“You are the universal fugitive / Escapist as we say.”
—From The Masque of Mercy, by Robert Frost

Some years ago, I attended a wedding reception at an elegant B&B. We danced to the light of fairy bulbs strung high in the trees. The gentle currents of a lake lapped against the lawn’s long incline.

Everything was perfect and perfectly lovely. I took a walk in the summer evening, watching the fireflies dart about the lane.

A craggy figure emerged from the shadows. It was my old friend, Teddy. He leaned against a car, staring up at the sky.

“This is all such bullshit!” he screamed.

“Shush!” I cried, glancing back in terror at the reception tent. Teddy and I glared at each other for a minute. Then we laughed and laughed.

We were old friends on the groom’s side. It was Paul’s second marriage and most of us there knew his former wife, Sarah, well. It must have been horribly uncomfortable for his new bride, who was all of thirty, to Paul’s fifty. She was a nice woman, better suited for him in many ways than his former wife, but the event still felt surreal. In all of it—the ceremony, the reception, the program full of poems, the toasts—the last twenty-five years of Paul’s life were never mentioned. Even the wedding location, at a church across the water, was picked for its lack of associations.

Paul and Sarah had never had an easy marriage; they had been the Bickersons since the beginning. Their marriage was arduous, through two kids and two houses, ups and downs. But in their forties, they seemed to have found a place of peace.

Then Sarah found true love, with a man as stylish and intelligent as her. She had never known the adoration she deserved, he said. He left his wife and preadolescent daughters to give it to her. When Sarah, after much evasion, announced this to Paul, he had his own revelation that he was in love with a younger colleague.

Suddenly, from your run-of- the-mill depressed middle-aged guy watching The Simpsons, Paul was transformed into a mad kayaker, traveling to Alaska and South America, bragging about his wonderful new sex life to Sarah and the rest of us. Sarah also bragged: about her trips to Paris, the romantic proposal, the elegant modernist house she and her new husband bought.

What could we all do but roll our eyes at this and all the rest: the kids who dropped out of college on one side; those who refused to talk to their father on the other; the “amicability” which rapidly went down the tubes; the memories that had to die so that the new relationships could live?

That was how it turned out for us in the old circle: we were that which Paul and Sarah’s reconfigurations could not bear. The new couples wanted a whole hog starting over. The labor to incorporate us was not something they could undertake.

It’s the way of the world now, reinvention and the friendships disappeared.

I have a hard time with my anger about this, because Paul and Sarah were once like family to me. And it’s the first divorce in my circle; it is true that New England has a low rate.

Once in awhile, when the old hurt comes back, I turn to that poet of the stony ground, Robert Frost, once himself rooted near a New Hampshire church picked only for its picturesqueness. His The Masque of Mercy, focused on theological exploration of prophecy and suffering, is a counterpoint to his earlier The Masque of Reason.

In Mercy, Jonas Dove, based on Jonah, is a refugee who seeks to find answers, looking for a God who punishes those who hurt, even unknowingly. But “I can’t trust God to be unmerciful,” Jonas complains of God’s “mercy-justice contradiction.”

In the end, it is mercy alone that matters, the only thing that “can make injustice just.” I must trust that path, I think, the path of grace, for myself, for others. I must see it for the gift outright that it is.