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Mondays With Muddy

12 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by emilypageart in Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, dance, faith, God, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript

Here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Evening. It has been a strange day. I have not ventured beyond my own yard. If any friends had dropped in on my, they would have found me behaving normally and looking perfectly calm, I think. But inside I have been running furiously to escape the ‘unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace’ following me. Yet at the same time, I was hoping to be caught. There were even times when I turned around to run toward the Pursuer instead of from Him, having first been careful to set up several barriers between us. How ambivalent can one be?

I must have had some naive notion in the back of my head that the conflict was going to be resolved all in one day. If I could not longer keep God out of my life, then I suppose I looked for a sudden ovewhelming conversion or illumination or rebirth. All at once I would be filled with joy and peace and the love that passeth knowledge. I would become Saint Somebody, in short.

Now that the panic of my predicament has worn off, I can think a little more calmly and clearly. I am no longer running, either from or toward. I feel as if I wre beginning a long pilgrimage that will take years, perhaps the rest of my life. I shall very likely get lost many times, and stumble from weariness, and be tempted to turn back – and may well turn back unless I can find more courage and patience, more faith, hope and love than I’ve ever discerned in my character up to date.

There is an old saying that to undertake a journey of a thousand miles, on begins with a single step. Perhaps I took the fist step unwittingly when I was drawn back here. I’m not sure in what direction to take the second step. It is not a journey that can be planned out ahead of time with road maps and advance reservations at comfortable motels. It has, I think, to be moved out like a dance, which is neither an intellectual procedure nor a random miscellany of steps and gestures, but rather the evolvement of one movement out of and into another, all of them related by an underlying intent. It requires discipline and balance and devotion, and the stamina to endure periods of discouragement. Like the dane, moreover, it should never be undertaken in a spirit of plodding drudgery or dogged determination but with a basic bouyancy and trust and sometimes joy in spite of temporary defeats. And like making a dance, it requires constant awareness, the ‘listening attitude’ of Mrs. McCaig, if one is going to hear the music to which one dances.”

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Mondays With Muddy

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by emilypageart in Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, church, God, journal, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, search for faith, unpublished manuscript, writing

This is the next installment of the unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures, by my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page:

“When I set out as usual for a walk this morning, I had no particular destination in mind. It just happened that I was passing the church over by the cove as people were arriving for the service, and on an impulse I went in too.

It is a typical old New England church, painted white and built with a lovely simplicity of line. On the inside there is a center aisle flanked by two sections of semi-circular pews, all of which had little doors a the ends which latched securely with a decisive click. I thought for a moment I’d actually been locked in just in case I changed my mind. As a matter of fact, my presence wasn’t needed that badly – the place was almost full. Most of the people I’ve met this summer attend one of the churches over in town if they attend any. However, this Stoneleigh church draws people from several communities in the area, most them local residents, I surmise, but with a fairly good percentage of summer people mixed in.

The cornerstone of the congregation seemed to be a row of old ladies with fine, strong features who sat stiff and erect in the front left pew. From where I saw on the opposite side, some rows back, I had an oblique view of their profiles. They looked as if thtey might all be Emerson’s sisters petrified by time.

I was surprised when the minister entered; I hadn’t expected him to be so young. I decided he must be fresh out of seminary and that this was his first incumbency or whatever it’s called.

All through the hymns and preliminaries to the sermon I felt self-conscious and vaguely guilty, as if I were an imposter. It is a long time since I’ve been in church except for a wedding or a funeral. My feeling of awkwardness was increased when I suddenly realized I had no money with me. When the offering was taken up, however, my interest in the way it was done made me forget my embarrassment. Instead of passing a plate, the ushers carefully thrust into each pew a pole from which was suspended a mulberry-colored velvet pouch that delicately muffled the clink of coins.

When the minister began his sermon, I tried to concentrate on what he was saying but most of the time I was thinking about him instead. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, very personable young man with good diction, and in spite of his youth his delivery was confident without being cocksure. I liked him, even though I didn’t take in much of what he was saying.

But what was he like when he was not in the pulpit, I wondered? Was he a person I could talk with comfortable or would there be too great a gap between our viewpoints? What made him enter the ministry? Did he grow up with a strong religious faith or was it something he had to struggle to acquire or was it something hat struck him our of the blue? Was he primarily interested in saving souls or in making the church relevant to the world we live in? Had he found a treasure forever beyond my reach?

If I had listened carefully to what he was saying, I might have learned the answers to some of my questions, but my mind and gaze wandered from him to the people around me. What were they really thinking about, what did they feel, what did they really believe? Was that ruddy, stocky, well-dressed man, for instance, really absorbed in the minister’s words or barely holding back his impatience to go fishing on this lovely day? And that slightly pained-looking woman in the flowered print dress – was she having trouble understanding the sermon or did her shoes hurt her?

When the service was over, I tried to sidle out inconspicuously but several strangers came up and greeted me cordially and then my friends, the Mitchells, appeared, looking as surprised to see me there as I was to see them. They offered me a ride home which I declined, but I chatted with them for a few minutes as we walked out together. It seems they’ve been attending that church in the summer ever since they started coming to Stoneleigh nine years ago.

As I was turning to go, Frank asked, ‘Why haven’t we seen you here before?’ I couldn’t decide whether it was an honest questions or whether he was teasing me.

‘It’s a good question,’ I laughed, and went on my way thinking that was the end of it.

But this evening the question has come back.  A little while ago I heard the chapel bell over in the village ringing for vesper service. As always, it seemed to me to have a lonely sound and put me in a slightly melancholy mood.

I visualized a little flock of the faithful straggling along the road – the ones who had no time for churchgoing in the morning, such as the domestics who work for the summer people, or the very pious and forlorn who felt a need to attend church both morning and evening. The image depressed me. I thought it was because I felt sorry for them.

Then without my intention or volition the image changed. I was no longer the creator of it, I was a passive spectator. Instead of a scattering of people along the road, I saw thousands and thousands of people stretching way back into the distance, far beyond eye range – a distance in time as well as space – all pressing forward together toward the chapel. The phrase ‘strnagers and pilgrims on the earth’ went through my mind, and to my utter astonishment I realized it was for myself I felt sorry. I felt a pang of envy and of loneliness. I wanted to belong to that procession.

It was then that Frank’s question came back to me and I asked myself; if instead of evading the question, I had answered it honestly, what would I have said?

I suppose my answer would have gone like this: ‘You don’t see me in church because I’m not sure I even believe in God. I’m one of those who are ‘lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot.’ I’l like to believe in God but I can’t.’

And then if he had asked me why I couldn’t, I suppose I’d have brought up the old argument about all the undeserved suffering in the world not jibing with a lovely and omnipotent Deity, along with all the other timeworn intellectual objections to which no one, so far as I know, has ever found or received an explanation any more specific or satisfactory than the one Job got.

That would have been my answer to Frank. But would it have really been an honest answer? A vague uneasiness tells me it would not. But then  what is the answer?”

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Mondays With Muddy

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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16th century poetry, Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, God, journal, journaling, Landscape with Figures, poetry, unpublished manuscript

This is the latest installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“We had another night so utterly still it seemed to me if I tuned my hearing a hair’s breadth higher, I could not only hear the secret, delicate burrowing of a mole among the roots of the trees but the infinitesimal sound of growing made by the roots themselves. Which is, of course, absured.

Nevertheless, I lay in the dark, quiet as the night itself, listening, listening – for what I wasn’t sure. It was not fear that kept me awake this time; it was something more elusive.

Then as I lay there in the silent dark there floated into my mind that anonymous little 16th century poem, one of the most poignant, passionate poems in all English literature:

O westron wind, when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arm

And I in my bed again!

I’ve never been able to make up my mind whether it was written by a man or a woman. It is a cry that might have been wrenched from the throat of Abelard or torn from the anguished heart of Heloise. In fact, I used to let myself imagine the poem was originally written by one of them in Latin and was somehow found and translated into English centuries later.

I hadn’t thought of the poem for a long time and when the words went through my mind, a wave of sadness swept over me and a moment later I realized I was no longer listening for something beyond audible sound but longing for something beyond defining. I could not have said whether it was for a person, a place, or an experience I’d once had and lost forever or one I might have had but failed to find. It was rather like an unassuageable home-sickness for a country I’d never seen, which is a contradiction, of course.

Was it basically, I wondered, sexual desire manifesting itself directly? It seemed to me that if ‘my love were in my arms,’ the longing might have been eased temporarily, but I had the feeling something deeper or other, was involved – something possible like what the psalmist felt when his soul was ‘thirsting’ for God.

Is there in the core of every human being this longing, this essential loneliness, for something we cannot or will not or dare not specify, which is why we so often avoid silence and prefer noise to drown out our thoughts?

I hope the wind blows tonight so I can sleep.”

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Emily Page

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