Edges and Rhythms

Longing
Skellig Michael is a peak of bare stone rising hundreds of feet out of the cold Atlantic six miles off the western coast of Ireland. A rugged pinnacle of granite, it stands in defiance both of the distant mainland and the fierce lashings of the surf. Brutal and inaccessible, with cliffs rising to unlikely heights then sloping steeply to precarious ledges, it seems unapproachable and uninhabitable, and yet for more than one hundred years beginning in the sixth century a small group of Christian hermits made Skellig's Rock their home.

Nine years ago I visited the spot. I had been sailing that summer with the merchant marine and had docked in Cork, Ireland. After a day and a half by train and car, I found myself waiting on a dock as the sun rose and the fisherman and his son who were to take me talked together to decide if the day were calm enough. The trip could only be made, they said, in the best of weather. At last they decided it was possible.

It was an hour before we had worked our way through the channel and out to open sea. The waves rose to heights of 10 feet or more, so that, riding a crest, we seemed to rest atop a mountain, then slipping into a trough a moment later, to wallow in a valley made entirely of water. It was another three hours before we reached the rock.

Following a trail rising higher and higher above the waves, I came to the plateau on which were perched half a dozen stone huts, the ruins of a tiny church, a Celtic cross carved in stone, an improvised terrace forming a small garden, and a graveyard--although the soil seemed hardly deep enough to cover the roots of plants, let alone the dead. No more than 50 feet from the last of the huts the rock ended and fell in a straight, vertical drop hundreds of feet to the rocks and waves below.

I walked from hut to hut, felt the soft, cold moss, apparently the only plant able to survive untended, stood beside the ancient graves, and paced out the ruins of the church. Finally the awesomeness of it made me stop. I looked all around; the dark sea was everywhere. I shivered from the wind--cold and wild even in August, it would be deadly in January. I looked back to the mainland, no more than a gray line on the horizon, then to the empty horizon to the west, where, as these hermits believed, the earth dropped off.

These men lived on the edge, the edge of everything--the edge of a cliff, the edge of survival, the edge of the world, but perhaps--and at that moment, for the first time in my life I could believe it--also at the edge of God.

But what did that mean, I asked myself throughout the four hours back to the mainland as the sky grew steadily darker and the wind more wild. What could it mean to live on the edge of God? And what would push a man or woman to try?

The answer to the second question I already knew, at least in part. What drew those men out onto that rock was something inside them that they sensed was incomplete, a longing for what was just beyond them, something they in no way understood and only partially perceived and yet felt was near. It was a longing to meet a deeper reality and by meeting be transformed into something more than they were.

I too had felt this longing. Everyone does. The difficulty comes in recognizing it for what it is.

The men who had gone to that narrow peak of stone called Skellig Michael had not only recognized the longing but found one of the oldest and most universal ways to express it. But to glimpse what it was that these men gained and what it was they suffered it is necessary to go elsewhere. I began to get an answer in Athanasius' Life of Antony, a biography of the fourth-century Egyptian hermit which, very likely, these hermits of Skellig had had a chance to read.

Antony was from a moderately wealthy Alexandrian family, but at 18 both his parents died, leaving him alone with a younger sister. In the months that followed he became more and more preoccupied with the fact that the apostles had forsaken everything to follow their Lord, and after hearing the verse from the Bible where Jesus told the rich young man to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, he did just that. Then, later, hearing the verse, "Do not be anxious about tomorrow," he resolved to do this as well, and putting his sister in the care of nuns, he went to live alone just outside of town. There his contact with people was restricted but regular.

It was then that he began to struggle with the doubts, uncertainties, and temptations that he was to know for so many years to come--temptations which to his eyes came in the form of demons. The horror of his visions nearly killed him, but for the first time Antony felt he was gaining control. Alone, he went deeper into the desert, discovered a deserted fort, and barricaded himself inside. There he sought to find God and to overcome the demons that attacked him from all sides.

The struggle was rewarded.

Nearly twenty years he spent in this manner pursuing the ascetic life by himself, not venturing out and only occasionally being seen by anyone. After this, when many possessed the desire and will to emulate his asceticism and some of his friends came and tore down and forcefully removed the fortress door, Antony came forth as though from some shrine, having been led into divine mysteries and inspired by God. (Life of Antony)

Here in the Life of Antony are the elements of what has been called the spirituality of the desert, and what I call life on the edge.

Life on the Edge
First is the call. For Antony it came quite simply. All the rest of his long life was a response to hearing one passage from the gospel. For him the beginning was clearly marked. For most others, I suspect, it is far less distinct, but a gradual awakening to a sense of incompleteness, an awareness of an absence, something vacant and unfilled. And with this sensation comes a strange restlessness, an unarticulated longing for something which seems both unattainable, yet just within grasp.

The feeling is universal. Everyone knows this longing to be more than she or he is, this longing which is in fact a primary religious urge and one just as basic to humankind as that of survival or sexuality. The problem is that it is seldom recognized for what it is. Instead the sense of incompleteness is assumed to be a physical or material need. And because it is a need so widely misunderstood ours has become a society which uses cars, homes, sexual encounters, and even food to fill a vacancy in many lives that these simply cannot fill.

The second aspect of life on the edge is the gradual understanding of what exactly it involves.

Antony did not answer the call by going directly into the desert. He moved out gradually, first selling a few of his possessions, then living at the edge of town, a while later moving out alone. Even the 20 years alone in the abandoned fort was only a stage of the journey, because he was later to go to even more secluded and desolate spots. The point is that a life lived on the edge must be begun gradually, in stages.

Surely Moses, listening for the first time to the voice of the Lord in the burning bush, had only the faintest suspicion of the glory and the suffering of the exodus he was soon to be called to lead. And Jesus' disciples--would they have responded the way they did to his request to "follow me" if they had known at that moment that the journey was to end at Calvary? This is a life begun carefully. The desert is harsh; its spirituality harsher still.

It is a life of total vulnerability. To fully surrender to that longing for transformation is to be willing to relinquish all that you are in order to become all that you can become.

Life lived on the edge is also one of solitude. It is a life turned inward, a life alone. It is one where the surrender is so complete that the ego itself is offered as sacrifice. In so doing the society which most people crave as a buttress to their sense of individuality, uniqueness, and importance becomes incidental and ludicrous. It also gets in the way. In solitude the masks are burned away and the beliefs and self-delusions used to support the ambition and self-importance taken to be so central to our being are turned to ash.

Clearly, this is not a journey to be begun casually. Yet what is gained can be awesome. For after the solitude has done its work, infected the soul with its fire, burned away irony and skepticism, burned away all feeling of self-importance, even all certainty of an individual existence, after it has grown into a raging conflagration as it feeds itself on hopes, ambitions, and beliefs until all is gone, then suddenly the flames quiet, and solitude becomes something extraordinary. Then one discovers for the first time God's power and majesty at the very core of one's own being.

But life on the edge is also one of death. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." In part this means the death of self, but it must mean a call to physical death as well. That does not mean that life on the edge must actively seek death but that it must, first, live with the constant vision of death's impending certainty in a way everyone else tries to avoid, and so, second, never shun death if it approaches. It is a life which can never compromise so that if life lived anywhere else but on a rock six miles from the Irish coast would be a compromise, then it is to the rock you go knowing full well you might not live to see another spring. And if it would be a compromise to go anywhere but with Jesus to Calvary, then it is to Calvary you go, fully aware that the person who might replace him on the cross might be yourself.

From life lived on the edge comes an altered vision. The confined sight of humanity has been exchanged for the limitless vision of God, and to have this vision is to see great value in things ignored or scorned by nearly everyone else while recognizing how little true worth there is in nearly everything others take as important.

To see in this way is a disturbing experience both for the person with this prophetic vision and for the community at which the gaze is turned, because seeing the falseness of so much in the community, the prophet might speak of it; or, more disturbing still, not speak of it but simply live in a way that offers a glimpse of what can be found, and so threaten what is familiar with what is better.

In either form it will be resisted. Even if the community tries to understand, it will not be able, not fully. The problem is that a prophet standing before the people can tell of a vision, but not give them the vision itself. For that they too must go into the desert.

The vision of life on the edge is not solely that of the prophet. It is also that of the artist. Thus it is that a young boy named David tending his sheep alone in the desert also came into the presence of God. But what he heard in that encounter was not a command to liberation, but the melody of a song, a song to which he gave voice. To live a life on the edge may result in a call to lead others and bring them freedom, or it may be a call to die for others and bring them life, but it may also be a call to sing for others and bring them peace. Anyone embarking on a life lived on the edge must be prepared for each of these--or perhaps for all together.

A prophet must also be prepared for inner demons. With no barriers to separate a person from him or herself, all the powers of the unconscious rage forth. For Antony they took hideous forms--devils, wild beasts, reptiles. They came as men and women whispering obscenities or arguing calmly that what he was doing was senseless. For others they may take less tangible forms, embodied simply in the fatigue of the effort, or as emptiness, fear, or doubt.

It is right to call these demons. They cannot be passed off as moods, or a simple dipping of the mercury of emotions. These are powerful forces; for them to take control may mean destruction; the result, death or madness. They are a part of the life itself, and the loneliness and uncertainty which accompanies it.

But the most powerful demons of life on the edge are not those which seek to push a person away from it, but those which seek to draw a person too close. One of the greatest dangers of solitude can be solitude itself. When solitude reaches the point where, far from being a burden, it is preferred to anything else, then it has become destructive. Even the call to death, that other aspect of life on the edge, can become an attraction which, rather than expanding the soul, diminishes it. Nothing is as far from the goal of life on the edge as domestication, and yet nothing is as great a danger as losing the ability to love.

The conclusion seems to be that demons are a necessary part of life on the edge. They tear away complacency and make it far more difficult to turn an acceptance of solitude and death into a destructive fascination.

But, finally, there is the gift of this harsh life on the edge, the vision of God's presence. "I pray thee," Moses dared to say to God, "show me thy glory." And God did. Alone on the desert mountain top of Sinai, God came to him, and Moses had to cover his eyes, since to see the face of God would be to die, but raised his head as God passed and saw the majesty of the Divine. And when he came down from the mountain the people stood back in fear. "Moses did not know that the skin of his face shown because he had been talking with God."

And Antony too, after his years alone in the desert had the mark of one who had come close to God. As with Moses, he was a person through whom God could be seen: "His speech was seasoned with divine salt, so that no one resented him--on the contrary, all who came to him rejoiced over him."

This is the human gentleness that comes of having seen God's majesty and lived, though living now transformed. What is seen is the God of fire, the God of the whirlwind, the God who creates and destroys, who builds and tears down, who gives life and takes it back again--the God to whom Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking to have the burden of his suffering lifted from him, and who answered no. It is this God, awesome and terrifying, who once met reveals that within it all--the building and the unbuilding, the growth and the decay, the life and the death--there is one great harmony, one vast, all-encompassing love far, far beyond the comprehension of any one human being, yet which will reach out to that human being and so make despair indistinguishable from ecstasy, and make solitude into space infinitely filled. This is the God met in the desert, on Skellig Michael, or in any life lived on the edge.

The price of this life is surrender, solitude, and death; the reward is the presence of God. The price is high, but of what it buys there is nothing more magnificent.

Liturgy
I hold before my mind two images. The first is of a man wearing rough clothing cut from the hide of animals he himself has killed with stone-tipped spears. He is in a cave in one of the valleys in southern France that is sheltered from the fiercest cold of the Ice Age. The man is squatting on the floor of the cave, crouching near a fire he has built. He is mixing pigments--deep ochres, purples, reds, greens--grinding them from minerals gathered just now within the cave.

As he grinds each in to a powder he arranges them along the ground, then stands and studies the wall. There, drawn with the same deep colors he has just prepared, are the representations of the animals he knows well--the bison, the antelope, others. The pictures have been there since the time of his father, and the time of his grandfather--in fact as long as anyone can remember. And now, just as his father had done and his grandfather before him, the man takes the pigment and, blowing the colorful dust through a hollow reed, redraws the pictures, tracing them as carefully as he can, matching color for color.

The second image is of a woman giving birth. She has been in labor for many hours. The regular pulsations of pain have been growing closer and closer and mounting in intensity, but have long since blurred for her into one endless agony. For over an hour she has been nearly delirious, tossing her head back and forth wildly, and breaking groans with frantic screams so that the man waiting outside looks through the door only to be motioned angrily away by the two women called in to help.

Suddenly something in the quality of the pain changes in a way that startles her, making her at once more alert. The women recognize the motion, and arrange a blanket on the floor, helping her into a squatting position. Her face suddenly brilliant with sweat, she groans, pants, and rocks back and forth as she pushes as hard as she can. And suddenly the baby is born.

It is a little boy, and begins to cry as the midwives cut the cord and hand him to his mother who is trembling and exhausted, but jubilant. She puts him to her breast. The women motion to the man outside. He enters the room pale, also trembling. Sitting down with the others he can say nothing and is silent while the midwives tidy up and chatter. At last one of them asks him what name he will choose for the baby. He can only nod toward the woman. It is she who says, "The name was chosen for us. He is to be called Jesus."

The first image is from the beginning of the human story, the second from the beginning of the Christian. Together they represent the range of a second spirituality, that of community and of the family. This is a spirituality more common than that of the desert, but also more difficult to appreciate. It is one that can apply to any group formed to give care and love, but it applies most especially to that small unit made up of a man and a woman and their children. Like the spirituality of the desert, it has its rewards, its touch with the divine, and of these the first image hints. It also has its trials and suffering, these suggested by the second image. And also like that of the desert this has four aspects--the same four as the other--the calling, the journey, the demons and, finally, the discovery of God.

It is, first, a calling. The 12 men who became Jesus' disciples were not the only ones called to serve him, and their life of discipleship not the only one Jesus asked. There was another as well. To this other life were called Mary and Joseph. This call sounded different from the other. There was, for one thing, less free choice. When Jesus asked his disciples to "follow me," any one of them might have refused. But when the angel came to Mary and later to Joseph and told them that there was soon to be a child born to them, there was only one answer for them to give.

It is also a call to a different sort of life. Theirs was not a call so much to renunciation or deprivation, as to hardship and routine. It was a call to form love into flesh and bone, then care for it and help it grow. The disciples were called to suffer with Jesus the pain of his death so that he might give the gift of life. Mary and Joseph were called to suffer for him the pain of birth so that he might give the gift of love.

The spirituality of the family is, then, a calling; it is also a spiritual journey. If the spirituality of life on the edge must follow Antony's pattern of a slow progression further and further away from people and closer and closer to the presence of God, so too is this spirituality marked by a halting progression nearer and nearer people and a gradual recognition of the love which marks God's presence there.

It begins with marriage. Although it is not always easy to recognize it as such, marriage is the most remarkable and most courageous of all human acts--the promise of two human beings to share life together on all levels, physical, economic, spiritual--a promise made in the face of the certainty of death, the certainty of change, and the uncertainty of everything else. There is nothing else a human being might choose to do which is quite like this act, nothing so foolish or so profound.

Marriage can be the most intense of all spiritual communities. In the Symposium, Plato has Socrates advance a theory that humanity comes to know the divine only by degrees. It begins as physical love, an unashamedly sexual craving of one person for another. From this physical love gradually develops another, a love for the person as a human being, and this in time deepens so that--the first two remaining undiminished--a third love is formed, that for the other as an embodiment of the divine. From this flowers a love for the divine itself.

This is precisely the sort of discovery of God which marriage allows. From the first attraction the love of a man and woman deepens in the early days of a marriage into a profoundly formed union, a bonding of thought, hope, and need so uniform that each soul comes to reflect the image of the other. It is a time of such beauty that when it passes--and it must pass--it might seem a loss. But what replaces it is something more profound, and in its own way more lovely still.

But this next phase is a harder time, fragmented, fractured, often weighted with fatigue. These are the middle years of marriage. For any marriage this is a dangerous time. The exhilaration of the first period is gone and the rewards of this one are not always apparent. This is a time when one or another of the marriage partners may buckle under the strain of the struggle and flounder in doubts and uncertainties and so must for a time lean against the other for support.

Later, the role may be reversed and the other partner may in turn fall prey to worries, failures, and depression and so need to be carried by the first. In these periods each one, by turn the husband or the wife, may begin to think "I am not being helped by this person, only held back," but because of that foolish, extraordinary vow, keep going.

And so after the intensity of the early years, and in the midst of the struggle of the middle years, at a time when each partner in the marriage believes that they have seen every one of their spouse's many faces, they see two more--that of the afflicted and that of the comforter of the afflicted. And only after seeing both of those faces on the same person, and knowing that they had been found on them as well, can each begin to really understand the nature of the divine.

Marriage is, then, very much a spiritual journey. So also is its most significant result, parenthood. To become a parent is to form the most intimate of all covenants with God. Abraham's original covenant with God was first of all a promise that he and Sarah would have a child; everything else followed upon this. And so too the new covenant began when the angel appeared to Mary and later to Joseph and announced the coming birth of Jesus. Both couples, Abraham and Sarah, and Mary and Joseph, were given essentially the same message, first that they were to have a child, and, second, that through their relationship with this child their relationship to God would deepen profoundly.

Parenthood can be seen as the fullest expression of a second essential human need. It is the need to love and nurture another, and it is just as strong and just as basic as that relentless spiritual hunger I have called longing.

The need of the parents to care for their child is as strong as the child's need to receive their care. It is for this reason that being a parent can be so painful as the child grows older. The child's need to receive diminishes, or at least becomes less pronounced, while the parent's need to give does not. Gifts of care and protection must be regretfully withheld, or offered in more subtle ways.

The covenant of parenthood has other aspects as well. It can be in its own way a vision for a world remade. With every family, human society has a chance to begin anew, to start again and correct the mistakes that went before.

A third aspect of the covenant of parenthood is personal growth. Children grow, of course, but parents grow too, although for parents the growth is less obvious, frequently tedious, and usually difficult. All the lessons of parenthood spring from the hard work of loving.

One result of these lessons of parenthood is wisdom, a deepened perception of human interiors gleaned from the process of watching a baby become a child and a child become an adult. And there is something else gained as well. It is what Anne Morrow Lindbergh calls a "timeless inner strength." It is a resilience, usually hidden, but powerful, the result of having to meet the demands of children day after day, to depend on energy which seems often to have long since vanished and so to come to discover secret wellsprings of strength which seem to have a source all their own.

The response to the spiritual need to nurture, the vision of a world renewed, the development of an inner strength--these are the elements of a covenant of parenthood. In these the covenant is fulfilled. But before the fulfillment come the struggles. There are demons to be wrestled here as well. They are not the same ones met in the desert, but no less numerous and powerful.

The demons of the spirituality of family, and in fact, of community in general are the frustration, anger, and despair which again and again appear in a life lived primarily for others. It is a frustration at the interruptions which inevitably break into every task--the ringing phone, the need to drive across town to pick up a child, the dishes which are no sooner washed than they are dirtied again, the night's sleep shattered by a crying baby. It is an anger at a lack of choices, at the feeling that there is nothing else to do but answer others' needs.

The needs of others limit the options of how to spend each day; they also limit the options of a lifetime. Harnessed with a responsibility to care for one, two, or three other people, the number of ways a person might choose to live his or her life grows smaller. Some choices become all but impossible; others are possible but much more difficult than they would be otherwise. Feeling that limitation and that difficulty, it is almost impossible not to feel the anger as well.

Worse, however, than either the frustration or the anger is the despair. It is a despair arising from a loss of individuality, a loss of creativity, a loss of a sense of achievement. The lack is not one of energy or talent, but of time and of the opportunity to focus time and talent and put them to a specific use. Little by little the energy is doled out, little by little the talent spent.

These are the demons of the spirituality of the family and community. They must be wrestled just as Antony wrestled those of the desert. And suddenly, unexpectedly, there comes a sense of something more. Even in the midst of the struggle there comes a glimpse into a deeper meaning.

Where the spirituality of life on the edge seeks the face of God, that awesome splendor found only in the presence of the divine, this spirituality offers something else, something subtler, but no less awesome. It gives a recognition of the patterns of eternity. This is probably the oldest of humanity's perceptions of the divine. It was very likely this which those early humans sought to express in their drawings on the walls of caves.

I began with an image of a prehistoric man mixing pigments, then tracing on the wall of a cave pictures which had been drawn and redrawn for generations. That image grew from an account of recent studies of the cave art of Cro-Magnon where, with the use of ultraviolet light it was discovered that Ice-Age paintings in a cave in southern France were made up of layer after layer of pigment. The evidence was that they had been drawn and redrawn, and so were perhaps an early record of the human spirit expressing its sense of an eternal rhythm through re-enactment and ritual. It is these mysteries at the very center of the spirituality of community which are sought to be expressed in all human rites.

In a community, especially the community of the family, it is the human seasons which come to be known so well, and it is through them that it is possible to discover the eternal.

Growing from child to adult, a young man and woman each leave their separate homes, find each other, and are married. Then a child is born--a miracle--an incident to them as fresh as if it had never occurred before in human history. But as the child grows, the routine takes over.

In the repetition of day after day the freshness fades. The baby becomes a child, then a young adult, and both she and her parents experience the difficulties that this involves. Then suddenly she is grown, married, and a new spring has come before anyone realized that the old one had passed. And when the new couple bring forth a new child, the parents--now grandparents--rediscover the memory of their own spring, and find it is not diminished because it is passed but is enriched because it has been repeated.

It is this truth which is the heart of ritual. Rites of the human seasons have come to be called "rites of passage" because they occur at points of change in human life--birth, maturation, marriage, death. But although they mark points of transition, it is not the transition itself which is the subject of the ritual, but those elements within the change which do not change.

So it is at ceremonies concerning births--the symbolism suggests that this added member is not a break in the unity between husband and wife but renewed evidence of its ties. At weddings, where one nuclear family is splintered so another can be formed, the extended family--that which has branched apart--gathers to show that despite the breaks, the ties continue. And of course the rites of death all emphasize that, although the person is gone, something continues. Rituals mark the eternal within times of change.

And it is interesting that the great liturgies meant to mark the incidences in human history when the divine burst through and shattered the rhythm of family life do so with symbols basic to the family--and so by means of the family itself affirm each instance's eternal significance.

The Eucharist was over a meal, a passover meal. There Jesus told his followers, his small family, that their time of sharing together would soon end, but at the same time he took the one element--bread--which by its very commonness and importance to family life symbolized for them, as it had for the followers of Moses, an eternal presence; he took the bread, broke it, and said, "This is my body." From that point on he would be present. The most shattering incident of Christian history became eternal by being drawn into the core of a family activity.

This, then, is the great gift of the spirituality of community and the family, and of the covenant of parenthood in particular. It is a direct participation in the cycles of eternity and the opportunity to see within the processes of individual love the working of a greater Love.

It is a profound understanding, but one never found in visions. Elijah sought God in a great wind but did not find God there; then in an earthquake, but did not find God there either; then in a fire but found that, too, empty. He found God at last in a "still, small voice." Like Elijah's this is a spirituality which finds God in the small incidents of daily life. It hears the "still, small voice" which whispers of a timeless repetition woven into every moment of the life created to help others grow and learn.

This is the voice that a Cro-Magnon man heard and which drew him to trace again, as had been traced for generations before, those pictures on the wall of a cave. This is the voice that Mary first heard that night in the stable, and the voice which forms the background of every ritual which marks the human seasons. It is the voice every parent knows well--soft, insistent, eternal--the voice of a child calling in the night.

Ernest Boyer was a student at Harvard Divinity School, a husband, and the father of three small children when this article appeared.