Candela lives in San Francisco. She is one of the reasons the city is the way it is. It has been complained recently that the city is getting less strange and more technological. But I think the technology will before long be taken over by the grace-giving strangeness of the place.
I have listened to her stories for hours. I relate these few incidents as plainly as possible. They are selected from the much more idiosyncratic variety of incidents in her life.
Our friend Candela was a conventional young woman with a soul both wild and calm, both aggressive and subtle. She wanted to participate in the world as she found it, yet she felt that a simple, coarse, stupefied commitment to work could not be justified. In fact, she felt, in general, only one commitment: to tell what truth she knew by the way she lived. In this way, she thought she had a chance to make a home in this life; at least, the ghost of a chance.
In other words, she was just like you and me.
Her first job after she finished her education was the most obvious work she could conceive: she became the understudy of a minister in one of those churches that thinks that women, too, have souls. Unfortunately, she found that the minister had no direct personal experience of God, only a conviction that He might well exist, and that it was a good thing in any case to exhort people to virtue in His name.
What a surprise this was to our Candela! She had thought that having a confirmed dialog with the divine was a fixed prerequisite for such labors. Her own intercourse with God, which she undertook every year in midwinter when it was cold and she needed some of the Holy heat, spark, and jocund company, was something she thought would be very useful in her new job. But her minister, no. He just went on day after day spreading upon the faces of his congregation the marmalade of virtue. So plastered were they by the sticky phrases of the preacher that they could hardly go out in the world to honor his exhortations. For one thing, they had to wash up. What was Candela to do; how was she to get some plain God-talk into this mess?
She hit upon a plan. For the next sermon, she came straight into the church and took up a place in the pews, accompanied by a clothes rack from home, upon which she had hung most of her wardrobe. Because of our heroine’s disinterest in matters of fashion, the hangers contained mostly sweatpants, denims, overalls, hoodies, and funny hats; hence, this was an easy rack to roll about.
As the pastor began one more stem-winding sermon on the necessities of virtue, Candela, in her simple way, listened with ferocity. For every one of his admonitions, she would put on another article of clothing. So numerous were the virtues suggested by her earnest compatriot that before long she had taken on the profile of the fat lady in a circus. Even the good Father could not help but notice that one of his congregation was growing. And so, not recognizing his swollen assistant, he summoned her forth.
Now Candela had to figure out how to move under such a weight of cloth. Taking courage, and slick with a downpour of sweat under her garments, she shuffled out into the nave, waddled to the front of the church, and situated herself directly in front of the pastor, who now understood that this puffy object was his own assistant. He had thought her so sweet and inoffensive. And so she proved to be!
Candela turned slowly to face the churchgoers and said:
“Everything has changed! The good Father and I have been playing tricks, and now the joke’s on you!”
The pastor could do nothing because, of course, the joke was on him.
Candela went on:
“You probably think that in some story you are portrayed as having upon your face the marmalade of virtue: a sweet thing for you to savor on your day of worship. Well, that story will be wrong. The truth is, you leave this church every Sunday covered over with ideas about virtue like so many layers of clothes. You are weighed down by what you want your soul to wear. You must feel just as I feel, standing here. Yet going forth with such bulk is the very opposite of our intention; in fact, we want you to leave here naked, having stripped from yourself the ideas standing between you and this world. For virtue, rightly considered, strips away your own self; it is, in fact, the way you learn to take off the clothes of your soul. Why not see the truth about ourselves?”
The pastor, meanwhile, hearing all this improvisation, was mad as a hen.
“And now I leave you,” she said with a winning smile to one and all.
“But where are you going?” asked the exasperated Pastor.
“To get naked,” she answered brightly.
The next morning after her parable-in-action, she turned up as usual for work at the church, fully expecting anything from a pat on the back to unreserved huzzahs of praise. Instead, she found the Father still so mad his lips were flecked with foam, so mad he could not speak without swallowing his tongue. Seeing this, she sat quietly in hopes he would calm down. But there is a limit on how long a woman is willing to sit with a foaming man; and when someone came in and handed her a paycheck, she got the idea that her performance had not been universally acclaimed.
Yet there was good news in all this: she began to understand that she would have an increasing number of career options.
And so it has proved to be: She has worked as a risk analyst in a financial management firm, a translator of poetry from Italian and Spanish, a waitress in a jazz club, and a cook in a Moroccan restaurant, where she specialized in dishes made with pomegranates or cinnamon (both of which ingredients she used to introduce certain variations in the amorous undertakings of late evening). She has taught in a community college, specializing in the Jewish and Arab poetry of medieval Spain, and is currently engaged in the study of mushrooms and juggling.
In every single job she has proved to be magnificently indispensable. And from every single one she has been fired. She is, therefore, not in the least discouraged.
AFTER ALL, IF each of us is meant to take off the clothes of our soul, then it can only be because, looking into the mirror, we might see ourselves as we really are. And within the sorrow we know so well, within the terrible sorrow that each of us carries, because of our ignorance, because of what we have done—beyond the savagery of every day, the pandering habits of mind and our hysteria of purposes—within and beyond all that, we might find our chance.
Candela is coming to see you.