When I was a young man, I had a fantasy that when I became an adult, really became an adult, I would have everything all figured out.  That the insecurity of trial and error would go away, and I’d know what to do and what not to do about any situation that might arise.  It never happened.  There was never a moment when I crossed the river into a clear and untroubled adulthood.  I’m calmer and more patient than I used to be.  I no longer think that mistakes say something terrible and permanent about my character.  But I still make them, and sometimes I wonder who I truly am.

These days I tend towards a different fantasy.  What if I could go back and live my teenage and college years again?  Not as the person I was, but as the person I’ve become.  Because even though I still make plenty of mistakes, a lot of the angry posturing of my post-punk college days is gone.  I’ve aligned myself to a faith and a creed, and that’s brought a lot of peace.  But not so much peace that I don’t regret the past, and fantasize about going back and knowing people in a different way, being wise and kind, the rare kid who is honestly interested in taking care of other people.  The rare kid who has the confidence to go off by himself when he needs to, as well, and who knows himself well enough to pursue his own particular interests without caring what other people think of them.

Both of these fantasies are equally meaningless, and therefore bad for me.  Malcolm Guite, in his book Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, talks about Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy.  Imagination is deep.  In Christian terms, to truly imagine something is to enter into God’s vision for it.  Fancy is superficial.  It’s to indulge in goofy fantasies, telling oneself stories that are, ultimately, self-glorifying.  Both of my fantasies are about my being more perfect, either in the future or in the past, and both are equally silly.  All the energy that I put into fantasies of the future or the past is a distraction from my own deepest feelings about the world, and distract my ability to truly think about God’s will, to imaginatively align myself to God.

Back when I was in college, I learned about the four life-stages, or ashrama, of Hinduism.  I find it helpful to think about them now.  I’m in the middle of the householder stage, which is all about duty, taking care of one’s family, doing good for one’s community, and working to make money.  Traditionally, this stage ends when you’re forty-eight, which for me is only six years from now.  Already I find myself drifting towards the next stage, in which one begins withdrawing from the world and concentrates on sharing whatever spiritual wisdom she or he has attained so far.  But I find it reassuring to think that the chaos and confusion of my young life was essentially appropriate to the first stage, when I was a student and therefore meant to learn and make mistakes.  And that the householder stage I’m in now isn’t really about perfection, but a set of purposes and the meanings that I make of them.

The pleasure of thinking about life in this way is that it releases us from the fancy of perfection.  Instead of thinking that adulthood is something that suddenly happens, a single, sharp break in human life, it’s useful to subsume it in other categories.  There are stages of adulthood, and some of them include portions of our childhood.  I am not perfect, and will never attain the pure perfection of God.  But by putting aside my fantasies of perfection, I can free myself to enter into the imagination of God, to go deep and try to see the world the way God does, which means seeing myself through the eyes of love rather than criticism – the kind of love that frees one from regret.

Winter white on the moving water,
reflected not only from the snow,
but the trees, the day, the surrounding weeks –
the world is bleached.

My grandmother made everything clean.
She ate wall paper paste when a refugee
with two small children in tow,
and everywhere was trampled snow.
Later her hands always smelled of bleach,
her skin was tight, it shone,
looked breathed on and polished,
incomplete in dampened light –

not scarred, but something far beyond
my knowledge was reflected in her skin.

And now the cold lake, moving winter
that knows everything it knows,
water that goes and goes
within its own flat glaze,
the colors almost fade,
the tints lay rigid and subdued –
yet the world is too much,
too true.

Maybe it was the sunlight on the turning trees that made me think of animism as I drove north to the Hermitage on Saturday.  I was remembering an old argument I’d had with some conservative catholic students over whether or not animals had souls.  Of course they have souls, I’d said, and I still believe it, and will go farther and say that plants have souls, and soil, and maybe even rocks.  I’m not alone in this.  Many of the early church fathers saw nature as ensouled.  Trees had to have souls, they reasoned, because we have souls, and when we die we decay and become the soil itself and the root-matter for trees.  But I know that this comes close to animism, the belief that the natural world is full of spiritual beings.

I was going to the Hermitage for a poetry and spirituality retreat.  It was led by my friend John Holliger, a retired priest and photographer.  He’d gathered almost twenty people together, and we read poems to each other throughout the day.  Some of us were artists, and shared our art in whatever form it took.

We had long rest periods in which we could go and wander through the forested hills.  The autumn light was crisp and cold, and the leaves patterned the ground.  I kept catching sight of the sunlight, of different beams falling at different angles through the canopy, and I kept grinning and taking pictures.  And, inspired by the day, I found myself writing a poem, something I haven’t done for a very long time.  Here it is:

The sunlight on stacked firewood
is thick, although its cold.
I go deeper into the woods,
past the choral mumble of the chimes
beside the lake, and the voice
of the bald psychologist,
stopped to talk beside two women.
Stones and moss and the stalactite sag
of an insect’s egg sac, distended
from a creviced rock.
All these things, the insects waiting
at the start of autumn for spring,
the shell pattern of leaves,
brown and dry on the wet and cold ground,
all these things are shaped to mean
something, only what they mean
would require the right words.
And I am only wondering, like them,
perhaps, when the hard white sunlight
might release the world, and let it,
until spring, at least, sleep.

This poem surprised me, because it seems to intimate that natural things could use a rest from my desire to flood them with meaning, or to name meanings that go far beyond words.  Animism only works if our imaginative minds are ready to impose themselves on nature, and I found myself oddly reluctant to do so.

After one of these rest periods, John read William Stafford’s poem “Vocation,” which begins with the line “This dream the world is having about itself.”  I heard that line and didn’t listen to the rest.  Is the world really dreaming, I wondered.  Is it sentient?  Despite all my morning thoughts about the souls of plants and stones, this didn’t seem believable to me.  Maybe it was simply that Stafford’s poem wraps all of nature up into some greater entity, “the world,” and that I’m more comfortable with separated mysteries, the single mystery of a fallen leaf’s soul, than I am with one, powerful, overreaching mystery.

And yet I believe in God.  Perhaps this is the single greatest reason that I believe in God as an entity, separate and greater than nature, certainly separate and greater then myself.  Perhaps this is why I believe that God acts in history, even our history, even now.  It seems kinder to nature.  Kinder to not demand that nature speak with a single unified voice, but to listen as it speaks with many little voices, individual voices that aren’t necessarily prodded into a chorus.  I would rather think of the world as a stage which God walks across, important and beautiful, certainly, but not divine within itself.  Divine as we are divine, divine when aligned to God, when allowing the touch of divinity.