After our meals together, the nuns went to their workshops and I went back to my little room and wrote. I also read, and did a little yoga, and lay on the small bed listening to the rain. I had no specific goal for the retreat; I only wanted to step outside my life for a little while, to make a space. A clearing. Those three days were the longest time I had ever spent away from June, who was now two years old. I hardly ever went away without the girls. When Grace was nearly two, I spent twenty-four hours alone in a hotel, where I read magazines in the bath, brought a novel to dinner, and awoke at four in the morning with a terrible pain in my breasts. Who knew a twenty-month-old could still commission so much breast milk? A few months later I left a fully weaned Grace and flew to Washington, DC, for the weekend. When my friend picked me up at the airport she told me that she wanted to have a baby someday just so she could leave her for the weekend and look as happy as I did. Chris had been leaving the girls since they were infants, and not only for work. Only I traveled alone with the girls; often I took them away for a week or longer, leaving Chris at home by herself, at home to enjoy the peace of a childless house where she could sleep as late as she pleased on Sunday morning and spend the afternoon on the couch with a book. “You never take them away,” I would say to her when I returned from these trips, suitcases full of dirty laundry, exhausted from the strain of entertaining two children on a plane. “I never get to be alone in the house.”
I was caught up in a great reckoning then, trying to even a scale that was never going to strike middle. Middle was simply not where our marriage was going to rest. I was beginning, in that time when I went to Wisdom House, to understand that seeking the elusive middle was my own folly. My contentment lay in seeking something else.
But what I first learned at Wisdom House was that I was tired. I lay down to read and woke hours later, the book open across my chest. I sat down to write and fought to stay awake, although I didn’t fight too hard. Instead I went outside, tried to rouse myself with long walks in the woods and along country roads lined with well-kept houses and stone walls far sturdier than the nearly ancient and crumbling ones that wound through our woods. When I came in from walking I wandered around Wisdom House, read the posters that lined the walls about the lives of nuns: nuns in El Salvador, nuns among migrant workers, nuns who wrote poems, taught in jails, held vigils at nuclear reactors and in old-growth forests. I spent many hours in the library and also the bookstore, sitting on the floor with a pile of books next to me. The books brought a familiar feeling back to me, that intoxicating possibility of salvation through words. But I couldn’t concentrate long enough to read more than a chapter or two of any of them. I was always wanting to get back to the dining hall, back to the nuns.
In the dining hall I often found myself sitting next to the sculptor from the Bronx, whose name was Peggy. She always asked me how the writing was going, asked how my girls were doing without me. “Fine, fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about either. I wanted to listen. And I also wanted to project myself into a make-believe future when these women were my friends, when I would travel to New York to see them, to see their work and their schools, to show them my daughters. To tell them my story and listen to them tell me how to be a different kind of Catholic in the world. This is it, I thought, more than once. This is what I have been waiting for.
At lunch on Sunday I exchanged email addresses with Peggy. We hugged good-bye, and I went upstairs to pack my things. It was a bright and warming day—the rain had finally stopped—and I was not ready to go home. I drove the few miles from Wisdom House to the Lourdes of Litchfield Grotto. The benches around the grotto were filled with people wearing sunglasses and comfortable shoes. Some had cameras around their necks. I didn’t linger. Instead I followed a wooden arrow pointing to the Stations of the Cross.
Years ago Chris and I stopped in the town of San Luis in southern Colorado because I wanted to see its famous Stations of the Cross. The high desert sun heated the trail’s pebbly switchbacks and so we barely paused when we reached each small iron station. In milder weather I could have lingered at each one; they were beautiful in their dark and metallic harshness. At the top of the mountain there was a small shrine, a sun-faded statue of Mary surrounded by small, turquoise-colored stones. Some of the stones had spilled over onto the path and I picked one up and slipped it into the pocket of my cutoff shorts. Chris started walking down ahead of me. I didn’t want to go. There was a feeling that I did not want to end, and it was not a comfortable feeling, necessarily. It was a sense of approach, of proximity to something that I needed and wanted, something that wanted me.
My visit to Lourdes of Litchfield was not so complicated. The statues were towering and theatrical and a little too realistically rendered. But they were also beautiful, as was the jewel-green hillside that surrounded them. At the last station a couple and their young daughter were planting pansies at the disciples’ feet. When I circled back to the grotto I felt no need to stay. I had seen enough, and I knew it. I happily attributed this peaceful certainty to my weekend at Wisdom House, to the possibility I felt when I sat with Peggy and all the others.
The next week I sent Peggy an email. I told her all the things I didn’t tell her when we were there together: that I was once a practicing Catholic but had not been since I was married, that I now belonged to a small Congregational church but was not sure it was quite right for me. That I missed the Church. What I didn’t tell her was that I wanted her in my life. I wanted her to be my nun. Peggy wrote back the next morning, and when I opened the email I was immediately disappointed. It was too short. Three lines, to be exact. Those three lines, before I even read them, told me that Peggy and I were not going to be friends, that she was not going to invite me to her house in the Bronx to drink tea with her and her fellow nuns around their wooden kitchen table. Those three lines told me that Peggy was not going to be my nun.
Dear Erin, she wrote, I know a priest in Boston you might want to talk to. Your church sounds like a good one. I’ll keep you in my prayers.
21
Between God and Me There Is No Me
I’m going to Boston next week,” I said to Chris on a June night a few weeks after I had returned home from Wisdom House. Both girls were in bed, and I had just received an email from Peggy’s priest, whose name was Ron Ingalls. I had written to him first, to ask for a visit. He had written right back. “Of course,” he said. “How about next week?”
“What for?” Chris asked.
“I’m going to see a priest.”
Chris looked surprised. “Really?”
I tried to seem casual, like it was no big deal. “He’s a friend of one of the nuns I met at that residency. He sounds kind of amazing,” I said. “He does same-sex weddings, and heads this really liberal congregation. And he’s married.”
“Then how is he a priest?” Chris asked.
“Well, officially he left the Church,” I explained, “but he’s still a Catholic priest.”
“How is that possible?”
I was getting exasperated. “Because he was ordained, and he believes in the sacraments, and he wants to serve believing people, I guess.”
Chris looked confused. “I guess I don’t see how that would work,” she said.
“It’s not really the point,” I said. “The point is, I’m going to see a priest next week.”
“Because?”
“Because of Hector,” I said without thinking. I looked at Chris then, and I wondered if she even knew who I was talking about.
“Oh,” she said. “Got it.”
I began to say something else, to explain more of what I was doing, to qualify it, but I stopped. The way to Chris is not toward her. “I’ll need to leave early,” I said. “I’ll need you to drop off the girls.”
The next week I drove to Boston, to Ron’s small house, where he kept an office. He opened the door and greeted me, smiling, his face thin and lively, his silver hair combed back from his face. “I’ll warn you,” he
told me when we sat down, “I like to talk. Maybe you should tell me about yourself first.”
But I didn’t want to talk about myself, and so I asked him to start. He told me about his years in seminary and the years he spent in Baltimore as a young priest with a young congregation, and about the excitement he felt for the changes that Vatican II would bring, and the profound disappointment he felt when those changes did not come. He left the priesthood and married but continued to lead a small congregation of progressive Catholics and taught Latin and philosophy at a prestigious Boston high school.
There were some things Ron already knew about me, things that I had told him in an email a few weeks before our meeting. He knew that I was married to a woman and we had two children, and that a long time ago I was a practicing Catholic, sort of.
“So, then.” I was having trouble deciding where to begin my story, how to present myself. Tell him what you were looking for, I told myself. What you are looking for now. I began to explain why I sought the Catholic Church, and after a moment I realized I didn’t have much to say. The words coming out of my mouth seemed to belong to someone else, which is not to say that they were untrue, just unfamiliar. They sounded young and shallow, like one first gulp of air after another that can’t seem to settle into the sustaining evenness of breath. Ron looked at me kindly; when I paused he didn’t speak.
This is what I could not say, what I could not then put into words: I once loved—and will love for the entirety of my life—the Catholic imagination, which insists that the world is a mysterious and holy place, every corner, every instant ripe with the possibility of miracles. A crucifix hanging over an unmade bed, a kitchen windowsill lined with sun-faded Mass cards. Our Lady of the Angels, St. Mary’s of the Snow. My young forehead tipped to receive holy water from my nana’s fingertips. Blessings on the garden and the animals, the sleeping baby, the rising bread.
“Communion,” I said finally, “is what I love.”
Ron smiled. “It’s ancient, isn’t it? Our desire to share a meal. Every year we drive, we fly, we stop everything so that we can be together with the people we love around the Thanksgiving table. We want to gather, we want to share in the literal and symbolic feast.”
I asked Ron about his congregation and he spoke about them, and about celebrating Mass, with enthusiasm. But he was also moving in new directions. He was clearly captivated by Eastern religions; he was interested in Buddhism and in meditation, in an examination of consciousness. “A friend of mine likes to say that between God and me there is no between,” he said. “And for years I loved that. But now I like to say between God and me there is no me.”
I decided to tell Ron about everything, and everyone, between God and me. I told him about St. Patrick’s, and Father Dowling. I told him about Father Dowling’s response to my nonconfession of having a girlfriend.
“Well, at least he wasn’t hostile,” Ron said. “I guess that’s something.” I could tell by his tone that he didn’t actually think it was much of anything.
And I told him about Hector. Not the whole story, not exactly, but I told him about Hector’s enthusiasm for my faith and his disapproval of my love affair, and the complications of both.
“You made the right decision,” Ron said emphatically. “God is on the side of love.” And then he added, “But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Actually,” I said and then I stopped and for a moment neither one of us said anything. I smiled at Ron. “No,” I said, “I don’t.”
It was so lovely to sit there with Ron in his office, an impressive poster of the Buddha on the wall above his head, a delicate statue of Mary on the table next to him. It was so lovely to hear a man talk about his enduring dedication to Catholicism and in the same breath his certainty that I was beloved. I had waited so long for this moment.
But then I looked at Ron, and perhaps it was the way his eyes were fixed on me, or the familiar distance between his chair and the couch where I sat, smoothing my skirt over my knees, but suddenly I knew that this was not something I could do again. I could not sit across from a gray-haired man and tell him my secrets because I wanted to know God. There couldn’t be another Hector. Oh, but it’s not the same! I told myself. Ron sees you—all of you—and believes in your goodness. You’re not asking to be the exception. And I wasn’t. But still, I had been here before. I had rested in the authority of others, and in their high regard for my intellect and faith, and in every meeting, every session, I had lost something. Or maybe it wasn’t what I lost so much as what I absorbed: someone else’s vision, someone else’s articles of faith. Someone else’s ideas about love. I would need to shed them now and begin to forge my own.
“I should go,” I said, not wanting to leave but knowing I needed to. Knowing it was time. “I have a long drive, and I have to pick up my daughters.” Ron walked me to the door, told me that he was here if I want to talk again, or we could email. Whatever I wanted. I thanked him, shook his hand, said good-bye.
I haven’t seen Ron Ingalls since that day, although I think of him often. I think of him every time I say the words be still and know that I am God, and I say those words nearly every day. Ron is the person who told me that those words are the perfect meditation because each word, on its own, is a prayer. Because I am so often interrupted, so easily distracted, sometimes a word or two is all I can manage. But even a word changes things.
And I think of Ron when, every once in a while, I pick up a book by Richard Rohr. “Read him,” Ron told me, “and you will be changed.” I first opened one of Rohr’s books on a quiet afternoon, stretched out on my bed while June lay next to me watching Little Bear on my laptop. The story of our lives with God is a story of descent, not of ascent, I read. I put down the book, closed my eyes. All right then, I thought. I’ll descend, or at least I’ll try. And I was not frightened, although I had been frightened for so many years. For so many years I had been certain that such a descent meant relinquishing the woman I loved, turning away from everything and everyone else I wanted. But I had been wrong. It was true that the Catholic Church could not be mine. I could not raise my children in it; I would not sit in the first pew and watch my daughters, their dresses as white as cake frosting, make their first communion. But this denial—real and painful as it was—did not mean I could not descend; it did not mean that if I wanted to move toward God I had to move alone. In the years since St. Patrick’s I had made promises and forged bonds—forged bodies—from which I could never be fully separated. Before I knew Chris, before we had our children, the questions were: Who will come to me? Who will come and share this life? Those questions have been answered. And I could not, and would not, go anywhere without them.
After a few chapters I closed Rohr’s book, rolled over on my side, and tried to smooth June’s hair before she swatted away my hand, but, as always, she was too fast for me. I laughed and rolled over on my back with the closed book on my chest. I thought of Ron’s church in Wellesley, Peggy’s house in the Bronx. Merton’s Gethsemane. The basement chapel at St. Patrick’s. All of them lovely, none of them meant for me.
This is what happens, still: I see a photograph in the newspaper of robed Christian Pilgrims in a Spanish cathedral or I find my rosary beads in a drawer when I am looking for a tape measure, and my heart beats faster. I can feel it. Still these things set me off. But now I know that all the beating of my heart means is that I need to stop for a moment and talk to God, to forget about the tape measure and the rosary beads, the pile of newspapers, and say something, anything. To close the distance. To remind myself that what I long for is something I can have.
For many, many years I kept that leather-bound book Hector gave me on my confirmation night. The Imitation of Christ. The book traveled with me to Colorado and back, from one apartment to the next, and then to Massachusetts, to the house where Chris and I were married in the living room, the house where I walked the halls in the night with a baby, twice over. It was an ordinary day when I finally let go of
the book, an ordinary day when there was not enough room on the bookshelf and I cleared out what I didn’t want: the airplane novels, the baby food cookbooks, the back issues of Granta. I tossed the book into the box with all the others, and I thought that perhaps what surprised me most about this life is how long it had taken to call it mine.
On a July night a few weeks after my meeting with Ron, I was driving to a friend’s house for dinner when I realized that the burned ruins of the West Cummington Church were on the way. You have time, I told myself, as though time is what had kept me from Church Hill Road in those months since the fire. I turned and drove up the hill; I parked the car and walked to the great crater of rubble that was once the church. The stone steps remained intact, as did their black iron railing. I did not look closely at the ruins; I was not interested in what I might recognize, and regardless, anything recognizable had long since been salvaged. I sat down on the stone steps, right on the edge of that small sea of ash and stone and metal. I could have leaned over and touched it, but I kept my hands on the steps, which were warm from the sun.
It was a perfect summer night. The peepers were still calling; the creek was running fast enough to hear. The sky was the fading blue of a world surrendered to summer and its mist, its fecund haze. From where I sat on the steps I had a wider view of that place than I ever had before. There was no austere white church, no steepled bell tower to block the ledge that was now in view, wide and brown, blooming, water running down its face in sleek streams. I knew the ledge well from those Sunday mornings when June would not settle into sleep before the scripture reading and I would slip out the back door and walk along the ledge, shushing her to sleep. But it was always shadowed then, and I could never see more than the few feet of it in front of me. Now I could see the whole of it, washed in light.
Given Up for You Page 16
