Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (75 page)

Ideally, in giving up the sexual pursuit of women (whether as demons or as idealized vessels of purity), the male celibate learns to relate to them as human beings. That many fail to do so, that the power structures of the Catholic church all but dictate failure in this regard, comes as no surprise. What is a surprise is what happens when it works. Once, after I’d spent a week in a monastery, I boarded a crowded Greyhound bus and took the first available seat. My seat-mate, a man, soon engaged me in conversation, and it took me a while to realize that he wasn’t simply being friendly, he was coming on to me. I remember feeling foolish for being so slow to catch on. I remember thinking, “No wonder this guy is acting so strange; he didn’t take a vow of celibacy.”

When it works, when men have truly given up the idea of possessing women, healing can occur. I once met a woman in a monastery guest house who had come there because she was pulling herself together after being raped, and said she needed to feel safe around men again. I’ve seen young monks astonish an obese and homely college student by listening to her with as much interest and respect as to her conventionally pretty roommate. On my fortieth birthday, as I happily blew out four candles on a cupcake (“one for each decade,” a monk in his twenties cheerfully proclaimed), I realized that I could enjoy growing old with these guys. They were helping me to blow away my fears of middle age.

As celibacy takes hold in a person, over the years, as monastic values supersede the values of the culture outside the monastery, celibates become people who can radically affect those of us out “in the world,” if only because they’ve learned how to listen with out possessiveness, with out imposing themselves. With someone who is practicing celibacy well, we may sense that we’re being listened to in a refreshingly deep way. And this is the purpose of celibacy, not to attain some impossibly cerebral goal mistakenly conceived as “holiness” but to make oneself available to others, body
and
soul. Celibacy, simply put, is a form of ministry — not an achievement one can put on a résumé but a subtle form of service to others. In theological terms, one dedicates one’s sexuality to God through Jesus Christ, a concept and a terminology I find extremely hard to grasp. All I can do is to catch a glimpse of people who are doing it, incarnating celibacy in a mysterious, pleasing, and gracious way.

The attractiveness of the celibate is that he or she can make us feel appreciated, enlarged, no matter who we are. I have two nun friends who invariably have that effect on me, whatever the circumstances of our lives on the infrequent occasions when we meet. The thoughtful way in which they converse, listening and responding with complete attention, seems always a marvel. And when I first met a man I’ll call Tom, he had much the same effect on me. I wrote in my notebook, “such tenderness in a man…and a surprising, gentle, kindly grasp of who I am.” (Poets aren’t used to being listened to, let alone understood by, theologians.) As our friendship deepened, I found that even brief, casual conversations with him would often inspire me to dive into old, half-finished poems in an attempt to bring them to fruition.

I realized, of course, that I had found a remarkable friend, a Muse. I was also aware that Tom and I were fast approaching the rocky shoals of infatuation, a man and a woman, both decidedly heterosexual, responding to each other in unmistakably sexual ways. We laughed; we had playful conversations as well as serious ones; we took delight in each other. At times we were alarmingly responsive to one another, and it was all too easy to fantasize about expressing that responsiveness in physical ways.

The danger was real, but not insurmountable; I sensed that if our infatuation were to develop into love, that is, to ground itself in grace rather than utility, our respect for each other’s commitments — his to celibacy, mine to monogamy — would make the boundaries of behavior very clear. We had few regrets, and yet for both of us there was an underlying sadness, the pain of something incomplete. Suddenly, the difference between celibate friendship and celibate passion had become all too clear to me; at times the pain was excruciating.

Tom and I each faced a crisis the year we met — his mother died, I suffered a disastrous betrayal — and it was the intensity of these unexpected, unwelcome experiences that helped me to understand that in the realm of the sacred, what seems incomplete or unattainable may be abundance, after all. Human relationships are by their nature incomplete — after twenty-one years, my husband remains a mystery to me, and I to him, and that is as it should be. Only hope allows us to know and enjoy the depth of our intimacy.

Appreciating Tom’s presence in my life as a miraculous, unmerited gift helped me to place our relationship in its proper, religious context, and also to understand why it was that when I’d seek him out to pray with me, I’d always leave feeling so much better than when I came. This was celibacy at its best, a man’s sexual energies so devoted to the care of others that a few words could lift me out of despair, give me the strength to reclaim my life. Abundance indeed. Celibate love was at the heart of it, although I can’t fully comprehend the mystery of why this should be so. Celibate passion — elusive, tensile, holy.

Naomi Shihab Nye

 

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
is the author of
Never in a Hurry
(essays);
Habibi
and
Going Going
(novels for teens);
Baby Radar
and
Sitti’s Secrets
(picture books); and
You & Yours
,
Fuel
,
Red Suitcase
,
Words Under the Words
, and
Amaze Me
(books of poetry). She has edited seven anthologies of poetry for young readers, including
This Same Sky
and
The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East
.

 

I’m idling in the drive-through line at a fast-food franchise in Texas, the kind of place I usually avoid, because my hungry teenager
needs
a hamburger, when a curling strand of delicate violin rises from National Public Radio. I know immediately it’s Simon Shaheen, the Arab-American virtuoso violinist, an elegant man who wears starched white shirts and black suits and plays like an angel.

A calm washes over me that I haven’t felt in days. The commentator says his name. I raise the volume; our car fills up with grace. I place my head on the steering wheel, tears clouding my eyes.

“Mom! Are you all right? You are
so weird
!”

No. I am simply an Arab American in deep need of cultural uplift to balance the ugliness that has cast a deep shadow over our days.

Play Ali Jihad Racy, Um Kalthoum, Marcel Khalife, Hamza El Din, Matoub Lounes…any melodious Middle Eastern music to counteract the terrible sorrow of this time! With so many precious people and lands grieving and no way that we, simple citizens, can solve it or get our full minds around it, what shall we do with our souls?

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music — Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering “The Lost Chord” on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn. He held single notes so long we thought he might faint.

The world rang rich counterpoint, mixed melodies, fragrances, textures: crushed mint and garlic in the kitchen, cardamom brewing in the coffee, fabulously embroidered Palestinian pillows plumped on the couch. And always, a thrumming underchord, a hovering, hopeful note: Things had been bad, but they would get better. Our dad had lost his home, but he would make another one. People suffered everywhere, but life would improve.

I refuse to let go that hope.

Because men with hard faces do violent things, because fanaticism seizes and shrinks minds, is no reason for the rest of us to abandon our songs.

Maybe we need to sing them louder.

I hold in my heart so many sorrowing individuals. All families and friends of innocent victims everywhere. All dedicated advocates of peace — keep speaking out wherever you can! All people related to the Middle East who despise bad behavior. All gentle immigrants — how much harder their lives may be now. All citizens who trust the great potential of humanity. All children who want to be happy. All mothers and sisters of violent men.

I wish for world symbols more than SUVs wearing American flags like hula skirts — aren’t images that embrace all humanity, all nations and variations, the only thing that will save us now? My friend Milli makes me an exquisite peace bracelet with a miniature globe on it, alongside an ivory dove and beads from many countries. I wear it every day.

A friend I don’t know sends an email: “It is our duty to be hopeful.”

The words of children console us, not the other way around. During a local poetry workshop with fourth graders, a girl hands me a folded note: “Poetry is eating all my problems.” My great-niece stomps her foot. “Adults are forgetting how to have fun!”

I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!

I read about the Seeds of Peace teenagers, Arabs and Israelis who come together in Maine and Jerusalem for deepened dialogue and greater understanding. Their gatherings are not easy. They cry and fear and worry. But they emerge from their sessions changed. Every weapon on earth betrays their efforts, but we need them desperately, to balance the cruel tides.

Condolence cards fan out on my table — kind women I haven’t seen in years, writing, “We care.” Everyone advises me to stay balanced, practice yoga again, eat well, laugh out loud. They understand that an Arab American might be feeling sicker than most people these difficult days. I grip these lovely messages as if they were prescriptions from the best doctor. My wonderful Japanese-American friend Margaret in Hawaii is particularly vigilant, writing, “How are you? You are strongly in our thoughts,” every single week.

I treasure the welcoming world of women…laughing, tending, nourishing, mending, wrapping language around one another like a warm cloak. I try to think of supportive women in my community whom I could surprise — friends who might be able to use a bunch of red ranunculus, a plate of hot gingerbread when it is not even their birthday.

And I keep thinking of the Palestinian grandmother who lived to be 106 years old and didn’t read or write, though she always said she could “read the sky” and the tea leaves in the bottoms of everyone’s cups. She claimed she didn’t want to die “until everyone she didn’t like died first.” We think she succeeded. The truth was, she was very popular. She liked everybody and they all loved her. The Israeli anthropologist who did an oral history project in her village found me years later to say, “Her warmth changed my life — I consider her my grandmother, too.” Even though she had lost her home to Israel in 1948, she said, “I never lost my peace inside.”

The only place she ever traveled beyond Palestine was Mecca, by bus. She was proud to be called a hajji, to wear layered white clothes afterward. In her West Bank village, she worked hard to get stains out of everyone’s dresses — scrubbing them with a stone over a big tin tub in the courtyard, under her beloved lemon tree. If we told her, “You are very patient,” she would joke, “What choice do I have?”

I think she would consider the recent tragedies a terrible stain on her religion. She would weep. She never fussed at my father for not praying five times a day in the traditional way. As she excused herself from our circle for her own prayers, he might say something like, “I’m praying all the time, every minute,” and she would grin.

She wanted people to worship in whatever ways they felt comfortable. To respect one another, enjoy one another’s company, tell good stories, sit around the fire drinking tea and cracking almonds, and never forget to laugh no matter what terrible things they had been through. Laughter was the power.

What wisdom did she possess that other people can’t figure out?

I thought I was done writing about her — for years she starred in my essays and poems. But after September 11, she started poking herself into my dreams again, kindly, sorrowfully: “Say this is not who we are.”

Apparently, the entire United States has taken to reading more poetry, which can only be a good sign. Journalists ask, “Why do you suppose people are finding strength in poetry now?” Those of us who have been reading poetry all our lives aren’t a bit surprised. As a direct line to human feeling, empathetic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

I feast on
The Poetry of Arab Women
, a contemporary collection. Deema K. Shehabi wrote, “And where is that mountain / that will fold us inward slowly.”

Then I read Coleman Barks’s vibrant translations of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet who has for the past few years been one of the bestselling poets in the United States. It’s rumored he’s also the poet most often read aloud on the radio in Afghanistan. Open
The Soul of Rumi
anywhere and find something helpful.

Yes. I breathe deeply, closing my eyes.
And how are we educated human beings so old and so stupid?