Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all that had ever been asked of me.

Beside it all ran the creek, never the same, holding no memory. Nothing to be afraid of here, I thought, nothing lying in wait.

Another way of putting this is that they had the soul of the lake, not of the river, and not of the sea.

As one writer put it, it’s not the meek who inherit the earth. The meek get kicked in the teeth.

And so as I tramped daily through the woods, feeling for once in the world, I told myself over and over that I must remember this moment, here, now, a moment which could not last and would inevitably be followed by an unhappiness that would be commensurate with if not exceeding it in strength, and that I must therefore carry it with me, the knowledge that once, for a time, for a series of hours, even stretches of days, I had seen what happiness might look like, that would have to be enough.

Do you understand what I am saying? Beauty is something to be eaten: it is a food.

There was so much one had to live up to, so many good deeds one had no reasonable expectation of carrying out, because of one’s resources, because of one’s will, and they would loom over the whole of one’s life, these specific failures, representing metonymically as it were the profound spiritual failure of one’s life, the community always holding one to account.

In truth and as it happened a building further away from God one could scarcely imagine.

Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action. So, listen. I am not blameless. I played my part.