cold comfort farm
For Easter I rewatched my favorite film, Jesus of Montreal, and reread my favorite novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Both of these, along with the sonnets of Donne and Hopkins, the complete novels of Graham Greene and the second season of Fleabag, describe unhappy love affairs with God, which I suppose makes that one of my favorite genres. At one point Angel Archer quotes Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” in its entirety. My unsettled mind latched onto “Reason, thy viceroy in me” and has been worrying it like a broken tooth ever since.
It’s easier to leave some parts of the church than others. It’s easier to leave the smiling horrible minister who was raping a teenager in the vestry, and all the others like him, easier to leave the inerrancy of scripture and a scholarship fund called Sons of the Parish than it is to leave sixteenth century choral music and the enigma of Jesus himself, remote as the Nabateans one minute, immediate as any other Palestinian freedom-fighter the next. I think Jesus is hardest to understand, or maybe believe, when he is at his simplest and most direct. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Okay I get that, I do, but Jesus I’m genuinely worried I haven’t saved enough for retirement?
Consider the lilies of the field, says Jesus, and I consider them a lot actually. Louise, my house’s benevolent ghost, planted calla lilies and roses in the garden, and while I indulge her survivor roses, I dig the calla lilies out by their roots as soon as I catch so much as a tender leaf unfurling. Sure, I can say they’re invasive and toxic to cats and that I’m trying to nurture wildlife habitat here, and God could say the same about me. This is Ramaytush land, pull me out by my roots, three-person’d God, you coward. So the lilies of the field are cold comfort to be honest.
My high school librarian Marie Suchting, may her name be blessed forever, never reread anything – she didn’t have time – but I circle back endlessly searching for clues. How in God’s name did I end up here? What ridiculous superposition of texts made this set of choices seem logical? I just wanted to be safe and happy and not to have to hurt anyone, and here I am working in the tech industry. Humbling to acknowledge how much of my ethics I owe to Hawkeye Pierce, how great my debt to Felicity Kendall in The Good Life. Reason, thy viceroy in me, frankly derives its political legitimacy from highly dubious grounds.
