Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,42
offend the man whose generosity kept the church’s mission going. This man’s generosity was necessary, but the safety of my friend was not. My friend’s father eventually moved them a few towns over to get away from this boy. I am enraged by stories like this, and I’ve heard many of them. But if I decided to let this be the last word on God’s nature I would be no better than this priest who decided to let the supermarket king define what charity was. There is the church and there is the Church.
As far as loving your neighbor, you have always done a better job of that than I have, or ever will. Please do not berate yourself for not inventing the Catholic Worker.
I wonder if you should meditate some on the idea that God is eternal and bides his time. You once wrote to me of taking Augustine’s slow, blind journey to belief as an example. I am praying for you to see once again that we will never be made perfect in this lifetime, and that’s how God wants it. Perfection is what comes after this lifetime. You know your Paul. So you should know this.
If God is eternal he stands outside your illness. He cannot be corrupted by it.
Also, I think that psychoanalysis is reinforcing whatever selfishness you think you are crippled by. If you say you are suffering from a wish to be a hero, and that this wish has corrupted your faith, I don’t see how this system will disabuse you of that wish. It seems to me that it will keep putting you front and center of your own myth. Why is the unconscious any better than free will? What does it serve us to imagine ourselves enslaved to impulses? If you never imagined that we were enslaved to sin, why imagine that we are enslaved to drives and paralyzed by frustrations that we had no hand in making? This seems like nihilism.
I’m sending you this prayer to Saint Anthony that I hope might prick your conscience. I realize how much that makes me sound like my aunts and the nuts who buy Bishop Sheen’s books. But I am willing to take up the weapons of spiritual warfare used by the Irish banshees of Kensington if it means you might come back to the fold.
Love,
Frances
August 16, 1959
Dear Frances—
The card with Saint Anthony on it is now in my wallet. I intend it to stay there for all time.
Nevertheless, I can’t help what I am thinking and feeling now. These thoughts and feelings are truths piling up like rocks against the deluge of my previous whims; they feel like something to build from. Whatever I thought I knew scatters and drifts when I ask myself: Who and what did all this performance serve? I think this is perhaps the first time in my life that I can be said to know my own mind. I wish this acquaintance could have been made in a less disastrous way, but I am glad of it nevertheless. And there is still something in me that wants to say God has orchestrated this revelation. See, Frances, I am no complacent, smugly Buddha-minded, excessively rational indifferent atheist. Don’t worry, I won’t say Freud’s the orchestrator here.
I don’t want this parting of practice to sever our friendship. Am I naive to think it won’t? I still want you to make me laugh, and I want to make you laugh, and I want to read your work and see how it is coming into being, and help you strengthen it if you want me to, and I want you to take your pen to my work and see on what points I might be silent. I want the ruthlessness of your last letter riding my work to bits. When I look at you without my faith, I still see you, Frances, shining-eyed, penetrating, sound-hearted. I know that what you love me for is not God within me but me—or am I also naive in thinking that you did love me for me? It would fill me with sorrow to think that you and I could not ever again walk by the Hudson together and talk until the sun went down. We may not ever take communion together like we did that August, or that March, but could we not make New York City our sanctuary?
Write when you feel you can.
Love,
Bernard
August 25, 1959
Dear Bernard—
I have been thinking about faith, and your faith,