Seeing God

Seeing God

by

Thomas A. Williams

Venture Press

ISBN 978-1-878853-028

Copyright 2012 by Thomas A. Williams

Published by Venture Press at Smashwords

I dedicate this book to the memory of

Christina Dunaway Williams,

my partner in life, and to our son,

Thomas Andrew Williams, III

Also by Thomas A. Williams

Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism

(University of Georgia Press)

Eliphas Lévi: Master of Occultism

(Univerisity of Alabama Press)

The Bicentennial Book

(Era Press)

We Choose America

(Era Press)

Tales of the Tobacco Country

(Era Press)

Poet Power

(Sentient Publications)

How to Publish Your Own Magazine, Guidebook, or Weekly Newspaper

(Sentient Publications)

How to Write a Book

(Sentient Publications)

Acknowledgements

The many poets I quote in this book often opened spiritual paths that I did not even know were there. The first of these is Robert Frost, whose Death of the Hired Man and The Woodpile I quote in the first few pages of his book. These citations are followed by lines from Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes!, Whitman’s Song of Myself, Wordsworth’s Preludes, William Blake’s The Lamb, The Tyger, and Auguries of Innocence, Hart Crane’s Legend, Wallace Steven’s Anecdote of the Jar, and Of Modern Poetry, and Robert Browning’s Paracelsus. I would also like to acknowledge the careful work of my daughter Lisa Williams Gelbard, Clay Loadman, Sharla Taylor, and Jackie Williams for their close reading and comments on the galley proof of this text.

1

A bitter March wind sliced through the needles of the long-leaf pines. The azaleas would not bloom this year. Bartow Willingham, cheeks flushed red by the blustery cold, checked the address on the paper they had given him at the Home. Yes, this was it, this was where he was supposed to come.

The door was unlocked and the room looked warm, so Bartow went inside and took a seat, settling his denim rucksack on the floor beside him. On the table to his left, he saw a stack of small magazines. The cover bore the image of a bearded man dressed in a white robe and riding a small, brown donkey. He was riding sidesaddle, it seemed, his feet almost touching the ground. The man did not look happy, Bartow noted, but he did not look particularly unhappy either. Above the image of the man were written the words Upper Room. Bartow wondered where the man on the donkey might be going. Wherever it was, judging by the palm fronds the people along the way were waving, it must have been a warm climate.

Bartow’s reverie was interrupted by a fresh blast of cold air as the door swung open and quickly closed again. A small man wearing a pin-striped suit, vest buttoned tightly over an ample belly, stood before him. He rubbed his hands and blew on the red tips of his frosted fingers.

Cold as a witch’s tit out there, the man said. Then, turning to Bartow, plunged on.

Name’s Andrrew Piper, he said, head deacon around here. This was clearly a man who had no time to waste. He spoke in pure ellipses. Come for the custodian’s job? Good. Gotta clear this up before noon. Got lunch with the new preacher.

As Bartow was thinking through this bit of information, the deacon continued, turning what he hoped was a piercing gaze on Bartow. You got good references from that Home where you were, and it’s not a hard job, he said. Anybody can do it. Just one question. Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?

Do you? Bartow asked.

Of course, said the deacon. Everybody around here does. This is a Presbyterian church, What else would we do?

Then I do, too, Bartow said, pleased to agree with this busy little man.

The deacon clapped his hands, apparently a signal to move on to the fine print of the offer. Good, good. Takes care of that. Here are the details. You keep the place clean, we pay you $200 a week plus room. No board, though there is a good deal to eat at the spreads the women put on every time they get a chance. Leftovers would keep an army fed for a month.

The deacon turned and motioned for Bartow to follow. They walked through a large room that Bartow would later learn to call the fellowship hall, and down a dim hallway at whose end stood a small room. The Boy Scouts used to meet in this room, the man said, but we built them a new place outside. There’s a sink on the wall and a washroom just down the hall. Once you settle in, you’ll feel right at home. Bartow liked feeling at home. Home was good. He smiled and answered,

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in."

When the deacon looked puzzled, Bartow explained. "Robert Frost. The Death of the Hired Man. 1932."

Right right, replied the deacon, paying scant attention to the words of his new employee. He turned and scurried off to dispose of whatever urgent task was awaiting him elsewhere, leaving Bartow to settle in.

Bartow was, to all appearances, a thoroughly ordinary person, but an ordinary person from whom a kind of inner joy, a serenity, seemed to flow, even though he made no effort for it to do so.

No one knew much more about Bartow than that. He was a fairly young man—one would have guessed that he was in his thirties. Standing just short of six feet, he had a solid frame, not particularly muscular, but strong nonetheless. He had the steady, careful hands of a workman, perhaps even of a craftsman. His complexion was clear, and his brown hair was cut and combed from part to side like a schoolboy’s. Gray eyes looked out at the world beneath a smooth, unfurrowed brow as though anticipating that something good—or at least something interesting—was about to happen. When it did, his eyes said, he did not want to miss it.

The very simplest things were of interest to Bartow. The world was alive for him. Unlike most of us, he noticed things: the warmth of a mother’s hand spread gently against the back of the infant she holds in her arms; a yellow flower pushing up against all odds between the broken bricks of a walkway; the particular way a gnarled hand gripped the handle of an oak walking cane; a child’s rusting red wagon filled with geraniums.

Now he surveyed his room. A single, iron-framed bed with a mattress that lay across naked, wire springs occupied the corner. Its frame, painted what had once been a yellowish tan, was peeling here and there, revealing darker metal beneath. A small desk sat against the wall across from the bed. It had a single, shallow drawer in the middle. A slat-backed straight chair was pushed beneath it. A wooden chest of drawers rounded out the furnishings.

Above the desk someone had tacked a cardboard image. The same bearded man who had been pictured riding the donkey was now knocking at a door of a small cottage. It must have been late in the day, observed Bartow, because the man was shown silhouetted in light, with menacing shadows creeping in from the sides. Having arrived wherever he was going, he was, Bartow decided, looking for a place to spend the night. It was uncertain whether anyone would come to open the door. If no one came, the man might be in a tough spot.

Bartow took off his jacket and hung it neatly on the wire hook affixed to the back of the door. Then he sat in his chair, lifted his faded rucksack and placed it on the table before him. He carefully removed his one change of clothes—shirt, trousers, underwear and socks—and placed them neatly in the top draw of his chest.

Then he took out his two books and placed them in the center of his table, one on top of the other. These were Webster’s New World Dictionary and the Norton Anthology of English Poetry. Though sturdy, the books were worn, for he had read them through many times. He liked these books. They made him feel at home, wherever he was.

Bartow quickly took charge of his new domain, for he loved cleanliness and order. Order was a center around which disorder could arrange itself. Like that jar in Tennessee, he thought, the one that Wallace Stevens talked about:

I placed a jar in Tennessee

And round it was upon a hill

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill

Cleanliness was like poetry, Bartow thought. Everything in its place, proceeding inexorably from one thing to another until the whole seemed lit fromsome inner light.

His new job was not demanding. The church was a small one, standing in a grove of pine and oak trees on the edge of the city. The sanctuary had room enough for more than 200 worshipers when they brought in the folding chairs for Easter or the Christmas Eve candlelight service. This was joined to the much plainer Fellowship Hall by an enclosed walkway. The Fellowship Hall housed the offices of the pastor and the church secretary, several Sunday school classrooms, and a large area for congregational dinners and other activities. During weekdays there was seldom anyone there, and Bartow felt a certain air of . . . . what was the word for it? His mind leafed through the pages of his dictionary and from thousands of words plucked the one that fit best.

Desuetude n. [ME

Yes, that’s it, he thought, desuetude He could feel it in the scent of the pale green paint covering the cinder block walls. It was the odor of abandonment. Curious how so many churches were like that, he reflected. But Bartow, being the man he was, took this as a challenge, not a cause for discouragement. He had long ago sensed that meaning was something we infused into our surroundings. We did not derive it from them.

He set about his work with his customary good will and energy. He assembled the tools he would need from the janitor’s closet: brooms, mops, pails, brushes, cleansers of all varieties, rags. He quickly decided that the first thing that needed cleaning was the janitor’s closet itself, an eight-foot square space, encrusted with the grime left behind by the scores of half-hearted custodians who had preceded him.

He shook out the ragged ends of the dirt-saturated mop. All the heart seemed to have gone out of this one. He took it to the driveway, soaked it in the strongest cleanser he could find, and sprayed it out with the garden hose. He soaked it in Clorox and dried it again before disinfecting it with Lysol.