I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 76
NOW and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its Rhythm.
Often I read the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and feel their truth in the blood-sweating tune of their Rhythm—Rhythm unspeakable and ecstatic.
The prophet Christ believed himself divine and was all Rhythm in his utterances: and so sounds true as the scheme of digestion and the laws of hygiene.
He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Everybody who has tried it knows that to be true with the flawless Rhythmic truth of health and illness.
Mourn frightfully a day and the next day will be a day of soothed warmth and quiet like a grateful pitiful heat current in the breast. Mourn a week and that will come the week following. Mourn a year and the next year will be the year of peace. For anguish: peace. For peace: anguish. It never fails.
The great thing lacking in Christ, the sense of humor, permitted his perfect personal Rhythm. Humor oddly wants Rhythm. The human race is made in Rhythm like its beating heart: but humor is an 'extra.' Everybody is so full of lies that humor, an 'extra,' always wonderfully appetizing and out of season, and inexplicably God-given, feels like a great keystone of the race. So it is: but in a lying race. And Christ in his beautiful dual rôle would lack humor. As a God come among the human race to save it, knowing it as he did: his measureless worldly wisdom being paramount even to his gentleness: his mind and his personal tenor could be set only in intense terrific gloom.
The Rhythm in the Beatitudes is equal Rhythm of sense and Rhythm of sound: Rhythm of music and Rhythm of meaning. Equally, half and half.
The most Rhythm thing in it is: Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
I feel it soft-prickling just under my skin. Rhythm—Rhythm and ecstasy!
I have read it many times since I was a child: till I know it in my brain, in my Soul, in my hands, in my breast, in my throat, in my forehead, in my gray eyes, in my aching left foot. I know it and feel it by its Rhythm. There is barbarous justice in it. It cuts everybody off from seeing God.
Pure in heart I take to mean pure in motive. A fool has an equal chance with a philosopher: a harlot with a horse-thief: a nasty rag-picker with a small sweet child. But none is pure in motive.
Of other persons I don't judge. But me I know to be murderously un-pure of heart.
If I could open a window or unlock a door with only the simple mechanical motive in the act— But I can't. There's a romantic impurity in even the look of my hand as it touches the window-sash or the door-key. There's a pervasive delicate infusion of impure motive all over me, Soul and bones, as I perform the act. It is one curse in the Necklace which God himself bestowed on me so long ago.
It is not my fault that I am un-pure in heart.
And it is not God's. It is a comfort to me that I can reason out that it is not God's fault. He knew I needed the Necklace and each blue-green stone in it to rhyme and balance me. In the wide surprisingness of the universe everything will be rhymed and balanced. In me, being savagely complex, that balancing took a bit of doing: hence my unusual Necklace. It comforts me that I can reach that analytic point. It leaves me a lightning conviction that God is worth seeing.
And if a day dawns for me when I can open a door with no ulterior motive: thinking only of the door and the fine small muscular power of smooth hand and supple wrist given me to open it: thinking only that I want to get the door open: then back of that door I know I shall see God!
It is so written in that barbarous blood-sweating worldly Rhythm on the Mount.