Before The Dance Begins

It is the day after the last day in October.
All but few oak leaves from height have fallen.
Scattered. Gathered in groups and companies;
As children may among gardens and lawns.
I will sit and sift among my memories
While wind’s twist whips dead leaves into blur.

But that October’s thirty one days are gone

I cannot think why I should begin.

I close my eyes to prevent the outside’s
Presence, its insinuous intrusion,
Should dancing leaves seduce with windy
Intricacies and cause me to hide
From some shuddering memory.

Is this the reason for rising from my bed?
To sort my mind’s blue moments dressed
Already, rounded, wrapped in haze like hills
Passed yesterday, seen again with regret?
The reason, yes, to have risen-
And moved into another room?

To find the door unopened was no surprise.
To know if it was the way in or out
I could not say with certainty.

A cold breeze, a brief rain breaks
Across meadow and woods beyond
Besieging day and bringing doubt.

Where do the secrets lay among
The blue heaps of memory
All of them laid about
And all of them mine?

I see the saint’s and sinner’s eye within
Reflected, clear as virtue cold as sin,
Regarding me regarding them more or less
And all is I.  The things that I have done,
The people whom I have done with pass
In truth, seen reluctantly or full of joy
While rain beats incessantly outside.

Still, the naked trees weep leaves no more.
Their bright tears litter lawns and woodland’s floor.
I sigh in recollection now and clearly see
The high sun awake and full inside me.

The sun, original of my early days
No storm could darken long,
Spreading light like syrup
Over old blue hills now leafed in gold
Has returned, is strong.

I wished some to stay and so thought I’d choose
Which were worth affection and which respect
Which to keep within and which to cut loose.
I found something different. Now think no less
Of one than of them all, nor more of all
Than one.  They are each forever mine
Who in light’s bright truth knows he should not try
To keep particular quantities of time
In reverence aside for pleasant recall
But own what is my own
And love what love has shown.

This is a day then of recognition
Not of regret nor any part of it.
I will get up from my recollection
And join the throng who sing,
Whose voices in truth eternally ring
Before the throne where both love and truth sit,
Praising Him from whom all mercy flows:
“Gaudeamus omnes in Domino!”

I looked up at the sky as I walked out to the car.  Cloud islands were underlit by the just risen sun. Shades of rose and gold colored them and I imagined myself actually looking down on a strange landscape from a great height, another place; looking down on the hills and plains of these islands slowly moving by surrounded by a powder blue sea.  Away in the distance a fanfare of coppery golden light announced the sun’s actual arrival.  As Mariellen and I got into the car and drove off to meet the young student we take to school each morning I thought it would be the same kind of day it was ten years ago; the same kind of peaceful warm day.

The previous night Mariellen, whose presence in my life is such a blessing, had mentioned that the next day would be the tenth anniversary of Sheila’s “graduation”.  I thought then how much the two of them are alike.  If it had been the other way round, the same reminder would have been made, the same charity shown, the same care taken.

I remember that day.  I awoke from a brief sleep on the floor beside the couch where Sheila had spent almost all of her time the previous three months.  She still slept so I gathered the cushions I had been sleeping on and returned them to the couch in the living room, ran upstairs and took a shower, dressed and came down to find her awake.

Would she eat something, I wondered?  Tea was all she wanted.  I brought her tea and some toast, a piece of an apple.

She sipped the tea.  For possibly the hundredth time she accepted a small bit of toast, a bite of the apple and weakly waved away the rest of the meager meal, smiling that she would try again later, but I should leave the tea.  It was as it had been for years rich, black, strong Irish tea.  It would grow cold waiting for her next sip.

Outside the day got on.  It seemed as if summer had returned, bright and sweet as a morning should be.  It would be a fine day.  I opened windows to let in the sounds of birds flying by on their morning rounds, the odd dog barking at the kids off to school.  I had my own cup of tea in the chair nearby in the little room where we both had lived while we waited for Sheila to die.

Ten days before she’d come home from the hospital where she almost had died and then, miraculously I had thought, rallied.  For about a week she had returned to me with all her wit and spirit intact.  In spite of all the other evidence in front of me this gave me reason to hope.  I didn’t dare hope for the great miracle of a complete cure.  Even thinking about that made me fear presumption’s sin.  Could God do that for me?  I didn’t dare to wonder, or plead.  But I did wonder and hope that God would let her see Christmas and the new year, the new century; let us see it together.

The other hopes, of trips back to Ireland, visits and vacations together, simple days growing old, these things I’d put away with less and less regret as their time came to be let go of.  I remembered the day in the office of Dr. Baker, she so very sick from and tired of her latest chemotherapy.  “Can I just stop,” she had asked me.  I had wondered about that question for a few weeks, and what would be my reaction to it.  “I want to stop.  I am tired of this,” she continued.

We hear so much about “fighting” the disease, and about maintaining a positive attitude.  How grim I think, now.  Sheila’s attitude had always been to ignore the fact until she had a symptom; to live in the meantime as if there were no such thing as cancer.  Now she would die that way.

“I don’t have cancer,” I answered, “and I can’t tell you what to do.  I know what I would like.  If you stop and wait I’ll wait too.”  We went home to begin waiting.  And that simply meant continuing to live quietly together as she went about the business of getting me ready for her death.  That was in July.

She took me around the house that first week and showed me how everything operated, the stove and oven, the dishwasher, the washer and dryer; instructing me to put the colored wash in first so as not to get bleach stains on them.  She showed me when and how ro do the bills, and sat with me as I took care of all those things she had been taking care of for the past thirty or so years.  As usual, she was living for me, and making sure that I would live as well when she wasn’t there to help.

Each night I said good night, kissing her as she lay on the couch in the family room watching some old movie, and going up to our bedroom.  The couch was the only place where she was comfortable.  I’d become very good at arranging pillows and cushions for her so she was at her ease; so there was no pain from the tumors on her spine.

I slept alone, with an intercom on so she could call me when she needed me in the night.  A lot of the time I lay awake listening to her labored breathing remembering how we’d both listened to the children years ago breathing in the night.

In the beginning, up until mid-August she was still able to take care of herself for the most part.  But it soon became evident that she could not be left alone.  When I was not in the room, she became anxious.  I moved in, and our life became that room, mostly her sleeping and me watching; a long vigil.

Once a dy at about three in the afternoon, I would make her a martini and wheel her to the front door so she could sit and look outside while she darnk her drink and smoked a cigarette.  Occasionally we’d joke about the dangers of drinking and smoking in her very delicate condition.

There were no visitors.  Sheila was a very private person who once said, “I have enough friends.  If one of them dies I’ll think about getting another one.”  In keeping with her desire I told everyone that she was aware of and thankful for their concern and prayers, but she was, well, busy with dying and hoped they understood.

She did come out once in September for our grand children’s September birthdays.  She enjoyed the time spent and the children’s company.  I worried how much time the effort took away from the small amount she had left.  The doctor had said possibly three months back in July.  Two of them had almost gone by then.

Then her rally and my brief hopes after an overnight stay in the hospital because she could not breathe.  We had our last great time together “breathing the same air” as she liked to say, actually doing little else than being in each other’s presence.

Ten days after that stay she died.  The children, Jeanne and Andrew, were there as we sat with her for the last hours, she and I together on the couch which had been her “home”.  As the hours wore on I felt her grow increasingly more cold, her breathing more labored.  The hospice nurse told us she would die that day.  Her cold arms and legs were a sign, her labored breathing.  “Try to make her as comfortable as possible.  Help her to breathe.”

So I sat her up and put my arm behind her head.  And we stayed together for six hours, quietly.  I moistened her lips from time to time and wet her mouth with a sponge.

Finally her breathing grew easier, it seemed, slighter, softer, calmer.  It stopped.  I waited for the space of a breath or two and then asked Jeanne to tell me what time it was.  She looked at the clock in the kitchen and said it was 10:47pm.  I laid Sheila down on the couch and stood looking around me at the room wondering how close she was to us, how far she might have gone, saying goodbye and wishing her safe journey home.

Then I gathered the children in my arms and said a prayer telling them that the best part of the family had gone.

It had been thirty four years, three months, eleven days, eleven hours and forty-seven minutes since we had promised to love one another.  Ten years on so much has changed, and nothing much has changed at all.

I will sit in the morning sunshine
And drink hot black tea.
I will sit and read translations
Of German poetry;
All the great prophets of Romance
Goethe, Schiller, Heine.
I have heard them set to music,
Listened now for years and have seen
“The moon lying on the clouds
Stretched on the harsh gray sea.”

“Shall we go out and pray?”
A gentle question is put softly to me
Gentle as a mist rising from the warming sea.

We sit in choir on a little height.
We sit on mere planks, more descending
To the pebbled sand, quiet water,
Spread below receiving day’s first light,
Open books and begin.

A Mantle of Brilliance on the Surface of the Sea

“O, Lord, open my lips,”
From the line between earth and heaven
“And my mouth will declare your praise.”
To the salt sprayed sand below
“As it was before,”
Light has thrown a mantle of brilliance
“So now,”
On the surface of the sea
“And evermore.”
Flashing like snow on Mount Zalmon.
“Glory to the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
This living light washes over me.

We obey the cadence of the day
Continue with each strophe, each song,
Followed by a breath, break, sigh,
Selah at once assent and good bye.
Just so long we linger, living in between
The beautiful music continuing
While the mantle off the mountain lifts,
And snow melts on the surface of the sea,
And the moon when it appears
Is a thing of glory, not of tears.

Father Richard Kelley,our pastor, left September 26th for Ars in France, the little town where St. Jean-Marie Vianney, more popularly know as the Cure d’Ars, had his church and worked his work among the good people who came from all around to see and hear him.  I have read The Diary of A Country Priest, the novel by Bernanos about a good French priest, of which some say the main character is based in part on the life of St. Jean Vianney.  I don’t know about that at all, and wouldn’t venture a guess.  Nonetheless, reading that book is well worth the effort!   Deliberately learning about this saint’s life seems to me even more worth while.

Certainly, learning about Vianney’s family life — his childhood, the role his mother and father played in forming him, introducing him to the faith, and encouraging his growth in the knowledge of God, our Mother Mary –  the life of simple love that he led while in their care is, in the best sense of the words, edifying and educational.  (That’s a big sentence, and I hope all the effort I put into building it will bear fruit.  It will, I guess, if a few of you who read it are prompted to do as the saint’s parents did!)

I remember my own growing up with not a little tender affection for my parents who were, at least in my early years, concerned to show me a living faith.  Even so, learning how the Vianney family lived, and the kind of attention and affection he received from his parents made me wish my own childhood could have been more like that.  More to the point, it made me wish I could have been the kind of parent his parents were.

Despite what St. Jean-Marie learned so easily and naturally from the loving example of his parents, anyone who knows anything about the man chosen to be the patron saint of all priests knows that he was thought to be a bit of a slow learner, possibly below average in intelligence.  That’s the common perception.  And it is very true that he was on the edge scholastically during his seminary years  Many believed that he wouldn’t make it.

The facts of his life after ordination may somewhat belie that opinion, since the Cure d’Ars was sought out by people from all walks of life as a confessor and spiritual director.  One biographer explains it all by saying that Jean Vianney was so advanced in wisdom that it was hard for him to “study” those things he knew almost by nature, and harder still to bend a mind and heart so attuned to what he already so thoroughly knew, to the dryness of academics.  Whatever the explanation, his slowness in the classroom frustrated the folks who had to teach him there things they thought necessary.

And, I suspect, his academic slowness must have frustrated the saint himself whose mind and soul were already well advanced in the knowledge of things that are vital to a lively and fruitful relation with God.  These would be things which are, somehow, learned before anyone begins to think a child is ready for teaching; while a child is judged to have too simple a mind for “real learning”.  Love and trust come to mind when I think what that kind of learning this might be, subjects which, it is said, cannot be taught.  (I wonder.)

Wonder makes me think of a few other “simple” saints, Ven. Solanus Casey being one of them.  St. Pio is another who comes to mind.  Nor should I forget such others as St. Francis of Assissi, Therese of Lisieux and Catherine of Siena (the latter two having been proclaimed Doctors (teachers) of the Church).

It makes me think finally of Jesus, who never took a class in anything that I know of, except what was taught him by His mother and St. Joseph.

It is nearly mid-day outside, but
Midnight still hangs hushed
Within, and midnight urgent whispers
All the sounds we make,
We two early mourners at a wake,
And walk, as if dampening slippers
Covered tiptoeing feet,
Across thick carpets on the floor
To the tight shut door
In a quiet house on a quiet street.

“Are they…?”  “Yes, still asleep,”
He answers returning where I wait
In the way between the kitchen
And dining room, the table set
For meals eaten not yet
And maybe never, plates
To be left how long, food to keep
While night lasts how long
And they sleep long past dawn.

It is long past dawn and yet
Dawn waits near my breast.
I leave and promise to return
Tomorrow.  But, I shall pray
The sleeping then will wake and eat
Dawn waiting, patient, near to me.

---

I wrote the piece below eight years ago today, the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary.  I didn’t know that, then.  But, who better, don’t you know.

It appeared on the front page of the Zanesville, OH, Times Recorder on Sunday, 9/15/01 if my math is correct.

COMFORT MY PEOPLE

“Morning has broken like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning!
Praise for them, springing fresh from the Word!”

“Daddy,” it was my daughter, Jeanne, calling me from New Hampshire. She was crying. “I’m sorry to bother you. They just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. They’re burning.”

I was born in New York City, went to school there, lived there for 30
years. For five years I worked in a building across the street from the
World Trade Center. I watched it being built. And its scope and size
amazed me, who played and worked among metal and stone giants since childhood.

I married a New Yorker and my children were born in the City. My sister
and brother and their families live there, now. I am from a lot of
places, but I am a New Yorker. It is, for me, one of the most beautiful
and friendly spots in the world. Its people are the most spirited and
fun loving, adventurous and daring of any people I have ever met, and
I’ve been around the world more than once. Chicago may have broad
shoulders. New York has Heart and Soul. It’s the only city in the
country to have a state named after it. It is the capital of the world!

I awakened this morning and thought that, after yesterday’s horror,
things, light, colors, nature itself would look, feel and seem
different. I thought that the terrible evil which had been hurled at the
place of my birth, the wickedness spawned by living hate would drain
heart and soul from everything around me.

Not so. The testimony of the earth and sky talk about the heart and
soul and say you have not changed, nor shall you despite the cruelty and hatred of yesterday, despite the sadness and anger of today. And the place and people where your heart and soul were formed and nurtured shall not either.

Yesterday my niece, newly married to a cop in the City walked eight
hours home from her office across the street from the World Trade
Center. She stepped over dead people and pieces of a dead building as
she did so. My sister, herself a cop’s widow, said she would probably
not see her husband for a month. (He is safe, thank God.) She also
told me that her other daughter had been at a meeting in the WTC the day before at the spot where the first plane hit. All those people she had met with died yesterday, at once. I am thankful she and all I love are safe, but I know of the pain thousands awoke with this morning, pain of heart and soul.

The same sun that rises now just over the nearby ridge has been shining for an hour or so on destruction and wounds in the places where I used to play and work, shining on the people I lived among, the people I love. It rose today not less but more bright I suspect. And the sun brought with it both promise and fulfillment. In the darkness of
anguish and pain there is light. In the middle of grim anger and heavy
toil there is hope. In the blackness of sudden loss light shines.

Everything has changed, and nothing, in the City I love. What must be
done will be done and the wounds healed that were caused by malevolence personified. Restoration and renewal will take place because, after all darkness cannot last. We have this promised to us. Light and love last forever.

I commend to your attention the words of a hymn I was unable to sing
this morning because of my tears:
“God, whose almighty Word
Chaos and darkness heard
And took their flight:
Hear us, we humbly pray,
And where the Gospel day
Sheds not its glorious ray
Let there be light.”

Yesterday everyone in the country became a New Yorker.

PEG
9/12/01

In the Palace of Meekness light
Consumes the darkness of fear.
Silence sings that one is always there
Clarity discloses simplicity of right.

Columns graced, substanced as of air
Unseen, of that regardless,
Supporting, solid, there
Uphold domed wisdom’s stress
On jeweled truth’s foundation
Bearing strong virtue’s walls.
Windows of contained elation,
Convey bright beams of love’s thralls.

No enemy may enter to destroy
Nor threat weaken nor storm bear way.
While Meekness simply stands, joy
And hope joined defeat darkest day.

I began writing this about a week or so ago as the day began to slide away. The shadows from the big maple tree next door spread slowly across my lawn and drive. It’s been very quiet, here, and very hot. After lunch Mariellen and I sat on the deck. I stretched out and leaned back looking at the sky while she read to me. We’ve been re-reading all of the Harry Potter books together; a long detective story as well as a story about love and hate, which has more power and what happens to you when you say yes to either one. I watched the clouds building up and felt a cool breeze move along the ground, among the trees, and thought of the Holy Ghost, another story about love, hate and power.

Not the Holy Spirit? Nope, the Holy Ghost. That was the name Marge used the day before, Friday, when I brought Communion to her and her husband and we prayed. Marge must be in her 80’s. I know her husband, Larry, is 99. His fastball is gone, but he still has the slider and the change-up. He can still play, and, he emphasized when he heard me use the neo-logism for the Third Person, it’s still the Holy Ghost around him. They’ve been doing it, now, for 63 years together. Some game.

Larry got a couple of days off to fly out to LA from New York City and marry her back in 1946, shortly after he got out of the Service. He’d met her a while before after a drive out there with a priest friend of his, no small thing back then. And, as he said, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. She was a Catholic girl from Minnesota doing something in the movies. She tore all of that up to marry this guy from the city, and never look back. They went back to New York after a one night Honeymoon in the apartment Marge shared with her friend.

I saw the picture they took that day. She, a cute redhead, and him with curly black hair, smiling. “It’s been a sixty three year long yes, I will,” he said. He still calls her “My Doll”, and sounds like an old Bogart film when he does it. She sits quietly, smiling, listening once more to the story he’s told me three times, now, and how many thousands of times over the years.

Well, why not?

I thought of the Holy Ghost, as I said, and August’s great feast, the Assumption, and about what took place at Mass in the morning that day. There was a new priest on the altar, a fellow I had seen once or twice before, filling in here and there. He looked very distinguished with his neat white beard and neat white hair and neat white vestments. He strode out, not processing, in a commanding and significant way.

Anyway, the Mass went on and we got to the homily. I’m not too good on details but I remember the fellow starting off by telling us he’d read Maria Shriver’s eulogy for her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. He said what struck him most, after telling us that Shriver said her mother liked to play tackle football and smoke Cuban cigars, was that her heroes were, in this order, her brother Jack, Mother Teresa and the Blessed Mother.

I suppose she knew her brother, the President, better than most of us did, and admired him for things only she would know about. And I waited for the link to come between Eunice Shriver, Mother Teresa, Cuban cigars, John Kennedy and the Blessed Mother. For the life of me I cannot remember if Father made any real connection. He did make a little joke about Our Lady probably not smoking cigars, but there was not much more to what he had to say.

I kind of thought he had missed the point of it all. Pictures I see of Mrs. Shriver show me a lady with a big smile. Little old Mother Teresa had a lovely smile, too. I thought about both of them, and what seemed to give them so much pleasure. It certainly wasn’t Cubans…or cigars. What wasn’t the fellow mentioning? Their smiles reminded me of Marge and Larry; her sitting to one side quietly smiling at him while he tells “The Story” another time.

So, I did the thing I often find myself doing while the homilist is doing his best. I gave my own homily to me. I’ll share it with you, now. You are, of course, permitted to hit the delete button. Or, better yet react in the form of a comment:

I have to say that until today I didn’t ever give much thought to the fact that Mary, that woman who is the mother of Jesus, lives now with Christ unchanged from the way she was on earth. Her body has not decayed, and, as it is with the rest of us, she does not “wait in joyful hope” for the Second Coming of the Lord, and the Triumph of Light.

I begin to think that in some sense she had already begun to know what that would be while she was alive here on earth, and I wonder, as I think about Mary, unchanged and unchanging, now, perfect as her Father is perfect, why. How is it that Mary is as she is?

What was, is, so special about her?

I can only come to some conclusions about this by thinking of what sometimes happens to me. A recent story will illustrate this, I hope. A couple of days ago we had invited someone to the house. We wanted to make this visit, our guest’s first visit to our home, a special one. So, the day before we spent some time fixing up the place and preparing several dishes to serve. We looked forward to welcoming him sometime around 9:00am, and staying with him through an early lunch.

Now, much of what we had to do involved a lot of standing in the kitchen, and much of that had to be done after I’d been standing at work for a few hours. On the best days I hurt, and standing hurts more, so I wasn’t too keen to begin the work. But, I did. I put aside, sort of, my own feelings about what would be good and thought of this person we would host; what would be good for him. Funnily enough, as the work continued I forgot about my pain and began to enjoy myself.

We finished preparing the several dishes and put them away for the next day, thinking that a good beginning to a nice day had been made. We had a plan. We went to bed expectant and happy.

How nice, you might say. And your point, Peter?

The next day, after Mass, our guest approached us and said he couldn’t come; an unexpected appointment, a scheduling foul-up had occurred. Not to worry, Dear Reader, because instead of arriving at 9:00am, we were able to welcome him for a real lunch at 11:30am, and a leisurely visit until nearly 1:00pm.

I hear your question repeated.

My point is simply this. I find nothing of coincidence or luck in things like this when they happen. No, I find God in these details. That is I find Him when I think about it, and when, but not only when, things have a “happy ending” as they did here. That is something relatively new with me, but, I suspect, it wasn’t so with Her.

I am close to the end. I mentioned “happy endings” above. During the last nine months of our marriage, Sheila and I spent almost every hour of every day in each other’s company. She was slowly dying, and I was doing my best to take care of her. Mostly what I was was a witness to her slow dying and a servant of her needs. As much as I could, as well as I could, I simply said yes to what the moment required.

A few years later I visited Knock in Ireland with my wife, Mariellen. I was struck by the representation of the vision on the wall of the church where it had taken place; the vision John Paul II had called the most perfect representation of Mary. Nothing was said during that time, you know. She simply stood together with St. John and St. Joseph, two other witnesses, two other servants, and watched; her presence giving assent.

The point is, I suppose to simply say yes. It was her way; in good times and bad, the lowly handmaid doing what the moment required.

Grumbling
Like some old dog in a corner
A single thunderstorm settled on the day
Already heavy, hot and wet.

Serious rain began.
Silk curtains of steam
Rose from baked asphalt
Soft as gum from
Days of heat.

Very serious rain, sheets of it, fell
Flattening heavy flower heads,
Limbs full of dark green leaves
Creating streams, carving canyons in the mulch.
The old oak angling overhead in angry wind
Above the roof of this old house
Threatened to give way.

At last the flimsy
Umbrella twirling in wild wind
Just a while ago above a table on the deck
Slowed, settled, stopped.

Light pierced gray armored sky.
A piping jay returned, while little
Wren began again its
Interrupted song.

A few mornings ago the first reading in the Office of Readings told the story of Elijah’s encounter with God in the tiny little voice outside his hideout up on the Mountain of the Lord, Hebron. This is a tale everyone’s familiar with, and they think it’s very cool, how God lets the last prophet in Israel find him in a soft whispering wind.

Nice God. Nice Old Prophet. Well, maybe. Go back a few paragraphs, or a chapter or so in the Book of Kings, and find out how Elijah wound up at his time share on the mountain top.

As they used to say on the radio, “When we last saw the Lone Prophet he had…” Well, he’d just slit the throats of 400 prophets of Baal, after pointing out to Ahab (no not THAT one) the King of Israel, that he, poor old Elijah, really couldn’t be that much trouble. (Or was it 800? No matter, it was a lot of work for one prophet.) After all, he was the last prophet left in Israel. Well, not true, exactly, he was the last prophet of, as they used to say, the Lord God. The rest of the guys were members of the International Union of Prophets of Baal, which, if you want the truth, had just about taken over the prophesying business in Israel. It was sort of like the NEA here, controlling who can say what about anything important in the public schools.

It’s funny no one in Hollywood has ever made a movie about Elijah’s life. We’ve had Moses and Jesus, and a bunch of saints, and Mary the Holy Mother of God. Elijah? Not a peep. In a perfect word there’d be one and Jack Palance would be the guy I’d cast in the title role; big, soft voiced and just a little scary looking, enough to go one on one with a disreputable king…or president?

Well, no movie’s been made, or likely to be made. I think it’s because, well, after Moses died being a prophet for the Lord God was not a peculiarly glamorous occupation; unless living in deserts, eating locusts and honey and running for your life is appealing to anyone out there. Come to think of it Moses had no soft job, nor corner office, either. Who needs enemies, as St. Teresa might have said, about the way God treats his friends.

Anyway, back to the story, the next day, Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, not your average soccer Mom, sends a message to Elijah that chills his beans a bit. “May the Lord do thus and so to me if I do not do to you what you did to the 400 prophets of Baal.” That’s when Elijah got out of Dodge and wound up in his room with a view.

It makes for an interesting story, and a very interesting contrast. In act one, we have Elijah and Ahab getting in each other’s faces about the latter going over to the dark side; you know, where they did all the kinds of things we do now, including killing newborns and marrying your best friend’s wife…or husband if that’s what trims your sails for you.

Now that kind of straight talk sort of reminds me of some of our bishops telling certain Catholic politicians that they are coloring outside the lines, so to speak, and the politicians saying that they don’t see things that way. The way they see it, they’re very devout Catholics. Why some of them could even set the Pope straight on the difference between right and wrong. They say.

In act two, Elijah sets them up for the big deal on another mountain, where the altar of God has all but fallen into ruin while them fun loving Baalists have been rocking and rolling all over town. Until, that is, they fall flat on their faces in front of the home town crowd. Elijah, then lights up the place, literally, and we come to the end of the act with him slaughtering the other team, again literally. Why not? They lost.

That brings us to Jezebel’s message and yadda, yadda, including the part about the angel telling the almost despairing wretch of an Elijah to get up and get going, until we wind up on the mountain.

Now I guess I get the reason why no movie. Remember the Ten Commandments, and all of the sturm und drang about the plagues and crossing the red sea? (I would have given Moses to John Wayne. I can see him strolling up to pharaoh and telling him it’s all over. Except that Moses stuttered. OK, so Jack Nicholsen is Aaron. But The Duke is still Moses.)

Anyway, he’s got a lot of Hollywood to his story. Right, Elijah gets to fly to heaven in a flaming chariot, but after the slaughter scene there’s nothing much for a computer to gin up, no 3D stuff.

So you’re probably asking, “What is the point of all of this? I know the story. God’s a small voice. So??” I thought so, too, until a few days ago.

The story’s not about some long dead king and some lonesome prophet. The story’s about me…and you, too…I think. Heck, I know it. Why else tell it to each other, and walk around remembering it. It’s no fairy tale, and it certainly isn’t the same thing as, oh, say, The Aenid.

Not that I’m, or you are, Elijah. No, that’s not the point of it, the big “T” truth of the story. That conversation between the miserable wretch Ahab and Elijah is a conversation taking place right now within me and you, and all of those things called the prophets of Baal run around inside of us, weaknesses, faults, reasons for choosing the easy way or the wrong way. But none of them, as Elijah proved, can get the job done, can make us, finally, feel or be safe or happy.

Somehow or other they must die. And, then what? Well, I guess it’s kind of like the end of an affair, a bit of anxiety, a mess of depression, recrimination and a desire to die or hide out until all of that stuff is over at last; the storm, the earthquake, the fire. Finally, peace, and peace is always something that starts out small, and grows to take over your whole life. “No storm can break my inmost calm…” as the song says.

With peace comes the realization that what has happened wasn’t something that I did, or you did, on my/our own. We had company, and we had help. Some fine day you will have that understanding. We are all Elijah. Don’t get too puffed up about that, though. We are all Ahab and Jezebel, too.

Prophesy to yourself, anyway. He’s got your back.

Come to think of it, maybe this would be a good movie.