Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,41

not God, who was only myself made boundless. When I review all the things I did while I thought I was in the throes of what I might have called the Holy Spirit, I see everything I did as one more gold earring tossed into the fire. My fervor was self-adornment.

When I think about all my fervor, and realize that God is an image thrown up by my illness, it’s very hard for me to understand my faith as anything other than a fever dream. Especially when I am said to have said what I did during my episode. Faith is now inextricably linked to madness for me. This is a great sorrow. I wish very much for you to believe that it is a great sorrow.

I will never be the sort of person who despises religion.

And my faith also might have been fueled by a great fear—I wanted an ancestry that would not be the meaningless ancestry of my family: blood, land, money. I wanted a lineage, and what better church in which to seek a lineage?

So all of this is seeming very much like fear, obstinacy, vanity, and illness.

To go on in it would be like going on in a marriage after one discovers unfaithfulness. I know some people would dig in to the marriage, would fight for what they believed to be the truth about the marriage, which was that it was a good thing that has been wounded, and they would use their love to stanch the flow. But I see the uselessness of that kind of love now—that love may not be love, but fear. I could not stand under God now with a pure, expectant heart. After all that’s happened, I think my heart still has something pure and hopeful in it—if it didn’t I wouldn’t be writing you. But I don’t want to think that there’s a supernatural tone whose object is to extract purity from me. I went back and read Augustine last week and his own need for God is his own need for God—I am not moved. I am moved by the tenderness with which he comes to philosophic problems of memory, of time, and metaphors of creation, but I do not feel moved to capitulate as he capitulated. I once met a former priest—turned atheist by the war—who told me that every time he read the Confessions he found himself lured back to a desire for belief because of Augustine’s description of a God who would not give up on us. But I am utterly immune to the chords he’s playing.

I am sorry.

Love,

Bernard

August 5, 1959

Dear Bernard—

I wrote two other versions of this letter but then I decided to proceed as if your heart is indeed as sturdy as you say it is.

If you’re so focused on your own selfishness—your own sin—you will of course lose your faith. If you concentrate on your need for faith as display, you will never find him.

This is more attention paid to self, the notion that because you were selfish, your love was never really love. I have heard you speak, Bernard. And even though I will agree with you and say that yes, occasionally I thought exactly what you have said—that God was sometimes merely a conduit for feelings and thoughts that were too large even for your poems—I never, ever thought that you were deluding yourself in a love of him. Or that you were acting. I saw you as someone who was truly trying to love God.

A word on parishioners: Parishioners are not Christians. They are parishioners. Their allegiance is not to God but to their priest, whom they think is God. It’s like Heart of Darkness with Kurtz. And often priests are not Christians either, because they have too much of Kurtz in them. When a friend of mine was about fourteen, she found herself followed around the neighborhood by a young man who’d recently been discharged from the army after he’d had a nervous breakdown. He was the son of a man who owned a large grocery store and who gave a lot of money to the church school. The young man’s attentions were troubling my friend, and when it got to the point where he parked his car outside her house one night with the lights off, her father went to the priest and asked him to talk to the family about it. The priest said that it would be impossible to bring this up because it might