Beneficence
[Hall, Meredith, Beneficence. Boston: Godine, 2020.]
O Lover,
The setting for my reading highlight of this summer (but half spent) is largely restricted to a Maine farmstead across decades beginning in the early 1930s. In this stunningly written novel Doris and Tug Senter tenderly bind themselves to each other and his ancestral acreage which particularly she perceives as a bastion which only the external could threaten. This idyllic albeit delusional vision, in time enriched by three beautiful children, is forever bludgeoned by an intra-familial tragedy the ripples of which variously savage all concerned into the third generation. The shades of disintegration are as varied as are the characters all of whom struggle to forgive each other and/or themselves. The scarring of these multiple and protracted impasses, seemingly interminable for this reader, devour the years and decades, with flight, isolation, betrayal, and sclerotic paralysis of the heart but a sampler. Regrets cover the land like January’s snow, poisoning the Senters’ life within, between and among. Camelot mockingly exists only in the rearview mirror, and Camelot is dead.
O Lover, is not one of our principal tasks that of clearly seeing our human condition for what it is? And is not Hall’s Beneficence a profoundly spiritual book for that very reason alone? Did not the reading of it repeatedly and forcefully remind me of my own journey, the long and toxic shelf life of regret, and the nonnegoiability of forgiveness of both others and myself? Is not one of the most dangerous threats, whether at the individual, ecclesial, national or planetary level, our sidling up to delusionary paradigms which at best defer the deluge? Can healing ever come when we compound the unspeakable with closedness, judgment, and retrenchment?
Although both protracted and excruciating, the arc of Hall’s novel does bend, imperceptibly at first. This is, after all, a love story, but love of a sort not all would recognize. Rather than dualistically opposite to, or sequential supplanter of, the darkness, this love is encompassing loss, regret, self-accusation, and the temptation to despair. In her penultimate page Hall in the voice of Tug writes this: “‘We are not perfect,’ my wife said in the night. ‘No,’ I said. ‘We are not at all perfect. We are just us’” (284). What has been done and said is, but the ligature is being broken, the paralysis being undone. This is a grown-up love, ruthlessly stripping off sentimentality, judgment, and ideational realities. Like a reknit bone break it proffers strength and dependability while ever remaining fractured. Or in the pithy and paradigmatic image of the Apocalypse: “the lamb with the marks of slaughter upon him” (5:6). In the words of Doris: ”Tup and I. . . . slept without guard. There is never a going back. What we say and what we do stays, always. The great price of love and attachment is loss, with us every day. But here, too, each day, are their great easings” (272).
How do we become aware that such a transformation can even be, that it is not yet another layer of prophylactic delusion? For me such unconditional love is not self-evident, but rather an “acquired taste” apart from which I suspect I would futilely spiral down cursing the darkness. Nor for me has the perceived cosmos been sufficient for me to acquire this taste, succulent and splendiferous though she be. No, I am indebted principally to one of Your versions of the Story, O Lover, a version in the texts, vicissitudes, and mystics of which I have been graced with glimpses of such a possibility. And to this Story—and to You its Source, Singer, Wideness, and Embodiment—I have given as much of my consent as I am able to this point. As intimated in Hall’s novel, my truest self is who You see me as being.
Yes, the love which returns to Doris and Tug, not surprisingly as for the first time, can be and indeed is. And that has made all the difference.
