To find in the sober woods these little Orients of delectation was like hearing a tale of opulent grace poured out on modest need or of miracle astonishing despair, a parable brilliant with strangeness, cryptic with wisdom, disturbing as a tender intention full of the frightening mercy of foreknowledge. God will wipe away all tears, the dead will rise, meant to me then, Little girl, you will mourn and you will die. Perhaps that was some great part of the difference I felt between the world and myself, that while it was a thousand ways true that it knew me as I could not know myself — my old relatives remembered people with my voice or my eyes and how they lived and how their lives ended — I hoarded the notion of this singular self in this singular moment, as if such things could exist, and shrugged away intention and anticipation and cherishing, knowing they meant that even I never was my own.
I knew my grandfather for many years, but I am not sure I ever knew him well. He seemed stern to me and I was very shy of him. I had heard sad stories about him as a boy and a young man, and when I was with him I always thought of them, and I was cautious, as if the injuries might still be tender.
It may be that I did know my grandfather very well because I thought of him as a boy and a young man, and explained his silence to myself in such terms. My memory of him allows me to interpret the dignity of his shrinking height and stooping back as an effort of composure of the kind people make when the shock of cruelty is still new to them, when resignation is still a novel labor. I interpret the memory of his polished shoes and his habit of gardening in his oldest suit and his worst necktie as evidence that I sensed in him diligent pride in the face of sadness not otherwise to be borne. Perhaps he himself could not have told me how near the truth I was.
His gardening was uncanny. The flourishing he set in motion brought admirers from other counties. I remember once following him down a row of irises, not sure whether I was invited, whether the irises were being shown to me. He would hold one blossom and another in the tips of his fingers, at arm’s length, and tilt his face up and back to look at them. It was an old man’s method of scrutiny, but to me it seemed as if he were revealing prodigy or sleight, the way a magician opens his hand to reveal a dove. I looked carefully at every blossom he appeared to commend to me, noting how they were made of cell and capillary, whisker and freckle, frail skin tented on white bone, and how they were chill to the touch, and how they curled on themselves like smoke, and how, till the life was wrung out of it, each one accomplished a small grandeur of form.
In those mountains there is a great constant silence surrounding any brief local silence, and one is always aware of it. When I was a child it seemed to me sometimes it might be emptiness that would tease my soul out of my body, with some intention too huge even to notice my fragile flesh. I knew that the mountains and the lakes and the woods brought people’s lives to disastrous conclusions, often too frightening to repeat in the hearing of children. There were people whose loss could hardly be borne no matter the years that passed, and whose names were spoken rarely, and then softly, with rue and grief — Steven and Lewis and the precious Virgie, a woman or girl I have mourned my whole life in the absence of all particulars, just for the way they said her name. I lived so as to be missed with bitterness, and I learned to be good at the things they praised, preparing and refining their regret. I poured myself into the vessel of their memories, which are mine now. I save all those people in myself by regretting the loss of them in the very way they taught me.
Oddly, perhaps, in the circumstances, no one so far as I remember ever spoke to me of heaven. Certainly no one ever spoke to me of hell. Though absentmindedly they sometimes murmured hymns to themselves, among my kindred religion was rarely mentioned. I believe I ascribed this fact to the power of it, since it was characteristic of them to be silent about things that in any way moved them. It never occurred to me to wonder if they were devout, nor have I any great reason to wonder, looking back. Religion was simply among the burdened silences I pondered and glossed, feeling no need to inquire, assuming an intimacy with the thoughts of those around me which may well have been entirely real.
Among my family, my training in the right conduct of life seemed to assume that left to myself I would rather not break a commandment, and to bend its coercive energies to improving my grammar. The patient old women who taught me Presbyterianism taught in parables. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, Pharaoh dreamed a dream of famine, Jesus said, Take up your bed and walk. We drew or colored pictures of these events, which were, I think, never explained to us. No intrusion on the strangeness of these tales was ever made. It was as if some old relative had walked me down to the lake knowing an imperious whim of heaven had made it a sea of gold and glass, and had said, This is a fine evening, and walked me home again. I am convinced it was all this reticence, in effect this esotericism, which enthralled me.
Surely it is not true to say that the gospel stories were written in the hope that they would be believed; rather that, by the time they were written down, they were the cherished possession of the early church and had taken forms many had already found to be persuasive, and also beautiful and moving. It seems wrong to suggest that in their accounts of the resurrection the intent of the writers is to persuade their readers and hearers of the truth of an incredible event, simply because there is so much evidence that resurrection would not have been considered incredible. The prophet Elijah had brought a child back from the dead. He himself ascended into heaven without dying, and his return was awaited in Jesus’ time. John the Baptist was believed to be Elijah. Jesus was believed to be Elijah. Herod thought Jesus was John the Baptist back from the dead. Jesus restored to life Lazarus and the temple official’s daughter. Before the resurrection of Lazarus, his sister Martha dutifully misinterprets Jesus’ assurance that he will live again to refer to a general resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees are described as those “who do not believe in the resurrection,” a phrase which surely implies that the idea was abroad independently of Jesus. At the moment Jesus died, graves are said to have opened and the dead to have walked in the streets.
In the world the Gospels describe there seems to be no skepticism about miracles as such, only about the authenticity or origins of particular miracles. Indeed, where in the premodern world would one find such skepticism? The restoration of the dead to life is not only anticipated but reported, with, if anything, less astonishment than the healing of those born blind or lame.
It seems to me that the intent of the gospel writers is not to make the resurrection seem somehow plausible or credible — this could hardly be done without diminishing its impressiveness as miracle — but instead to heighten its singularity, when, as event, it would seem by no means unexampled. I believe it is usual to say that the resurrection established who Jesus was and what his presence meant. Perhaps it is truer to say the opposite, that who Jesus was established what his resurrection meant, that he seized upon a narrative familiar or even pervasive and wholly transformed it.
When, in the Gospel of John, weeping Mary Magdalene stoops to look into the tomb and sees the angels, they ask her, “Woman, why weepest thou?” The text creates the dreamy impression that the two angels speak together. Then she turns and sees a man standing behind her, Jesus, whom she mistakes for a gardener. He speaks the same words as the angels did, “Woman, why weepest thou?” and he asks, “Whom seekest thou?” Does he see and hear the angels, too? Or does he know her thoughts? Or was it his voice she heard in the first place? Mary herself would not have known. Jesus seems to be teasing her toward delight and recognition, ready to enjoy her surprise, in something like the ordinary manner of a friend. The narrative asserts that he is a figure of unutterable holiness, only pausing to speak to Mary before he ascends to heaven, yet it is his very ordinariness that disguises him from her. Splendor is very well for youths and angels, but when Jesus takes up again for a little while the life he had wept to leave, it is the life of a plain man.