Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card in front of bright, early summer leaves. The card is The World by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the image a person is dancing with one foot down and one up, they’re draped with a flowing purple fabric but nude otherwise and holding two white batons, one in each hand. Outside of the wreath in each corner are the heads of a human, eagle, lion and bull. The card, which is the last in the twenty-two major arcana, is often read as an image of completion. Of particular interest to me is the wreath enclosing the person in this image, suggesting closure. In this Offering I reflect on what it means to resist the impulse toward closure in uncertain times.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
“Apocalypsos means literally unveiling, thus revelation. So apocalypse means disclosure, not closure. Not a closing down of the world, but an opening up.”
— Catherine Keller
As fixated as I've been on the grail legend these last years, I’m troubled by the neat ending of its popular tellings.
If you're new here or don't know the story, a young person named Perceval sets out to fulfill his dream of becoming a knight, and finds himself accidentally at the grail castle of all places, where a sacred treasure is being housed by a king with a terrible wound.
Heeding the well-meaning advice of a mentor, Perceval doesn’t speak or ask questions about what he’s witnessing. Not the grail, nor the wound, nor the bizarre white lance with fresh blood dripping from it.
Upon leaving the castle Perceval’s told his not asking was a horrible mistake. He is shamed by a crying woman in the woods who says “everything would have been restored, if you had just asked.”
The shaming is ongoing throughout the story. And as its typically told, he does make his way back to the grail castle eventually where he asks the right questions to cure the king's wound and restore the land.
Most versions of the grail legend follow the familiar arc of the well-known hero’s journey: A brave individual follows a weird, winding path. Not without danger or folly, always culminating in some manner of redemption or closure.
When I think about my own relationship to closure specifically, I think of all the times I've grasped for something sure in an uncertain time. And how often haste is followed up by a haunting, sometimes years long.
I think of all the ghosts, the what ifs, and the regrets that have come from the grab for something sure in a time when nothing’s sure, or should be.
As a result I think I've grown to be protective of my big life questions, and of the quest for the things I don't know yet, and of the need that I have to be lost sometimes, without feeling nudged toward a prefixed idea of what's holy.
And I’m grateful to have developed this different relationship with not knowing, which is often repressed or pushed away by the insistence on closure. I’m using closure somewhat interchangeably here, with certainty.
I've been told all my life, by stories not unlike the grail legend, that closure was all I should want or could want. But a lot more’s available.
—
Asked in an interview about moments of weirdness in her life, theologian Catherine Keller responded that “the synchronicities that have meant the most to me have often been quite low key, like bumping into just the right book at just the right moment to set me on what turns out to be the right path.”
I didn't quite bump into the grail legend. It’s one of those stories that's kind of everywhere you look, once you know what it looks like.
But I did bump into Chretien de Troyes’ telling of it, which I was shocked to find has a bizarre ending that elides closure, does not include the classic curing of the wound, and instead culminates with the less-certain imagery of forgiveness.
Last summer, after a couple years reading modern tellings of the grail legend I decided to read one of the original written versions for myself and chose (unromantically) the one I was able to access immediately in full for free online, which was Perceval by Chretien de Troyes from the twelfth century.
It took a while to get through but I found the right time of day to read it and ultimately had fun. I highlighted poetic language and typed out a document with what I saw to be the juiciest details, which I'd use to thicken the oral version of the story I've been learning to tell.
When I reached the end, eager to read de Troyes' telling of Perceval’s redemptive return to the grail castle, something strange happened.
Having wandered years alone in the forest lost in every way one can be, Perceval meets a hermit who bears witness to his suffering. The shame of his mistake at the grail castle had taken the shape that shame sometimes does, as habitual violence unto others.
Perceval confesses his sins and over a days-long process the hermit grants him forgiveness. The hermit whispers in his ear the most sacred names for god—only to be spoken in the most terrible danger—and sends him on. And the story ends here.
For all we know, if we let de Troyes’ tell it Perceval never does make it back to the grail castle. The last we hear, the king's wound remains, as do the consequences of that wound which we're told include things like confusion among the people, and once lush fields gone fallow.
When a story ends in an unexpected or different-than-typical place, it can have a radical effect on that story's meaning. If the story ends with Perceval going through this process of forgiveness with the hermit rather than making his way back to the scene of the crime and doing the perfect thing that yields the cure and closure, a space is opened. New meaning might emerge there.
Meaning which could be supportive for those seeking a new way of relating with what is rejected or repressed by the common (and understandable) impulse toward closure. Like wandering, wondering, and uncertainty.
—
Unsurprisingly, I loved Catherine Keller’s statement about synchronicity as bumping into the right book at the right time.
I was reading de Troyes’ weird grail legend ending just as I was starting to work as a therapist for the first time since graduate school, and it did feel like the right time to start thinking anew about wounds that don't heal, shame, forgiveness, and wandering.
More recently I bumped into Grace Jantzen's book Becoming Divine—by way of Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma—which contains (I think) the perfect passage for anyone feeling protective of big questions when it seems the world is hurrying you to give them up, or rushing you prematurely toward closure.
Jantzen writes that a demand for closure can be "profoundly unhelpful.”
And that it’s possible one who insists on closure “deflects attention form threatening creative alternatives.”
If we’re able to suspend our need for ultimate truth, closure, or certainty "in the interests of allowing more scope to the creative imagination...such shifting of ground will involve a re-visioning of truth itself and how it should be pursued” (1999).
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
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See you next time. <3
Sources
Jantzen, G. (1999). Becoming divine: Towards a feminist philosophy of religion. Indiana University Press.