The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  As I was examining the row of breakfast cereals, I heard the voice of a woman in the next aisle, scolding her child. She’s speaking English! I thought to myself with a rush of excitement. I slowly made my way to the edge of the aisle and peered around the corner, trying not to appear too obvious as I stared at this young mother in her ponytail and jogging outfit speaking to a little girl with her two feet swinging out of the shopping cart.

  Then I remembered. I was now in a place where everyone spoke my language. It hit me with the force of a revelation.

  4.

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke up in my bed once again, and the sun was shining through the windows and lighting up the entire room. I could smell coffee brewing. I said to myself, Today, you will tell your family that you have chosen to become a nun in the desert.

  But I didn’t. I walked down the stairs to join my family for breakfast. My younger brother, on vacation from college, was reading the comics from the newspaper, and my older brother and sister were chatting over mugs of coffee. The Three Tenors were singing “O Holy Night” in the background. My father, when he saw me emerge from the staircase, opened up a white box of glazed doughnuts.

  “Breakfast?” he asked me.

  It didn’t seem like the right time.

  So I pushed my secret to the back of my mind, and at the breakfast table I tried my best to impersonate a normal human being. My sister filled me in on the latest sales at Banana Republic, while my brothers discussed The Simpsons between themselves. None of them had any idea of how strange it was for me to talk about television and shopping. So this is what people talk about, I thought, when they are not asking why so many men and women are dying in Iraq.

  After breakfast, I walked down the street to the neighborhood Starbucks, with its green umbrellas and perfectly round tables. Behind the glass counter, blueberry muffins were displayed with cranberry muffins. There were stacks of the New York Times. I stood in line and listened to the men and women ahead of me ordering, speaking again in my language: Frappuccino. Tall latte. Pumpkin maple scone. It sounded like music. I could have stood there for hours, just listening to them.

  Then my turn arrived, and I forgot that for years I had been anxious before speaking to strangers.

  “Nonfat iced grande chai,” I told the man, blushing. He nodded, took my money, handed me my change, and then called my order out. I loved hearing it again, repeated in his deep voice. The barista called it a third time, Nonfat iced grande chai, louder to overcome the sound of steamers and coffee grinders.

  I claimed my drink from the counter, even though I could not have cared less about the beverage. I had just wanted to say its name. I just wanted the sheer, exotic pleasure of hearing those words roll off of my tongue and knowing that they were mine.

  What had Gerard Manley Hopkins written? The world is charged with the grandeur of God. That night, my sister and I did go to see the San Antonio Spurs play the Orlando Magic. We bought nachos and foot-long hot dogs with credit cards and drank beer in big white Styrofoam cups. When a young woman stood at a microphone and sang the national anthem, I placed my hand over my heart. Then, the oddest thing happened: I felt a tear falling down my cheek. I was in a room full of tens of thousands of people who loved my country. For four long months, I had only heard my country associated with the dead.

  Then the game began. The players ran onto the court, fluid in their long, lean, muscular bodies, and cameras flashed and thousands of people yelled. I stood on my chair to get a better look. They were like dancers. It seemed impossible that human beings could move like that. I cheered for the French point guard Tony Parker until I almost lost my voice. We swayed in rhythm with the Spurs’ coyote mascot. We jumped into the air and tried to catch Spurs T-shirts launched in our direction by cannon.

  Somewhere in the middle of it all, a thought slipped into my head. No doubt the desert fathers would have called it waswas, one of those tempting thoughts sent by the devil to lure me away. Evagrius Ponticus, the early theologian, would have called it the “noonday demon,” that famous voice that reminds the monk that he might have chosen an easier, more comfortable life. But I knew that the voice was none other than my very own voice, reminding me that if I spent my life living in a monastery in the deserts of Syria, then I would probably never again attend a Spurs basketball game. And, in a way that took me by surprise, it was not the idea of leaving my family, or the English language, or even my country, but the simple fact that I would never again watch Tim Duncan make a slam dunk that made me realize just how permanent my monastic decision was. It was as if this was the only way I knew, concretely, how to process the reality that overwhelmed me: I won’t come home again.

  5.

  IT WAS ST. AUGUSTINE who wrote the famous prayer in his Confessions, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” I could relate. I was only now conscious of how many things in my life remained to be done. By the time I had been back home for a week, I was clinging to my former life like a terminally ill patient given only three weeks to live. Paolo had warned me that because my body was still weak and vulnerable from the Exercises, tending to interpret any visual image at all as a message sent straight from the Almighty, it would be a bad idea if I watched too much television. But, since I knew I would not be getting cable in the desert, I allowed myself the luxury of sprawling out on the couch to watch hours upon hours of Sex and the City on DVD. I then sat through an entire series of Smallville, the television show chronicling the life of Superman during his high school years. Without Jesus to speak to, I began to compare my spiritual predicament to that of the superhero Clark Kent, who also happened to be both human and otherworldly. How did he manage it? How did he walk the fine balance between two such contradictory lives, spending days as a writer and his evenings battling demons, interceding on behalf of mankind?

  I showered twice a day, and I bought clothes I could never wear in Syria, tank tops and tight-fitting jeans and short skirts, hardly the uniform of a desert novice. I told myself that I was buying them just for these few weeks, just because I could. I called the quarterback of my high school football team and asked him out to lunch, because I had wanted to do that for years and would never again have the chance. I gained several pounds in tacos. Then, in true Catholic penance, I promised myself before bed each night that the next day, the very next morning, I would announce to my family that I was going to become a nun.

  Then I would wake up the next morning and start over, showering and binging on Coca-Cola, watching Superman and saying nothing to my family and at the end of the day feeling terribly guilty about my giant sin of omission. Yet something was holding me back. It was not just that I was no longer living in a simple, austere cell, walking in the desert and passing my afternoons conversing with God. Since I left the monastery, I had stopped praying at all. In fact the idea of falling on my knees and speaking to someone invisible in the air was now bizarre and even slightly repellent to me. I found it hard to believe that I had just passed a month praying ten hours a day and speaking with Jesus. I didn’t know who that person was in Syria who witnessed men and angels appearing from the ground. I knew that she existed. I just did not understand how she could possibly be me.

  If it had been only my spiritual life that seemed distant to me, then I could have blamed Paolo, I could have blamed the Exercises. But the entire person I was in Syria seemed unrecognizable, not in any way associated to the real me. It felt as if an impersonator in some science fiction version of my life had briefly taken over my body and brainwashed me. I avoided speaking about it in detail, not because my family did not ask me, but because I discovered that my Syrian life belonged to a world of images and associations that I could not hope for them to understand, that even I could not understand once removed from their context. What could I tell my father about the family on my roof speaking the language of Jesus, or of Hassan painting the same lost streets of Baghdad over and over again? What would he say if he knew that, in another city, I was known as Grand
father? What would my siblings say if I told them that I went to the mosque every single day, or that I rarely showed my elbows, that I dreamed of Iraq almost every night and passed a month of afternoons summoning up images of Jesus and the disciples and asking them questions?

  And so I remained silent, and in my fourteen-hour nights in bed I sometimes awakened and asked myself who I had become, what kind of life I had been living these last years, and why I had chosen to align myself with one of the most difficult regions in the world. I had often met foreigners in the Middle East who became obsessed with conflict, who did not know how to live outside of war areas because they no longer felt alive without the rush of it. Maybe I had also convinced myself that a deep and fully examined life could only be lived in a monastery in the middle of a region at war, that it was not enough to find a place in the inhabited world among those I loved. And perhaps I was not wrong. Maybe life takes us to a certain point and we cannot go back again without betraying the life we have been given, the person we have become. And yet I was starting to hate that life. I wanted to trade recipes and buy baby clothes, to watch television on cable, not to spend my whole life praying for peace.

  I had been home for a week when I woke up at five in the morning, unable to go back to sleep again. I pulled aside the covers and crawled out of bed, tiptoeing down the flight of wooden stairs toward the kitchen, only to find my father in his Superman pajamas, sprawled out on the leather couch in front of the television. He looked up at me and smiled.

  “Well, hi, Daughter. Couldn’t sleep?”

  I nodded. “Do you always watch the television in the morning without the sound on?”

  He shrugged, motioning at me to take a place beside him. “May as well. There’s nothing good on at this hour.”

  I climbed onto the couch and curled up next to him, in an imitation of a thousand childhood Sunday mornings, and we watched as the stations moved back and forth in the dark. I was so confused. I remembered that my father had once hoped to become a priest, and that as a young student in the seminary he had waited long afternoons for a vision of the Virgin Mary to appear in a garden, hoping she might tell him what he should do with his life.

  “Dad, I want to talk to you about something important,” I told him.

  He put down the remote, leaned over, and kissed my forehead. “I’m listening.”

  I tried to explain it without sounding crazy. “Last month, I went to the desert to pray…” I described that long, labored walk up a flight of three hundred and fifty stairs, and the monastery that hung like a pearl over the valley below. I told him about living in silence, praying in the chapel in the early morning, the way the desert seeped into my bones. I felt as though I was confessing to him. I said that I had decided to become a nun. He listened patiently, not asking questions, just staying there beside me, with the same tender patience in which he had received every far-fetched idea in my life, my childhood desires to run in the Olympics and win the Nobel Prize. When I was finished, he waited for a moment in silence. Then he reached down and pushed away the few strands of hair that had fallen down onto my face. His eyes were full of tears.

  “You know, Stephanie,” he said softly, “I have always told you that you have my heart.”

  I didn’t dare look at him. It was too early in the morning to cry. He took me in his arms, and we held each other and watched the television on mute, the images flashing in front of us like silent scenes in a human life, one after another.

  6.

  MY CONFESSION TO MY FATHER was the beginning of the end for me. I didn’t want to become a nun. I dreaded giving up my life. I felt like the mother in Solomon’s parable about splitting the baby in two. I had given up everything because I thought I didn’t have the choice. But now I wanted the baby back.

  The next morning when I woke up, a voice was speaking from inside of me. Only this time, it wasn’t telling me to become a nun.

  I don’t want to go back to Syria, it said.

  When I went downstairs for breakfast, I took a long look at my family, seated around the table. They looked so normal, so human. My father was wearing his terrible red shirt. My siblings were laughing. My stepmother was setting out a plate of cinnamon rolls. Here they were, my roots, tying me to the earth. I couldn’t imagine letting them go. I thought of Hassan, almost gasping: My Baghdad doesn’t exist anymore. I thought of a Palestinian refugee cabdriver taking me home from school in Damascus and shyly asking me if I had ever been to his village in Israel, if I knew what it looked like. Of the Baron, dreaming of a house abandoned in the middle of a war and never returned to again.

  I had a home. I had a family. I had never touched the simple, alarming beauty of it.

  CHRISTMAS CAME AND PASSED. At the Christmas Eve Mass, I watched the priest lift the holy bread in the air and I longed for the rush of light that had sometimes accompanied that moment at the monastery, that sense of participating in holiness, in the transformation of the world by God. But the desert felt like another life, and that feeling was too far gone by now for me even to try to retrieve it.

  The days moved on, one after another in succession, and the date of my flight back to Syria approached. I had promised myself that I would finish my Fulbright year, no matter how much I longed to remain in America. Yet I had one demon left to face. I missed Mark. Terribly.

  I had managed to push him to the back of my mind for almost two months, to busy myself with thoughts of my cursed family, of the war in the Middle East, conversations with Jesus, and the weight of a monastic choice. Yet now I could barely go minutes without thinking about him. When I heard the phone ring, I rushed to answer, hoping that he might be calling. I couldn’t watch nighttime talk shows without remembering curling up beside him in front of David Letterman. I thought of him when I ate chocolate, or drank red wine, or heard any mention of Russia. I couldn’t drink a cup of tea without missing him.

  I knew that our relationship contained a laundry list of problems, and that we had said so many awful things to each other in moments of anger that there was little hope of patching things up between us. Still, I wanted to hear his voice. Day after day in San Antonio, all of the feelings surged back that I had suppressed up in heaven, in the desert, when I was trying so hard to be perfect. I missed his black glasses from Russia with their peculiar shape. I missed running with him in the park. I missed grilling portobello steaks on the porch and drinking cheap wine. I missed receiving his phone messages in the middle of the afternoon. I missed wearing his bathrobe, I missed coming home at night and seeing him typing at his desk by the window, the lamp shining on his face, his profile casting a shadow over his open books.

  I had mourned a thousand losses in the monastery, war and murder, suicide, the deaths in my family. But I had not let myself grieve losing him. It had seemed shallow of me to mourn a broken heart in the middle of so many greater, more dramatic losses. I had not been ready to admit to myself the one truth that no one seems willing to tell us—that no matter what the circumstances, there is no weight quite as heavy as losing someone you love. It does not matter how they disappear—if they flee the country, if they are killed, if they are run over by a bus, or if they just say I never loved you and shut the door. What matters most is that they are gone.

  Ten days passed before I drank a very large glass of wine and found the courage to pick up the phone and call him. The phone rang and rang, until the ring was replaced by the familiar sound of his voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey you,” I said.

  “You’re kidding me,” he answered, and I could hear him smiling.

  We talked for hours. I lay down on the floor of the hallway, curling the phone cord around my fingers, listening to him. We didn’t talk about our relationship. I didn’t mention my boxes of clothes still stowed in the basement. Instead we filled each other in on the stories we had missed. He told me about the afternoon he had scoured all of Boston for veal bones to use in an obscure recipe from the New York Times, the gas company
that had forgotten to collect for an entire year and was now seeking revenge. I told him about stumbling through Arabic, and about the cabdriver who, upon hearing that I was from Texas, worried that I was in danger of being attacked by either cowboys or Indians. We laughed until I had to cover the phone and catch my breath. For the first time in months, I allowed myself to remember that I had lost my best friend. “My God,” he gasped on the other side of the line. “I haven’t laughed this hard in a year.”

  I told him about the monastery, the way it looked like a jewel from the valley below. And I admitted, for a moment, how lonely life could be, an American in Syria, halfway across the world.

  “Stephanie?” he said quietly. “You know, there’s no point in saving the world if you can’t be happy.”

  “If I can’t be happy, then I might as well save the world,” I snapped back. I did not realize just what I had said until I was done.

  We were both in shock for a moment. “You know that I wish that I could be there to help you,” he said quietly. But they were empty words, because he couldn’t be here, and we both knew that. Here, in my life, was not where he was supposed to be anymore.

  I hung up the phone and went to the bathroom. I undressed and sat on the bottom of the shower and let the hot water run over me. I remembered the last time I had seen him, the sad, awkward moment of good-bye at the airport, his promise that he would wait for me to return at Christmas.