“SONNET XLI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
June 1955
Jack took only three months to finish that novel, his greatest in my not very humble opinion.
Alone in my bedroom on Avoco Road, I typed the final pages on a June afternoon. With birdsong outside the summer window, and my boys calling out in a game they played with neighborhood children, I read the end of Jack’s novel, our quarrel with the gods and love and obsession. My fingers were set on the keys when my breath caught under my ribs, and my heart paused as I read the last line of the novel.
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.
Questions that die away.
Answers I sought.
Questions that haunt.
All my life I’d been searching outside myself for the answer to this one inquiry: do you love me?
Seeking, always seeking. Always scrambling. Always losing. This, I’d thought more times than I could count, this is the answer and this is the mask and this is the way. I had done the same to Jack—I had made him the answer.
I’d wanted him to answer a question that only God himself could.
I’d heard Jack say more than once, in a pub or at lunch or in front of the fireplace with Warnie, the way out of the petty self almost always “requires the seeing of deception.” What Jack called deception was what I called illusion.
It was as clear as if someone had walked into the room and ripped the veil off my soul, forcing me to stare into its darker depths. Much of what I’d done—mistakes, poems, manipulations, success and books and sex—had been done merely to get love. To get it. To answer my question: do you love me? Even as I gave love, was I trying just to gain it? Had it really taken the fictional Orual to show me the truth?
In my bedroom, I fell to my knees on the hard floor and rested my head on the edge of the mattress, pressing my face into the softness.
The face I already possessed before I was born was who I was in God all along, before anything went right or went wrong, before I did anything right or wrong, that was the face of my true self. My “bareface.”
From that moment on, the love affair I would develop would be with my soul. He was already part of me; that much was clear. And now this would be where I would go for love—to the God in me. No more begging or pursuing or needing. It was my false self that was connected to the painful and demanding heart grasping at the world, leading me to despair. Same as Orual. Same as Psyche. Same as all of humanity.
Possibly it was only a myth, Jack’s myth, that could have obliterated the false belief that I must pursue love in the outside world—in success, in acclaim, in performance, in a man.
The Truth: I was beloved of God.
Finally I could stop trying to force someone or something else to fill that role.
The pain of shattered illusion swept through me like glass blown through a room after a bomb.
All had been turned around. No longer was the question Why doesn’t Jack love me the way I want him to? But now Why must I demand that he love me the way I want him to?
I was already loved. That was the answer to any question I held out to the world.
“Mommy?” Davy’s voice called out from the hallway. “Where are you?”
I wiped at my face, realizing it was wet with tears. Love overwhelmed me—a sweeping wind of complete acceptance. I stumbled to my feet and threw open the door to pull my son into a big hug.
“I love you, Douglas Gresham,” I said.
He laughed and pushed me away. “Have you gone loony?” He squinted. “Are you crying?”
“Sometimes we cry when we’re happy,” I said and tousled his hair as love pulsed around me. A sense of calm so pervasive I didn’t recognize the stillness inside. It might pass—the need and fear might rise again as old and familiar comforts. But deep down, I knew the Truth now.
“I do not cry when I’m happy,” he said with that big Douglas smile. “I just wanted to know what’s for lunch.”
“A picnic,” I said. “Let’s take a picnic to the park. Go get your brother, and let’s get outside and enjoy the sunshine.”
He ran off calling his brother’s name, and I stood in the hallway of my rented rooms and smiled. I had it all, everything I craved, and I hadn’t even known.
It had not taken a man’s body to finally open me to true love, but a man’s myth and God’s unwavering tenderness.
CHAPTER 45
Love universal is love spread too thin
To keep a mortal warm
“SONNET XVIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN