Diana Greene Discovering The Lighted Shadow

The Lighted Shadow
I do not dread the darkening of the sunset,
The coming of the night;
But may the shadow that I leave behind me
Be full of light.

When my father died, after his struggle with leukemia, a lot of curious events took place. While most have been utterly sad and difficult, there has been at least one truly amazing experience, and that is the one I want to share.

Allow me to first paint the scene.

The day after my father's funeral, my brother and I went to the Walmart in Pinehurst to buy sturdy cardboard boxes. We were going to box up my father's desk and files so I could bring them to Winston and begin my new job of executor. For those who are lucky enough not to know what an executor is, the executor of a will is kind of like the last person out of the house - she has to make sure everything is taken care of - lights turned off, fish fed, and doors locked.

So my brother Brock and I sat together on the floor of the beautiful sunroom in my father's house and began making our way through our father's desk, a place that had all our lives been just his. Some fathers I knew growing up had their very own rooms called studies, my father had his desk. And, as children, we knew not to go inside that desk. It was a private place, a serious place, perhaps the only place in the house that was completely his. (I could probably do an entire chapter just on the task of clearing out my father's desk and uncovering the meticulously kept records of a sentimental man.)

In any case, my brother and I had sorted through five of the six desk drawers, when I lifted out a folder stuffed so full the side seams were splitting in places. Inside that folder were hundreds of onion-skin pages telling the story of Ada Alden, my great-grandmother.

After reading this manuscript a few times I've come to feel extremely close to this woman whom I'd never met. Even more than being kin to me, she is a soul-mate.

So along with all the nasty executor's work of bills and banks, property and death certificates to be sent to social security and about eight-hundred other people, I had this story. The story has been like a fine chocolate served after a delicious meal. I savor it.

Stories with too many names, however, can quickly become confusing. So I'll begin simply. Ada's daughter, Constance Greene, was my father's mother and my grandmother. It was Constance Greene who actually typed all these pages. Here's how Constance introduces the book.

"When Ada Alden was seventy-eight I realized she would never write her life but I did not need to persuade her to tell it to me. Through the autumn and early winter of 1935 we would hurry with our morning's work, then sit down together. While my mother darned and mended my family's clothes, I interviewed her. This book is the result."

Ada was born on July 12, 1856 in Virginia, the youngest of six children. She was an award-winning poet whose first award came when she was just a teenager. Ada passed along that prize money to her mother so she could buy a washing machine, which, by the way, then cost $15 dollars. At the age of 75 Ada won the top honor from the National Poetry Society for a poem called Unhearing. I have yet to find that poem. I do know, however, that it was a humorous poem inspired by the time Ada spoke...and spoke and spoke...to a man who merely nodded. It was only later that someone informed Ada that the fellow was deaf.

For now, let me share a different poem, a poem that speaks both of beginnings and the sacred. This poem, entitled Sabbath Morn, appeared in the New York Evening Post when Ada was 15 and still living in the mountains of Virginia.

When, ushered in on piers of light,
In orient the day is born,
A softer sunlight crowns the hills
In the deep hush of Sabbath morn.

Ada was a spiritual woman and she was so, I think, because of some very powerful experiences she had as a young girl. To get to the essence of Ada's beliefs we need to consider for a moment a word seldom discussed in today's America, a place devoted to the worship of self. The word is Destiny. The rudder of destiny runs so deeply through the core of this character that I found myself one day looking up the word in the dictionary. Seldom, if ever, do I think of destiny in my own life. I wonder how many people do.

At times, I have marveled at the places I've found myself, whether that be teaching in a schoolhouse in rural Arizona, interviewing African-American classical composers for an historical radio documentary, or giving the first dose of morphine to my dying father.

But, destiny - it sounds too grand to be something working in my random little life. Isn't destiny a force that only pulls at the LARGE people, people like Albert Einstein or Dorothea Lange or Scarlett O'Hara?

This is Webster's view of Destiny:

"It's the predetermined, usually inevitable or irresistible, course of events."

Destiny.

This is Ada Alden's view:

"My instinctive belief in destiny has laid a restraining hand on my fears."

"As I grow older, I am less inclined to condemn humanity since we are all creatures of composition and destiny."

"The longer I live the surer I am that there is no such thing as accident."

It's my impression - I who sit here on the cusp of a new millennium, three generations removed - that Ada's sense of destiny was so deeply embedded because it first presented itself very early on. The ultimate or - depending on your faith - the penultimate, destiny for all of us is death, the inevitable destination.

At the age of 10, Ada Alden was confronted with a vivid view of her own death. It was a vision so powerful, a scene so indelible and assuring she would never let go of it. It was an accident that brought Ada to this reckoning. The Jungian author, James Hillman, says that accidents strengthen the integrity of the soul. His theory seems to be at work here.

At the time of Ada's initiating collision with destiny she was creating a little mischief - good, old-fashioned, girls against boys kind of mischief. And, it seems fair to say that Ada's peak religious experience took place not inside a church, but rather inside an unused tobacco house.

She says,

"My experience in that tobacco house has helped convince me of the inevitability of destiny. Alice Britts, a humble farm child, was a little older than I and must have had more sense or less courage (Lack of sense is often mistaken for courage and so it is difficult to tell these qualities apart). The windows of the tobacco house had no glass - only solid shutters and these were thrown back. Alice was sitting in front of one of them one day when she said, `Those boys are throwing rocks and I'm going to get away.'

"Declaring that I was not afraid of anything, I took her place by the window. A moment later a large stone thrown by a ten-year-old boy came whizzing through the window and hit my forehead so violently that I fell back unconscious into Alice's arms.

"In that few moments of oblivion I saw very plainly the figure of the Savior coming toward me with a gentle, welcoming half-smile. I knew instantly that everything was divinely right. I couldn't have reasoned this out, but something stronger than reason, and more spontaneous, impelled me to follow the beckoning look. The figure of the Savior drew nearer with outstretched hand but before I touched that clearly visible hand with my own, extended in happy confidence - my inferior senses returned. I have never seen any representation of Christ so beautiful as this face which looked down upon me, and though I had at that time seen fairly good pictures of Him in black and white, there had been nothing in my small, primitive life even to suggest such beauty. I searched the galleries of Europe hoping that such a vision might have come to some famous painter, but I never found it."

Seeing the hand of the Savior? Sounds a little unstable, does it? A little Pentecostal? Something out of a religious X-Files? But, you know, I believe Ada Alden for at least three reasons. First of all, I believe in the idea of a sweet spirit that has many mysterious by-ways to the heart. Two, Ada was a woman grounded in the gritty reality of meals and mending and motherhood. And, finally, and perhaps most convincing of all, she didn't run around telling people about her vision. In fact, it wasn't until she was 53 years old and in the company of her beloved second husband that she revealed what happened to her that day in the tobacco house.

No, Ada Alden was anything but a religious zealot. She was a privately spiritual person in a way painfully conflicted with her childhood experiences of church and religion. "As I look back upon my childhood," Ada says flatly, "I cannot recall one thing that was ever done to make religion attractive. The whole thing was a series of threats - word-lashings - with ministers cracking the whip."

I'd like to share short excerpts of Ada Alden's diatribe about punitive Christian practice, very much in style back then. Remember she was born in 1856, raised during the Civil War era.

"In passing I must fling a stone upon the grave of `Old Time' religion, which did more harm to my family than all the combined vices of humanity. And they never even enjoyed indulging in it as some people did! My first disagreeable memories are connected with religion. No matter how bright and gay people seemed, the moment anything about religion was mentioned, it was as if a pall had descended on them."

"I thought God was a most forbidding and reprehensible character but I wouldn't have dared say anything against Him for fear He might hurt me, `just out of spite.' I would never have dared either to confess the lurking distaste that I had for people's souls. This dates back to a picture in one of our holy Primer's of a little girl and a Newfoundland dog - my favorite type of animal at the time. Underneath the picture was the following:

Q: What is the difference between little Lucy and her dog?

A: Lucy has a soul and her dog has none.

"The difference to me was that little Lucy looked not only unattractive but perfectly miserable - in strange contrast to Rover's expression of noble contentment. I wasn't more than four when I first saw that picture and I wondered how the people who wrote the primer had found out that Rover had no soul. Had they taken him apart after making his portrait? And what made them think little Lucy had one? There was nothing about her appearance to assure it."

"I am proud to say that by 1881 I had advanced enough to refuse baptism for my dying child when I was told it would save her from the wrath of God. I said that I would not be willing to entrust her to a God who could feel any wrath toward an infant."

I won't go into my great-grandmother's elaborate and entertaining feminist exegesis on Adam and Eve, but, suffice it to say, she concludes her argument thusly, "Eve was made out of Adam's backbone!"

Ada Alden was ahead of her time, free-thinking, strong-willed, witty, feisty, and wholly devoted to the Christ she saw, a vision embodying loving kindness. Is it really any wonder that she so assuredly cast aside the harsh, judgmental God of her generation, her southern culture and upbringing? I find Ada to be a thrill and a revelation. She trusted her vision which is vitally important not only for the faithful, but for the artist as well.

On a personal note, having been raised by a mother who, with similar adamancy, cast aside her religion, in this case, Catholicism, and decided God was a destructive myth, I feel Ada was lucky. Ada was able to move beyond the wounds of bad religion. Because of this, Ada has given me the prospect of faith. My mother's atheism has often made me ashamed of my spiritual leanings. My mother considered religion a crutch. I, however, ascribe to Ada Alden's doctrine which she spelled out in four words: "My creed is wonder."

Up until literally the very last moments of her life, Ada Alden remained a woman illuminated and spellbound by wonder. At the age of 79 Ada ended up in the hospital in Washington, D.C. She'd been visiting her son, Foster, when her heart - the "old hulk" as she called it - began wearing out. Constance Greene, my grandmother, the woman who wrote down Ada's life story, rushed to Washington to see her mother. She arrived on Easter Saturday, April 10th. Ada had died earlier that morning.

Constance never had a chance to say good-bye. However, ever the thoughtful and industrious mother, Ada did leave a message for her daughter. As Constance looked through the last book Ada read, a book called The Prince of Abyssinia, she found a poem folded inside the pages. As it turns out, on April 10th, in the middle of the night, Ada wrote this poem on the back of a letter.

The Message
God set a message in my hand -
A message that I have not given,
I could not wholly understand
The language of His heaven.
I could not see the rounded arc
Nor read its rainbow promise clear;
But sometimes glowing in the dark
The lustrous syllables appear.
Words from an untranslated tongue
Are written in a book of gold -
Perhaps when I again am young
A clearer text may be unrolled.

Was it my destiny to find Ada's life story at a time when my father had died and I found myself an orphan? Maybe, could be. I'm not sure. What I do know is that I am the recipient of a wonderful act of grace. During this time of loss, there has also been soul-nourishing gain. My family feels stronger, bigger, more real than ever and this comforts me in my sorrow.

In the opening poem, The Lighted Shadow, which - by the way- Ada wrote on paper found in a hat box while cleaning the closet - she closes with these words,

But may the shadow that I leave behind me
be full of light

She needn't have worried. Her shadow has been discovered and it is indeed radiant.

Amen.