SNC

Marginalia

I have loved my siblings since before they were born, and of all the days of my life, the days on which I received the greatest gifts were the days my sister and my brother came to be. Of all the aspects of being an eldest child, the one I cherish the most is that I can really say I loved my sister and my brother from before they were born, and that I remember loving them. I remember the day my brother was born: my grandparents sharing the news at night, getting ready with my sister to brave the December cold, the window and the bed of the warmly-lit hospital room, and in the centre of it all my mother and now him: a new light in my life, to keep for all the days of my life. And while my sister is a lot harder to recall, because I was just a toddler when she was in the womb, I could swear I remember my mother being pregnant and my sheer degree of excitement at what was going to happen. I remember, in wisps which are hard to put together but which still feel real to this day, the joy I harboured in my little heart and the love I felt speaking to my sister before she was born, events that my parents witnessed. Yes, the best days of my life were when my brother and my sister were conceived, better even than the date of my own conception—because I would count myself more blessed if I had not been born than if one of them had not.

I have not always been the best sibling, and I am not the best sibling today: there are painful moments historically and imperfect realities now. But I am convinced that my siblings know for a rock-solid fact that I love them, and that means the world to me. It is actually that love which has buoyed me in the worst despair—it was my love of God which convinced me not to want to kill myself, but before that, it was my love of my siblings which convinced me never to do it whether I wanted it or not. Love has implications, and love sets limitations. For instance, even though I’ve spent time in G/ACC spaces, I would never dare let myself hate men, because I love my brother; nor would the opposite fly, for opposite reasons. But beyond limitations, love also creates patterns. All my siblings had to do for me to love them as my siblings was to come to exist—literally all humans, and even non-human animals, have done that. At the basis of sibling love is, I think, something so pre-conditional that it defines what love means to me; it also, because my I see my siblings as my “first friends,” defines what friendship means to me. I have spent my whole life seeking to make siblings out of people, not because my sibling relationships are inadequate, but because they are the only relationships which strike me as perfectly adequate no matter what may happen. When my sister and my brother came to exist, rays of light broke into my life and were given to me to my love with all my heart. I should like, in eternity, to love everyone like that.

By one definition, siblings comprise the most unambiguous in-group imaginable. It is sibling relations, and then their higher-order instantiations through cousins, which form the basic kin groups around and against which people define themselves. But to me, I feel my siblings have always also stood for a kind of radical otherness. I am not a believer in the pre-existence of souls; something very strange happens when a child comes into the world, as though the same world has been created all over again. While for my brother, the moment of his birth is the moment he owes both myself and my sister to, I owe my siblings to moments other than that of my own birth, and so those moments strike me as moments where the world was given all over again—given to me by not primarily being given to me, by decentring me and centring someone about whom I had no sure fore-knowledge. All of creation becomes strange because now it is for-you and not for-me, and I myself become strange because now on some level I too am for-you and not for-me. I think the reason I adapted well to these moments and reacted to my siblings with joy was because from the beginning I intuited that, through love, even if everything in the world becomes alien I am only enriched by its alienness. I think it is for the same reason that the Christian doctrine of God incarnating as a first-born among many siblings strikes so close to home. Of course God, being the fullness of love, would want to experience the advent of a new sibling over and over again, the moment of everything in the world and even yourself becoming for-them, and so in submitting to love another person to become unfathomably blessed. Because all blessings come from saying: “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” as in the last verse of Luke’s Gospel, from the mouth of Christ.

I am thinking about siblings tonight because I just rewatched a movie that I loved as a child, called The Secret of Kells. The film is set in 8th century Ireland, in a walled abbey where an orphaned boy named Brendan lives, who with the help of an Aos Sí named Aisling contributes to the illumination of The Book of Kells. It is a movie about creating beauty and preserving hope, and it is a movie about navigating between contradictory domains—between the masculine, civilized, Christian abbey and the feminine, wild, pagan forests. It is a movie about ways of drawing, whether with boundary lines of thick chalk or with marginal illustrations which turn the centre-text into the image of Heaven itself. And for me, it is also about being siblings. Siblings are people who at once share and do not share a common situation. Siblings share a family and a world, but to each the family and the world is centred on them, and so it is as if there were multiple families and multiple worlds. Aisling and Brendan share a condition—both are orphans, which is what begins their bonding—and they share a world in close proximity with each other. But Aisling, who is at home climbing trees and fording over rivers and sprinting through clearings, is not at home in Brendan’s world of towers and walls. Nor is Brendan, who is rather inept and afraid of transgressing and taken up with fantasies, at home in Aisling’s world of wolves and magic. I mention those three traits for each because they are directly applicable to how I remember differing from my sister when we were both little children. A sibling merges a neighbour and a stranger, living right next to you in ways which open up the same space so very differently. So is it for Aisling and Brendan, and for my sister and me.

The real reason I have to bring up The Secret of Kells is for how it shows a sibling-like relationship flowering—literally flowering—on the page which is one’s own distinctive existence. The Book of Kells, being a manuscript of the Gospels, is at the heart of a Christian domain. Yet what fills its margins is ink and patterns gathered from a surrounding world which is resolutely pagan and is gathered through a friendship which must pass beyond its Christianity, even as the pagan world passes beyond its pre-Christianity in order to contribute to the margins of a Christian project. I think this dynamic speaks to what it means to adopt a person as one’s sibling, with the disclaimer that I believe every sibling, including blood-siblings, in the end must be “adopted.” An unadopted sibling is one you identify with because of their similarity to you; an adopted sibling is one whose otherness you accept as a basis of unconditional love rather than as an impediment. Every sibling is, by virtue of their inhabiting a common situation while outside of your perspective, an other at their core. Therefore every sibling must be adopted, and maintained in that adoption as life goes on through forgiveness and reconciliation. But this adoption cannot look like cancelling what you yourself are and adopting your sibling’s essence, for here there is no relation across difference. It is impossible that I should ever inhabit the habitus of my sister or brother. My sister has always been so brilliantly capable and precocious in areas where I myself am slow and inept; as little kids, she taught me how to swing on a swingset and tied my shoes when I couldn’t learn how. I can look up to her virtues, and I can be inspired by them, but I cannot abandon what I am to be what she is by imitation or by competition without stunting myself and loving her less perfectly. And my brother! I will never have his ability to avoid getting into conflicts, or the ease of making friends he showed from when he was just a toddler. I will never quite get why he likes geography so much, nor how my sister has such an impeccable sense of fashion. But by God do I love them, in all these qualities, and the margins of my life therefore bloom with what could never have made its way into my main text. And this, as The Secret of Kells points out, is what makes for a book which is Heaven itself.

I have been interested lately in a scholar of Chinese religion named Brook Ziporyn, who translated the copy of the Daodejing which I have chosen for my yearly read-through. Ziporyn is an opponent of monotheism, and he absolutely despises Christianity and all religions which revere a certain Nazarene; he has a long essay critiquing Christianity which is possibly the most harsh of any I’ve ever read. I find Ziporyn’s argument worth contending with despite how uncompromising, unfair, and self-professedly hateful it can be because, implicitly, it deals with an issue very close to my heart. Although he does not put it in these terms, Ziporyn feels that Christianity has been a very bad sibling to people whose cup of tea is not to follow Jesus of Nazareth. I take this seriously, because my siblings fall into exactly that category! Neither my brother nor my sister are Christian, and going outside that sphere, the vast majority of the people I more-or-less treat like my siblings are not Christian. Ziporyn argues that the Gospel account of Jesus, and then how it’s been put into practice, is at its core a “dichotomizing monism,” where unifying love is secondary to a kind of divine hatred which separates the wheat from the chaff and burns the chaff perpetually. Well, okay, I believe that in the end all things will be reconciled and that no one burns in Hell forever, so that doesn’t quite apply to me. But Ziporyn doesn’t let me off the hook. Even universalism is based, he says, in the idea that everyone will one day give in, renounce what they are, and replace it with the sovereignty of a single man—and this is surely hateful. What if everyone didn’t give in, even if you think they will? Is it only an issue for them to burn forever because they lack an infinite backbone?

I’ve done my thinking, and I truly don’t think that’s what I believe at all. But that doesn’t mean Ziporyn’s depiction of Christianity doesn’t exist; I fear it is the mode which is most common. As I was reading his essay, I realized to my bemusement that my theology had actually been consciously designed from the beginning to avoid the exact pitfalls he was mentioning. I believe that God is uncompetitive, and that he cares not that we rank him hierarchically as the most lovable being of all beings (for he is not a being among beings) but that we love everything vastly more. I believe that the reward that Jesus promises for good works is that through them we participate in God’s unconditional love which is so ample that it contains all riches and eternal life. I believe that Jesus living as a human and dying on the Cross acted in solidarity with all the suffering of this creation, of all humans and even of all animals who suffered with nerves like those with which he suffered, and that in his resurrection not a single one is left unransomed. I believe that Jesus’s “seamless garment” is the entirety of creation which in the end can never be divided, and though our desire to know both good and evil has divided it for now, he who has led captivity captive will divide us from our divisions. All of these beliefs are ones I held before I encountered Ziporyn, and which I have held regardless of feeling like a lonely minority in the tradition of the faith. But in my experience, it is precisely when your parents are mad at you and you feel like you can’t trust them that you have the clearest chance to bond with your siblings. And whatever I lack in the parents and grandparents of the tradition, whatever the text set before me seems to lack, does not bother me, nor does it make me feel like I must abandon this text entrusted to me. Through my friends, through my siblings, the margins fill up with the strangest and most beautiful angels, and Heaven for a moment lifts its veil.

What is Heaven, which I write about so often? Heaven is this: that the person you most hate and want to kill will be your sibling forever and ever, and that whatever your sibling delights in, you too will undoubtedly enjoy. Heaven is that confusion of selves, of what you judge as dark and what you judge as light, which the Spirit of God has spent aeons in exile in order to assemble, the Spirit who only rests when all people rest in her. Heaven is the brook which trickles down into the valley and the river which empties out into the sea, growing drop-by-drop, growing in a rush of water. Heaven is the set of conditions so unfavourable that no one would accept them, except that someone has already. Heaven is the set of conditions so favourable that everyone would accept them, except that we haven’t yet. Heaven is finding everywhere at all times that God is doing a new thing in the world which you could not have expected, after which you cannot remain the same. Heaven is when your mother tongue blossoms into every foreign language, and when every conditional thing somehow inherits unconditional love. Heaven is, in the most literal sense you can imagine, infinite bliss and friendship which instills needs into you just to fulfill them and lasts so much longer than the stars will burn. And the creed which puts Heaven in your heart, which makes Heaven present not only in the future but from this moment on, is the vow that the text swears to the margins and the margins to the text, the pledge I sometimes dream every religion would pledge to one another (as do the pagan and the Christian in The Secret of Kells), the promise which siblings promise one another.

I’ll say it again: ”Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Or in other words: I guess you’re stuck with me.