A Special Sort of Loving

The heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

- from "The Testing-Tree," by Stanley Kunitz

It is no secret, really, that I have a deep love for great children’s and adolescent literature. These are the books that move me to tears, the words that come to me in the middle of the most ordinary and the most magnificent of moments. They are the pictures that re-create landscapes I have seen and help me imagine many I have not seen.

Yesterday I was introduced to Edward Tulane. If you haven’t met him yet, I believe you should.  I stayed up far too late reading his story and got up early to finish hearing it. When it ended I wished there was much more to read. The name of the book is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. It is written by Kate DiCamillo who has spun several other of my favorite tales, among them The Tale of Despereaux, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures and Because of Winn Dixie, which saw me through a terrible week that I spent in bed sick this fall at Jubilee.

Anyhow, Edward’s story goes a little like this: “Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a china rabbit named Edward Tulane. The rabbit was very pleased with himself, for he was owned by a girl named Abilene, who treated him with the utmost care and adored him completely. And then, one day, he was lost.”

In fact, on that day, he finds himself face down in the muck at the bottom of the ocean. This selfish rabbit, somewhat smug in Abilene’s love for him but unable to return that love and plagued by ennui (a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement… I had to look it up) and worries about his appearance, suddenly finds himself on a journey. He will meet many people, some who love him, some who are indifferent and some who are downright cruel both to him and to those around him.

He is named Susanna, dressed in pink ruffled dresses and loved by an old fisherman and his wife, he travels with a hobo and his dog, he is loved by a very sick little girl Sarah Ruth and, later after her death, by her older brother Bryce who turns him into a marionette to make money on the streets. Finally, in a terrible incident his head is smashed to pieces. He wakes up to find himself in a china doll shop, with his head all pieced together again, waiting, along with lots of snooty dolls, for the next person who would take him home.

One day a doll comes to rest on the shelf beside Edward. She is over a century old and has loved and been loved by many people. She has seen heartache and pain but also great joy. She wonders outloud, “I wonder who will come for me this time. Someone will come. Someone always comes. Who will it be?”

“I don’t care if anyone comes for me,” said Edward.

“But that’s dreadful,” said the old doll. “There’s no point in going on if you feel that way. No point at all. You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope. You must wonder who will will love you, whom you will love next.”

“I’m done with being loved,” Edward told her. “I’m done with loving. It’s too painful.”

“Pish,” said the old doll. “Where is your courage?”

“Somewhere else, I guess,” said Edward.

“You disappoint me,” she said. “You disappoint me greatly. If you have no intention of loving or being loved, then the whole journey is pointless. You might as well leap from this shelf right now and let yourself shatter into a million pieces…” (p. 199)

Edward spends a miserable night thinking about what the old doll has told him and, in the morning a father and his young daughter come into the shop looking, “for a friend” and they decide to take the old doll.

DiCamillo writes, “And when they left, when the girl’s father opened the door for his daughter and the old doll, a bright shaft of early morning light came flooding in, and Edward heard quite clearly, as if she were still sitting next to him, the old doll’s voice.

‘Open your heart,’ she said gently. ‘Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart.’

What happens from there I will leave for you to find out.

So, what do I make of all of this? One of the most amazing things for me in this story is that Edward never actually moves on his own volition. All of his adventures are brought on by things that happen to him. The only time he moves is in a dream-like sequence that occurs after he has been smashed to pieces. He walks up to the house on Egypt Street and there are all the people who have played a part in his journey. All of the changes that happen are within him, but those changes are still significant enough to drive the plot line of a 212-page story and still leave me longing for more at the end.

This morning, in some quiet moments with the onlineprayerbook from the Northumbria Community, I read a meditation which included a traditional Pakistani blessing prayer/hymn called Saranam which means Refuge, our Refuge. Here is one of the verses:

 

Make my heart to grow

as great as Thine,

so through my hurt

Your love may shine,

my love be Yours,

Your love be mine,

saranam, saranam, saranam.

I can’t get the story of Edward Tulane, or these words, for that matter, out of my mind. And, although I’ve only just read both of them, I’m guessing these words will travel well with me through the next days and weeks. This has been a winter of transitions for me. A winter of letting go of yet another place, just for the time being, and settling in to life with a new set of people in this home that is, in so many ways, brand new. It is a time of learning to embrace what is new and live completely into what is directly in front of me every day. This is my prayer for transitions, for times of change for moments of uncertainty, that I would be, along with Edward, along with the antique china doll, along with the writers of the Punjabi hymn always,

Filled with expectancy

Awash in hope

Wondering always who will love me

and whom I will come to love next.

Saranam, Saranam, Saranam.

                               May it be so.