Duty and Love
Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago, but just now finally got my computer at home up and running again, thanks to the help of a computer-savvy student...and hopefully I'll be posting weekly again!
I was finally ready, I thought, to come back to this blog, after an exhausting month of multiple professional and personal challenges, but when I read the gospel for October 7, I became physically distressed. Jesus tells his disciples, “Suppose one of you had a servant…would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat?’ Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink.’ Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
This passage bothers me for multiple reasons. Perhaps most viscerally, I have known too many women who have lived to serve their husbands and their children, soullessly and bitterly cooking, cleaning, scolding—women who were never thanked by anyone—as well as women who were abused by those in their own homes, trapped in a life of servanthood they could not escape. How could Jesus, who worked so hard to subvert the power dynamics of his society, use such a metaphor for living a godly life?
The answer to this question came to me this week through two sources: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and a wise sentence spoken to me by a woman who adopted three older children whom I sought out for advice.
Wilder’s book was my favorite novel in high school, and one of the few books I actually owned prior to starting college. I couldn’t remember why I had liked it so much, so I decided, when I recently rediscovered it on my shelf, to read it again. It felt almost eerie to hold the book, which literally fell apart in my hands as I read from it each night this week. I was startled to realize that I recognized my own handwriting in the margins, which has not changed much. Not only that, but the types of notations are similar to those I make in new books now—astericks, random phrases that don’t make much sense on a second read. No matter how I try, I’ve never found a better system for marking up my books—I am always drawing stars in the margins when I am struck in the deepest places in my heart, and the size of the asterick generally reflects how much I was moved. Apparently this is a habit I’ve had for 20 years.
In any case, I remember reading it greedily multiple times in high school. (I can tell I marked it up more than once by the fact that some of my notes are in black pen, some in blue pen, and some in pencil). This time, I found it a slow read, and I read it a little at a time over a week, sometimes having to review what had happened in earlier pages. But I’ve found it hard to read anything lately. I am struggling with the adoption process in more specific ways now, and I am finding it hard to focus on much else. Still, I was determined to read something for pleasure, a feat I haven’t managed in quite some time.
The book is a story of five people who die when a footbridge collapses near Lima, Peru. I was most drawn to the story of the Marquesa, an older, wealthy woman who is a drunk, and her servant-girl, Pepita. The Marquesa has had a very conflicted relationship with her daughter since her youth. Even after her daughter grows up, marries, and moves across the sea, the Marquesa continues to write to her regularly, sometimes dredging up old conflicts, sometimes complaining of her lack of love, sometimes demanding to know if her daughter loves her at all, sometimes bragging about her own happiness in life in order to prove she hasn’t been hurt by her daughter after all.
Pepita, an orphan girl, is sent to live with the Marquesa by an abbess who has been charged with her care. The abbess sees in Pepita the spirit of an abbess, and she sends her to the Marquesa to learn obedience and unconditional love. However, her plan is to eventually bring Pepita back to the convent to become her successor. Pepita serves the Marquesa kindly and selflessly, but the Marquesa barely acknowledges her.
One evening, during a trip she is taking with the Marquesa, Pepita writes the abbess a letter. She explains that she is miserable, that she wants to return to the convent, but that she also realizes there must be some reason the abbess has sent her to live with the Marquesa. The Marquesa finds the letter and reads it. She is stunned by the honesty and purity of the letter, by the girl’s desire to live lovingly despite her misery. After reading the letter, she invites Pepita to eat with her for the first time, but the girl, frightened by the invitation, refuses, saying she needed to get the evening fire ready in the Marquesa’s room. The Marquesa asks if she has any letters to be mailed the next morning, and she says she does not. When the Marquesa presses her, saying she knows of the letter she’s written to the abbess, Pepita confesses that she has decided not to send it. It was not a brave letter, she says.
The Marquesa is deeply moved. “She longed to be back in this simplicity of love, to throw off the burden of pride and vanity that hers had always carried…she remembered the long relationship [with her daughter], crowded with the wreckage of exhumed conversations, of fancied slights, of inopportune confidences, of charges of neglect and exclusion…”. And so, she writes her daughter a new kind of letter, the letter that is destined to be her last. In this letter, she expresses a pure, unconditional love. After completing the letter, she goes to Pepita’s room and sits beside her while she sleeps. She resolves to treat Pepita differently, to learn from her. She says, “Let me live. Let me begin again.”
And the next day, both the Marquesa and Pepita die in the bridge’s collapse.
The novel opens the question of whether there is such a thing as fate, whether tragedies happen for a reason, but that question remains unresolved at the end. This story, one of three in the novel, might suggest that the timing was good for the Marquesa. She has made her peace with her daughter without having to endure the response, whatever it might be. She has resolved to live a better life but is not tested in her ability to carry it out. But what of Pepita, who dies lonely, who is never able to use her gifts of service for a greater good, who never receives the Marquesa’s promised new attention?
But that is not the end of the story. At the end of the novel, Clara, the Marquesa’s daughter, pays a visit to the abbess to show her that last letter. The abbess, who knew the Marquesa’s hateful personality well, is stunned. “Now learn,” she says, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.”
Grace is a loaded word in the Christian tradition. Beliefs about grace have fractured denominations. They provided an easy out of sin for some and have been for others a much-needed road to forgiveness. I don’t think, in fact, that I understood the word in its purest form until I re-read this novel, this line in particular. Now, the meaning is clear: grace is a light in the darkness, a small piece of hope in what is otherwise for many a meaningless and empty life. It is also about surprise—about wonder. The abbess, who has made a life of serving the poor, is moved by the words of the Marquesa, who lived most of her life bitterly and meaninglessly.
I felt grace recently when talking with an adoptive parent, who said to me, “If you want to do this, to adopt an older child, you have to be prepared to love your child even if she can never love you as much as you love her—even if she can never love you at all.” Perhaps Jesus meant the same thing in his parable—he wasn’t talking about cruelty or abuse, but rather, of living a life that rises above thanklessness and bitterness, that requires less.
The Marquesa, after all, learns to love unconditionally by letting go of the past, by sending off the gift of her letter and then turning to the present, resolving to live there, to see the wonder and abundance of her life. The adoptive parents I spoke with recalled many happy times with their adopted children, even though the children never loved them in the way they had hoped to be loved.
I do not know whether I am capable of this kind of love. In our psychology-obsessed society, many of us who have been through therapy have learned all about co-dependence and boundaries. Don’t get me wrong—I know that many women have covered for alcoholic or abusive spouses and have ruined their own lives and sometimes their children’s lives as a result. I know the danger of caring for someone bitterly, greedily, at the expense of caring for oneself. And I also understand the importance of boundaries—we have to know how our own feelings and responsibilities and inner and outer resources are separate from those of others.
But we also have to know how to love unconditionally—how to say over and over to others, I love you, even if you can’t love me back. This is God-love, real love, but it can become destructive when it is accompanied by martyrdom, lack of self-care, or living in the past or future instead of the present.
Perhaps boundaries are not so much lines drawn in concrete as they are love letters sent across the ocean that are written with true, whole love, without any kind of need, any expectation of return, like the Marquesa’s letter. I felt this kind of love when, long ago, I handed over a book of my favorite quotes to another girl who I suspected needed them more than I did. I can still remember the little blue journal with the tattered cover that I carried with me everywhere in either a jean pocket or a little wallet. It was small enough that it did not draw attention, and I can remember pulling it out in the bathroom stall, in the privacy on my own room, in a little clearing in the woods where I sometimes went to think. And then, suddenly, I no longer had it. I made a half-hearted attempt to create a new one, but I never had the energy to go through old library books or my well-worn bible and find the quotes again. I never saw my friend, a girl I'd met at summer camp, again, and I never learned whether the book of quotes had been of any use to her.
So it was a moment of grace in the purest sense of the word when I got to the last four sentences of Wilder’s novel and found there a quote I can almost see scribbled on the front cover of that little book, the last thoughts of the abbess after Clara’s visit: “But soon we shall die and the memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
I was finally ready, I thought, to come back to this blog, after an exhausting month of multiple professional and personal challenges, but when I read the gospel for October 7, I became physically distressed. Jesus tells his disciples, “Suppose one of you had a servant…would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat?’ Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink.’ Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
This passage bothers me for multiple reasons. Perhaps most viscerally, I have known too many women who have lived to serve their husbands and their children, soullessly and bitterly cooking, cleaning, scolding—women who were never thanked by anyone—as well as women who were abused by those in their own homes, trapped in a life of servanthood they could not escape. How could Jesus, who worked so hard to subvert the power dynamics of his society, use such a metaphor for living a godly life?
The answer to this question came to me this week through two sources: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and a wise sentence spoken to me by a woman who adopted three older children whom I sought out for advice.
Wilder’s book was my favorite novel in high school, and one of the few books I actually owned prior to starting college. I couldn’t remember why I had liked it so much, so I decided, when I recently rediscovered it on my shelf, to read it again. It felt almost eerie to hold the book, which literally fell apart in my hands as I read from it each night this week. I was startled to realize that I recognized my own handwriting in the margins, which has not changed much. Not only that, but the types of notations are similar to those I make in new books now—astericks, random phrases that don’t make much sense on a second read. No matter how I try, I’ve never found a better system for marking up my books—I am always drawing stars in the margins when I am struck in the deepest places in my heart, and the size of the asterick generally reflects how much I was moved. Apparently this is a habit I’ve had for 20 years.
In any case, I remember reading it greedily multiple times in high school. (I can tell I marked it up more than once by the fact that some of my notes are in black pen, some in blue pen, and some in pencil). This time, I found it a slow read, and I read it a little at a time over a week, sometimes having to review what had happened in earlier pages. But I’ve found it hard to read anything lately. I am struggling with the adoption process in more specific ways now, and I am finding it hard to focus on much else. Still, I was determined to read something for pleasure, a feat I haven’t managed in quite some time.
The book is a story of five people who die when a footbridge collapses near Lima, Peru. I was most drawn to the story of the Marquesa, an older, wealthy woman who is a drunk, and her servant-girl, Pepita. The Marquesa has had a very conflicted relationship with her daughter since her youth. Even after her daughter grows up, marries, and moves across the sea, the Marquesa continues to write to her regularly, sometimes dredging up old conflicts, sometimes complaining of her lack of love, sometimes demanding to know if her daughter loves her at all, sometimes bragging about her own happiness in life in order to prove she hasn’t been hurt by her daughter after all.
Pepita, an orphan girl, is sent to live with the Marquesa by an abbess who has been charged with her care. The abbess sees in Pepita the spirit of an abbess, and she sends her to the Marquesa to learn obedience and unconditional love. However, her plan is to eventually bring Pepita back to the convent to become her successor. Pepita serves the Marquesa kindly and selflessly, but the Marquesa barely acknowledges her.
One evening, during a trip she is taking with the Marquesa, Pepita writes the abbess a letter. She explains that she is miserable, that she wants to return to the convent, but that she also realizes there must be some reason the abbess has sent her to live with the Marquesa. The Marquesa finds the letter and reads it. She is stunned by the honesty and purity of the letter, by the girl’s desire to live lovingly despite her misery. After reading the letter, she invites Pepita to eat with her for the first time, but the girl, frightened by the invitation, refuses, saying she needed to get the evening fire ready in the Marquesa’s room. The Marquesa asks if she has any letters to be mailed the next morning, and she says she does not. When the Marquesa presses her, saying she knows of the letter she’s written to the abbess, Pepita confesses that she has decided not to send it. It was not a brave letter, she says.
The Marquesa is deeply moved. “She longed to be back in this simplicity of love, to throw off the burden of pride and vanity that hers had always carried…she remembered the long relationship [with her daughter], crowded with the wreckage of exhumed conversations, of fancied slights, of inopportune confidences, of charges of neglect and exclusion…”. And so, she writes her daughter a new kind of letter, the letter that is destined to be her last. In this letter, she expresses a pure, unconditional love. After completing the letter, she goes to Pepita’s room and sits beside her while she sleeps. She resolves to treat Pepita differently, to learn from her. She says, “Let me live. Let me begin again.”
And the next day, both the Marquesa and Pepita die in the bridge’s collapse.
The novel opens the question of whether there is such a thing as fate, whether tragedies happen for a reason, but that question remains unresolved at the end. This story, one of three in the novel, might suggest that the timing was good for the Marquesa. She has made her peace with her daughter without having to endure the response, whatever it might be. She has resolved to live a better life but is not tested in her ability to carry it out. But what of Pepita, who dies lonely, who is never able to use her gifts of service for a greater good, who never receives the Marquesa’s promised new attention?
But that is not the end of the story. At the end of the novel, Clara, the Marquesa’s daughter, pays a visit to the abbess to show her that last letter. The abbess, who knew the Marquesa’s hateful personality well, is stunned. “Now learn,” she says, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.”
Grace is a loaded word in the Christian tradition. Beliefs about grace have fractured denominations. They provided an easy out of sin for some and have been for others a much-needed road to forgiveness. I don’t think, in fact, that I understood the word in its purest form until I re-read this novel, this line in particular. Now, the meaning is clear: grace is a light in the darkness, a small piece of hope in what is otherwise for many a meaningless and empty life. It is also about surprise—about wonder. The abbess, who has made a life of serving the poor, is moved by the words of the Marquesa, who lived most of her life bitterly and meaninglessly.
I felt grace recently when talking with an adoptive parent, who said to me, “If you want to do this, to adopt an older child, you have to be prepared to love your child even if she can never love you as much as you love her—even if she can never love you at all.” Perhaps Jesus meant the same thing in his parable—he wasn’t talking about cruelty or abuse, but rather, of living a life that rises above thanklessness and bitterness, that requires less.
The Marquesa, after all, learns to love unconditionally by letting go of the past, by sending off the gift of her letter and then turning to the present, resolving to live there, to see the wonder and abundance of her life. The adoptive parents I spoke with recalled many happy times with their adopted children, even though the children never loved them in the way they had hoped to be loved.
I do not know whether I am capable of this kind of love. In our psychology-obsessed society, many of us who have been through therapy have learned all about co-dependence and boundaries. Don’t get me wrong—I know that many women have covered for alcoholic or abusive spouses and have ruined their own lives and sometimes their children’s lives as a result. I know the danger of caring for someone bitterly, greedily, at the expense of caring for oneself. And I also understand the importance of boundaries—we have to know how our own feelings and responsibilities and inner and outer resources are separate from those of others.
But we also have to know how to love unconditionally—how to say over and over to others, I love you, even if you can’t love me back. This is God-love, real love, but it can become destructive when it is accompanied by martyrdom, lack of self-care, or living in the past or future instead of the present.
Perhaps boundaries are not so much lines drawn in concrete as they are love letters sent across the ocean that are written with true, whole love, without any kind of need, any expectation of return, like the Marquesa’s letter. I felt this kind of love when, long ago, I handed over a book of my favorite quotes to another girl who I suspected needed them more than I did. I can still remember the little blue journal with the tattered cover that I carried with me everywhere in either a jean pocket or a little wallet. It was small enough that it did not draw attention, and I can remember pulling it out in the bathroom stall, in the privacy on my own room, in a little clearing in the woods where I sometimes went to think. And then, suddenly, I no longer had it. I made a half-hearted attempt to create a new one, but I never had the energy to go through old library books or my well-worn bible and find the quotes again. I never saw my friend, a girl I'd met at summer camp, again, and I never learned whether the book of quotes had been of any use to her.
So it was a moment of grace in the purest sense of the word when I got to the last four sentences of Wilder’s novel and found there a quote I can almost see scribbled on the front cover of that little book, the last thoughts of the abbess after Clara’s visit: “But soon we shall die and the memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
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