A Walk with Jane Austen (12 page)

I struggle to know what it means to trust God—the God who gives both beautiful and terrible things. The church that morning was filled with the musky sweetness of incense, thick fragrance pouring out of the abbot's swinging censer, overwhelming the small space. I thought I would throw up, then decided instead to try to drink in the scents, like the grace I desperately needed. I often choke on the grace of God.

The day became a lost one, a day to recover. I needed rest. I prayed that God would heal my body and comfort my heart.

I had gone to church without showering, in my T-shirt and jeans and hiking boots, thinking it would be just the four of us like last night. Of course, it wasn't—there was a full congregation in their Sunday clothes, looking at me, I felt, a bit askance. I determined not to think about it, that this would be one more instance of grace given, if reluctantly.

Dom Andrew spoke on patience and trust. During prayers, the abbot repeated, “Lord hear us.” And we all replied, “Lord, graciously hear us.”

It was just what I needed to pray. Dom Anselm was terribly kind and encouraged me to sit in the sun and sleep and read while I was here.

I woke to a noise in the middle of the night—someone going down the hall to the bathroom. I was jarred by the realization that there was no lock on my door and turned on my light for a minute although I knew that would push me into waking. Everything was more awful and terrible and wonderful then, all of my certainty and uncertainty about Jack. For hours after turning the light off, with my eyes closed, trying to sleep, I dreamed and feared, afraid and full of wonder at what my heart already knew, that my life could change so much and so suddenly.

I had prayed that I would meet someone. I had hoped I would. But I'd never imagined it would be like this—so sure.

Susan said that being here on retreat can bring to mind things one doesn't usually think about. She was mourning her brother, and Catherine was mourning a sister who'd committed suicide years ago. Somehow, in all the quiet, it was the grace of God that overwhelmed me, like my challenge here was to be able to accept good things from his hand.

Somehow Jack's goodness and God's goodness became all tied up together in my head in a way I could not entirely untangle. But the truth was, I couldn't count on Jack.

What I knew for sure was that he wasn't sure he wanted to get married—“Someday perhaps, but now?“—and that he'd just started sort of dating a girl from North Carolina and that officially we were just hanging out.

It felt like so much more than that.

I was convinced he felt the same things I did. He never said as much—like Willoughby, it was never spoken but “every day implied.”
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The way he looked at me, watched me walk down the stairs, or just paid attention to what I said. He made sure I was next to him. When we didn't have time to talk about everything, he would tell me that he wanted to hear more about what I thought later. He carried my backpack and walked on the outside of the sidewalk wherever we went, in that protective southern way.

So there was that communion, those myriad unspoken signs that exist between two people, that claim them as each others. If he was talking to someone else when I walked in the room, I immediately had his attention. Or when I pulled on my white hoodie between classes, he reached over and rescued one of the ties that had gotten stuck inside— taking care of me, putting me right. When I'd said good-bye to Paul, I saw Jack watching while trying not to seem to be watching, to see just how close we were, like he imagined there to be competition.

People who didn't already think we were engaged assumed we were dating or that we would be soon. Everyone believed it—believed in us. Other guys noticed and kept their distance. Perhaps my active imagination generated this impression, but that was how it seemed.

So why did he send me off with this kind of uncertainty? I could only assume it was because he was uncertain himself and that I couldn't entirely trust what I felt.

Whether or not I can count on God is another question entirely. (And I feel sacrilegious just thinking that thought.) I'm not sure why the goodness and grace of God is so oppressive to me here.

The great and embarrassing disappointment of my life thus far has been the not getting married thing. Embarrassing partly because I've
not been asked, never been adored like that, and partly because even in this feminist age, I still want it so much. And if that sounds crazy to some, since I'm currently thirty-three and still very marryable, it may help to know the expectations in the conservative Christian world in which I was raised. Girls were supposed to grow up, go to college, and get married. Nearly all of my friends did just that. Two of my best friends got married before our senior year in college.

So as the years went on, I worried about trying to catch up to them and their growing families and gradually came to realize—contrary to popular American Christian belief—that God does not always give you what you want.

The American Christian mentality can be a dangerous one. We are so successful, so rich, that we begin to equate these things with the blessings of God. They are great blessings, to be sure. But in some ways this leads to a faith that evaluates God's work in our lives and the lives of our friends by the amount of stuff we have received. When things work out—marriage, children, 401(k)—God is clearly present. When things do not work out, we tell ourselves and others to hold on, that God will surely come to our aid and act quickly on our behalf, bringing us what we want/need/desire/cannot live without. This is not entirely untrue; God loves to give us good things. And yet what we end up with in many ways is a faith focused on all of our riches, a faith that works only in America. Just thinking about trying to encourage Third World Christians the way we talk to each other belies the fact that these “truths” we hold on to are not universal.

Through the window of this great disappointment, my unmet longing for someone to share life with, my eyes were opened to the other side of God—the withholding side, the hard side, the side that
could smite the Amalekites and keep someone in the greatest want.

I chose to believe that this harshness was still love, was still somehow for my best and would work for my good. Of course, I loved the freedom of my life. Nothing but my bank account and my calendar could stop me if I wanted to escape to the other side of the world. And truthfully I was thankful not to be responsible for a gaggle of toddlers. But somehow through this loss I grew to associate God's love with something harsh and difficult, with things that didn't feel like love at all.

As I sat on a bench under a willow tree, by the lily pond at Alton Abbey, I was immersed in sun and friendship and something like love. I felt like God was asking me to believe once again in his actual goodness, in his ability and desire to give me things that not only are good for me, but will feel good as well.

I believe that Cassandra—Jane's dear sister—would have understood my struggles with the seeming harshness of God. In one of the defining moments of Cassandra's—and by proxy, Jane's—life, her fiancé, Tom Fowle, died of yellow fever in the West Indies. He was on board a boat that belonged to Lord Craven, a friend and distant relative who had gotten him the position, who said later that he would not have allowed him to go had he realized he was engaged. The whole venture, on Tom's part, seems to have been only to help him earn enough money so he could marry Cassandra. They had been engaged for three years and were only waiting for Tom to have a better income. Lord Craven was expected to give them a comfortable church living when a position opened up. It took months for the news to reach Steventon, so in the
spring of 1797, when Cassandra was expecting her dear Tom home, she learned instead of his death and burial at sea. After waiting almost five years to be able to marry, Tom was not coming home, his body sewn up in a ship's hammock and dumped over the side after what was likely a brief and perfunctory service.
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Because of Cassandra's careful nature, her emotions would not have been extreme. Jane said she “behave[d] with a degree of resolution & Propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation,”
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but she mourned Tom deeply and after that never seriously considered anyone else. Perhaps in part it was this tragedy that encouraged the girls into the garb of middle age sooner than was actually necessary. Jane clearly believed in marrying for love; it seems in this, as in many of her other ways of thinking about the world, she was encouraged by her sister. I wonder how her loss changed Cassandra's view of the world, her view of God. Early death was so much more common then, so much more expected, that perhaps it was not as much of a shock as it may be to us now when we hear the story retold. But Cassandra seems to have felt too strongly the harsh hand of divine justice, and I wonder if that is not a trend that started with Toms death.

After Jane died, Cassandra wrote to her niece, “I loved her only too well, not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to & negligent of others, & I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the hand which has struck this blow.”
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As though God were more than justified in taking Jane away at forty-one because her sister loved her too much, occasionally to the exclusion of others. I think this is so far removed from what God would have us understand of him, of the gifts he gives and takes away.

Jane Austen was born just here. Or actually not here exactly, but somewhere very close-by. I am a bit in awe and can't get my scattered mind to actually understand the directions in my guidebook to find the site of the rectory where the Austen family lived, where Jane was born in the terribly cold December of 1775.

I sit on a bench in the Steventon churchyard, which is very quiet, and I am blissfully alone. George Austen, Jane's father, was rector here at this sweet, small stone church, built roughly eight hundred years ago.
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My American mind cannot fathom a building—or any place really —having survived that long. History is more mythical to me, something marvelous that happened elsewhere, that cannot be touched, only imagined. But here I sit, in the village where Jane spent her first
twenty-five years,
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next to the lane up which her father carried every baby for a public christening after he'd given the baby a private baptism at home,
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pondering the huge yew tree in the churchyard, which Jane herself would have known, where her father hid the church key. Somewhere nearby was the hill Jane rolled down as a child, like Catherine in
Northanger Abbey
,who “loved nothing so well in the world.”
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Across from the rectory, the barn, where she threw rousing family theatricals with her brothers. And somewhere close were the elm trees she mourned after a particularly violent fall storm pulled them down.
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This was home. Jane loved it here. I've heard other writers describe the landscape as small, and I suppose it might be, but it seems to me everything an English country village ought to be. Houses and thatched cottages, only a couple of streets, the whole thing surrounded by gentle field- and farm-filled hills. Jane knew all of its lanes and seasons, loved its families. Her favorite subject was “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village,”
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and Steventon no doubt provided the seeds for Long-bourn and Meryton, Highbury and Uppercross.

As a child, without knowing it I think I always longed for a place to be—not any place, but my place, my home. There was no quiet village, and our house itself seemed rather too quiet, our family too small. My parents did not take kindly to my asking for additional children. Mom always said that if we had slept through the night, she would have had a dozen, but we were difficult babies, so it was just me and my brother. (My sister would join us later, which is a complicated story and not mine to tell—aren't all families complicated these days?) Our little family was plucked up every two to four years, moving from one air force assignment to the next. The only permanence we had was our love for one another and our faith—both of which, however imperfect, left me
with a sense of abundance. But I longed for someplace sturdy and old, something other than Sheetrock in various shades of builder's white.