Tag: frederick Buechner

Why Are We Avoiding Paradise?

This past weekend was full of endings and beginnings.  Friday was Halloween, which – of course – marks the end of my favorite month, but is also the Eve of All Saints Day, when we remember the saintly dead.  That is followed by All Souls Day, when we remember all the dead. And, of course, it was the beginning of a new month, and the time when we turned back the clocks.  A propitious time for self-reflection.  November is the time of year which corresponds (metaphorically) with my age.  I have a few challenges ahead of me in the next few weeks, but both the young trick-or-treating ghouls and the thoughts of lost souls remind me of how good it is to be alive.  We somehow left Paradise behind as we grew up; can we regain it in old age?

That we are already in Paradise is something that is hard to comprehend and easy to forget.  I think often of the words of Joko Beck in her wonderful Everyday Zen (where she seems to talk directly to John Milton!):

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained.  Why?  Because you cannot avoid this moment.  You may not be awake to it, but it is always here.  You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.

You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.   Can it be true that the pathetic work of our long lives has been to hold paradise at bay?

Did we have paradise once and lose it?  Or did we just push it into a corner and place a fierce angel to guard the gates?  James Baldwin is much taken with such thoughts of paradise.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. (Giovanni’s Room)

Wordsworth is sure that, as infants, we brought paradise (trailing clouds of glory) into the world with us, but lost it, forgot it, along the way:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

But why should we forget?  From “The Old Fools” by Philip Larkin, one of the most miserable and cynical poems about old age there is, comes this remarkable passage:

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.

“The million-petalled flower of being here.”  If that is not paradise, if just the possibilities and potentialities of “being here” is not paradise, I do not know what is. And yet, I forget.  We all forget.  As Frederick Buechner puts it, we allow “Too good not be true” to turn into “too good to be true.”  In other words, paradise is all around us; we ourselves have put up the barriers, the angels with their shining swords are hired by us and paid a monthly wage to stop us from going back to where we belong.  Is that it? 

Beck implies that being old, being closer to death, should help us along with this process, if we let it.

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way they want it to.  Then they can see that the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below] – because that’s all there is, this very moment.

No one but we, ourselves, can dismiss the flaming swords. It is our paradise to take or to leave. No teacher needed, no secret key.  Here is some more advice from Joko Beck:

I’ll tell you how far I’d walk to see a new teacher: maybe across the room, no farther! It isn’t because I have no interest in this person; it’s just that there is no one who can tell me about my life except—who? There is no authority outside of my experience. There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher. It’s the only authority that you need to trust. And this teacher, this authority, is everywhere.

Old people have seen a lot of life.  If there is one thing that we have, it is experience.  We need to trust ourselves, dismiss the shining swords, and enter the paradise that is ours by right.  What are the odds that we would even exist?  That we should persist over all these decades?  We beat those odds; we should be glad to collect the prize.  Or, at least, that is what I keep telling myself. 

I’ll end on this bright November day with a quote from Emerson:

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.  (from “New England Reformers”)

In our old age, let’s storm the gates of Paradise.   Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in your midst.  Beck and Emerson tell us all we have to do is to change our perspective.  Change is hard in old age, but perhaps we could at least try.  Time is short.

Several years ago, I wrote a story about a woman’s misguided attempts to create paradise on earth, rather than just opening her eyes to it.  You can find it here.  I also posted a strange story about one last trip “Back to the Garden,” about finding paradise at the very last minute. 

This Old House

In trying to find a house in the right location in a tight market, my husband and I ended up buying an old house – one that is close in age to ourselves, a 1950’s house with a lot of character and a lot of problems.  It was not the wisest of decisions, but we have always made our housing decisions with our heart and not our brains, and, in the past, we have been able to make things work.  This time, however, we are old and tired, and I am not so sure.  The house has charm, but it is the charm of an old flirt in a wheelchair.

This is not the oldest house we have owned; that prize goes to a beauty we bought in 1999, which had been given to the couple we bought it from as a wedding present from her father.  It was immaculately kept up – not modernized, just kept up.  It had the original cherry kitchen cabinets with a built-in flour sifter.  That house was like people who take care of themselves their whole lives, and do not succumb to either bad habits or cosmetic surgery.  The old house we are in now was not kept up, and all too often, modern “updates” were grafted onto deeper problems.  It has gracious bones but needs both detox and some reconstructive surgery.

Obsolete appliances and rotting wood have got me thinking about the analogies between old houses and old people – a very popular analogy.  I recently ran into this by Frederick Buechner (from Whistling in the Dark):

Old age is not, as the saying goes, for sissies.  There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it’s like living in a house that’s in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn’t work right anymore.  There are bats in the attic.  Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there’s a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather.  The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on.

Buechner’s analogy, of course, reminded me of the old revival song, “This Old House,” by Stuart Hamblen, written about the time that my house was built:

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer, ain’t a-gonna need this house no more.

Ain’t got time to fix the shingles, ain’t got time to fix the floor.

Ain’t got time to oil the hinges or to mend the window pane,

Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer I’m getting ready to meet the saints.

Rosemary Clooney had the first hit with the song, but everyone from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson has recorded it.  It was supposedly inspired when Hamblen, while out on a hunting expedition with John Wayne (who else would you go hunting with in the Sierras?), came across a broken-down house where an old dog was guarding his dead master.  Believe that if you want.  The song has a catchy tune and great rhythm, but I think the song mostly resonates because it tells a great truth.  Hamblen reminds us that as the body deteriorates, we are getting closer and closer to not needing it anymore, and that is just how life is – so we might as well sing about it.

I need my body now, however, and partly I need it to make this house livable.  I need it to build a new life one more time.  But I also need to stop hearing my husband moan as he unearths (literally) some new problem.  (Though he denies it, the man is a saint.)

So, we try to cope with this old house in our old age.  Probably a mistake.  Surely feels like a mistake many days.  But maybe the process has some redeeming lessons about accepting what old is.  You can paint it, prop it up, make it over, but it is still an old house.  In the end, one can only enjoy its charms, but that is only possible if you can contain the angst and come to a kind of peace about aging, senescence.  In the Prologue to his Rule, the great St. Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.” (See my earlier post, “The Truce of Saint Benedict and Rules of the Road.”) A truce, not a war.  We will fix the house the house as we are able and as we try to “safeguard love.”  We will try to remember that we are fortunate – to grow old, to have a roof, to be busy with meaningful chores.  And we came here to be near family, and there are no regrets in that regard.  As I look at our teenage grandchildren, I wonder how they see us.  And then I think of this old house again.  I hope they think that we have some charm.