Purity, Longing to be Free

     Reading Dietrich von Hildebrand on the virtue of reverence has reminded me of something I witnessed years ago.

     My wife and I were a young married couple on vacation, and we'd had one of those days when nothing goes right: the hiking trail went nowhere, lunch was late and not very good, we'd lined up no motel for the night, and supper was approaching.  So we argued in the car.  Finally we pulled into a lovely state park in Watkins Glen, New York.  Debra went into the tourist pavilion to call her mother, I forget why.  I waited outside and took a few deep breaths.  And there, a hundred feet in front of me, I saw what I'd never seen in my life.

     There was an ordinary picnic table, with a bench in front.  A young lady sat on the bench, with her hands in her lap.  She was wearing a pleasant sky blue dress that reached the ankle; it was lined with a kind of white lace brocade.  She also wore a white hat, rather like a cap or a small veil.  She was looking up and smiling at a young man who stood in front of her, talking and gesturing, with one leg planted on the bench and one hand resting on his bent knee.  He was leaning forward, also smiling.  He wore black and white: black knickers and boots, a handsome white shirt, and a black stovepipe hat, which of course he was carrying in his free hand.  He was tall and broad in the shoulder; she was of a womanly slenderness, and very pretty.

     They had eyes for one another alone.  Clearly they were in love -- two young Mennonites, who were living happily without so much of what we take for granted as necessary.  They seemed to have dropped into New York from another world.  And as I looked over at them I could tell that they weren't married, but that they very much wanted to be.  It seemed that they honored one another: and that therefore their desire was all the purer and more electric.

     I used to compare that apparition with what I saw in shopping malls, on those very rare occasions when I couldn't escape visiting one; the slouching boys who have reversed the old feminist revolution in clothing by wearing the trouserly equivalent of hoop skirts and other items that you can't do any hard work in; the girls with the low cut jeans and the jelly rolls lapping over the belt, with pierced lip for pouting and a smudge of black mascara around the eyes.  But maybe that's not fair to them.

     Somewhere in many a slouch's heart sleeps a knight, and somewhere, behind the eyes of many a girl, especially I think the girls who are a little shy and big in the hip, a damsel paces alone in her tower, waiting, and losing hope.  The crude repressions of a middle class lie heavy upon them -- the middle class of America, with its single aim, to be gratified, now or later, by whatever means will best work.  The young are shamed and coaxed at every turn lest they fall into reverence and purity; and should one of them fall, nurses and social workers and teachers and classmates stand ready with the red letter to hang about their necks.  For purity is deeply feared.  But the young are made for purity nonetheless, and surely the time will come when my Mennonite couple will not be so alone.  Whether I live to see that time is another matter.

Comments

[peasant]

Thank you. That was a beautiful image.

From Proverbs 30:
18 "There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:

19 the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden.
(via biblegateway.com)

[rashomon]

It's interesting sometimes how we (all of us) sometimes invent whole stories and histories for people we encounter briefly - we never know how close to factual they are, and I suppose that's not even the point. The couple you saw were evocative of something, whether or not you accurate discerned their history, relationship, and intentions.

I once spent a weekend at a silent retreat, where the participants weren't allowed to converse until the last morning. Most of them were strangers to me, and I was particularly struck by one couple, who seemed so intimate and loving and expressive with each other, even without words. I was impresssed by how romantic and respectful their wordless communication seemed, and how charmed they obviously were by each other. What a wonderful marriage they must have, I thought.

On the last morning, when we all finally had a chance to converse, we learned that they weren't in fact married yet, though they had shared a room. Their story wasn't the one I had concocted for them, but rather a messier and more prosaic one.

That's not to say I didn't learn something from them, or from the hopes they stirred in me.

[Tony]

Rashomon,

I know, maybe I read it wrong. But you don't see that restraint, and clear excitement, every day. And maybe they married, and since Mennonites are sinners too, maybe they suffered: he scolded her for burning the scnitzel, and she huffed when he left his tools in the middle of the yard. You never know ... But if there was not real eros there, Cupid's not the only blind boy in the world.