and what might be helpful for you to hear at this moment. You might not want to hear about what I’ve been thinking, and it might sound hollow to you, but just write me and tell me if so. I’ve told you when I haven’t wanted to hear from you, so maybe it’s time I have a dose of my own medicine.
I think often of this sentence from Kierkegaard: “It is beautiful that a person prays, and many a promise is given to the one who prays without ceasing, but it is more blessed always to give thanks.” We should love him but without expecting his love in return. This way we know we are not loving him out of fear. Love then becomes a creative act, one in which each day we are responsible for moving forward into a more perfect practice of self-forgetting.
He loves us by letting us take a very long time to make that practice perfect. Otherwise known as: grace. He lets us, and lets us in the freest free will, make mistakes and keep trying. The fact that I am still standing and have not yet been reduced to a smoking pile of ash is some proof that grace is his nature. If you need to take a long time to figure out whether you love him, he will not be impatient.
And maybe I won’t be impatient. If you ever find yourself wandering forgetfully into a prayer, please pray for that. I can be too harsh. Harsher than God, which is pride. I was a little harsh in my last letter, and you were gracious enough not to remark upon it if you thought so.
What I think is that your fear is the problem here. Your fear, and the notion that you failed the Church because your sin eclipsed your love. (I’m relieved that you don’t think the Church failed you because then you would be leaving a disgruntled customer, which would be a much harder position to dig out from. Resentment, and I should know, is a toxin that causes paralysis, if not eternal enmity.) But I want you to think that perhaps you could be a knight of faith. You are the only person I have ever met who ever seemed capable of inhabiting and living up to Kierkegaard’s term. I don’t want to flatter you, but maybe you need a little bit of flattery right now.
Maybe you should leave off the Augustine and turn again to Kier-kegaard and Dostoevsky. I know we’ve talked about these two a lot, but I want to repeat myself. The gospels tell us Christ suffered, but all we have as proof is the stained-glass triptych of Christ’s suffering in Mark—the temptation in the desert, the praying in the garden of Gethsemane, crying out to God on the cross. It is helpful to know that Christ struggled with temptation—I am glad it is on the record—but sometimes it can feel like a bit of catechism we repeat without ever truly comprehending what he actually endured. But those two writers I think come closest to giving us the best modern articulation of what it means to struggle with what we have been charged with. They are poets of the agony that is doubt and of the burden that is conscience.
Bernard, I am about to flatter you again, but I think you could come up with an articulation that is as good as theirs. I think that if you wrote of this struggle, if you wrote of yourself, Bernard Eliot, born 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, with all your very particular temptations and fears, and your craving for God’s mercy, and the death that comes on from feeling so far from it, without glorifying yourself as a hero conquering this death but as someone in chains, it would be as powerful. I’ve said this to you before but I think you might need to hear it again. What I haven’t told you before, because I thought your head was big enough without your hearing this, was that the first time I heard your poems, at the colony, I thought of John Donne. Perhaps you could look at his poems.
I think I have written enough, and maybe too much.
Love,
Frances
August 30, 1959
Frances, my favorite. If God exists, he exists only in you.
All my love,
Bernard
September 5, 1959
Dear Claire—
Thank you for having me last week. I was very glad that Old Man Sullivan let me out of his clutches long enough for me to escape