Help. The Last Part.

Descent from the Cross. The painter thinks maybe it's finished.

Festival, Brian Kershisnik

*****
His people on the grass, around the cross, are lovely, so sad. Some are crying. Almost all of them are moving, stepping up to work, enclosing the dead son in a safe circle of their love, in their steady concern and bewildered, heart-broken care. They wear the neverwhen clothing the painter's people always wear, their hair is dark, as is almost always the case in his work, the men are mostly clean shaven. The air is filled with angels.

*****

Here is a tiny story about the painting of Descent from the Cross.
Nothing quite like this has ever happened in the painter's studio. Interestingly, this sequence of events was captured on film (or the digital equivalent thereof), which has also never before happened in the painter's studio.

He began the painting on a large canvas which, having been stretched, gessoed and prepared but never used, had waited on his wall, bored, for years (another first, or perhaps more correctly, an only). This one time his working would be captured in a sort of stop motion for use in a documentary (Painter: The Movie). The work went well, he was pleased. And pleased, too, with the animation, a baby movie of charcoal and paint flying onto canvas, figures growing up and fleshing out in mere moments. He liked showing people his work so far, liked the funny little tricks he played with the cameras; himself apparently shuttling about in front of the painting without moving his feet, a box that zipped about as if under its own steam.

Not that he approached this painting and its subject lightly. No. Far from it. He uses music to help him as he works, help him get his head and heart where they need to be, and I don't at all know how he could face day after day of the sad, sad music he has been using. I can hardly stand to be in his studio with it; I make him turn it off till I leave. He's, uh, expressive when he works. Laughs, cries, stalks about, sings, rants and whispers. I understand, I do it too. Talk to myself, mutter. Sketch things in the air, brush them away and draw them again, the same and different. I don't laugh, much, and I don't sing but I do listen to music, a song over and over, tears running down my face till I just get tired of it. We agree working alone is vital, otherwise you'd never envision, never build, you'd only ever perform and while that's important it's different. Also, people would seriously think you were crazy. Touched. Making up a true thing is really difficult work. It's been hard, hard, this painting, not like Nativity where the tears could be for the beginning of life and for the joy of a baby. This dead son hangs heavy, heavy. The painter's been weeping for months. In each week he stops work to read letters at his studio, e mails from our far-away missionary-boy. And he weeps. An anniversary comes and goes; our dear friends have been living a year since the death of their son. Other friends talk with them of respite, the easing of tearing, rending pain that only more years will bring, speak with knowledge as the death of their own boy moves slowly away and slowly away from them.

Curtain, Brain Kershisnik

All these sons are with him as the painter weeps in his bright, sunny studio, painting a family stirred and spilled in the first moments after the loss of their son. So he needs a break.
Sometimes he would have to be silly, laugh, this isn't a hopeless subject after all. The work went well, he was pleased.

One morning he called to tell me the world had ended.

*****

I've had a quote, or something I've made into a quote, lodged in a crack in my memory since I started mulling the images in this painting and these ideas of help. I haven't quite been able to shake it free; I've decided it must be a line of movie dialogue from years ago. Perhaps someone who reads this will remember too and tell me. Donnette? Julie? Tom?
This is the line, "who do you think you're helping?"
Or, no, "who do you think you're saving?"
Like in a movie with...knights and castles, perhaps? I have this vague picture of a sort of peasant person shaking himself away, pushing off a knightish person, a knight who's trying to do something helpful and noble. They struggle a bit, awkward. The peasant is looking up at his knight in disgust. "Who do you think you're saving?" The knight is taken aback and nonplussed. Doubting his nobleness, a bit, suddenly. Who do I think I'm saving, he wonders. I was pretty sure it was from The Holy Grail, but the painter, who will recite every shred and particle of all things Monty Python ("Ah," you breathe, "now I see!" and feel you finally comprehend his work) says, emphatically, that it is not. (He also says, "When you don't know what you're talking about, be emphatic." Now you truly comprehend his work.)

Pastoral with Injured Fool, Brian Kershisnik

*****

He had gone in the morning to his studio, flipped on the special cameras before beginning work at the large canvas, covered now with figures clustered around the cross where the body of the dead son hung, partially supported by the strength of nails driven through hands and wrists and partially held up in the arms of encircling family and friends. The painter stepped back to look, to see, stepped forward to work and just flicked away a bristle stuck to the canvas, a little hair from one of his round hog-bristle brushes. They stick in the paint sometimes. A great chip of the painting came away with the bristle.
Another first in the painter's studio.
He was bewildered, in an agony, in a fury. Sections of the painting flaked, fell away as he scraped at them. If that could happen, was happening, what else could, might, happen? To how many paintings? Why, of them all, to this one?
[*Note. Do not, DO NOT do this to paintings. The paint's not going to come off and you might cause damage. Painters do all sorts of things to artwork which no one else is allowed to do. This was a rare, unheard-of, one-in-a-million sort of event. DON'T SCRAPE AT PAINTINGS. Thank you.*]

That was a desperately dark and difficult day, and there were a couple more of them in the wings awaiting their turn to...not shine...glower? Quash, dismay, oppress, ruin, devastate, shatter, quell? Probably a good thing about the filming right there at first, probably people were more civilized for the camera. Smile like you mean it.

He worked it out. He reviewed and ruminated and reflected, experimented and examined, stomped around, made phone calls and prayers (did a little more scraping) and worked it out. It was an accident, a freak, an anomaly (good, good news), an aberration which irrevocably carried away the painting (bad, bad news). End of the world.
(Right?)

*****

In the composition the angels weep. Angels reach to help the man lifting down the top crosspiece. Angels reach out to touch hair, faces. The people standing on the earth don't look up, don't see the angels, don't realize, probably, that they are being helped. Are too cocooned in their pain. Have no way of measuring how much worse, if they were truly alone, this could be.

*****

The writers of the accounts that would one day be called The Gospels had a lot on their minds, a number of goals, a number of challenges and issues pressing them. I am, as many other people are, fascinated as much by what they could choose not to say as by what they wrote down. Pick events and phrases from something like thirty three or four years of a life you believe to be the most pivotal, vivid and important life ever lived. What do you not say? It grabs my attention that Matthew, Mark and Luke all stop the narrative, the account at the cross itself, the place where it's all going on, to jump for a tiny moment across town to Herod's temple. They tell us that as Jesus' soul tore away from this earth, racing back to the Father of us all, the veil of the temple was rent in twain. Take that statement a moment at face value, whether you believe the story as recorded in the New Testament or not. You're in Jerusalem, doing your thing in the temple, and suddenly the veil is rent. Not by any force you can see. Torn. How strange would that be?
Matthew does step back further, up onto a crane for a long shot, as it were, a sweeping 360 to show us the chaos and general upheaval in nature as time undid itself and the dead prepared to come forth. Except for that little phrase though, Mark and Luke never let us take our eyes from the close up, the same intimate scene the painter has chosen. Just a few words, like a voice-over, with all the attention still trained on these people here at the cross, these faces. The veil of the temple was rent in twain, and, according to Luke, from top to bottom.
Why would they want everyone, forever, to know about that?
Why just then?
I wouldn't pretend even to guess in a scholarly way what that's all about, but I'm willing to say what it means to me, right now, in a human way. I once told myself God tore the veil because he was so very angry with everyone for their hideous treatment of the son he loved, but I've shed that thought the way I've shed my braces and my fear of dogs. I believe the veil tore because, on some plane, people, a lot of people, needed to get through. Quickly. Their help was needed, and they came. The Veil, even the symbolic representation of the Veil, ripped, gaped, tore right across. Riven by the speed and density of their coming. I think one of the vital truths those men, those writers, wanted us to see and understand is that this is what happens when the world ends. God smashes open the windows and pours out help. I would, if it were my kids. And it wouldn't matter if it were the ending of a big important world with everybody on it and torture and mayhem in the immediate future or the end of the world in the size and shape of a three year old lost in the local grocery store. The end is the end. Nothing hurts worse than the end of the world.

Flight Practice with Instruction, Brian Kershisnik

*****

The painter started over. He had to. What else on earth was he going to do? Cameras were rolling (or clicking. whatever). The second painting, the one I've been talking about, grows, blooms in stop motion as quickly as the first one did. He'll show it to you if you express the least amount of interest. Possibly even if you don't. Here's the thing. The second one is better. Immeasurably better. There would have been no second painting had it not been for the death of the first.
Help.
Was that help?
Was someone helping?
A peasant sort of person angrily pushing away a knightly sort of person. "Who do you think you're saving?"

*****

He has a painting of Christ struggling with a man, holding him by one arm, holding him close and still as the man pushes against his Lord in surprise and maybe pain? shock? Jesus is, after all, rubbing mud into the man's eyes. Push, pull. Almost an embrace, almost a dance. This is healing. After he clears his eyes, the blind man will see.

*****

What am I trying to talk about? All the stories, these memories of help. Quick, unthinking. Practiced and measured. Unrecognized and vital. Back and forth, give and take. Help that hurts us in the giving and the getting. Hurts that make us whole. Healing we shove away, bewail and bemoan. Who do you think you're saving? People in Descent from the Cross stand in the grass without shoes. They could not draw nigh, the closest friends can go to death falls far short, but they could put off the shoes from their feet, stand on holy ground. There were only a few of them together there, but enough for a circle, all facing in to a present need, a common goal, and he was in their midst, still, as he had promised he would be. The air all full of angels. The terror had torn the veil. Angels could get through. They'd been waiting.

*****

Years ago the painter made a song based in part on a dream. In the dream we are all dancing barefoot in long grass on level ground, learning a dance sort of like a square dance and sort of like a line dance but in a circle. A complicated circle. It's fun but it's really hard and has to be done right. Slowly we realize the man coaching us through the dance, patient but exacting, is Jesus. We're not doing a perfect job, we aren't up to steps as complex as these. We lose our breath, we start to laugh and our steps are ragged. The dance master doesn't laugh but he doesn't get mad. And he doesn't let us stop. He's going to keep us there till we get it right or till we leave, I guess, but no one wants to leave. It's fun, really fun, and he's nice and funny but making us work so hard. It's just too hard. We keep laughing because we dance into each other and on people's feet and some of us are getting hurt and he just keeps making us do it again and again. It's got to be right.
The last line from the song the painter made is this.

Standing with Jesus on the grass.
Everyone has taken off their shoes.

There was a Kershisnik painting of Jesus on the grass discussed at a seminar a few years ago and I asked him about the song. He shook his head. Too long ago, couldn't really remember. I remember. It was my dream.

There's a painting of a friend holding his dying son to his chest, carrying his son who is a big boy and hard to manage. It has to be a close embrace. Push and pull. It looks like dancing. The air filled with banners. It's not a hopeless subject.

Father and Son Dancing, Brian Kershisnik

*****

I haven't the slightest idea how to tie it down. This is fundamental to my walk in this world and I can no more explain it than I can explain the earth that holds up each and every one of my footfalls. I believe in help and in helping. I do. This I believe. I want to help. And I want Help.

We are called to the work. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? Push and pull. Give and take. Where we struggle, where we step, this is holy ground. Angels reach down. People reach out. He gives and he takes. I can't come back if I never leave. If I never die how will I live again?

Con'se-crate [...to dedicate; from com-, together, and sacrare, to...devote to a divinity, from sacer, sacred.]
Webster

Dance with naked feet.

What is it I need?
Light in the dark.
Health if I'm sick.
Water.
Bread.
Life when I'm dead. Whenever I'm dead. Every time I'm dead.
Help to a better place, whether I like it, understand it, recognize it or not.
Who do you think you're saving?
If the people in Descent from the Cross reached out, they could hold hands and make a circle.
A dance, great and terrible. Me and you. Give and take.
Dancing with Jesus on the grass.
Everyone has taken off their shoes.

Behold, I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them--even so am I in the midst of you.
Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that also shall ye reap; therefore, if ye sow good ye shall also reap good for your reward.
Therefore, fear not, little flock; do good; let earth and hell combine against you, for if ye are built upon my rock, they cannot prevail...
Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.
Behold the wounds which pierced my side, and also the prints of the nails in my hands and feet.

D&C 6:32-37

They Dance, Brian Kershisnik

Help. Chasm. The Penultimate Part.

The painter says he believes Descent from the Cross is nearly finished, so I suppose I must finish the stories I set out for myself when I first thought through these ideas of Help and helping. Five stories, five chapters falling out before me in order like a fan, like stones in an arch. Nearly finished. I decided early to post them every other week to give me time to think. To wait. To avoid. Of course it was inevitable I would arrive at the one I have been carefully skirting in my thoughts all along. One, two, three, four, and here it is.When I was very tiny I began to have awful nightmares of falling. They stayed with me till in college my dream self set me the task of learning to fly. That was rough and messy and took about a school year. I got it in the end, and the dreams went away. This story has to do with falling.

Horatio. You will lose, my lord.
Hamlet. I do not think so; since he went into France I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds. Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart--but it is no matter.
Horatio. Nay, good my lord--
Hamlet. It is but a foolery, but it is such a kind of [gain]-giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman.
Horatio. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forstall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
Hamlet. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come--the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be.
Hamlet, V ii

For my twelfth birthday my parents took my sisters and a bunch of my friends to Lehman Caves. They also took lunch and cake; candles, even. This was an unusually elaborate birthday celebration in our family. The adult I am now thinks it must have been quite an undertaking for my mom as it would have been an all-day excursion, including the healthy drives between Kanosh and the caves. I think there were about six friends plus the six of us. We had a fifteen passenger van. The important feature of our van was not the number of people it could legally carry (admittedly handy on occasion, though who cared what we drove, really, we stacked up, it's not like safety was an issue, I'm not sure the van even had seat belts) but that its four bench seats gave each sister a berth in which to lie and read while our parents drove us in the summertimes through glorious and scenic sections of this great country of ours. That they were glorious and scenic I have on hearsay. "Suzanne!" my mom would say, "Sit up! Sit up right now and look at this! Just look at this!" I would sit up, look carefully around on all sides, say, "Mmm!" and lie back down and read. In my defense, the balance of drives made in the van were between Kanosh and southern California; this instilled in me very low expectations of landscape potential. By the time we drove the coastal highway in Washington and Oregon I was a grownup myself, sitting in the front seat to claim my own slice of view, fighting a bit of carsickness, braking sympathetically and uselessly as my dad took the cliff turns at bracing speeds, his own eyes on the view, my reading times reduced to the drive from the eastern edge of the Cascade rain shadow to Kanosh. So, a goodly chunk. I still find when I read while riding in cars or buses or trains, even through England and Wales where I might be expected not to read at all but rather drink in view to the last drop, I carefully scan the windows every so often, on all sides, making sure there is nothing I should be looking at. Mostly in Britain it's just trees and more trees or in America dirt and more dirt but you can tell when the light changes on your book page it's to come up time for a look round. I discern from comparative conversation with fellow passengers who eat up views like they're starving that I don't miss much. (Close and careful readers may by this point have worked out that I mentioned four van seats, one to a sister, while all the world knows there are five of us. Well, Close-and careful, by the time the youngest came along to skew the math, the oldest was gone.)

What, you are asking, has this got to do with a birthday party on the Utah desert?
Nothing. I'm avoiding it.

The caves are amazing; if you haven't been, you should go. We all thrilled and grabbed for each other when the guard turned out the lights and thick solid blackness slammed us into our separate existences, revealing us suddenly as we always are, really are, so totally, so utterly alone in our heads that we are forced to reach instantly out to the humans on each side, squeezed by true dark into a spasm, a hiccup, of unpremeditated hand-holding if only to regain balance and a sense of things as they truly are outside our skin. Are you there? Are you? I am. I am. An unlooked for chain of twelve year old girls with the odd sister haphazardly strung among us, shuddering, astonished and giggling, gripping tightly where we joined, eyes stretched wide on black that pressed between our open lids like cotton wool, listening with horrified joy as a United Stated Forest Ranger told us there was a mile of rock between the tops of our naked eggshell heads and the fresh, free air and the wild and natural light. He paused to let that sink in and in our blindness we strained our ears for any sound that wasn't people trying to breathe normally in air gone thick and damp, cold, used-up air the earth exhales. He allowed me plenty of time to wonder if he had abandoned us below the desert rocks, finding his own way back through passages he'd come, like a mole, to know, while we felt our way alone, round and round this great room till we fell down in a heap in the middle and then he would come back like he always did saying, see, silly, I told you it was dark, now come along, and lead us out, blinking into the autumn desert evening, fading light easier on eyes grown used to the black. There are reasons I'm uncomfortable in the dark, I don't find it leads me to good narrative. Then our guide (who was of course right there all along, just imagine) brought us back one step into the known world, holding up a star in all that dark, a lighter from his pocket with the flame turned up rather high, pushing the black back a bit from our center to our edges where it turned and pushed back at us. He told us all the hundreds of people who came to the caves before the sanity of electricity only saw their wonders by the flames they themselves carried and that, worse, the first man who came here came alone, with only matches. I thought how easily a flame blows away. Embracing our day and age, the Ranger turned on the safe, fake, canned light modern men take underground with them and we breathed easy in that light without bearing all the burden and knowledge of the weight of earth or the flickering uncertainty of fire. Some hands we dropped now, flustered, some hands we held. And we walked after the Ranger in obedient single file through light that ran comfortingly ahead of us, chamber to chamber, room to room, leading us on from hidden wonder to hidden wonder while the black licked us from behind, closing down the way lest we be tempted to stray. The Ranger shepherded us meticulously, counting and shooing. "Can't go on till I know you're all here, don't want to lose anyone." He said it standing close to me and I guess my dread (I was swiftly spinning out a few pleasant little tales concerning "losing anyone") showed on my face because he said quickly,"Oh, it's not that I would lose anyone, it's that people are always trying to stay behind. Can't have that." And off he went, into the next light, us behind him, looking where he pointed, scanning all around, watchful lest a casual caress from a human hand halt the creative work of centuries, vigilant in our stepping that we mar no wonder belonging to our descendants, chastened that even our moist breathing and weak dependence on light brought to this mysterious, delicate labyrinth algae that, unchecked, might one day shroud its glories in the same slick, dull green draperies cloaking the stones in the creeks where we played on summer days. It was marvelous.

We ate lunch and cake afterward in the picnic ground, easy in the air, casual in the sun now beginning its descent, slanting through the shortening daylight of an autumn birthday. It was chilly, I remember everyone had on coats. We conscientiously picked up the bits of wrapping paper. Dad said, let's drive home through Eureka, I've always wanted to see it.

It's the way things happen. You take an extra drive on a birthday. You go up to Jerusalem for Passover. Some people see the unfolding and ready themselves against events, some people are unfolded by events they never thought to look for. If we could see our coming future simply by looking around, would we dare take any steps toward it at all?

I didn't check this, I'm going to tell it as I remember it. I've never been back so you're getting a foreshortened view, barely twelve years off the ground. My youngest is twelve, just barely. I put her in my place in this story as I shape it here, she keeps me honest, helps me fathom what must have happened. How it unfolded. My dad parked the car. We got out. Is there a ghost town at Eureka? Or near there, maybe? That's what I remember. We all jumped out of the car, itching to run around, to explore. I was full of myself; my mom had made me a great birthday, everyone liked me and I had lots of presents. I took off the instant my feet hit the ground, racing myself to the top of a little hill nearby with a funny beam standing upright on it, a railroad tie, I thought, running, racing myself to the top.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?
Psalm 24:3

No one came after me. I was a pretty fast runner, not the fastest in seventh grade (late birthday) but maybe still in the top ten or so. I was going to run, I don't know why, to the top of that little hill, past the upright beam, and jump up and down in the middle up there. Yelling, I think. These were my unformed thoughts as I ran. Not a story, just intent. About halfway up the hill my goal shifted. Now I was running to that railroad tie standing up there alone, I was running to grab it and swing around. My plans changed again, of course, about ten feet away. I had had sufficient experience with railroad ties to want to avoid the mass of infected slivers that would have followed any serious swinging. My whole goal was to just run my heart out to the tie and grab it. And I did. It was standing at one corner of a square mine shaft which bloomed under my feet, opening like a mouth, a wound, and into which the gravel and dirt I kicked up as I stopped were now falling soundlessly, without a whimper or a scream, down and down into velvety blackness without a bottom. There was no sound as they vanished. No sound. No sound. The tie stood at the corner of the pit as solidly as if it stood in stone, bearing my weight and the speed of my headlong ascent easily, casually, as it would a song bird come to rest on its crown. I clung to it, frozen, emptied, revealed to my very young self for what I always have been, an eggshell human, alone, perching with my back to the cliffs, and to darkness. The railroad tie was the only friend I had in the world. I clung. I was a limpet. Not one part of me worked. My tongue was solid in my mouth, my eyes were split wide apart and staring unblinking at blackness, the grain of the wood was printed into my cheek and I'd still be there, eternally narrowly not falling, had little sisters not come running up the hill to me. I had to save them because there was only room on the tie for one supplicant at a time.

My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity.
I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God.
My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.
Mosiah 27:29

Way down the shaft I showed to my father after I had a terrible fight with my sisters to keep them away, hit one of them when she wouldn't obey me, said yes! yes! go get Dad! when she screamed at me that she was telling, way down and lodged across it at an angle was what at first I thought was a two-by-four but what my dad told me in tones of sickened, agonized assessment, still thorough and methodical in explanation, was another railroad tie. There were four, you see? At the corners? They've been coming loose and falling in over the years. I looked at mine, anxiously, and it looked back at me, unconcerned. You'd have hit that, he said, grim and calm, if you fell. Below us, my mom was loading everybody into the van. This is a bad place. We're going home. That jammed tie, too far away in the fast-fading light for me even to judge its dimensions, was for the twelve year old kneeling carefully by her dad and is now for the mother of a twelve year old, a fast runner, the most upsetting part. I can see it clearly, clearly in my memory and I can give to the horror some words I didn't have then. Everybody dies. I don't want to bounce and spin off a railroad tie on the way. Oh, my soul, almost as it were, fleeth at the thought. My standing railroad tie looks back at me, solemn. Everybody dies. Try to take precautions.

Safety is an illusion, Costis. A Thief might fall at any time, and eventually the day must come when the god will let him. Whether I am on a rafter three stories up or on a staircase three steps up, I am in my god's hands. He will keep me safe, or he will not, here or on the stairs.
The King of Attolia

I sit with friends in the fading light of a summer Sunday afternoon, talking about this story which now they have read, and one asks me what the terror was I tried so hard to avoid in this writing. Did I miss it, she asks. I stumble, unsure of my writing but still solidly horrified by the memory. No, I tell her, it was just that. Just the hole. She looks across the twilight at me, her face open and unconvinced, and then slowly her countenance changes, bleaches into bleak remembering, and slowly she tells a story of an afternoon in a park with a baby and hole hidden by tall grass. An opening into a culvert with fast running water, a long way down, and a mother who suddenly looked up, not for any reason but in the nick of time. More stories come, of holes and water and missteps, of children and of big people, too, saved by a casual glance, a slight shift in direction, a straight-up prompting. None of the stories are tragic. They are just about holes.

We camp with our children in a canyon that was once a goldmine, thousands of people living stacked on top of each other where now are only woods and stones, "improved" roads and Forest Service bathrooms. We hike to a waterfall past a sign warning us to be careful of open mine shafts. Exercise with caution. It is a momentary freezing thought on a hot day; I tell my children a fast, bare bones version of this story to frighten them into wariness, one of the only times I'll ever tell it. I'm pretty sure my sisters have heard it, maybe not though, maybe only the ones who know it were there and old enough to remember, and maybe they no longer do, or only remember that I yelled and hit one of them. I didn't fall down the shaft because for no reason a slight, unbidden thought came that I might change direction.
I try to ready us for the way things happen. Don't do anything stupid, I tell my children whenever they leave; we walk carefully the edges of our abyss as once a lost and wandering prince walked a cliff's edge, all unknowing, at night and in a fog, accompanied only by a Voice which suggested direction and took the edge-side for its own. The young prince loathed and feared the Voice speaking out of fog and dark and never till morning light showed him the narrow slash of dirt under his feet and the straight drop beyond it learned there are worse things than help with direction.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.
Psalm 121

Hole, Brian Kershisnik

Noah's photo

Help. Succor. The Middle Part.

Slivers, Brian Kershisnik

succor, v.t. [L. subcurrere, succurrere, to run up to, aid]
Webster's

I don't like to work at a desk. If it's a big project I spread out on the floor or for word-work I sit on a squishy surface like a sofa or a bed with books and paper and pens (laptop, too, now) surrounding me in nesting half-circles. For this reason when I was a freshman in the dorms I made my bed every day, made it like it mattered, like I was in the army; otherwise there was no place good to sit. One day as I was pulling up the quilt my grandmother made for my far-from home-college-bed I stepped all my weight down onto a cute cup full of perky colored pencils my (former) cheerleader roommate had left at the edge of the empty space between our beds where she had been working on an art project, sitting with her back against her bed, paper and pencils spread on the floor, me at the library. The cup, which co-ordinated with the push-pins in her bulletin board, the throw pillows on her bed and brought out the secondary colors in her spread, was supposed to reside on her desk like a fat little vase with a bunch of skinny spring flowers, brightly painted shafts, wooden cones topped by pretty color cores tapering to fine, fine points kept very sharp because she liked to work small, but she had abandoned it on the floor and it had migrated to the very edge of my bed where it secreted itself and lurked in quilt folds till I outed it with my foot. The roommate stored her pencils point up lest they be inadvertently dulled by too long standing.

The people in Descent from the Cross are hurrying. The cross is coming down, coming apart, the whole weight of a man swinging from the nails fastening his hands and arms to the heavy upper crosspiece. The horror at the tearing and twisting in his flesh must be immediate to them and awful in their hearts and stomachs. He's dead of course, he doesn't feel it and though they know that, they feel it for him, as we do for the dead, the sleeping, the comatose. They hurry not to be hurting for him longer than they must. The sun is slipping away, pulling them into the Sabbath and enforced rest. They can work now, set and headlong, fill their minds and eyes but tomorrow will be empty and relentless. No distractions. Now they have him still, now they know what to do; now, in this little moment, they can help him, still. They love him, they believed him, this is not what they expected. There's irony here, rich and dear. Him dead, in his death and with his suffering hammering out for them their greatest help, driving home their most exquisite relief. Them crying, dying inside, hurting from force of his help. I don't know how they could be big enough, old enough, to see this moment as anything other than a disaster, the worst possible outcome. At least he's dead, he didn't suffer as long as he might have and it's over. They no longer must stand back, frozen, breathless observers of suffering. They can work and they rush to him, helping their helper. And he needs them, needs their hands; he can't get off the cross by himself.

Give us help from trouble:
for vain is the help of man.
Psalms 60:11

I couldn't see why my foot should hurt so, so badly and I didn't know what to do. There was no blood and only a strange, hard white bump along the edge of the sole of my right foot, just outside the circle of the heel. If I'd been home I'd have limped out my dad who would have turned off the table saw, taken my foot in his hands and turned it toward the light while I hopped madly around in the sawdust trying not to fall over. Then he would have sighed and taken me into the bathroom where the light was good and worked me over with tweezers and fingernail clippers till I was out of danger and then as final benediction doused me with alcohol for good measure. All on my own, far away from the family table saw and tweezers, I washed the funny bump with soap, returned the scattered pencils to their darling cup, put them on the tidy desk opposite mine, climbed on my bed with my books and studied while my foot sang a hot and throbbing song of pulses and heartbeats.

Next morning I couldn't walk well. The bump was still there. I went to class sans books, I couldn't manage them. I didn't go home for lunch, it was too far to cross the street; by the end of class I was just focused on living long enough to get back to my dorm room and die. I wanted to die lying down. It was for this my parents had send me out into the world, to make me strong or, failing in strength, dead. Limping on my toes was not the ticket at all, better to take a long step onto the heel of my right foot, a shorter, quicker, more painful step onto my left, rest, repeat. I didn't ask for help as I inched and halted across campus, in fact I told a couple of nice people who stopped to inquire that I was fine. They believed me. Sadly, I need to be forced to accept help. No one forceful came along. Must have been a student government meeting somewhere and all the team practices. I had never noticed till I measured it out in handspans that my dorm room was the furthest but one a person could live in and still be on campus. The atmosphere thickened as I edged along, taking up arms against me; accomplishing the Castellia Hall main doors seemed like half way instead of home free, I was rapidly going downhill and the hall all felt uphill. When I finally, finally got my key in the door and opened it I found our living room/kitchen full of people. Male people, and one roommate.

I had one roommate (not in my actual bedroom, that was the (former) cheerleader) who was nearly always to be found in the company of many brainy and attractive men. This was for two reasons. First, she was the most caring, generous, mature and, well, noble person on campus. She lacked physical loveliness of any sort whatever and I hope dearly when she grew up she married the best man on the planet. Second, she was maybe the smartest student on campus. People, boy people, wanted to study with her as often as she would allow them; she was a born teacher and made learning difficult maths and sciences joyful. I think. The learners all looked joyful; I couldn't understand any of their conversations but things seemed to be going well for everyone. Consequently our living room/kitchen regularly overflowed with crowds of the best and brightest male students. It was a splendid situation for everyone and I heartily recommend you always arrange your dorm rooms after this pattern. Blessedly, one of them this time was an especial friend of mine who, like all my true friends, had some considerable force to his nature. He saw my trouble (I was listing and leaning and green), told me I was stupid, got me to a chair and required of me the history of my injury while another friend, a caring, truly good and very tall person (what a lot of lovely people in this story!) put aside his trigonometry or nuclear physics or whatever to go examine the dear little desk cup and its denizens. He brought it into the kitchen, a trifle grim about the face, holding out one pencil, a white one. Where the other pencils all had great long tapers of colored core rising proudly, piercingly yet perkily in softly complementary shades from the wooden shafts, the white pencil's sharp core was broken off cleanly at the base, at the wood, showing no color whatever.

Which explained the funny, white bump in my foot.

My especial friend, who I'm going to call Rick which wasn't his name but is close, took off my shoe and sock, assuring me he would take the broken lead out and wash it and I would be fine. He examined my foot for about three fourths of a second and assured me that his friend and mine, the good man holding the sweet cup and offending pencil, would remove the lead from my foot, wash the wound and I would be fine. You can trust him, Rick said. And that is what happened, Rick holding my hands and talking to me and risking maybe half a glance about twice during the process (there's a scene in Master and Commander which reminds me forcibly of this moment, you know the one, the calm surgical removal via mirror, by the doctor and a crewman, of a bullet from the doctor himself which is accompanied by a lot of deep breathing and not a lot of watching on the part of the master and commander). Our mutual friend went to work, calmly and steadily opening up my foot using the single edged razor blade people who study advanced maths apparently keep about them, (my dad always had one) while my beloved roommate acted as scrub nurse and swabbed frequently with horrible but helpful alcohol. The alcohol swabbing made me press my head down hard on the sofa arm and hate all of them heartily (Rick in particular) while Rick stroked my hair and said all the things a dental hygenist once told me she had to learn not to say, ever. "Oooh boy." "Whoa!" "That's not good."

It wasn't good and it wasn't over because I think we had all assumed the broken and embedded point, once exposed, could be lifted out whole, but the demon-spawned white pencil had a chalk core and the chalk had fed on my fluids, had crumbled and softened to an indistinct and formless mass. There was no lifting it out at all, more like spooning. The good, good man worked steadily away while my angel roommate held my foot and made quiet, useful suggestions and Rick had his head down now, too, next to mine, holding on to me like he was the one dying and told me I could bite his hand, if it would help. I said I didn't want to, thanks, which was a lie but I didn't do it and I thought, this is what happens at college, your friends take care of you, and felt very alone and unsafe and wished for my dad who had been to a bit of medical school and was better than a surgeon.

The next morning I had a bright red line running across the bottom of my foot and about two inches up the inside of my leg, toward my ankle.

What a waste of alcohol.

You need never have heard the words blood poisoning to know how scary it is when you see it. Like seeing a blackwidow spider, certain streetbikes, or a woman all dressed in plether, an ancient instinct tells you, this is bad; run, baby, get help. The first person, miraculously, I met that morning was the boy who was at the time sort of functioning as a boyfriend and who had me into his car and into the emergency room long before I had finished telling him why I couldn't walk so well. I was scolded roundly by the receptionist, the nurse, the doctor (for---???), given antibiotics and taught how to treat blood poisoning. Which I have done since, too many times. Seems I am a bit prone. It was good for me to learn this on a week day when doctors were readily available.

Therefore, let your hearts be comforted;
for all things shall work together for good for them that walk uprightly...
D&C 100:15

That is the end of the story, or very nearly. All these people helped me, rushed in as soon as I admitted my need, tipped my hand (my foot?), as it were. Maybe they saved me from serious difficulties. I don't know what happened to any of them after we all left Snow College, not a single one, though I do know one thing that happened before we left. My good, calm friend had an epiphany that night. At about the moment he set down the razor to wipe the sweat off his hands because nothing was going as planned and the pencil point was chalk and the chalk had become a porridge, he noticed he had started to feel good. Confident. And interested. Realized he was going to change his major, realized he would become a doctor. I wonder now, all these years later, which of us in this story was helper to whom and by what working we all found our places. Helping people can hurt quite a lot. As it can hurt to let them help you.

And he ordained twelve, that they might be with him...
And to have power to heal sicknesses...
Mark 3:14-15

I have a little movie in my mind of my friend; a very tall doctor with red hair fading now to grey, taking a child's foot in his hands to be stitched, to be treated, turning it to the light, working with care and precision, growing interested and confident as he sees things are not what he expected here. I see the mother, holding the child's hand, maybe watching a little, maybe not, trusting this good, good man who is helping them.

And the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me.
Matthew 25:40

Thorn and Sparrows, Brian Kershisnik

Help. The Second Part.

A man and a woman stand in the foreground of Descent from the Cross, waiting to help. The man's arms are stretched out, the painter has given him a cloth to hold. Very ordinary, no more than what is needed. What, at this point, can be done? The work of it; lifting the poor, broken son, cleaning, wiping, combing, wrapping, positioning in a semblance of living comfort, shift him gently. Hurrying, hurrying, as the sun strides away, turning from this day's misery, flinging itself over the horizon and dragging all the day's terrible work with it. These people, this family, are coming back after the Sabbath to unwrap, to touch and linger, to work without hurry, to settle him, sleeping, with all their love and all their care and all their time. They leave him in darkness but they are coming back, they will see him, once more, soon. And they are right. But before they see him, someone else will have freed him from their careful bindings.


Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
John 20:6-7

I always wonder about that napkin, folded and set aside. Careful, deliberate. Tidy. I am thinking about angels.

I struggle getting to church on time. Arriving early is what separates general authorities from me. Also, being nice. But definitely arriving at church on time. Sometimes it has felt like a qualifying task from a wonder tale. Gather these feathers from the wind, carry this mountain of grains in your palm, fashion flower crowns for the Queen and all her bees. Pick up your family and carry them on your head to church and do it in less than no time.
A monstrous task.
When my youngest child was about two or three, this failing in my life loomed like a rockfall across a mountain path. The rockfall seemed too deep, too tall, I could never remove it. For years I had negotiated it, climbed up and around and over it. I could do that, just, but it was wearing, made me dirty and too tired. Worse, the stupid pile seemed to be growing each week, spreading till it felt dangerous lugging my children up and across my enormous rockfall. My spirit wore thin scaling my pile of boulders, fighting on Sunday morning with my children, fighting with the painter, fighting with myself. Fighting with Everyone.
I considered skipping church.
I considered skipping church till my kids were older.
I considered skipping the first part of church (intentionally, I mean).
I considered.
With a heavy heart, I marched myself up to my rockfall and began considering my rocks.


It might seem simple to someone on the outside, someone of, say, an engineering frame of mind. Rocks have to go, can't use the road with rocks all over it, rocks have got to go, get those rocks out of here, what you want to have rocks for here in the first place? It may seem simple from the outside. It was as hard as the hardest thing I have ever done.

Drink the ocean whole, run without stopping till you reach the castle beyond the sea, swim beneath the waves till you find the fish that swallowed the ring.

I pondered my rocks. I forced myself up close to them, close enough to name them by their names. I took a Sunday to observe my failings, free and in the wild. On Monday I began to get ready for Sunday. Rock, rock, rock, rock. It took the whole week.
It's not that rock removal is Herculean. Hercules' tasks were doable, they simply required heavy machinery. My rocks, for me, were both heavy and paradoxical. I had to admit things, confess fault, remove licence, apply discipline. Close your eyes. Now do you see? How'm I s'posed to see with the blast shield down? But I kept my eyes closed and saw a lot of things. I took care of them, grimly, day after day and one day it was Sunday morning and we were going to be on time for church. Damn it.
Spin straw into gold, make bricks without straw, lay down your life to find it.


For want of a nail...

I couldn't find the white tights I had purchased, new, to fit and to be clean so there would be two pair and I could always find them and one wouldn't be in the wash and I had put the tights in the drawer but they weren't there--they weren't!!--they weren't anywhere and the whole thing, the whole week's work, lurched, stumbled, shuddered, stopped, ground down right there and I was stuck, skewered, hanging onto the drawer that was so unbelievably empty and we were going to be. Late. I hung there and felt myself collapsing on the inside into that empty space in the drawer, held on, clenched, the sides of the drawer and really felt every good solid true thing sucking down into the dark place that was never going to be--wait!-no,why-please!--brand new white tights I truly, factually, had put there myself.
It probably sounds silly from the outside, but you have to understand, I had been running to win, running for the crown, I had run till I couldn't run anymore and I didn't have a backup plan. We weren't going to make it, at all.
It probably sounds silly, from the outside.

Take back the ill you have done, fill the time you have wasted, restore the trust you have lost.

I can't. I can't do it. I prayed. Dear God, I tried, I tried so hard but I can't. God, help me, don't let this happen to me and to the children I'm trying to teach. I can't do it. And I know this is my fault, but I don't know how it happened and I don't know what to do now. Help me because I can't fail. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I will never try again.

And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
Luke 22:43

Different people get direction in different ways. I sometimes hear words in my head. These were very clear. Look in the back of her sister's drawer. They aren't the tights you're looking for but there is a pair there that will work. And they did. Clean. And white, a perfect fit. We were not early, but we were on time.
It was as good as the best miracle of my life. It was stunning. And cozy. I had an angel working with me who knew where the tights were.

familiar, a. [ME. famylier; OFr. familier; L. familiaris, of or pertaining to a household, domestic, from familia, household, family.]
Webster

I close my eyes to see impossible things are not accomplished according to any plan of mine. I never found those tights. In Hades there is an imp cavorting about in a small pair of white tights. I shall not dispute them with him; I can't imagine they are, by now, in very good shape. Anyway, we had sufficient. If my familiar angel can restore to me tights I never had, what impossible thing shall be beyond my believing? Feed them all with five barley loaves and two small fishes, bread from the sky and water from the rock, light to those those that walked in darkness. The people on the painter's canvas patiently waiting to undertake their grim work don't yet understand; it's not just the end of the world, it's that the world has ended.


Raise the dead.

How can I keep from singing?


Noah's photos

Help. Familiar Angels. The First Part.

Untitled, Angels; Brian Kershisnik

deposition, n. [OFr. deposition; LL. depositio, a laying or putting down, from L. depositus, pp. of deponere, to lay or put down.]
Webster's Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged

The Son of Man hath descended below them all.
Art thou greater than he?
D&C 122: 8

The painter is working on a large canvas. It consumes and absorbs him. He works on other things, too, he always does, but this large painting is the core, the nut, the meat, of where his thought and intent are right now.

Descent from the Cross

I'm thinking and thinking, these last days and weeks, about help. Given and received. How we ask for it, or ask to give it, why we sometimes refuse, whether we would know it, for sure for sure, if we fell over it.
Into it.
For ease of thinking I debate, decide, divine, and divide help into two types.

The painting splits between two crowds, one on our earth's ground and one in its air, which hinge at a central dead and bloody body, awkwardly reclining, extended, by the efforts of the crowd on the ground who are lifting it up from below so that the legs swing forward and the whole thing, the whole composition, folds, creases, at the hands still nailed to a cross. Everybody, in the air and on the ground, looks to be holding their breath, being as careful as they know how to be. Dissolving into sorrow or stepping forward to work, to the task. Still, it doesn't look good. It looks like it's just as well he was dead for this part.

From my memories I tease out one sort of help that anyone can give.
And would.
In Manhattan, across the street and kitty corner from us, a group of people wait for a bus, among them a man in a wheelchair. My focus, my gaze, will be on these events only because I'm interested in the building behind the people. Bus pulling toward the corner; as it does the wheelchair also pulls out of the crowd and turns toward the bus. Getting in position? Going on the bus first? I don't know enough of buses or wheelchairs to properly understand what I see but in less than an instant, quicker than I can organize the frames of this little movie I'm watching, the chair stumbles, sort of staggers, maybe the wheel goes off the curb, and the chair tips, falls into the path of the bus still moving forward, still heading to stop on top of a man suddenly separate from his wheelchair, suddenly lying in the street.
I have taken the step to run, dropped my small girl's hand, drawn a great breath and lifted my other foot for the first true running step to sprint across all those lanes through all those cars. That strange moment; foot jerks and hops back and forth between air and pavement while eyes and brain hold a conference. The cease and desist order nearly sprains my ankle. Never, never make it, I'll be dead, nothing, nothing I can do... and people are coming from everywhere. So many, so fast, I don't see them come, they are acting and thinking and helping while I am saving my own self from accidentally falling headlong into the traffic kitty corner and across the street. Stopping the bus (how?), re-directing traffic, helping the man up, checking him all over, righting the wheelchair, gathering up his scattered belongings, putting him and all the waiting people on the bus, directing the bus back into traffic, picking up their own discarded possessions, walking away, getting back to whatever. Not looking back. Don't thank me, anyone would do it. Done and over, just like that. Nothing like as long as a minute. The first sort of help. All it takes is being present and human.

There are crying people in the air and on the ground who turn to each other, touch and nuzzle, reach out to stroke hair even from air to earth. The women, especially? The crowd on the ground set their teeth, their hands, their shoulders, to a task that should have been an occasion, a job that should have been a ritual of lingering and loving, fond remembrances, shared comfort in a life well and fully spent. This body should have grown up and gown old through a lifetime of stories; there should have been laughter here, too. Not grim, not hurried, not like this, quick and brutal in the gathering darkness as the sun sinks and flames behind them. The crowd in the air press as close as they are able, torn between the agony and terror of this suffering, this grieving, this dying, and the solemn weight of witnessing history twisting on its axis. The mills of God grinding, unbelievably, to a stop, silent for this moment before they turn back, begin to rumble and grind the other way. This horror is the culmination of our most desperate, private, scathing hopes. A dead man birthing our souls' delight. It's the end of the world.

In the emergency room with my first miscarriage. It's an off time, no one needing assistance, the rooms are silent, sterile, no other hurting humans to bring pathogens even by breathing. My baby is dead. Word spreads. Nurses come to hold me, to stroke my hands and hair, make sure I have enough pain killers for my body, assure me my heart will not be always broken. They enclose me, they are intimate. These are my sisters because they know. Every one of them standing around me tells me about her lost babies. Every one. We are a clan. They stand by me for hours till it is all over and they practically carry me to the car. You will be ok. It will be ok.
Second miscarriage the nurse gives me morphine. She is busy, comes and goes. I hear through the drug haze another nurse asking, "Is she bad? Is she ok?" and the answer, quick and curt. "She's fine. A miscarriage."
Third miscarriage. I am alone in my house and this is a much later term baby, someone I knew from ultrasounds who has unaccountably fled, leaving a tiny ghost in my body. A poltergeist, wrecking havoc. I push my head against the wall and whisper to God. Feel myself known and safe and surrounded by sisters who know. Hands on mine. Keep my eyes closed because I don't want to know if I can't see them. You will be ok. It will be ok.
My last child's birth. "Oh," the nurse says, reading my chart,"you're three for six. Right?" She looks up, smiles, squeezes my hand. "Me too."
This is the other sort of help; giving this help requires experience, expertize. I aim to remember this whenever God lays before me a way of suffering. This is for study, so now I know. Now I can help. Sometimes in order to be of real help it is required that we study, know intimately.

The painter talked to people who would know about how a dead body looks, how it would move if moved. He puts tools in the bottom half of the painting, among the crowd on the ground, scattered between feet, tools to use for getting large nails out of human hands and feet.

I saw a girl once, in the student health center, quiet and calm, holding one hand in the other with a napkin lying loose over the cradled hand. I was there for blood poisoning (not for the first time. It's a problem I have). When the nurse came to call me, the girl's companion stood up, nervous and fearing to be rude but worried and driven by unease. "Please, could you see my friend?" The other girl, hands lying one atop the other so oddly, demurred. "It's alright, she was here first--" but her friend cut her off, forcing assistance. "No, I think you need to look at this, first, she has a key in her hand," and lifted away the napkin. I barely had time to reflect with knee jerk irritation that blood poisoning isn't exactly a stroll through the flower show and to wonder, key in her hand? is that weird or just weird? before I saw that she did have a key in her hand. In the center. Right through. Sticking out above and below her palm. Some strange, detached, observant part of me said get a close look. Remember this, it's a central image, it will be important later. As the nurse took her quickly away, running almost while the odd girl with her odd predicament still demurred and protested the gravity of her situation, I thought what on earth are they going to do? Who helps somebody like that? I'll bet they've never seen just this thing. What tools do you use to rescue a hand in such a danger?
Not knowing keys, but knowing hands.

I saw a man in Kanosh working on his car just outside the general store, hood of the car up, head close to the engine, hand resting on the edge of the car. Saw the wind blow the hood closed, saw him jerk his head out in time, saw the hood close and the lock catch and bind through his hand, saw him trapped. Saw people coming from everywhere.
First sort of help. Be human.
Saw them trying to open the hood which stuck. Jammed.
Saw a man running to his truck parked on the next block, throwing himself around it to grab his large tool chest, saw him running, urgent and awkward, the tool chest slamming his legs and him running, gasping, back up the street past the store where we watched from the window.
What on earth, I wondered, is he going to do? Can he possibly know how to solve this? Does he have a plan? A tool for this use? This doesn't look good. I decided not to watch and walked home. I had no experience.
The second sort of help. Know what you're doing or stand out of the way.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities;
but was in all points tempted like as we are,
yet without sin.
Hebrews 4:15

The painter thought about it, talked about it. How do you get spikes out of a person and preserve the person at all? What would they have used, been thinking? Did someone start planning for this ending at the beginning? Did someone run to their shop, their shed?

Descent from the Cross.

I try to stage it in my mind. This is how I see things. Make it a play, make it concise, consistent. People are basically the same, world without end and time after time. How would they act? I push them around with my thoughts, rearrange them for maximum impact, suggest motivation. I am moving a painted figure in the foreground, rocked back into an arc, body tense with effort, his shoulder under the descending top crosspiece, bearing so much of its weight and of the man still fastened to it. There is a pry bar lying at his feet. Realization washes across me. Woman, over there. Man, here. Mother. Brother. Carpenter. Tools.
Family.

familiar, a. [ME. famylier; OFr. familier; L. familiaris, of or pertaining to a household, domestic, from familia, household, family.]
Webster

This would be a man familiar with tools. Father raised him to this work, to this task, shape, hammer, sand, cut, and maybe he's never done precisely this thing but he knows the wood, knows the nail.
Knows the man nailed to the wood.
Brother. Mother. Father. God. Family. Anyone near could lend a hand, anyone would try to help with the poor broken son. Anyone would gently support a leg, hold the weeping, stroke the hair, but hand over the pry bar to the one who knows.
It's your family who knows how to take apart wood, get the nails out of you; those who know this become family.
Anyone can call 911. We're primed, we've got this. The surgeon hands off his cell phone to take up his scalpel.
Two kinds of help.
I'm not going to think about people deciding not to be human.
I remember a neighbor, a nurse, working fiercely to save a life and never recognizing till the end the horribly sick man was his brother.
I think of a story, a friend standing between the living and dying, between fire and water, watching death make off with one of her family while the jaws of Hell stretched wide after the others. All the human people working desperately, hopelessly.
And the air around them filled with angels. Or so I have heard.
It's the end of the world, don't stand back, do what you know.
Be human.
While Walking; Brian Kershisnik

I have been aided by angels who happened on the scene, the closest people at hand when terror came.
I have been sustained by brothers and sisters, seen and unseen, who came because they had studied this pain, knew, from the inside.
I have seen people wracked by circumstance and blind chance.
I have seen people hammered by trials constructed, from the ground up, to fit them. Snug as a coffin.
I will tell you what I believe.
For succor in our most shattering, exquisite, personal trials, they don't send just anybody. Those who fly to our aid were chosen. Because they know. It is so on earth where they are seen. It is so where they are not seen.
We observe it in our lives lived on this earth's ground. Some help has to have labored, studied, suffered sufficiently that it knows what to do. This is a comfort, to me. Believe I'll take care of you like one of my own.
This is family.

And he looked round about
on them which sat about him,
and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
For whosoever shall do the will of God,
the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.
Mark 3:34-35