SEEING THE LIGHT

Miami Herald, The (FL)
December 20, 1987
Author: TOM SHRODER Herald Tropic Editor

It always bothered me, when I was growing up, that there didn't seem to be any beginning to things. As far as I could determine, by the time I noticed I was alive I was already walking around asking for Popsicles.

Whenever I came up with a really early memory, like standing on tiptoe in my room trying to reach the doorknob, I knew that there had always been a day before that, which I had once remembered and merely forgotten. After much reflection I decided that I had never remembered my birth. (If I had, how could I have forgotten it?) Which meant that I had simply found myself alive one day--that everyone just finds themselves alive one day--and no one is ever given any iron-clad explanation of why.

It was the ultimate detective story: You are in a locked room with no furniture and nothing on the walls. You don't remember coming into the room, or anything before you got there. The only clue is the light streaming through the window. What do you make of it?

I realized they talked about that kind of stuff in churches and temples, though I had attended neither. It didn't seem that going would help matters much. After all, the rabbis and preachers had simply found themselves alive one day, just like me. If they appeared to have the answers, they were only taking somebody else's word for it.

I noticed as I grew older that most people simply forget they're making everything up as they go along. They tend to believe, at any given moment, that they know in great detail how the world is put together, why it works the way it does, and who they are. I'm guilty of that myself. I can go on at great length about what people should and shouldn't do with their lives, as if I were sure myself what was essential and what wasn't.

The truth is, despite 17-years of education at semi- respectable institutions, and more than three decades of introspection and experience, I am still in that locked room trying to make something out of the dust patterns in the light. I still haven't got a clue.

When I first heard about the Poor Clare nuns of Christ the King Monastery in Delray Beach from Tropic writer Joel Achenbach, their vows struck me as bizarre, even creepy. I got claustrophobic just thinking about a life shut up behind monastery walls--decades without flying home for Christmas, without walking down a long beach on an overcast day, without getting away.

Achenbach was fascinated by the extremity of the Poor Clares' situation--virtually a medieval existence in the late 20th Century. "When you go see them, they have to speak to you from behind a metal grate," Achenbach reported. "I almost felt like I ought to liberate them or something."

But Achenbach's view changed during the course of his reporting, and reading the final result, I understand why. These are not women in hiding, nor have they been lured into captivity. In the face of unfathomable mystery--locked in that bare room with the rest of us--they have simply decided to spend their lives in pure and uninterrupted contemplation of the light pouring through the window.

As Sister Mary Frances says in the story that begins on Page 8, "You wouldn't deny a scientist his laboratory to work in. You wouldn't deny a musician his studio."

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald

"God Knows," by Joel Achenbach