Our helplessness in the face of implacable Nature can teach us the limits of our own control, allowing us to rest in the peace of a mercy beyond our understanding.
By Marie Glancy O’Shea
Illustrations and Lettering by Katie Howerton
When I was a teenager, the epigraph from St. Augustine I read in one of my prayer books—“Peace is the tranquility of order”—seemed self-evident. Order? Yes, please. Observing rules, keeping things in their designated places, approaching tasks methodically—these were ways of dispelling stress and achieving satisfaction. That such habits could be attractive to college admissions teams wasn’t an explicit consideration of my spiritual practice, but it didn’t hurt.
Yet outside the grading scales and ruled pages of a formal education lies apparent caprice, and sooner or later even the most conscientious of us have to contend with it. I don’t want to judge my youthful self unfairly; my very truck with prayer books attests to some bigger-picture thinking. But “order” is a bit of a floating signifier, easily unmoored from the theological weight Augustine attached to it. Order can be alphabetical, chronological, color-coded. It can be quaint, like the picket fence of a Rockwellian idyll, or as baneful and perverse as the segregation that inspired Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With.” It can be all of these things, and anything in between, if we are talking of order as humans impose it.
I needn’t mention the manifest benefits of basic order in the form of discipline and organization. To a greater or lesser extent, depending on personality, we all tend to be more “at peace” the more in control we feel of our day-to-day existence. (Any parent to a toddler witnesses daily proof of the converse.) We do well to set up conditions conducive to peace in its most anthropocentric sense (Everything feels manageable; therefore I’m calm).
But we also know very well how much our lives are shaped by currents beyond our control. Though the world operates according to seasons and schedules, history is the unending story of our unscheduled interruptions. We busy ourselves according to a fetishized, human-scale concept of order, perhaps to forget we are waiting—paradoxically awaiting that which we cannot anticipate. When the unseen, uncontrollable circumstance arises, that clung-to sense of how things should be becomes an impediment to Paul’s capacious and supple “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.”
When disorder appropriates a place dedicated to memory, it looks uncomfortably like forgetting.
In those teenage years of the prayer book, the place I considered most peaceful was probably a small rural cemetery in the Irish townland of Cloonmorris, where my ancestors are buried. Some years before, it had been overgrown and unsightly. Stinging nettles crowded near headstones; grass sprouted through cracks in the concrete paths. In my family and certainly in others, the prevailing opinion was that something should be done. When disorder appropriates a place dedicated to memory, it looks uncomfortably like forgetting.
Those nettles and tufts were incursions of wilderness, which has traditionally held all the terror of oblivion. As William Cronon eloquently summarized in his 1996 essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” it is only within the last 300 years that the word “wilderness” acquired any positive connotations. Its most notable use prior to that may have been in the King James Bible, where it indicated “places on the margins of civilization where it is all too easy to lose oneself in moral confusion and despair.… Whatever value it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be ‘reclaimed’ and turned toward human ends—planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill.” Lawn mowers, hedge clippers, weed-whackers: had such tools existed then, they would have been roundly celebrated for carrying out God’s work.
And in Cloonmorris, they were. A clean-up operation restored the cemetery to a state of manicured beauty, and I returned one summer in early adolescence to find it transformed like a rescued castaway after a bath and a shave. I don’t know much about Zen gardens, but I found this patch of land—nestled between fields, woods, and a railway bridge—preternaturally soothing. It was profoundly quiet, but more than that: The landscape felt charged with immanence. I used to visit just to drink in the calm.
I assumed, I think, that the newfound tidiness—the order—was what made it lovely. But in retrospect I’m not so sure. What prompts my doubt is another plot of land in another country, another world, thousands of miles away.
What was that feeling? A sense that this place is more than a memorial, because those being memorialized seem to abide in the very air.
My cousin and I, friends from childhood, took a trip to Turkey in 2010. It was her idea to visit Kayaköy, a ghost town on the Turquoise Coast created by the Turkish–Greek “population exchange” of the 1920s. This innocuous-sounding term refers to the forcible expulsion by their governments of Muslims in Greece and Orthodox Christians in Turkey in accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended Turkey’s War of Independence. Christians from Turkey outnumbered Muslims from Greece, and they left behind many homes that were never reclaimed. In Kayaköy lay the husk of an entire community abruptly departed.
The idea of a settlement surrendered to animals and the elements intrigued my cousin, an urban and regional planner in Ireland. In 2010, that country was newly dotted with “ghost estates” of its own—housing developments built in bedroom communities during the later part of the “Celtic Tiger” boom, unable to attract buyers or even occupants once the recession hit. But Kayaköy was also a historical artifact, a memorial to a painful chapter of the past. We arrived to the sun unhurriedly setting after a brief, intense evening shower.
As children, my cousin and I had often visited Cloonmorris together—at least once using its 13th-century ruins to act out the drama of a secret Mass raided during the days of the Penal Laws. Maybe being in her company strengthened the association, or maybe it was the awareness of an environment so still, you can hear a throat cleared from half a mile away, but as soon as we began climbing the hill in deserted Kayaköy—following the remains of an old village street between ruined houses, shops, and churches—I thought: “This feels like Cloonmorris.”
What was that feeling? A sense that this place is more than a memorial, because those being memorialized seem to abide in the very air. A sense of the present moment dissolving into the eternal. Kayaköy’s atmosphere suggested that the awful loss it embodies, the sadness of lives crushed and abandoned here, has somehow been reconciled with the dirt that coats every piece of concrete, and that will devour all of this eventually.
It’s an important disclaimer that I was a mere tourist in Kayaköy; my ancestors weren’t touched by Turkey’s wars or the terms of treaties that followed. People with a familial connection might perceive the spot very differently. Nonetheless, my visceral sense of commonality between the two places might be instructive. It’s a commonality located in the realm of spirit rather than any outward features. Though the slant of light, the color palette, the history and meaning of Kayaköy all differentiate it from a mist-swept patch in the Irish midlands, both beckoned me to step over a boundary separating a realm of rush and purpose—the busy “now”—with an unendingly patient Divine Present. And the way that nature, in Kayakoy, is slowly reclaiming the ruins may be a more fitting tribute to both grief and faith than meticulously tended lawns and plants.
I might be reaching, but I see a poetic connection between the imposition of neatness upon Cloonmorris and Ireland’s transition to a place of more disciplined operation and efficient enterprise.
I emphasize slowly. We witnessed two exemplars of slow-paced living in Kayaköy—one between animals, one between humans. Descending toward the main road in the charcoal twilight, we observed a pair of tortoises engaged in romantic pursuits—an unhurried dance, the kind of intimate moment usually captured by the patient lens of a nature documentary cinematographer. Then, adjacent to the bus stop where we’d catch our ride back to Fethiye, we saw a cafe advertising gözleme, Turkish pancakes. We walked in to see if we might have one to go, indicating our wrists to convey our rush. The proprietor was confident. He beckoned a young woman from a back room, and she sat down at a low table to roll the dough. Minutes ticked by; we raised our eyebrows and the proprietor patted the air with his hand, universal sign language for “It will be fine.” The bus arrived before the pancake was ready, and he said a word to the driver, who waited. Two minutes later, gözleme in hand, we boarded and the bus rolled on.
Back when my cousin and I were growing up, when Cloonmorris was choked with nettles and Ireland’s economy was a shambles, a Bus Eireann driver would probably have waited for someone to finish cooking a pancake. I might be reaching, but I see a poetic connection between the imposition of neatness upon Cloonmorris and Ireland’s transition to a place of more disciplined operation and efficient enterprise. It’s crudely reductive to suggest life is better in a country that hasn’t reached the highest echelons of modern prosperity. Yet something is undeniably lost when narrow definitions of optimization arrange our pursuits, like magnets exerting their pull on iron filings. Or, you might put it this way: A rising tide carries all boats, and soon most boats are empty because no one has much leisure to sail. The buses, meanwhile, are full of people understandably tense about being on time.
They are part of an order, a system, that consumes their time as a natural resource. Because of that order we have penicillin, anesthetics, air travel, legal recourse, and numberless other innovations mitigating our suffering in such pervasive ways that I can scarcely conceptualize the hardship, physical and otherwise, that characterized every life on Earth in earlier generations. Yet it is also a mode of denial, because its achievements persuade us that a human-scale order can be imposed on all things. We will subdue the Earth, and all its creatures: That is the final word.
We have become condescending to wilderness.
Cronon’s essay doesn’t use the word “condescending,” but it’s the word that comes to my mind reading his account of “wilderness” and its evolving connotations: We have become condescending to wilderness. “As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty,” he writes, “the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat.”
I have never experienced a major earthquake, but those who have—including millions in Turkey last February—are unlikely to think nature pleasant or comforting. Their experience brutally reminds them that we remain, all of us, subject to the whims of an unknowable natural world. The more fully we grasp this truth, the more dread we might feel. So without condescension, without denial, how do we keep going? How do we make the most of human-scale order—filing cabinets, regular exercise, responsible bookkeeping—without clinging too tightly to the illusion of control it gives us?
I’m reminded of the yoga instructor at a gym I once frequented, bursting forth from the room where his class was gathered to scold pugilists in the boxing area: “Stop punching the bags! It’s too noisy!” His yogis were in Shavasana! How could they possibly play dead with this infernal racket rattling in their ears?
The object of yoga, as I understand, is learning equanimity amid the infernal racket. It’s letting the noise and chaos teach you inner calm. I do love the quiet of memorial places. But it’s the chaos reclaiming Kayaköy day by day, decade by decade, that serves as a useful focus of contemplation. Pieces of stucco litter the ground like rubble from a slow explosion. You step across the disintegrating thresholds or inside the cavernous church, and there comes a gentle release of tension as you absorb how all the exhilarations and disappointments, intrigues and schedules that make up daily bustle will one day turn to dust, consumed by effortless wilderness.
If your picture of God is rooted only in retribution, the unruly reach of mercy might look similarly menacing, as treacherous as a rent in the earth itself.
Effortless—that is to say, peaceful; that is to say, beyond all understanding. What if that wilderness we read about in the King James is just as sublime and fearsome as our ancestors knew it to be, but—rather than a chaos necessarily in need of our ordering hand—is actually the expression of sublime order beyond our comprehension?
While writing this essay, I happened to see a local production of Les Misérables in its entirety three days in a row, because my daughter was among the cast. Les Mis is so beloved, I suspect, because of its portrayal of mercy and redemption. Inspector Javert is effectively the villain because he embodies the opposite—implacable justice. But the show is generous even to him, giving him a beautiful, expressive solo song: “Stars, in your multitudes… Filling the darkness/ With order and light…”
Order is Javert’s god, and he imagines it’s God’s order he serves. Instead, the heavens he serenades, the light he believes is guiding him, are projections of his own grasping need for control. He confuses the constrictive laws of men with the unfathomable order of the divine. Javert’s code is a neat arrangement of rules and penalties; it leaves no room for the mysterious terrain of mercy, which he encounters through Jean Valjean. When he experiences a side of God he does not recognize—a strange face—he greets it not with wonder but horror. The stars go “black and cold/ As I stare into the void/ Of a world that cannot hold…”
Javert’s despair at witnessing mercy might strike us as bizarre. But so might our forebears’ anxiety at witnessing natural beauty. “Surrounded by crags and waterfalls,” writes Cronon, the Romantic poet “felt himself literally to be in the presence of the divine—and experienced an emotion remarkably close to terror.” Cronon quotes Thoreau, legendary proponent of nature’s healing powers, to show that even he felt cosmic fear on Maine’s Mt. Katahdin: “Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature… seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you.” If your picture of God is rooted only in retribution, the unruly reach of mercy might look similarly menacing, as treacherous as a rent in the earth itself.
Waiting, by its very nature, implies restlessness. It may be unrealistic to expect creatures without ultimate control, and with only a partial picture of their situation, to achieve unwavering peace. The best we can do may be to admit our own ideas of order are illusory. We can try to surrender the insistence that peace is here, but not there; in revenge, but not forgiveness; in the quiet church, but not the busy street; amid the well-trimmed hedgerows, but not the sprawling wilderness.
Marie Glancy O’Shea is a writer and editor who has covered culture, finance, and travel for publications including America, The Columbia Journalism Review, and CNN.com. She has written, co-written, and adapted several plays for Manhattan’s New Stage Theatre Company, and is the recipient of an Individual Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and children.
