Brilliance
by Mark Doty

Maggie’s taking care of a man
who’s dying; he’s attended to everything,
said goodbye to his parents,

paid off his credit card.
She says Why don’t you just
run it up to the limit?

but he wants everything
squared away, no balance owed,
though he misses the pets

he’s already found a home for
— he can’t be around dogs or cats,
too much risk. He says,

I can’t have anything.
She says, A bowl of goldfish?
He says he doesn’t want to start

with anything and then describes
the kind he’d maybe like,
how their tails would fan

to a gold flaring. They talk
about hot jewel tones,
gold lacquer, say maybe

they’ll go pick some out
though he can’t go much of anywhere and then
abruptly he says I can’t love

anything I can’t finish.
He says it like he’s had enough
of the whole scintillant world,

though what he means is
he’ll never be satisfied and therefore
has established this discipline,

a kind of severe rehearsal.
That’s where they leave it,
him looking out the window,

her knitting as she does because
she needs to do something.
Later he leaves a message:

Yes to the bowl of goldfish.
Meaning: let me go, if I have to,
in brilliance. In a story I read,

a Zen master who’d perfected
his detachment from the things of the world
remembered, at the moment of dying,

a deer he used to feed in the park,
and wondered who might care for it,
and at that instant was reborn

in the stunned flesh of a fawn.
So, Maggie’s friend?
Is he going out

Into the last loved object
Of his attention?
Fanning the veined translucence

Of an opulent tail,
Undulant in some uncapturable curve
Is he bronze chrysanthemums,

Copper leaf, hurried darting,
Doubloons, icon-colored fins
Troubling the water?

As the man in Mark Doty’s poem sits, waiting to die of AIDS, it becomes clear that he has a moral choice to make.  We might think that he’s in a situation where all choices have been taken away from him.  His life has been reduced, whittled down, to the point where no one visits him except Maggie, his caretaker, who comes to sit beside him and knit.  Maybe the other people in his life are gone because they made their own moral choices and fled from him when he got sick, a gradual seeping of friendship that is all too familiar to people who are living with long, debilitating illnesses.  But maybe they’re absent by his choice.  As his condition has progressed, other people become increasingly threatening, not by their actions but because of the infections they might carry, infections that are so unimportant to them that they go unnoticed, but that could easily kill the man in the poem.  This was written in the early nineties, before the advent of potent antivirals, and I must pause here and say that we can all be like Maggie when visiting people who have AIDS, and wash our hands a lot to reduce the risk of passing on some unrecognized infection, but also be present, and loving, and remain true in our friendships without fear.  But for the man in the poem, AIDS has meant that his life is reduced, by neglect, by fear, possibly by both, by the untenable emotional wounds he’s bearing as well as by the sad terror of his coming death.  Reduced now to the point where even his pets are gone, given away, because they, too, can carry diseases.  Reduced to making his moral choice, the choice to whittle his life down even farther, paying off his credit cards, not spending money, preparing to leave a nullity where his life had been.  No sign that he’d ever been on the earth.  He has, as Doty says, established a discipline of denial, “a kind of severe rehearsal” of the emptiness that is death.

And that is what the Gospel is about this morning.  “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”  The end times will come, and amid the calamity, the destruction, the fear, the distress, the shaking, we will have a choice.  We can either stay awake, watching and aware, hoping for the coming of Christ, or we can turn to dissipation and drunkenness.  We can become frantic, too frantic, can immerse ourselves in worry and terror, and by doing so come to imagine that destruction is all that there really is.  And if it’s all there really is, then there’s nothing we can love.  Like the man in Doty’s poem, we might say that we can’t love anything we can’t finish.  And with the world ending, how could we finish anything?

A world that’s whittled away.  Although the end times haven’t come in the two thousand years since Jesus spoke about signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, we are always constantly in danger of having our worlds whittled away.  The man in the poem is living in his end time.  You and I have lived in our own end times, from time to time.  Or thought that we were.  Something has happened, and we have been frozen, wondering how the world could go on.  And we have fallen prey to dual temptations.  To withdraw so thoroughly that nothing will ever touch us.  Or to invest ourselves in panic, to run around insanely, to invest ourselves in the worries of this life, in the hope that through this investment, we can stop our worlds from ending.  Jesus doesn’t want us to do either of these things.  He wants us to stay awake, aware on the razors edge of awareness, to pay attention to the things that are happening as our worlds end, but not to strive in an attempt to stop that ending.

For me, this happened when I was nineteen.  I was in love with my high school girlfriend, but I was going to college in Ohio, and she was in Wisconsin.  One Sunday morning in November she surprised me during a telephone call by wondering if we shouldn’t take a little break from each other.  I panicked.  My world was ending.  I borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Wisconsin.  I had no money, no cash on hand.  This was in the days before ATM machines, and, it being Sunday, the bank wasn’t open.  So I had to avoid the toll roads, to drive far to the west around Chicago.  It was a long, cold, agonizing ride.  I had just crossed over the Wisconsin border when the car broke down.  The engine seized.  I walked through sleet to a gas station and called a tow truck, and then I called my girlfriend, told her where I was, and begged her to come pick me up.  The tow truck arrived long before she did.  The driver hitched up the car and then I sat in the cab of his truck with him while we waited.  He’d just had a new baby, and he told me all about her.  Time passed.  It became obvious that my girlfriend wasn’t coming.  He took me to a gas station and left me there, and I sat and waited for her to finally come running in.

I am, to this day, deeply grateful towards that tow truck driver.  Because in his talk about his new baby, he was telling me something important.  He was telling me that new life remained a possibility.  That in my despair, there was something to cling to.  A small domestic happiness that I could still attain someday, that he had attained, that was enough to make a man get out of bed at two in the morning to pick up a panicked teenager on a cold Wisconsin road, and still be happy, still be content, and kind, because happiness waited for him at home.  He gave me an opportunity to mimic the man in Mark Doty’s poem, to say “yes” to the fish.

Jesus would approve of the man’s choice.  “Let me go, if I have to, in brilliance.”  Get the fish, concentrate on it.  Stay awake, as your world is ending – awake enough to invest yourself in something bright and beautiful.  For us, for Christians, the most bright and most beautiful thing is Christ himself.  Can we turn and contemplate Christ even when our worlds are ending?  That is the question, and the call.  To open our eyes, to stay awake.  To truly see and stand before the Son of Man.

And what of the Zen master at the end of the poem, who is reborn in “the stunned flesh of a fawn?”  Part of the brilliance of Doty’s poem is the realization that for the Zen master, this is a failure.  He doesn’t want to be reborn as a fawn – he doesn’t want to be reborn at all, but to slide beyond the cycle of birth and rebirth that Buddhists consider the source of all misery.  Yet how can he help it?  How can any of us help it?  How can we help it, even when we would like to whittle away the concerns of our lives, to create an absence, a nullity?  Instead, we make a choice for love.  We hear about a new born baby on a cold Wisconsin road.  We let ourselves remember the deer who once ate from our hands.  We accept the purchase of a fish.  And, in the final moments, if we are faithful, we will forget everything but the contemplation of the “last loved object of our attention.”  Christ, coming in a cloud, with power and great glory.

King Louis IX of France, better known to us as Saint Louis, lost his father when he was twelve years old.  His mother Blanche became regent and ruled France until he was old enough to become king.  Blanche was a domineering personality, so domineering that, after Louis had married the lovely young Margaret of Provence, he and his new bride would have to sneak away to the back stairs of the castle for cuddling and smooching (a detail that I throw in here for no better reason than to gross out a certain ten year old girl of my acquaintance).

Louis went on two crusades.  He built a personal chapel, Le Sainte-Chapelle, which was of such magnificence that it was copied everywhere in Europe, and although I’ve never been there, it is a place of such delicate beauty that just looking at a picture of it is enough to rest my mind when I’m weary.  His reign was a golden age for France, and the arts flourished.  He purchased the crown of thorns from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople and brought it to Paris in a long procession that took many days.

But it wasn’t these actions that made him a saint.  It was the fact that he would dress in a plain linen tunic and go out into the streets and wash the feet of the poor people who gathered around him.  He did this frequently, and one can imagine that some of his courtiers found it disinteresting, yet for many of them it was an example of righteousness, and more than righteousness, holiness – and it became an example that they wanted to follow.

What is a saint, exactly, and how is being a saint different from being a king?  And if we assert that there is a difference, and that it’s better, far better, to be a saint than a king, then what do we make of the fact that Jesus was called the King of Kings, and today we celebrate Christ the King?

The best definition of a saint that I know of comes from Sam Wells book Improvisation.  A saint, says Wells, is not a hero.  The hero, says Wells

is at the center of the story.  It is the hero’s decisive intervention that makes the story come out right.  Without the hero all would be lost.  So if the hero makes a mistake, if the hero bungles or exposes a serious flaw – it is a disaster, a catastrophe, probably fatal for the story and, if it is a big story, pretty serious for life as we know it.  By contrast, the saint expects to fail.  If the saint’s failures are honest ones, they merely highlight the wonder of God’s greater victory.  If the saint’s failures are less admirable ones, they open out the cycle of repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration that is what Christians call a new creation.  A hero fears failure, flees mistakes, and knows no repentance; the saint knows that light only comes through cracks, that beauty is as much (if not more) about restoration as about creation.

Louis wasn’t a saint because he tried to invade Egypt and led his troops in battle.  Both of his crusades were failures.  If he had thought that the survival of the world, or Christendom, depended on his eventually retaking Jerusalem, then he would have retired from the Seventh Crusade (the first crusade he went on) in total misery, and lived out his life in the belief that he was an abject failure, and that the world was doomed.  But he understood – and this is a hard thing for a king to understand – that he wasn’t the center of the story.  Ultimately, the story wasn’t about him.  It wasn’t even his story.  It was God’s story, Jesus’s story, and he, Louis, was just a bit player.  More than that, it was a story that was, in a sense, already finished.

As Sam Wells points out, Christians are living in the fourth act of a five act play.  The first act was creation, the second was the establishment of Israel as a chosen people, the third act was the coming of Christ and his life on the earth, and the fifth and final act will be the eschaton, the end of time, when Christ will come again in clouds descending and all of creation will be restored to the original beauty that God dreamt when first setting out to make heaven and earth.  We are actors in the fourth act, not responsible for creation, since God has already created, and not responsible for the ending, for bringing everything to fulfillment, because Jesus has promised that he’ll do that.  The only thing that we’re truly responsible for, in this fourth act, is imitating Christ.  That is, trying as hard as possible to be saints.

When Louis washed the paupers feet, he was imitating Christ.  We might tend to disparage this, to point to the horror and stupidity of the crusades and say that they, in some way, canceled out a few clean feet on the streets of Paris.  But light only comes through the cracks.  When Louis was able to set aside the mantle of kingship, when he was able to forget about being heroic, when he was able to let light seep through the facade of greatness, then he became saintly.

To say that Christ is the King is to say that no one else is.  It is to say that Christ is the only hero we need, and we don’t have to be worried about being heroes ourselves.  I am not the hero of my own story.  Jesus is the hero of my story.  I can fail in all sorts of things, and the world won’t end.  So can you.  I’m not called to be tremendously successful, or to have people admire me.  I’m not called to create great art, or preach great sermons, even though I would like to.  I’m called, simply and intimately, to be a follower of Christ, to wash the world’s feet.  I will sometimes fail in that.  We will all, sometimes, fail in that.  Hopefully, our failures will be honest ones.  If they’re not, if we fail because we’re selfish, or lazy, or distracted, then at least they can call us into a cycle of repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration.  And when that cycle has worked its creative powers, and we feel ourselves refreshed again, there is really only one thing that we should do.  Find a way to kneel down, and wash the world’s feet.