"But where is Faith?"

I've been doing a lot of thinking. So I want to say a few words before my office hour starts in forty-five minutes (I refuse to do a lick of official work or lesson planning until 11:30 a.m.). One of my best friends Audi took this picture of me when we took a midnight trip to Mesa Verde during the summer of 2006 ("midnight trip" meaning, we decided to drive from Mesa, AZ, to Mesa Verde, CO, at midnight and drove all night). Audi is still pretty proud of this picture, and we both feel it owns a striking resemblance to that old LDS journal cover that everyone insists is a painting of me: Walter Rane's "Add to Your Faith Virtue; and to Virtue, Knowledge."

Ironically, this photo that insinuates my 24-year-old self climbing towards goodness, truth, and light, was taken during the first and only spat I ever had with Miss Audrey N. I'm sure it had to do with lack of sleep, as well as upset stomachs from having only eaten several Jack-in-the-Box Monster Tacos and a whole Fry's Grocery bag full of summer cherries in the previous 48 hours. Regardless, the situation sucked. We tried to ignore the funk between us, running around trails barefoot and appreciating Native American rock drawings, stacking rock cairns to throw tourists off the right trails, chewing perfectly brown sugared juniper berries strewn along the borders of ancient cliff dwellers' walls. But the funk persisted. Conversations were strained, forced. Grins were a little too toothy, a little too quickly faded. I hated it.

A tangent: Nine months ago, I taught Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" to a group of at-risk girls at the boarding school where I taught English. I was nervous because I never really liked or had paid much attention to that particular short story--I was more excited to skip ahead in time to Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver. But my girls surprised me.

I read the first two pages in a shamelessly burlesque fashion to get the girls interested. I acted out Faith and YGB's dialogue suggestively, bawdily, ridiculously:
"Dearest heart," whispered--more like panted--Faith, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, "prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes."

[. . .]

So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him (Oooh la la!) with a melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons [for some reason "pink ribbons" began to be interpreted as "hot pink lingerie"].

"Poor little Faith!" thought he, for his heart smote him. [. . .] Well, she's a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven, hubba, hubba, hubba."

I felt some chagrin about it then, and I kept trying to séance-speak to Hawthorne on the other side, pleading with him not to roll around too much down in the earth there, that I really wasn't purposely trying to country line dance on his tombstone. Plus, ultimately, it worked. Even the ADHD girls calmed down to giggle at the sexiness of it. Then, oddly, they started to get into the narrative. They repeatedly shared personal experiences relating to Young Goodman Brown as he realized his Sunday School teachers and leaders in life and truth were no more than sick sinful hypocrites themselves, and where's the hope in that? How could he continue to swallow the truths from his youth after hearing the woman who taught him his catechisms laugh with the Devil over him because of his naivete, his gullibility?

My girls began to relate so much with YGB that I feared they would be tempted to follow his same fate--that they would lose trust in their Faith and her no longer sexy-funny or innocent-sweet pink ribbons, that they might begin to see "the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot." I wanted to weep when we read together, this time solemnly, this time with all the girls staring at their printed and stapled copies of the story and not at my no longer rolling eyes or shimmying body, the part when Satan reveals all the sin and wicked arts of all the members of Goodman Brown's Puritan congregation and asks God's children to "look upon each other" in their nakedness. It is here that Hawthorne writes this aching and mind-destroying passage:

" 'Lo, there ye stand, my children,' said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. 'Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.'"

The story finishes with Young Goodman Brown never being able to look at his wife Faith the same way again--all hope in goodness and mankind was forever swept from his spirit and "they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."

I looked up at my girls with worry that I had just further ruined them, that I was going to hear from all their therapists shortly for magnifying their cynicism and rebelliousness. But I was mistaken. Surprised, I watched these 14 to 17-year-old girls pause, think a moment, and then chorus out with shouts of "What a moron!" "What a dumb ending!" "Geez, Hawthorne, way to give us a downer," etc.

But I asked them what ending did they expect? How could Brown have kept his Faith after so much disillusionment, so much sorrow and hypocrisy and sin and secrecy? And my girls spoke truth--despite their dirty, filthy pasts and their own secrets and hypocrisies, their lips and tongues bled honesty like honey onto their plastic desktops. We talked about the dangers of cock-eyed optimism (a favorite topic of mine since my freshman year at BYU-I) and about how ignorance couldn't truly be bliss, depending on how you define bliss. The girls felt strongly that Brown could have accepted the sins and stains of his neighbors, even the imperfections of his own Faith, but that he could have chosen to focus on their light, on their goodness, on what they do right. That the red blood stain would be shadowed by the light and glitter and shininess that each friend and neighbor also held. Because we are multitudes, we contain universes.

I guess when I realized my friendship with Audi wasn't perfect, I got scared, because I thought it was. We had told each other repeatedly that we were perfect friends, perfect soul sisters, perfect fits. I feared hopelessness and cynicism and forever screwed-up-ness when we finally fought, and I always secretly hated this MormonAd-worthy photo that I found so misleading, so dishonest.

Apologies for the length of this post. I suppose I just wanted to tell the world wide web that I am a fan of disillusionment, a fan of optimism, a fan of truth and a fan of goodness. I am a fan of forgiveness and hope and the cores of souls. Audi is getting married soon and we have continued to bear the blessed name of bosom buddies all through the past four years. She is my kin and my heart and my blood. And I have a shiny countenance and shit on my hands at the same time. And I aim to keep on a-washing those dirty, grubby paws of mine and scrubbing them clean every day for the rest of my livelong life, dirtying them, washing them, dirtying them, washing them, and hopefully I'll be able to cyclically get myself somewhere good before I finally keel over and kick the bucket. And I aim to recognize the cores of the souls of all my friends and favorites who are running, trudging, sauntering, meandering, and frolicking this worn path with me.

In other words: Back off Satan, with your fears and your doubts and your cynicism. I'm having a great year.....the best year of my life so far. And don't it feel good.