By Nancy Yuen-Fang Chu

The monastery’s evening bell sounds each night on the mountain, marking impermanence. Darkness and cool settle over us like fog, a relief from the damp, bright daytime heat of Taiwan. The flickering fluorescent lights from the main halls are quickly and politely switched off, as one might stifle a cough in a library. The first moments of night at the monastery are so quiet that I hold my breath to watch it arrive, then breathe lightly to keep listening. There could be a quieter and more perfect stillness deep in the sands of the Gobi Desert, where the wind is still and there are no travelers on the achingly long highways stretching for thousands of miles, but from what I can tell, this is the loveliest, spookiest moment of the day at the monastery. In a few moments, the novice nuns will be making their way to the bathrooms to wash off the day.

I am with the nuns in Taiwan on a summer research project for divinity school. My goals are to live with them for several weeks and interview them about gender, spirituality, and the bodhisattva Guanyin, the female embodiment of enlightened compassion—and beneath that is a stirring of questions I cannot name. The nuns offer food, shelter, and care, giving me love and protection in innumerable ways.

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I wrote this during a summer in my mid-20s when I’d gone to live with a group of Buddhist nuns in the mountains of southern Taiwan, on the outskirts of the city of Chia-yi. One of perhaps three books I brought with me was a translation of Simone Weil. I was mostly out of my room during the day, spending time with the nuns. We washed vegetables in the mornings, and I attended the daily chanting in the main hall in the evenings. In the afternoons, when it was too hot to do anything, we would go back to our individual rooms to rest. I remember the great pleasure of closing the screen door, kicking off my sandals, turning the fan on, and feeling my arms and legs relax as I flopped on the bed and closed my eyes and breathed.

Often I would reach for and rifle through the pages of one of the books I had brought with me. I remember reading and rereading Weil’s Waiting for God in short segments and long gulps. I reread the passages I loved and never went back to others, the way I read as a child. I had forgotten there was so much pleasure in rereading. What I remember most from that summer in Taiwan are the nuns and Simone Weil.

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I was reading the Huffington Post one day and came across a photo of a 9-year-old boy in a Brazilian soccer T-shirt embracing Pope Francis and weeping. The accompanying article reports that what the boy said moved the pope to tears: “Your Holiness, I want to be a priest of Christ, a representative of Christ.” The article says the pope then beamed and said, “I am going to pray for you, but I ask you to pray for me.”¹ I don’t know how in the world someone his age knows his vocation, but I do know that look on his face: relief and gratitude and disbelief. Though the picture does not show Pope Francis’s face, I imagine he has a look of wonder and surprise at the heart of this boy. In such an encounter, who is the savior and who is the miracle? I think: “How could this young boy have known? How could he possibly have known?” And then I think: “That was always in him. That was always going to happen.”

From Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress:

Since the upright man is kin to the stumbling drunk
to whose sultry glance should we give our heart? What is choice?
—Hafiz²

What is choice, indeed?

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It seems we never reach the end. we exhaust all of our efforts and the furthest we get to is the beginning. Near the end of The Wedding Dress, Fanny Howe writes about a man she loved, whom she calls, “the man who was a poem” (145). She loves him and is unsettled by his unknowable ways, and then he disappears. She describes herself as reeling with grief and loss and confusion. His disappearance also creates a question in her. This question is not just an absence or empty space. It is also a womb. She writes, after the disappearance of the man she loved, “All this was a prologue to belief” (148). It is the last line of her book.

We hear echoes of this in Mark D. Jordan’s “In Search of Queer Theology Lost,” when near the end he says, “Everything I have written so far is prologue to a (new) narrative I meant to write.”³ Howe writes about her experience traveling around for footage for her film on Simone Weil: “every move I made was an error” (127). She writes: “In the end the filmmaker Babette Mangolte read the voice-overs, and she told me how I should have made the video, beginning with the writing and ending with the filming. She made it clear that I had done the whole process backwards” (134). Howe’s and Jordan’s writings reveal a world in which intent and effect are strangely related—or, perhaps better, unrelated. Wanting to go forward seems to mostly take us backward, or at least the long way around. It is as if we cannot help it; these are simply the physics or mechanics of existence. Our good intentions lead us in a million ways, but they all have the same name: “Away.”

Simone Weil says that salvation is not something we can reach. “We cannot take a single step toward [God].”⁴ We must wait for God by turning our gaze continually and unwaveringly in his direction. She says it is the only thing we can do. Howe, too, gives us the following: “ ‘One is seized,’ Aquinas said about the experience of being ‘found’ by God” (70). One does not find God, one is found by God, or rather, “seized.” The power of that word. The question then is not what can we do? but what has happened to us?

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Nearly a decade later, I find myself coming back to this essay. My life has changed in the intervening time, but I am back where I began, doing my dissertation fieldwork with the same group of Buddhist nuns in the mountains of southern Taiwan. I am now studying how Buddhist nuns cultivate resilience to physical pain through practices of ignoring the body. And they, I think, are still studying me. The days are quiet here. Cicadas buzz from the trees, and visitors flow in and out to worship at the old temple. The nearest town is a 10-minute drive away. Time seems to blend and deepen, and I am content.

If we take Howe at her word that our lives move in circles more than in straight lines, what then is it to wait? To wait is to frustrate desire while not ceasing to be in relationship with that which one desires. By gazing unwaveringly in his direction, Simone Weil waits for a transcendent God who is “infinitely beyond our reach” (143).

The action of waiting is the action of nonaction. Waiting asks us to be patient with impatience, which at best is irritating and at worst is affliction. Howe refers us to Weil’s statement, “there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object” (53), which is what waiting asks of us. It seems that there is little else to do but to endure it, although what we are enduring is ourselves.

Jordan also waits in “Queer Theology Lost.” His writing is his waiting, which like Weil’s waiting is a gaze or gesture toward something. His writing is not queer theology but a searching for and a seeking out of queer theology that exists in the future. Which we might say is queer theology itself, but that would be by our terms, not his.

Jordan points us to an unknown but anticipated future. He wants us to be aware of “future languages not audible now except as the silence of an empty stage cleared within certain texts” (306). He comes to what feels to me like the heart of it:

Near the end of my other narrative, . . . I would pursue questions like these: Once we’ve found queer theology, so far as it can be found in mortal time, what do we expect it to do for us? Do we expect it to ease our lives (if only by explaining them), to excuse God’s silence, to reform the world, to hasten the eschaton? Then: How do you say what you’re waiting for?(305)

He has to end there. Because there is nothing more to say. Not because he is finished but because what might be said cannot be said now. It does not yet exist. For now, we can at most hear the silence of the empty stage.

Waiting reveals the distance between us and what we want. So too does failure, so too do loss and disappointment. So too does the voluntary celibacy practiced by Carmelite nuns, whose bridal ceremony for becoming members of their order inspired the title of Howe’s The Wedding Dress. When what we want is unknown or ungraspable, whether some unimagined future or an impersonal God, to choose to wait is to choose a kind of ego-death. It is to freely embrace the knowing of loss.

Living on the mountain with the nuns in Taiwan, the rigors of monastic life teach me to be humble. The days pass by in a regular rhythm, one after another. The sun rises, the sun sets. I slow down. I learn to receive. I learn to wait.

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When I showed Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress to a friend and she asked me what it was about, I remember getting excited and incoherent when I tried to explain it (“It’s about bewilderment and God and Edith Stein and her experience”). What I wanted to say about Howe is that her writing radiates with a kind of plus-quality, so that what she says is more than what she is saying.

When I think about why this is so, the first felt-answer that comes to mind is that it has something to do with suffering. Loneliness, loss, frustration, failure, separation. These are things that create space between the self and the other as the source of one’s desire. Waiting and celibacy do this too. A transcendent or completely absent God does this as well. Suffering is not getting what we want or losing what we love. It wounds us and gives us pain. And if what we want is deeply tied up with who we are (St. Francis of Assisi: “You are that which you are seeking”), then not to get what we want is to experience a kind of death or loss of self.

It seems that life gives each of us a promise: that we will know wanting, and we will know want. Desire and the frustration of desire. Love and the frustration of love. The more we live, the more we die. Howe writes: “Disappointment is an insidious killer. It brings you down with small, repeated blows” (56). So does affliction, loss, disappointment, and renunciation. Being brought down with small, repeated blows is a condition of being alive. The art of life is the art of losing.

Ranilo B. Hermida writes:

No one can read Weil with attention without being seized by this unusually forceful insight: “It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom. . . . Only the contemplation of our limitations and our misery puts us on a higher plane.” (Gravity, 84)

Weil acknowledges the reality of misery or affliction, malheur, as an integral part of the human experience. She asserts, moreover, that it is more in this experience of affliction that the real truth about our existence is to be sought: “To be aware of this in the depth of one’s soul is to experience non-being. It is the state of extreme and total humiliation which is also the condition for passing over into truth.”⁵

Decreation as a creative act. What a strange idea. Being while experiencing non-being. How is that even possible while remaining alive? It must mean that one’s being has been shattered somehow. One is oneself but no longer oneself. Howe writes: “There is a Chassidic story saying: Why was the miracle Elijah the Prophet performs so great (when he caused the idols to be consumed by fire)? No one said how great is Elijah. Everyone said how great is God—that is why it is a true miracle” (72).

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Writing is dialogical not only between the writer and the reader but between the self and what is beyond: a dialogue between form and emptiness. Howe writes, “Hope is an intuition of emptiness” (48). Hope leans into what is not, which creates spaciousness in what is. Hope is an “intuition,” which is a knowing of the unknowable. She writes on Edith Stein:

On the subject of what [Stein] called “expired experience,” this is what she once wrote to a friend, and it sounds like a developed poetics: “Whatever is actual—the Now phase—is always something momentary, and as such has no experience that in its totality will have some duration. That from which this reality has sprung is—insofar as it no longer belongs to the Now—expired. However, insofar as it necessarily belongs to the unity of the experience and makes possible the ever present Now, it is still alive, not extinguished.” (57)

This sounds like the way Weil talks about God. It also sounds like how Howe herself writes about the swing between experience and transcendence: “If God allows God to be found in each experience, it will be more than part of each experience. Its essence will precede the existence of the experience and form it into a corresponding course” (9).

Ayşe Papatya Bucak writes about the moment of her death in “Three Things I Have Never Told Anyone”:

I have decided that if I am, at the moment of my death, cognizant that it is the moment of my death, I will think only the word love. I will not try to remember my own history of love, will not name my loved ones, nor recall the moments of our love, but will trust that the word will carry in it the feeling: love, and that will carry me into death.⁶

The moment of her death, as she describes it, is of the specific and particular dissolving into the infinite and unknown.

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I want to go back to the image of the boy reaching out to hug Pope Francis and telling him he was going to be a priest of Christ. In that moment, the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s couplet from “East Coker” becomes clear: “In my end is my beginning” and “In my beginning is my end.” I imagine the boy one day looking back at everything leading up to that moment, and perhaps that will be when things finally all fall into place. That was why I had wandered, that was why I was lost. That was what I had been waiting for all along without knowing what it was I had been waiting for.

To wait is to be in relationship with the unknown. And yet, when we have arrived, when the waiting has turned into the long-awaited moment of encounter, is that moment any less the unknown? I think of what Bucak says in her essay with so much bravery, that at the moment of her death she will just think the word “love,” and it will carry her into death. Is that moment of thinking the word “love” anything less than her entire history and experiences and relationships of love?

When I consider Simone Weil, Fanny Howe, and Mark Jordan, I wonder why and how they spoke to me so loudly. Was it already decided, as I packed Simone Weil’s book into my luggage when I went to Taiwan that long-ago summer to live with the nuns? I suppose the “why” of it is that I wanted to be changed by them, and I think that has happened. They have been good and patient friends over time, as I have looked at their words and tried to listen for the unknown they were pointing to and slowly found the words I was waiting for. With these writers as companions, I have discovered something about form and spirit, the location of God, and the process of waiting through which we are transformed. I cannot name it, but I do not know if I need to. It is all already there, existing in the unknown future.

One day I will know what it is I have been waiting for.