In Christianity, the cross announces a terrifying requirement, a gloomy invitation to participate in that at which we “shudder,” according to Fr. David Abernethy of the Pittsburgh Oratory. Blessed Mark the Monk scripts this invitation starkly: you must sentence yourself to death. “Every virtue on being achieved is called a cross. [Jesus] says, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and come after me. If any man will quicken his soul with comforts, he will lose it; and if any man loses it for my sake, he will find it.’ For this reason then he has gone in advance and has set the cross in front of you — that you might sentence yourself to death… and then send forth your soul to go after him…”1
What is equally terrifying, and perhaps galling, is that this requirement applies not only to Christians who have, so to speak, accepted the wager of the cross, but to each and every person. You cannot, by ignoring the invitation to the cross, escape its reality; you may only, so doing, escape its meaning. Its meaning is the only way by which the destruction it augurs can be placed in its proper context — not as an ending, but as a radical stake in the flow of time, that, as with the Israelites crossing the Red Sea in escape from Egypt, definitively saves one from the abjection of slavery, even as it casts one into the destabilization of the desert.2
When the Palisades fire began, I quietly and methodically packed my go bag, tucked my cat in his carrier, and, saying many prayers, got into my car and drove to a friend’s, where I stayed for ten days. I felt there was nothing to do but this: to recognize that what God wished to take away, He would take away, and for good reason, and what He wished to remain would remain.
Let me say at the outset:my home was safe after the fires. But throughout the month, during the weeks of evacuation and the weeks after, there were other problems that emerged and crystallized, pressing down upon me as ever-mounting emergencies. The question “will my house burn down?” was literal and metaphorical, and the metaphorical was perhaps more literal than I cared to admit.
But I remained peaceful and calm, or so I told myself.
However, I knew that if I were to drive down the Pacific Coast Highway again, past the Palisades beneath which, on the coast, I used to do my weekly runs and exercise, past the empty, charred lots where my favorite restaurant used to charmingly sit, that I would most likely be undone, plunged into a state of serious disturbance.
How can we come to terms with the destruction, the loss, of a past, a place, a way of being that we did not know to be an Egypt? What is the experience of being liberated from that which you have not read as enslavement, or even, an enslavement which you had found a way of living with, which you had come to call life, and to whose meager comforts you had become even sweetly accustomed? One thinks of the Israelites, who, after being freed from Pharaoh and fed with heavenly bread, began to dream of the diversity of foods they had in their slavery — cucumbers and melons; leeks, onions, and garlic. If it is possible to dream of Egypt’s food when you know yourself to have been Egypt’s slave, how much more possible is it to dream of it when you never quite knew — or admitted — that your chains were chains?
Of course, not everything that is lost is lost fairly; not everything that is destroyed is bad. But there is no suffering that does not have the potential to recapitulate the movement from Egypt to desert to Promised Land, because there is no suffering that does not hold within it the mystery of the cross. Even in a deeply secular sense, the logic holds: suffering is a stake in the flow of time, in the flow of days; it is a stake which interrupts that which hummed along. Suffering is a stark and definitive sound; it establishes a before and after, and thus has within it the potential to yield name, meaning, shape, and narrative to that which previously seemed curiously, and even painfully, devoid of these. For even our good qualities are mere notions until they have been tested and proven. In Homily 72 of the Ascetical Homilies, St. Isaac the Syrian quotes St. John, who takes this even further. “Virtue is blameworthy,” St. John asserts, “when it is linked to ease.” Courage is not courage, faith is not faith, hope is not hope until they have been proven and refined in the furnace of trial. The desert is a mirror and a school; it shows you who you really are and gives you the means to become who you really should be. It is not the promise; it is the preparation.
That the world we live in is not meant to be the promise itself—that it is meant to be, always has been, and always, ultimately, will be the desert prelude and not the paradisal main event—is a truth we often wish to ignore. But what do we gain by ignoring it? What do we gain by telling ourselves that life on Earth is not a battleground, is not a trial, is not a desert? The flowers of the desert can be very beautiful, and the manna is very good, but the flowers do wither, and what manna we do not eat today is, as it was for the journeying Israelites, melted away by the hot sun. Ultimately, we must make a choice: do we run back to the slavery of our old country, or do we proceed further toward the new, unknown country to which our suffering has, in its painful way, invited us? Seeing the suffering that has been set, like a cross, in front of us — do we reconstitute the past, or do we complete the action of suffering and sentence our former selves to death, sending our new selves forward? Do we rebuild what was or do we journey forward?
I think briefly of the strange magnetism of those Dutch still life paintings, in which food is rendered with all the particularity and exactness that would attend the human form, and with just that same tension of warm desire and maintained distance that makes you feel like you are being introduced to someone who may thereafter be in your life for a very long time. For example: Clara Peeters’s Still Life with Crab, Shrimps, and Lobster (1635–40). Perhaps all the sumptuous shellfish adorning the table resonates with where my mind has gone, thinking of the Israelites for whom that food was forbidden, who, in the desert, dreamt of the food that slavery had offered. But at the very forefront of Peeters’s banquet, hidden, but centered, is a simple loaf of bread, veiled as if holy, in defiance of the feast behind it, quietly and daringly offering itself, proposing itself, as the real feast. It is the proposal of the manna. The proposal of the desert. The proposal of the cross. The proposal of suffering. Which meal do we choose?
Do I rebuild what was or do I journey forward?
One can take this all in very philosophically, but the experience of the desert does not long accommodate false pieties or empty “can-do” jargon; its only interlocutor is the soul in its nakedness. Who can bear the frank and simple conversation of the cross, of virtue? Even writing this, after a month of upheaval, fire-related and not, that I, so to speak, peacefully and even joyfully endured, I find myself undone by the final straw of having a bad cold. When the sinus pressure increases — first with a tickle, and then with sly action proceeding upward to my supraorbital ridge — suddenly I am totally undone, and all that I have kept at bay over the past month rushes in and over me, and I feel like I might drown in fury at my abject abandonment.
