a commentary on the spiritual life
These are the stories of Peter K
Wensleydale,
an aging American male person coming to the
realization that there is no such thing.
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“What’s this supposed to be?”
US Ambassador Quenton Adkins asked, as he read from the sheet of
paper Peter had just handed him.
The year was 1974, late in the ’73–’74 winter.
Peter K Wensleydale and Ambassador Adkins were meeting alone in
the Ambassador’s office on the third floor of the American Embassy
in Gazinga, as they had done on a daily basis in the year or so
since Peter had joined the Embassy staff as Administrative
Officer. The agenda for this meeting was unlike any other that had
preceded it, however, and as a result, Peter was more than just a
little uncomfortable. And Ambassador Adkins was making no effort
to alleviate Peter’s discomfort.
Peter had not looked forward to this
session one bit, and now, standing on the plush carpet, facing his
boss glaring at him from behind the huge, government-issue
mahogany desk, Peter could tell it was not going to unfold any
more pleasantly than he had anticipated.
“It’s a letter of resignation, sir,”
Peter replied, adding, as gingerly as if he were handling a stick
of dynamite, “mine.”
From his expression and tone of voice,
it was apparent Ambassador Adkins was not pleased, in large part
because Peter had clearly caught the man by surprise, and
Ambassador Adkins did not like surprises.
“I can see that,” he growled. “What I’m
asking is, what’s the meaning of it?”
The meaning of it was that, after seven
years as a US Foreign Service Officer, Peter was quitting. And,
truth to tell, Peter was every bit as surprised by
that as Ambassador Quenton Adkins seemed to be. Not that Peter
didn’t want to quit, mind you. Resigning his commission, Peter has
now come to realize, albeit thirty-plus years later, was an action
he had been wanting to take for some time; but until the
circumstances surrounding this encounter, he never thought of it
as something he could do. Of course, as an administrative officer,
he had processed the paperwork of others who had done it, so he
knew it could be done, but he did not think that he could do it.
Peter had been raised to meet the
expectations of others, or better said, to meet what he perceived
to be the expectations of others. Thus, although he never did so
consciously, Peter made decisions based not on what he wanted to
do, but on what he thought other people wanted him to do. Clearly,
this is a crippling, not to say insane, way to live, but, for all
Peter knew, it was all there was. Of course, no one ever actually
said as much to him, but it must have been the mold they used, for
it was who he had become.
A particularly complicating symptom of
this condition is an inability to respond in the negative to any
sentence which begins with the words “Will you” or “Would you”. An
absurd example will make the point: When Peter and Anna arrived at
their first overseas post, his new boss, by way of introducing
them to the local diplomatic community, invited the Wensleydales
to a bridge party. Thus, she said to Peter, “Would you and your
wife like to …?” Naturally, Peter immediately accepted; never
mind that he didn’t know how to play bridge!
Quitting can be a way of saying ‘no’
(or ‘no more’), and so Peter didn’t think he could do it. At
least, not until one fateful evening not long before this meeting
with Ambassador Adkins. Outside, it had been cold and dark, two
adjectives which perfectly describe Gazinga’s long winters. Peter
had just come home from work to the comfortable house he and Anna
rented in a residential neighborhood a few minutes’ walk from the
Embassy. It had not been a happy day, and as was his custom then,
he chose to soak it off in a hot bathtub, a cigarette in one hand,
and a very large, very dry martini on the rocks in the
other. Anna had perched herself on the edge of the tub, there to
watch him dissolve into the water. By then, they had been married
about ten years, during which time they had become each other’s
best friend.
“What’d he do today?” Anna asked, for
she could tell.
“Nothing,” Peter lied.
Peter used to lie about himself a lot,
about his problems and his needs; sometimes to others, but mostly
to himself. Not big lies, you understand, just stupid lies, and
too often well enough that even he believed them. Of course, he
was not unique. In those days, and perhaps still, men did not
easily admit to having needs, much less problems, and certainly
not to the women to whom they had sworn to be perfect, at least
not without a lot of preliminary, painful backing and forthing. It
was, quite simply, not something men knew how to do. Their fathers
didn’t do it, so they had no models, and their mothers didn’t
teach them. Also, – and this is a condition Peter did not even
realize to be a “board certified, government approved” syndrome
until not too long ago, when, while preparing lunch one day in the
Wensleydale’s home in the Maine woods, Peter happened to hear
himself being perfectly described by a panel of Ph.d’s on one of
the daytime television talk shows, described so precisely that as
he listened to it, he sank to the floor in tears, tears which were
the happy expression of surprised relief at the realization that
not only was his “condition” normal, but it was decipherable and
repairable; to wit, Peter was a so-called ACOA, the adult child of
alcohol-dependent parents, which meant, cutting quickly to the
chase, that he felt personally responsible for the health,
happiness, and general wellbeing of everyone and everything on the
planet, that if anything was wrong anywhere it was his fault, if
not for having caused it, then for not having fixed it yet, and
therefore the very last thing he could ever do was admit to having
needs or unresolved problems himself.
Anyway, eventually, under gentle pressure,
Peter agreed to talk, although, true to type, he cushioned his
reply with “Okay, but it’s no big deal,” which in ACOA-talk means,
“Although it might appear the sky is collapsing, I can have it
back up and in place before I return to work in the morning, so
there is no need for you to worry, the eternal peace and sublime
harmony of your life remain safe and assured in my hands.” “The Ambassador is in an uproar,” Peter
finally explained.
“What is it now?” Anna asked, listening
attentively. By now, these stories had become a form of
entertainment between them, and mostly, while they regretted their necessity, they enjoyed them.
“It’s about your Brit,” Peter said,
“Mrs. what’s-her-name, the woman you had here for tea the other
day.”
Over the preceding week, there had been
visiting Gazinga, giving public lectures and such, a gentle, very
practical looking, elderly English woman who enjoyed a solid
reputation as a psychic healer. By coincidence, she was personally
known to the Wensleydale’s landlady, a lovely person who is
fascinated by anything supernatural – (the day the Wensleydales
met her, while Anna was looking at her house with an idea of
renting it, she exuberantly announced that, the previous night,
Peter and Anna and their two Persian cats, which she had not yet been informed about, had appeared to her in a
dream, which she took to be unmistakable evidence that they were
destined to be her tenants, as in fact it did evolve) – and as
Anna too had a healthy interest in the so-called occult, a social
visit at the Wensleydale’s was arranged for the British healer.
“What about her?” Anna asked.
Peter replied, “Apparently, yesterday
evening, Ambassador Adkins and the Soviet ambassador were guests
at the same cocktail party, during which the Russian made some
crack about American diplomats consulting English psychics.”
“He was talking about you,” Anna said,
as much a statement as a question, adding, “and my tea party. How
could the Russians know about that, Peter? There wasn’t anyone
here.”
“There’s undoubtedly KGB at their Embassy,” Peter said with a smile, but not joking. “Anyway, at this morning’s staff meeting,
Ambassador Adkins went through the roof, and he hasn’t come down
since. First, of course, he wanted to know which of us it was.
Looking around the room, I could see that no one else had any idea
what he was talking about, so I had no choice but to own up. At
that, he lit into me for putting him in ‘an untenable position’.
Then he announced to all present that from that moment forward, no
one on his staff, and no member of their families, was to
entertain, consult, visit, meet, or in any other way,
intentionally or accidentally, consort with psychics,
spiritualists, or anyone of that kind, anywhere anytime under any
conditions. He didn’t approve of such people, he said, and he
wouldn’t tolerate it. Period.”
“You’re kidding,” Anna observed; but
she knew he wasn’t.
Later, at dinner, through dinner, and
after dinner, they talked about it. In the years since, when
others have asked Peter why he resigned from the diplomatic
service, he has recalled this event. But it is important to
understand that it was not this incident alone which prompted his
decision, although it was certainly an important element in the
equation, and definitely of the last straw variety.
“Honestly, Anna, I don’t know what to
do about this,” Peter finally admitted. “If it were just this
incident, or just this ambassador, I’d hold my breath. But we’ve
seen stuff like this before, and what if there’s another like him
at our next post? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
endlessly wishing I were somewhere else.”
“Why don’t you quit?” Anna asked,
simply.
“I suppose I could,” he replied, “but,
what for? Again, we might just be trading one problem post for
another.”
“Not transfer,” she said. “Quit.”
“Quit?” Peter repeated. “You mean, quit
the Foreign Service? Resign?”
Anna nodded.
“I can’t resign,” Peter said,
immediately.
“Why not?” she asked, simply. “You
joined, you can quit.”
By then, they had moved into the living
room. Peter was seated in a large, stuffed chair, and Anna was on
a couch across from him. This was the first time in their
conversations about his work that the word quit had genuinely
taken on the meaning of resign, and for a long moment, Peter said
nothing. In a way, it was as if Anna had spoken to him in a
language he did not quite understand.
“Resign?” he repeated, finally, as much
to himself as to her. Again, she nodded. There was no denying the
logic of it. He had joined, so why couldn’t he quit. Still, the
Foreign Service hadn’t been just a whim. It was about following in
his father’s footsteps, fulfilling the promise of his education,
making a career commitment. All very serious stuff.
Peter thought out loud, “What would we
do?”
“Who knows,” Anna replied. “We’re both
college graduates, intelligent, healthy, hard working. And
besides, you’ve made a lot of good contacts the last few years.
We’ll find something.”
All true enough. Peter had done well in
college and graduate school, and as a naval officer, and now in
the Foreign Service. Why not somewhere else, too?
For a long time, they sat there, not
speaking, letting sink in all that had been said, and all that
hadn’t needed saying. For his part, Peter could hardly believe
what he was thinking; but there was no getting around it, he was
thinking it.
After a bit, Peter noticed he was
crying, that there were tears running down his cheeks. (For the
record, a lot of Mediterranean blood flows in Peter’s veins, so he
cries easily.) These were tears of joy, joy arising from somewhere
deep within, an awareness that he was about to take the great
leap. Of course, that evening in that living room, neither Peter
nor Anna fully appreciated, or even understood, all the
implications of the decision they were in the process of making.
Certainly, as far as Peter was concerned at the time, he thought
that, at most, he was considering going from his present job to
another different, but similar job in another different, but
similar Washington bureaucracy. At no conscious level did he then
realize or even suspect that a much larger ship than that was
getting underway, and that, in fact, he and Anna were embarking on
a spiritual quest which would, in a matter of a few months, take
them far beyond the boundaries of Washington, DC, real and
metaphorical, deep into the Maine woods, where they would clear
land themselves, build a house, and craft a homestead, from which
over the next three decades, they would be transported into realms
and realities, depths and heights of conciousness, whose
dimensions, and even whose existence, neither had ever imagined in
their wildest dreams or fantasies.
Finally, Peter rose from his chair,
walked across the room, and sat down next to Anna on the couch.
“Enough’s enough,” he affirmed. “I’m submitting my resignation.”
“And that, Mr. Ambassador,” Peter said
to the man to whom he is and will remain eternally grateful for
having been the last straw, “is the meaning of it.”
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