The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I suppose it is inevitable to wake up one day and ask how much of the chaos around us is of our own making, and what exact role we had to play. I wonder if I asked those phantoms in the desert for forgiveness if that would be the same as asking real people, face-to-face. Where would I begin? I can’t blame myself for the wars surrounding me. And yet what of my first real boyfriend in high school, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, but who was now a tank commander in Iraq? If I had done something differently, might some of the people he killed still be alive? Might he have been spared the horror of standing in front of that violence, might he be somewhere else in a quiet room, praying alone, or sleeping peacefully beside his wife at night?

  I cannot blame myself for the tragedies of my mother’s family. Yet why had I flown so far from home? Why had I left her? How had so many years passed without me consoling her in her grief?

  Why had I walked away from Hassan? Why had I closed my door to Michael? How do these small, daily acts multiply and extend themselves into eternity?

  7.

  LAST NIGHT IT RAINED. I heard sheets of water falling outside my window against the mountain. I felt it in the desert air, within my body, which has grown sensitive to everything around me. This morning I look over the cliffs to see that the earth has changed color, dark and deep orange, the stones shining in the light.

  I can bear it no longer. I leave the Exercises behind. I leave everything in my room, my notebooks, my Bible, the instructions of St. Ignatius. I walk out along the narrow path into the valley, turning left instead of right, following a new trail, a path I have never walked on before.

  Wild dogs are barking across the valley. I pick up stones to carry in my pocket. I could be Jacob, fleeing overnight, who is tackled by the riverside, forced into a wrestling match with God. I know his frustration now, his insistence on finding out why this stranger has come and attacked him while he had been walking alone. “Tell me your name,” he begs.

  I am fed up with God, fed up with the terrors I have spent the last week remembering. I climb a mountain face without a path, stumbling on loose rocks, the earth still wet from rain. The sky is alive with blue and fierce clouds that keep changing, rolling in and departing. Everything around me is writhing and alive. I lie flat, pressed against the mountain, and crawl on my stomach, afraid of the earth giving way beneath me. When I finally reach the summit of the mountain, my hands are caked with earth, and burning. I sit down to rest, with a view of the mountains on every side of me.

  And then I begin to speak aloud, to the sky. I speak about all of the people in my life, my family, my great loves, everyone I have ever kissed or lay down beside, each city I have lived in. I speak of a man I once loved in Kashgar, the way we held each other in a room set high above the marketplace, hovering over thousands of scarves and carpet stalls, donkeys and wagons being carted through the streets. I speak of the sea in Tyre breathing against Roman ruins, of my father. I speak of Mark, beautiful and asleep in his bed. I tell the air the story of my life. It comes out like music. I don’t know to whom I’m speaking, but I feel someone listening. It must be God. It can be no one else.

  The clouds are wild, breaking off from the sky and walking across the open space between the mountains and the horizon. I keep calling out to them. Maybe for years I had only needed to say it all out loud. To admit that those lives, those cities, those stories left unfinished exist for me. I need them recorded in the Book of Life. If God is listening, I need him to know. I need him to witness my passing, so that I can at least know that it was not all for nothing. I am no longer ashamed in front of God—I am full of rage and awe and even a quiet pride, and despite any sorrow I refuse to see the world as fallen. I had loved in that world. I had loved in that stupid, hellish world, and it is beautiful despite everything, even though I cannot begin to understand how or why. I speak to the sky, and the sky listens, and the world takes me into its arms and welcomes me home again.

  It is already late when I return to my room. I shower, washing the mountains off my skin, put on a clean blouse and a long yellow skirt. When I walk outside to descend the stairs for my nightly meeting, something is falling, catching in the moonlight. It is just beginning to snow.

  I run down the long flight of stairs to confess my sins.

  8.

  FOR DAYS, THE SNOW KEEPS FALLING. The world takes on a strange, muffled sound, so that the imprint of my footsteps, my own breathing becomes magnified in space, every movement becomes pronounced. The stairs between my room and the chapel disappear in whiteness. I can barely see beyond the step in front of me. Even the mountains are gone.

  After the first week, I rest, taking a few days off from the rigor of Ignatius’s daily schedule of prayer and meditation. Sometimes I wake up early in the morning and walk alone through the desert valley, my hands clasping the red stones that are still cold from the crisp desert night—and in these moments it seems that nothing separates me from those who came here almost fifteen hundred years ago. I can reach out and briefly touch eternity. The desert is an endless, quiet room. A white canvas, so that any object placed against it takes on a startling fierceness—olive trees, thistles, a single blade of grass.

  At night, when the clouds clear, the sky fills with more stars than I knew existed. Behind them sleeps darkness so dark that it makes the brightness of the tiny lights brighter still. When the moon swells to its fullness, the stones inhale it, and I can walk the steps from the chapel up to my room without a flashlight.

  The time is becoming long. None of us manages to keep the silence. Dima knocks on my door at night and pours me a cup of tea, sitting beside me, huddled next to the stove. Rania stops me in the valley to talk before I climb the mountain. We carry the exhaustion of soldiers who have just survived a week of battles, reaching out to one another for some small solace. I have rarely been so thankful for the presence of other human beings.

  The snow continues. There are no visitors at the monastery now, just us, the workers, the monks and nuns and volunteers who live here. Even with our few words, I never knew silence like this could exist. God placing his hand over our mouths, saying, Hush. Just listen.

  9.

  IT IS THE TENTH DAY OF THE EXERCISES. I walk into the desert to meditate on the story of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her that she will give birth to a child. I have been waiting for this moment since I arrived, the promised moment of salvation, the moment in the Exercises meant to redeem all of the hells of last week. I close my eyes and wait for the characters to appear. I witness them briefly: Mary trembling in front of the angel, and Gabriel trying to comfort her, whispering, Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God.

  In truth I feel nothing at all. It isn’t real. I look down at myself as from a distance and see the fool that I am, a child, summoning phantoms up in the desert. I am not sure how my life has come to this—twenty-seven years old and in the desert, talking to my imaginary friends.

  I stay up all night, listening to the wind beating against the windowpanes, and by the time I climb from bed the next morning I am so tired I can barely move. In the chapel, we pray the Psalms in Arabic, and the words are far too difficult for me. They swarm through my ears like a river of noise. I begin to cry. Someone motions to me to light the candles behind the iconostasis, but I can’t do it. I motion them away with my hand, exhausted.

  After what feels like eternity, the prayer finishes. Paolo calls my name. I stay huddled in the back of the church, against the fresco of paradise. He asks what is wrong. I look around; there are still others in the church, kneeling in front of icons, warming themselves beside the oven.

  “Out,” he calls. “Yalla, everyone out.” They leave—his voice carries that kind of authority, somewhere between an abbot and a cop. He follows the last of them, closing the door of the church, and bolts it shut. Only the two of us remain, locked inside, with the endless faces of anonymous saints staring down at us.

  I find a place bene
ath the enormous thirteenth-century fresco of hell. Appropriate. Paolo sits across from me.

  “What is it?” he asks gently. No more bad cop now.

  I still don’t know what it is. I have reached a space bolted as tightly shut as the door just beyond us, a space where I can no longer pray. I have arrived at a dead end, and I can’t go forward and never want to go back again. I’m simply lost.

  “I’m supposed to meditate on the Incarnation today,” I say quietly.

  “Why is that making you cry?”

  I consider for a moment, and then I turn my face away from him. “Because I don’t believe that it’s true.”

  There are few more blasphemous things a Mexican Spanish Irish girl brought up in Catholic schools can say to a Catholic priest. I’m shocked by my own words. Until that moment, I have never had the courage to think them, much less say them aloud. I don’t believe in incarnation. I don’t believe that God became man.

  I begin shaking, tears running down my face. He takes my face in his hands, looking into my eyes. “Remember these tears, Stephanie,” he whispers. “These are the sweetest tears of your life.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, I climb to my secret place, where even the mountains disappear and there is only the red stone beneath my feet and sky stretching out in all directions. No one can ever find me here. I open my Bible and read the passage from Luke again:

  The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you!”

  Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God.”

  I close my eyes, and wait for Mary to arrive. She is alone in her room, barely a teenager, quietly folding her dresses into a neat pile and stacking them on her bed. She hums absently to herself. Now she looks up and finds an angel in front of her bed. She drops everything, looks at him.

  What does it feel like, to see him standing in front of her, Gabriel in all of his strangeness? Does she look at his hands? His wings?

  No, she doesn’t even ask his name.

  She just listens to his voice, a voice like water. Like cold water against her trembling.

  Look at Mary in front of the angel, Paolo told me. Notice how afraid she is when she learns that she is pregnant. This is how we feel the story to be true. We should be afraid. To not be confused, uncertain over something as enormous as the presence of God in our lives is not to be human. And Mary is human.

  The miracle, then, is that she still says yes.

  The truth is, I have been up on this mountain for more than ten days, and I have yet to meet God. I have forgotten how to speak to him. He is like a lover whose life has gone in such a different direction that I am left to sit awkwardly across the table, silently watching him. I can’t even remember when I lost him. I can only guess that it didn’t happen at once, that my faith eroded slowly, over time, like a wall left exposed to the rain. Perhaps it began when I was that young teenager watching my grandfather’s face turn blue. When I was in the hospital, listening to patients screaming. Later, as I saw the Middle East crumbling in pieces, perhaps another piece fell away, until when Mark told me I was delusional for believing, I could laugh and pretend that there was nothing wrong with describing the dearest longings of my heart as childish, ridiculous. Jesus was simply a man, a historical person, because God could not be here. God was in exile. He had lost his interest in my life long ago.

  But then a voice from within me speaks:

  Weren’t there moments, almost invisible, when he appeared, briefly, like a figure passing quickly by a window? Surely, you remember. When you looked at the color of blue hand-blown glass. When a poem arrived, unbeckoned, in the middle of the night. Fireflies. A morning in the subway in Paris, when the sound of human voices hit you with such fierceness, humming against the rails. Tangerines. The eyes of pregnant women. There were moments, even if they were never articulated. When you felt: someone is here.

  And now this, God becoming man, the timeless entering time. Which is worse, a God who remains distant, or a God who enters the world, a God who exists in war? A God who must now also be in anguish?

  I SIT ON THAT MOUNTAIN FOR A LONG TIME. And then I decide to give myself over. It is against every natural instinct in my body, every desire for self-protection, and yet I let go of myself. Here, I say to God. Do what you will do.

  At first, I don’t feel anything. It is simply a door opening. Nothing more. It isn’t sadness. It is more like coming up for air. Something inside of my chest breaks open, unleashing an aching, a longing.

  My eyes are closed, but they feel as though they are open. I ask to see the Incarnation. The next moment I watch a collapsing of opposites, as if one world is falling into another. The unknown falls into the known, infusing every object with light. Everything becomes electric. Everything feels full to the point of brimming over.

  When I open my eyes, the desert, the trees, the stones—everything is magnified, expanding beyond themselves. All of them contain a suchness, as though I can look within them and view their essence. The world reveals itself from the inside. Gerard Manley Hopkins once called it “inscape.” For me, it is simply as though I am looking into the soul of each thing.

  Everything appears different than before, as though I haven’t seen anything prior to this moment, as if I have been closing my eyes for an entire lifetime. For an instant, everything feels vivid, illuminated. As though the world is stained glass, and the light is coming in.

  I close my eyes again and wait.

  Now, I am looking through a window, and the other side contains several worlds at once. Beirut. Bethlehem. Baghdad. The buildings riddled with holes. And my family, my poor, exhausted family. Yet something is different now. A strange light breathes beneath the pavement, illuminating everything. Something else is present, beneath the surface of things.

  I remember the story of Mary, trembling in front of the angel.

  I look to the sky, and I whisper, Yes.

  10.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Jesus is born in the desert. I watch his arrival from my cold, barren room in the monastery. I am exhausted, and barely find the strength, and yet he comes. A snowstorm blocks the road to Damascus, and held up in that room I pray. I light a candle, and in my heart God comes into that bruised and terrified day, he comes as a child and he keeps crying, and I hear him.

  “Christ put on the body,” the Syriac church fathers wrote to describe the Incarnation, so that I imagine him sliding on this new skin like a terry-cloth robe after a warm bath. Yet to me it feels more visceral and profound. I try to conceive of what it means concretely, for God to be present in the world. If he is truly embodied on earth, eternally, then this means that he is contained in everyone, in Hassan and Ali, in the Baron, in Michael, in those refugees pouring into the streets. Then he is also in the war, he is contained in the bodies of those who are dying, and even in those who are killing. My mother holds him closely, just as he had been contained in my grandfather’s body as it swelled and changed color and drifted toward sleep.

  For the rest of the Spiritual Exercises, I will be reading only a single Gospel, meditating on the text line by line, imagining the roads and hills and Roman markets so completely that I will live inside of them. Dima, who was raised as a Greek Orthodox Christian, has chosen the Gospel of John, whose emphasis on mysticism makes him particularly beloved by the Eastern churches. Rania chooses Luke, who legend says was not only a physician but also a painter of icons, tying his life to her own work as a restorer of frescoes and religious art. After some thought, I choose the Gospel of Matthew. Though I certainly tell no one this, the truth is Matthew’s Gospel makes me smile. I appreciate his depiction of Jesus as a radical, rabbinical Jew: awkward, brilliant, and misunderstood by even his closest friends. Matthew’s Jesus is so incredibly human. He reminds me of Woody Allen, or someone equally unlikely to be God, a man who in my mind has brown, curly hair and certainly wou
ld have worn glasses had they been invented. Despite the fact that he is a carpenter I still see him wearing corduroy. He is charming in his own way, charismatic and yet overwhelmed by the circumstances of his life, unable to express his thoughts directly, resigned to using parables no one understands. He is the Messiah, and at the same time marginally like almost every man I ever met as a graduate student at Harvard. I feel like I might have run into him in the Judaica section of the library at 2:00 a.m.

  Yet despite his familiarity, there is something strange about him, from the moment he first appears to me in the desert, real as any human being. I watch him baptized, see his long and lean body shivering as he emerges from the water, his hair dripping, and there is something I cannot touch. I see him hungry in the desert, tempted by Satan, his landscape mirroring my own landscape, his haunting language: Man cannot live by bread alone. And I know that I am watching someone who is more than human. And who, though he allows me inside of the room, will never be mine.

  Sometimes, I feel like a mother, watching Jesus appearing out of the bones of the desert each afternoon. He grows up so quickly. One moment I am in the stable in Bethlehem, surrounded by animals, a few shepherds looking on, as he is born, and before I know it he is fully grown. I can barely touch him as his life moves by me—and I find myself wanting to hold on to it, want to slow it down, to claim him. I feel a kind of longing, a regret that so many chapters of his life go missing, for here in the desert those missing pages become concrete, years in a human life I will never witness. I want more time to know his laughter, to memorize his way of walking, his turns of phrase, to ask him if he ever fell in love. But I will never know Jesus at fifteen, or at twenty-five. I will only know him at the beginning and the end of his life, when it is still too early and already too late, and time for him to go.