Astringency

British writer Elizabeth Goudge published her novel, Pilgrim’s Inn, in 1948. It details the struggles of an English family to move from London to a country inn soon after World War II. The plot is at once nostalgic and forward-looking at a time when pre-war certainties have been obliterated by the conflict that decimated Europe. Seen from the early days of the twenty-first century, readers may be tempted to pity the naiveté of the characters struggling to come to terms with their spiritual, emotional, and physical exhaustion by placing their hope in the future while anchoring it to the past. But those readers would be naive to do so.

A central motif of the novel centers around a medicinal herb: Rue is bitter, with astringent qualities. According to Goudge, it has the folk name “Herb o’ Grace o’ Sundays.” Not coincidentally, that is also the inn’s name: the Herb of Grace.

Living at the Inn means different things to the novel’s various characters. For Nadine, a beautiful woman, coming to the Inn means discarding her previous life and the double-mindedness that finds her married to one man and in love with another.

“I’m happy,” said Margaret. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” said Nadine, pouring out her coffee.

“What is it that you haven’t got, Nadine?” asked Margaret bluntly.

“Some saving grace,” said Nadine. “Something that you have and I have not. Some sort of astringency. I don’t know what it is.” … An astringent grace. Not one of the flowing graces. Astringent, like an herb. Herb of Grace….

The common definition of the verb, “rue,” is “bitter regret” as in, “he will rue the day;” but before the word meant bitterness, it mean repentance.

I am struck by the astringent quality of repentance. After one deals with the shame of sin and–by the help of the Holy Spirit–screws up the courage actually to repent and not just hide from the consequences of one’s actions or inactions, then the astringency of repentance kicks in. Repentance is a grace, but often a bitter one, for while its astringency can cause our sins to shrivel, it must also tighten our resolve and our determination to live a life of penitence:

Without a word he went away and left her. She groped her way to the armchair and sat down. It was done. She had denied. It was over…. No, it wasn’t…. That was where she had gone wrong before. There was never a last step, but only one more step. Nothing is ever over; it is all a continuing process. Lying back in her armchair she shut her eyes and made her submission to the process; it seemed somehow a personal submission to a personal power, a reorientation of herself…. Yes, she said…. Well, what next? She had denied…. Now she had to learn to laugh.

Tightness. Tension. Even temptation. They never go away. Repentance is frequently a bitter choice: uncomfortable, unpleasant, even painful. It is hard for me to understand, even after all these years and so many Lents, that choosing the harder path, the astringent path, will lead to joy. I have dodged it so many times before. Yet I intend this time and this Lent to make a better, more astringent beginning.

June

It has been a cool June. Yesterday, Julie & I drove to Santa Fe to meet friends for several days of sightseeing, eating, and friendship. 

We drove “Mary,” our little red sports car, and for the most part, we had the top down. That was fine when we drove out of Denver on US 285, but coming down off Kenosha Pass into South Park, the weather got progressively colder the further we went down into the park.  The big thirteeners to the west still had a lot of snow on the peaks and filling in the cols and arêtes on their faces. And the wind blowing down from them was chilled from passing over all that coldness.

Even with the heater going full blast, we were glad to get to Fairplay and find a cafe to warm up and have breakfast in. They had a gas stove/fireplace, and we gravitated to it like moths to a candle. By the end of the meal, however, we were sufficiently warm to brave the elements again, but this time, with the top up.

Continuing down 285 and over the pass into the San Luis Valley, it started to warm up, and by the time we passed Villa Grove and headed down the state highway that borders the Great Sand Dunes, we were warm enough to take the top down again. Driving south past Antonito, we passed into New Mexico and traveled through high chaparrel before wending our way down into the Rio Grande Valley. 

Lordy, it turned hot in a hurry, and by the time we approached Española, we put the top up again–but this time to hide from the sun and turn on the air conditioner. 

Now we safely ensconced at the El Rey motel in Santa Fe, and I’m sitting out under a tree with birds objecting  to my presence up above.

It’s cool here, but it’s the cool of the high desert: you know that the pleasant temperature is an ephemeral thing  that won’t last long. It’s caused in part by the lush vegetation that the gardener admitted was “a lot of work.” And it’s artificial. Roses shouldn’t be blooming so lushly in this climate; the grass shouldn’t  be so green–shoot, there shouldn’t even be any grass.

It’s a very Spanish thing–or rather, I suppose, a Moorish thing, this impulse to make the desert bloom. Water is like liquid gold, and to have it flowing out of fountains surrounded by flowers and vegetation in an enclosed space holding out the heat and the dryness is a blessing. A smug blessing, perhaps, but a blessing nevertheless.

And I’m old enough to take my blessings where I can get them anymore. 

We stopped 

Springtime in Colorado

I’ve been thinking a lot about Wordsworth recently.

Oh, there is blessing in this gentle air…

…he wrote at the beginning of The Prelude, the introduction to his “epic poem” that he called The Excursion. 

When I was in graduate school, I almost died of terminal syncope reading The Prelude, but now that I’m older and crankier, I find that things I studied in school are coming back to me. Somehow, in spite of my determined resistance  to that  sort of flatulent romanticism, in spite of my materialism, my exposure to Wordsworth has come home to roost.

Oh, there is blessing in this gentle air!

And there is. The first time I noticed it this season was a few weeks ago when the warm days were warring with blizzards and other evidences of what one Denver television weathermen (a damn boobie) called “Challenging Meteorological Events.”

But that afternoon, sitting out under the gazebo (which we pronounce “gaze-boe” in a nod to a female shark trial lawyer friend who grew up in the south), I felt “gentle breezes,” and the just made me happy.

Today, a month later, it’s even warmer, and this evening I spent some time in the front of our house walking up and down the sidewalk and watching the light fade and smelling the air that’s a combination of the usual Colorado goodness along with Iris pollen and flowering trees and things that make me take antihisamines so that I can enjoy the vegetation while hallucinating.

But there is blessing in the air. I’m so glad and so grateful to be alive and to experience this most wonderful of seasonal change. The newly green trees obscuring the view of the mountains to the west remind me of another poet’s image of the “whinnying green horses walking warm onto the fields of praise.” All of this green and all of these perfumes in the air. It don’t get much better than this.