The Giving and Taking of Wounds
Frederick Buechner’s Godric teaches us that friendship depends upon a trust that we are each building toward each other, willing to yield, to listen, to reach each other.
By Joshua Rio-Ross
A popular meme that periodically washes up on the Internet’s tides says that Jesus’s greatest miracle was having twelve close friends over the age of thirty. At least here in the West, parting with friends is so common that we now call it a part of growing up. I first read Frederick Buechner’s novel Godric in graduate school, a time of such short and intensely focused community that one becomes accustomed to the triage of whether to risk short-lived nearness or the loneliness of casual acquaintance. Godric met me when living felt most like a constant fragmenting. And within his first few pages Godric won my trust when he asks, “What’s friendship, when all’s done, but the giving and taking of wounds?” Ten years later, with many friendships since begun and parted, I find myself taking seriously this joke about Jesus’s greatest miracle and wondering what, if anything, friendship has to do with the lives of the faithful. I also find myself returning to the hermit Godric as an unlikely resource for guidance on friendship.
Once you develop an ear for the Anglo-Saxon tongue Buechner adapts for Godric as a narrator, the work assumes the coarse, merry-yet-bereaved tone so often associated with the British Isles. Godric the narrator is over one hundred years old and on his deathbed. He’s been a hermit for over half his life, and he wants to tell his story himself over against the hagiography being written by a monk named Reginald. “For the sake of him who is himself the Truth,” Reginald says, “I leave some small truths out.” Rather than Reginald’s polished, sterilized summary, Godric’s account is at once winsome and harrowing, preparing us to rethink hagiography—and with it, holiness—in a world where “nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.”
Pitting Godric’s confession against Reginald’s hagiography forces us to question, first, whether holiness is meaningful at all. One could read Godric from that angle; certainly Godric is suspicious of how Reginald represents holiness. But doing away with holiness altogether would oversimplify what Godric offers us. “Traditional” hagiographies like Reginald’s, which stifle our imagination and understanding of what holiness is, are not the final word on the saints. Confessions like Godric’s invert our perspective by representing the saints in terms of spiritual formation rather than as spiritual blueprints for emulation.
Whatever holiness is, it’s steeped in that inevitable broth of false and true that characterizes the human. Just so, the confessions of a saint aim to train our vision on Christ’s nearness in the people and world around us. Godric in particular trains our vision on friendship. Rather than beginning his narrative with a genealogy, his birth, his childhood home, or his family, Godric the hermit begins by telling us about the five friends he’s had in his life—friends who, if mentioned at all in Reginald’s hagiography, are glossed, flat, and nameless. From the very start, we are primed to consider this hermit not divorced from the world but in the context of these specific relationships.
Godric’s five friends are Roger Mouse, Gillian, Ailred, Tune, and Fairweather.
Godric’s five friends are Roger Mouse, Gillian, Ailred, Tune, and Fairweather. Roger Mouse is a cozening, womanizing sea merchant with whom Godric makes his wealth in his youth. The two sail from town to town buying and selling wares as well as swindling or seducing pilgrims who pay them for transportation. While Godric says they would have been hanged on hooks in Hell had they died in their youth, he also remembers Mouse as giving him lessons in the art of living. Godric recalls Mouse shouting into the wind, “The waves are like the years the way they melt! Great Alfred’s arse, while we yet can, we better . . . LIVE! LIVE!” From his relationship with Mouse, we also get one of Godric’s first fundamental insights about human love:
We loved each other, Mouse and I, and our love was born of need, for so it always is with mortal folk. God’s love’s all gift, for God has need of naught, but human folk love one another for the way they fill each other’s emptiness. I needed Mouse for his strength and mirth and daring. Mouse needed me for my mettle and my wit.
Eventually their Saint Espirit ship needs long-term work, so Mouse and Godric temporarily part ways. Godric goes on a pilgrimage to Rome with his mother Aedwen to pray for his dead father, whom in a dream Aedwen saw suffering in a cold Purgatory. Rome is ultimately disappointing and hardly feels like a gateway for intercession. On their way back, Godric meets his second friend, Gillian, a physical yet angelic “maid” who emerges out of thin air or shapeshifts from tree to human and back. Gillian carries report of Godric’s father’s Purgatorial progress, and she uses these reports to spur Godric’s movement toward Christ: “Christ was a sailor, too, in Galilee. Hand him your helm… The voice of silence calls, ‘Be still and hear,’ poor dunce… The empty well within your heart calls too. It says, ‘Be full.’”
Godric’s relationship with Gillian, and her report that Godric’s father had finally ascended the ladder out of Purgatory, proves integral to Godric’s eventual conversion toward a faithful life. Gillian warns Godric, “Leg over leg he [Godric’s father] mounts to where he’ll wait your coming, child, for even in Paradise there is no peace at last till all we love find peace as well. Pray, fail him not.”
Not long after these words, Godric has a violent falling out with Mouse because Godric refuses to cheat pilgrims out of more money than they’ve already paid. Godric is thrown overboard to the shores of Israel, where he’s eventually baptized. Through signs and visions and an unlikely apprenticeship with a curmudgeonly hermit, Godric becomes a hermit himself in the woods. Here he befriends two snakes, Tune and Fairweather, as well as a local abbot named Ailred.
Tune and Fairweather live with Godric for most of his hermitage. He considers them loyal friends, and they guard him both against physical threats as well as temptations. After Godric’s death, Reginald notes that two snakes stay at a safe distance but follow all of the funeral events until Godric is finally laid to rest.
Ailred periodically visits Godric, either to pray together or to ensure Godric’s needs are met. Godric characterizes Ailred by his chronic cough, his longsuffering, his ability to listen, his steadfast friendship, and his one nearly unforgiveable offense: “Only once did he do me a bad turn,” Godric says, “and that was from love as many a bad turn’s been done before. He sent me Reginald.” Godric bears Reginald—often cruelly—for Ailred’s sake.
Should we part with our earthly loves in order to love God more fully, without distraction or risk of idolatry?
While we get to meet each of Godric’s friends and hear his love for them, the hermit’s narrative reads like a chronicle of constant parting. Godric and Mouse part ways after their fight on Israel’s shores. Gillian leaves Godric after her last report about Godric’s father. She tells Godric that she, too, is a pilgrim, and that it’s for his best that she departs. Godric and Ailred never fall out; however, Godric does outlive Ailred by many years. And with still around twenty years left to live—and after about forty years of their company—Godric banishes Tune and Fairweather from his dwelling in the woods because they distract him from his prayers. Godric warns us of all this from the outset. He tells us,
That’s five friends, one for each of Jesu’s wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what’s left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What’s friendship, when all’s done, but the giving and taking of wounds?
When Godric banished Fairweather and Tune, they all three bled for it, and part of Godric snaked off too nevermore to come again. And it’s Godric’s flesh that Ailred’s cough cleaves like an axe. And when brave Mouse went down off Wales, he bore to the bottom the cut of Godric’s sharp farewell. And when Gillian vanished in a Dover wood, she took with her all but the husk of Godric’s joy.
This litany of painful departures exemplifies a characteristic of confessions: they force theological problems upon the reader that hagiographies like Reginald’s simply can’t—and not just abstract problems. These are problems with teeth. Among the most harrowing is whether Christians truly can love both God and neighbor faithfully. Despite these being “the greatest commandments,” Augustine’s Confessions and Godric show over and again that our lives are fraught with negotiating between these loves. We treat them as competitive rather than complementary or perichoretic. In Book IV of Confessions, Augustine famously recounts the death of his friend in Thagaste, whom he grieved with tears for weeks. Augustine later reflects upon this not as participating in God’s grief and love for his friend but instead as a kind of idolatry. He believes that he loved his friend inordinately, that he loved him more than he loved God. This catalyzes an extended discourse by Augustine about how loves must be ordered toward God lest they consume the lover or the beloved.
After Godric parts from Roger Mouse, Godric begins his life as a Christian and, soon after, as a hermit. By this point, we’ve already seen Godric part from his family, including his beloved sister Burcwen. Godric describes his sins up to this point with acute detail, and he thus gives two reasons for becoming a hermit: He believes that God cannot be given anything God has made, but that everything abstained from in this life is a gift to God; and he wants to protect the world from himself (rather than vice versa). Even once he’s a hermit, Godric continues to isolate, eventually even banishing his snakes. Only Ailred is never parted from, though his visits are sparse.
It’s understandable to ask, then, whether we ought to emulate St. Godric. Should we part with our earthly loves in order to love God more fully, without distraction or risk of idolatry? Are our earthly loves always damned to walk a razor’s edge between obedience to God and idolatry of creation? And is our love for those in this world best expressed by protecting the world from ourselves, especially knowing the sin within us?
We shouldn’t think of Godric as a holy rubric for friendship specifically or saintliness in general. Godric shifted away from traditional hagiography; we should also shift away from its hermeneutics. Godric isn’t written to show us that saints become hermits who protect the world from their own sinful influence. Godric and works like it offer us resources for living our own lives—even our lives in community. Nor should we think that a hermit doesn’t share enough with our lives to offer us anything. Even if we’re among the few who are planted near those whom we love, our loves are always aimed toward grief in this world, just as Godric’s are. Our loved ones also leave us, whether by necessity, by choice, or by death. And our loves fall prey to sin, just like Godric’s, making us cynical about all this talk of faith and hope and love. Less dramatically, but no less painfully, we simply change and find a gulf has opened between us and our friends precisely where we once stood together.
We should read Godric and the confessional saints for how their extreme experiences help us articulate our own.
Godric is brimming with this sense of loss. It’s fraught with a sense that our language and categories aren’t equipped to hold the complexities of our relationships. What we hope for might be unnamable, if not simply unspeakable. We should read Godric and the confessional saints for how their extreme experiences help us articulate our own. I don’t have to seek out loneliness or failed relationships or silences laden with longing; those experiences find me, and Godric gives me the means of holding those experiences in a Christian hope.
To this end, Godric offers us resources for friendship when friendship becomes characterized by distance or silence. “We said goodbye in other words and ways and silences,” Godric says of his friendship with Mouse. Godric’s communication with his loved ones always has an undercurrent that transcends the words they speak to each other. Explicit communication is necessary for building a friendship (Godric even talks to his snakes); however, that undergirding, meaningful silence is equally necessary for cultivating that friendship. Godric’s brother, William, serves as a grim negative example. Godric tells us,
I speak a word. My friend speaks back. Then I again, then he, and thus we make a bridge of words so each may fetch across the ditch that lies between what’s in his heart. But William never paused enough to let the other have his say, for fear, I guess, his friend might flee away instead. Thus no bridge ever crossed from him to anyone. Of all the men I ever knew, I think my brother was the loneliest.
Friendship, then, depends upon this exchange. It depends upon a trust that we are each building toward each other and willing to yield, to listen, to reach each other. Godric describes friendship in these terms:
Ailred. Mouse. The snakes. And Gillian even. What made them friends was this. Fancy us each perched on a different rock in Wear. The water races in between with strength enough to kill. But each of us reached out to touch the other, and our friendship was the comfort of that touch.
Godric’s life of silence has attuned him to the meaning shared in the absence of words.
Godric’s bridge and touch metaphors both focus on a form of connection that transcends speech—though speech can certainly be a vehicle for it. It transcends space—though, again, proximity can be a vehicle for it. And Godric demonstrates this connection throughout his narrative. Of Ailred he says, “Poor Ailred’s cough was fierce… It was the crack of woodsmen axeing oak, and if he tried to speak, it started worse, so I spoke most… His way of listening was itself a kind of talking, though. Say what you will, it said. I hear, I pardon, all.” Though she’s not described as a friend, we see a similar connection between Godric and his sister Burcwen. When she wants to go with Godric on his adventures rather than stay home, Godric tells us,
She did not speak her plea, for like our prayers to God, the deepest prayers we humans ask of one another speak but silence for their tongue. Yet I heard her wordless praying well, and in my heart I pondered what she asked… So, like Almighty God himself, without a word, for both our sakes, I told her no.
Godric’s life of silence has attuned him to the meaning shared in the absence of words. What he knows is “the comfort of that touch” and the “wordless praying” shared not only between humans and God but also between other loved ones. What he’s giving back to us is not a commendation of his hermitage, but the treasure he’s taken from it—how to listen to those palpable silences that reach across to one another. But, just as with Godric, many of our friendships not only fall silent, but also part ways. Here, too, Godric offers us a disposition of hope amid loss. Speaking of his life cut into two parts, his life in the world and his life as a hermit, he says,
So, by the reckoning of men, one half my life has been an empty box. Yet if they only understood, it’s been the fuller of the two. Three things I’ve filled it with: what used to be, what might have been, and, for the third, what may be yet and in some measure is already had we only eyes to see.
Godric is offering ways of contextualizing speech and companionship in terms of silence and solitude—not so that we will turn from our friendships to a shack in the woods, but so that we can better love God and our neighbor when either or both seem more absent than present, more silent than talkative. Godric’s “empty box” is an example of apophasis, which we’re most familiar with in theological studies. At their most effective, apophatic theologies have served not to replace cataphatic theologies but to give us robust and meaningful boundaries to cataphatic theologies—and to show us that we trace those boundaries by making negative statements about God and language as well as by pushing positive statements to their limits. Discovering those limits isn’t a failure of language but part of its cartographic challenge. Likewise, saints like Godric or Julian of Norwich or Augustine or John the Baptist offer us something like an apophatic praxis, where their lives of denial for God and neighbor do not replace friendship and speech and daily bread in this world. Instead, they unveil that our lives here are not perfect enactions of the Kingdom we hope for. We’ll inevitably run up against limitations in how we see and experience that Kingdom’s fulfillment—we will lose our friends, we will fall silent, we will go hungry—and when we do, the saints’ lives depict for us that Christ is there in the desert waiting for us.
Just as Gillian warned, Godric will not find peace until “all he loves find peace as well.” From him we can learn that when we talk of or long for a coming Kingdom, we’re not concerned with some vague, serene paradise; we’re concerned with reconciliation with our loved ones—one where our loves are transformed in a way that can flourish and last. In these silences, we practice attending to that already/not yet. Godric teaches us that the silence we once shared in our friends’ company is now shared apart. There remains in that silence the promise of a touch that makes us whole—of a time when, finally, the wounds we give and take are transfigured into something we don’t have in this world: wounds of joy.
Joshua Rio-Ross studied Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is an instructor of data analytics in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his poet wife and philosopher pup. He plays fantasy football using data analytics; he swing dances with his wife; he and his dog just are.