Lent

The lake has a provisional name. It has had other names. 

It’s possible those names were also in some way 

provisional, unless the lake has a name for itself.

Facing it, it’s feasible to believe that the lake really does 

have a name, one it has given to itself and that it keeps. It 

keeps things. My friend, kneeling on the sand, arranged 

stones in a circle while she told me about the dreams she 

has had to commemorate her dead. The lake has eaten 

the stones.

I went in to the church, which is close to the lake. I like 

the melancholy of churches. The minister, breaking the 

bread, wears a small smile that suggests he knows the 

futility of what he does, and does it anyway, from love, 

from habit, from the way the two become, over time, 

indistinguishable from one another.

I love because I have grown the habit of love, I cannot 

love all at once, by choice, it happens gradually, like water 

overtaking the shore. It happens slowly, without noticing, 

and the shoreline has altered. It is not willed. I suppose 

that is what this man might mean by grace.

I am ambivalent about churches. I would rather 

ambivalence than certainty, I will live and die in 

ambivalence, which is a pretty meager supper, perhaps an

excuse for evading the problem of evil, or the other 

problem, of good, by not quite believing in either. By not 

quite believing. By longing for belief.

At eighteen I walked out of a church in another country 

and came out into the square and there was a group of 

boys playing soccer and I knew that God was real in the 

blunt humiliation of that statement.

But then my life went on as before and God was just 

another metaphor.

And maybe God was only present because I was a tourist, 

thinking the boys and the paving stones placed there so 

that I might find them and be transfigured, and they 

themselves remain luminously flat, without fault or flaw, 

without meaning except for mine.

As a child, my father heard a sermon in which the 

minister told the congregation that they must pray 

unceasingly. He was a serious child, with no mother, not 

because his mother was dead but because she had left, 

not because she had left but because she was sent away by 

his father. Boys belong to fathers.

She was returned to the country where she was born. She 

was not permitted to say goodbye. He came home. His 

mother was not there.

The few times I met her, she was like a moth at a light 

bulb, buffeting against him, not knowing what to do with 

the intervening time, that he was a man now, that she was 

old.

My father snuck back into the church later on to begin 

his career as an unceasing prayer. He knelt, intending to 

praise forever, assuming that is what prayer is, to praise 

and to plead.

Someone came in. Embarrassed, he lay on the floor and 

hid.

Call: O Lord hear our prayer

Response: And may our cry come unto thee

When I think of God, I think of hiding. The way a child 

hides. In hope of being found.

This church is nearly empty. There is a table in the aisle 

and a tray of small stones. We are asked to remember our 

dead by dropping the stones into a dish of water. I hold 

mine until the stones are warmed. They darken as they 

sink.

On Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent, the 

priest marks the forehead of the believer with ash. 

Formerly, it was only women who had their foreheads 

marked, while the men had ash scattered over their hair, 

which must have looked like billows of smoke from a 

small fire. Women covered their heads in church. The 

priest says Remember you are dust and to dust you shall 

return, a modern formulation replacing Remember, man, 

that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return, spoken to 

Adam and Eve in the garden, before they were turned 

out of the gates and had to start walking.

What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.

A friend is fretting over her father’s books. Her father 

must move to a retirement home. He fled the Iranian 

revolution along with his wife and daughters when the 

woman was a child; she has never returned, though she 

knows that the house of her earliest memory is still 

standing, uninhabited, an orphan in a street where every 

other house has been replaced by concrete slabs of 

apartment blocks. Her father, who was a civil servant and 

then a security guard, has read devotedly all his life. 

His books number in the thousands. Eighteenth

century love poetry, illegally distributed Marxist theory, 

which he collected at enormous risk to himself and his 

family, books of history and philosophy. I don’t even read Farsi 

anymore, not really, not at that level, the woman says, and 

who will want these books, who will read them now?

The woman and I smile at each other bleakly. To preserve 

the past, you would need to let it crush you. You would 

need to be nothing except a receptacle for memory, as 

though you were a glass case. We keep smiling. Decent, 

conscientious. Not willing to be obliterated.

I read a story about Bristlecone pines, a tree that grows 

along arid mountain ridges. These trees can live to be 

5,000 years old. They are squat, twisted. Survivors, not 

conquerors. They are as secret as the name of the lake.

In 1967, a graduate student in Arizona wished to cut down 

what he believed to be the oldest specimen of this 

tree. He summoned a forester. The man laid his hand on 

the trunk and turned to the student and said I will not 

touch this tree. Then he left.

The young man found another forester, who cut down 

the tree for him.

This is a story of useless sanctity. The first forester could 

not save the tree. But I hope it can stand as an epitaph. 

That he refused. I think there would be no better way to 

be remembered. To have said I will not touch this tree. To 

have left.

If the world were a way out? A river? A door? If this was 

not a rhetorical question?

I first became aware of the work of Expressionist painter 

Charlotte Salomon because of a

series of panels painted on cardboard squares torn from 

grocery delivery boxes and arranged along one wall of a 

barn in Vermont. The series is entitled Let Us Praise The 

Wondrous Life of Charlotte Salomon and is painted in the 

style of medieval religious

paintings and also in the style of the subject and also in 

the style of the old man who painted them, who lives 

near the barn.

He makes, among other things, cardboard testaments to 

things that might be praised, or marked, or just 

remembered for a while.

Not permanently. Just for a while.

The barn is very dry. One spark, and it would go. This 

does not trouble him. Let it burn, he said. The burdens of 

history are already over-plentiful. Let something exist for a 

while, and then burn, and be forgotten, and make room.

Having spent time with this man, I believe he is not 

lying. He does not wish to inflict a permanent mark on 

the world. He is reconciled with being. He is in being. 

Not guarded against the spark. He has laid himself down.

Just before Charlotte Salomon, five months pregnant, 

was gassed at Auschwitz, a witness claims she saw the sky 

and cried out God my God, how beautiful it is!

The circumstances of this statement make me wary of 

ascribing meaning.

And yet. And yet.

A talismanic hope that it might be possible to notice that 

the sky is still there?

Something that means we are praise.

God my God, how beautiful it is.

-- Kate Cayley, Canadian poet and playwright, Mitchell Prize winner for 2021, from Image Journal