoken word. They were elaborate spectacles, devised to move the hearts of the young and of their families. The plays that were staged were attended by the assembled mothers and fathers. Theatre was a powerful instrument of propaganda among the population, at a time when television did not yet exist.

The fathers acknowledged the power of images. There is no more effective way of transmitting knowledge to the masses. The fathers wished to present the churchgoing public with a new face of religion by showing unprecedented images. Among other things they did this through still scenes, the tableau vivant, organized in the school theatre for an eager audience always ready for a religious diversion.

During one of the scenes the old Father Surin can see himself at work as a young exorcist. The young version of himself on the stage is played by a made-up pupil from the grammar class, placed alive but motionless in the depiction devoted to the episode of the exorcisms at Loudun.

The possessed nuns lie on planks, bound and clothed in penitential robes, played by the boys of the grammar class. Sister Mary of the Angels is lying there performing wonders, a little too much perhaps. Living actors portray the scene without speaking or moving. A father at the side provides expert commentary, interspersed with biblical quotations and sound effects.

Curtain. Shuffling behind the invisible stage. Father Surin has fallen asleep. Then he wakes up.

Ecce Homo

The curtain rises again.

A tormented man looks at us. His face is skilfully illuminated. The audience utters a general sigh of horror. The suffering person in view, a man, sits on a stool and leans against a small column, bare-chested with visible nipples, precisely lit, incompletely covered by a purple cloak.

About thirty years old, with beard and long locks of hair. He wears a crown woven from thorns. He looks at us with moist eyes in which candles, torches and mirrors are reflected. He says nothing, but it is clear how he suffers. He is covered with traces of blood from the scourging and from the crown of thorns.

Ecce homo. Spat upon by the executioner, there he sits, the humiliated Saviour, scourged, mocked, seated on the cold stone, with a reed in his hand, his mock sceptre, his ridiculous shepherd’s staff. An image of deep sadness, mourning and lamentation.

There is much laughter around him. His tormentors roar with laughter about the kingdom of God he so often proclaimed. They laugh at the mad king of the kingdom of madness, in this corner of the Roman Empire, or in seventeenth-century France, and even now in 2003 as I write this, or later when you read this, my beloved?

The word has been spoken irrevocably. The logos. The word of redemption. Everywhere Christ suffers there is love. Since then each day unfolds into a new today as history unwinds, and the silent suffering becomes tangible in unheard care-love, in the uninterrupted present that spreads over more than twenty centuries.

To speak with Surin himself: “Through the centuries betrayed, mocked, humiliated, exhibited and dragged through the mud: thus our Tormented Redeemer looks at us in the depths of his suffering, at a moment when he is utterly broken, in a foreshadowing of the torture on the cross. Thus he sees us and stares us in the face.”

Then the cries of the people are heard: Crucify him! The monastery choir evokes this atmosphere in polyphony. Pilate (preferably a bass) asks: “Whom shall I release, Jesus or Barabbas?” in a curiously questioning tone. “Barabbas,” the people shout through the voice of the excited school choir.

Under the music the freshly washed choirboys look down in unison at the suffering man who there plays Christ upon the cold stone. It is the mathematics teacher sitting there in costume and make-up, wigged and powdered in the wondrous theatre light, looking at us with his foolish reed staff and his crown of thorns.

The Madness of the Lord

Whiplashes and curses.

La Pazzia del Signore! La Folie du Seigneur! According to Saint Ignatius of Loyola we must not flee the madness of the Lord but rather imitate it. “Just as Christ, treated as a fool on the cold stone, mocked and derided, so we go through the world, madmen of faith, established in the Humanity of the Redeemer, however much this may expose us to mockery and scorn.” Or again: “Let them call us fools and consider us deranged. Our madness comes from the Lord, despised as He was by the world. Filled with love we are, in and for Jesus Christ, Who suffered for us and washed our original sin white by taking our suffering upon Himself.”

The source and foundation of every mystical experience is suffering. Our own suffering measured against the suffering of Christ is nothing and negligible, and that is the final measure. Father Surin writes: “Suffering is for the Christian a cause for joy, if he suffers not for his own wickedness but for the name of Christ.”

The surviving thoughts of this crippled father form a balm for the soul. Much becomes clear to me concerning my choices. To mortify my self-love, to sacrifice unspeakable desires, to think only of the Bridegroom, to be of service to the little sons. To make myself small, to give up my book-learning. To become myself a little bit like Christ upon the cold stone.

To be glad when others take me for a fool, insofar as I draw this scorn upon myself out of love for the Lord. Whiplashes resound. Choir and organ make themselves heard. “My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him, and in My Name his horn shall be exalted. Ps. 88:25.”

The lighting effects are far ahead of their time. A careful imitation of thunder resounds, and lightning is produced with magnesium powder. By appealing to all the senses, the fathers manage to create a glimpse of timelessness and a foundation for personal reflection, nourishment for meditation, humus for faith.

Father Surin, with his crooked little bird-like head, looks his Tormented Redeemer in the flashing eyes and gazes lost into a fathomless Look that, after long wanderings over the audience, has bored itself into his field of vision.

Finale

The timpanist gives it a mighty blow.

By artificial light the banquet-hall scene has turned into a lugubrious temple building, with heavy shadows, organ tones and flickering candles. On the lowered backdrop, thanks to the magic lantern, Christ upon the cold stone can still be seen, executed in a many-metre-high chiaroscuro and grisaille.

To quote Thomas à Kempis in the Imitation of Christ: “The whole life of Jesus Christ was a continual cross and suffering, and you yourself seek rest and joy! You err if you seek anything other than to be tormented and to suffer: for this mortal life is full of miseries and everywhere beset with crosses.”

“For God’s Beauty”

After Saint Teresa Ahumada, called Teresa of Ávila

O Beauty,
surpassing every beauty!
Without wounding Thou dost cause pain
and without pain Thou bringest to nothing
the love of creatures.

O knot, thus binding
two things so different,
I know not why thou loosest thyself
where, bound, thou givest strength
to consider afflictions a good.

He who does not possess being thou joinest
to Infinite Being.

Finishing without finishing,
loving without anything to love,
Thou makest great our nothingness.

End of the novel