things. I know I can judge like an Irish mother-in-law, but I don’t think I was too far off. However, feel free to contest.
But back to school: I would have quoted scripture to you, too, if I thought you liked the sound of your own voice too much: If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, but have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkly cymbal. I would have nicknamed you the Sounding Brass. And you could have called me Tiny Methuselah.
Do I think we can ever hear God’s voice? Well, this goes back to what I said earlier—I think it might be dangerous to believe we hear him. I am suspicious of what we take to be signs—they may be only our own desires reflected back to us in an ostensibly fortuitous event. Simone Weil horrifies me, but I also believe a great deal of what she says is from God. Your question makes me think of something she has written: “But this presence of Christ in the host is not a symbol either, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image; it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself; it is not supernatural.” Whatever we may think we hear will be corrupted, or as she would say, debased.
To ask to hear God’s voice, to ask for signs—this seems to me impertinence of the highest order.
My aunts and my sister, however, would cluck their tongues at me and say that I have intellectualized myself out of one of the great pleasures of the Catholic faith: signs and wonders, and a network of saints to arrange for them. They certainly do believe God talks to us, and with a megaphone. My grandmother was big on praying for parking spots. “Help me out here, Lord,” she’d say when circling for one. “What if you’re dialing him and he’s busy?” I used to say. She’d laugh and tell me “Oh, hush,” and Ann would snip at me when we got out of the car, say that it wasn’t right to talk that way. Ann has snipped at me all her life. My aunt Peggy believes in the song of Bernadette and helps raise money for people to go to Lourdes. Ann can always turn a disappointment into a sign of God’s promise that something better will come along. The women in my family certainly do feel that his will will be done. My aunts all think that it’s God’s will that my mother died when she did. They have to. They have intimated to me and Ann that she was “unhappy.” I have figured out that what they mean is that she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown right after she married my father. I overheard them talking one day two years ago. They do not know I know this, and I am curious to see if they will ever bring it up. My father never will. And I won’t—to him, at least. Who knows what he went through? I can’t bear knowing, and I don’t think he could bear explaining. It’s none of my business. I believe that he loved us as fiercely as he did as a way to extinguish the sorrow.
Forgive me. I didn’t mean to go on that long. Bernard, I have a sneaking suspicion that one day you will get me to confess to all sorts of things without my realizing it.
But then there’s prayer and discernment. Prayer is a mystery I should not approach. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really do it unless I have it written out for me. Anything I came up with on my own would sound like my asking for a pony for Christmas.
Speaking of prayer, here’s something about Simone Weil that kills me. She says that it’s sort of humorous, the line “Our father, who art in heaven.” To think that we, so far from him, really could knock and receive him, when the distance is so great. I’m the last person to want to describe God as a constantly available warm lap, but this strikes me as self-abasement taken to an absurd degree. And then she writes: “Each time that we say ‘Thy will be done’ we should have in mind all possible misfortunes added together.” But her line is what seems like a joke to me—to say that God’s love always makes Jobs out of us. It’s like something Mencken or Twain would