The most oppressive statue was that of Christ, the enormous crucifix at the front of the room, compelling object of her gaze during the homily, during the hymns. In the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness, the cross was also the sanctuary’s dominant feature, but it was an empty cross. She had adjusted to this difference in her earliest years as a Catholic, but now she found it troubling. Why did they have the image of Jesus hanging there? Why the perpetual reminder of his torture? His shoulders forever thrust upward, his torso contorted, the knees bent and twisted to one side. Jesus had died, but he had also been resurrected—or so the Catholics, the Christian church, herself included—believed. Why portray him always so brutally broken, the picture of defeat?
She decided that, like society at large, the Catholics were fixated on the body. For the first time in years she recalled the dark church in winter and the vigil with her mother-in-law: Eucharistic adoration.
The parking lot surrounding the church had been snow-filled and trackless, illuminated in white pools by lampposts planted in snow-buried pavement. By contrast, the church was dark. It was a round, modern structure, and the sanctuary’s dome, while from the inside an impressive vault, appeared low from the outside. The vellum sky glowed faintly with diffused light from the town, and the church building seemed hunkered beneath it, a dark smudge crouching within the ring of parking lot light. Only a dull glow issued from the glass doors in the foyer, and off to the right, from a source unseen, a flat rectangle of red light lay on the snow.
It was very cold and a steady snow was falling. Maddie and Frank’s mother Peg didn’t speak as they made their way across the unbroken whiteness of the parking lot. They held their coats closed at the necks and bent their heads against the wind. Through the foyer doors, they were met by a merciful rush of warm air, but Peg didn’t pause to absorb it. A few steps took them across the tiled floor, and then together they pushed against the heavy wooden doors to the sanctuary.
The carpet here swallowed sound. The room was dark and still. Maddie sensed a looming emptiness overhead and felt compelled to veneration by the enormous silence: they should stop, remove their coats, maybe their shoes. But Peg was moving away from her. She pushed open another door and they were in a small, dimly lit side chapel ranked with pews. Only now did she pull off her coat and gloves. Maddie followed suit and then, like her mother-in-law, knelt briefly and crossed herself before sliding next to her into the pew.
Almost immediately, Peg composed herself into stillness, folding her hands in her lap and bowing her head. Maddie hadn’t expected much in terms of conversation, but this instant retreat into prayer caught her a bit off guard. She herself needed more time to adjust.
She had learned of Eucharistic adoration months before this vigil, during the classes leading to her conversion. It was an ancient Catholic practice, one rooted in transubstantiation, that mystical transformation of the communion bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ. Adoration extended the sacrament: for a period of time, months or sometimes years, the priests left the Host exposed on the altar, creating an opportunity for parishioners to draw near to Christ. But in honor of the Host—Christ’s very flesh—someone had to be praying before it, worshipping, day and night, regardless of the hour.
At Frank Sr. and Peg’s church, daytime shifts in the schedule were easily filled, with various, unscheduled parishioners also likely stopping in. But the morning’s small hours were the province of the ardently devoted. Peg had signed up for Friday mornings from four to five.
She had almost seemed to be joking when, at dinner the night before, she invited Frank and Maddie to join her. Frank had begged off immediately under the auspice of exhaustion: he and Maddie had just driven all day to get there. It was mid-January and the newlyweds had come for a long weekend; they would be leaving on Sunday.
But Maddie had agreed immediately, surprising everyone including herself, and pleasing her mother-in-law—which might have been part of the design. Frank had teased her about it later in their bedroom (“Trying to get in good with my mom, huh?” which had sent her into a small spiral of concern: “Do you think that’s what she thinks, Frank?”), which had in turn given rise to a brief but earnest conversation: Peg loved Maddie, she didn’t need to worry about that; and Maddie honestly wanted to go to the church at four a.m. for reasons beyond keeping her mother-in-law company.
She was intrigued by the practice of Eucharistic adoration, which was redolent to her of other beauties in her new church tradition, things like liturgy and the communal recitation of creeds. It rang with her vague understanding of medieval monastic life: rising before dawn in the cold, spending an hour in prayer. Surely this had been part of the earliest days of Catholic experience, and Maddie wanted to try it.
Now she sat next to Peg in the dark side chapel, and the cold pew beneath her echoed the cold in her core. The only light in the room was a single beam shining down onto the altar. It glowed dully against the red stained-glass windows and reflected on the glossy wood of the pews ahead; behind them, the back of the room dissolved in darkness. The sides of the room were composed of large blocks of stone, and in these were occasional and evenly spaced openings, small concavities in the wall. Retreating from the room like this, the openings were darker still, but Maddie could see that each of them held a statue on a pedestal, a single white figure, faintly luminescent.
It was time to concentrate. Time to focus, time to pray. She realized with some surprise that, mentally, she hadn’t gotten this far: she hadn’t prepared for the actual praying so much as she had prepared for the idea of it all. Now here they were, and Peg was already silently focused. Maddie began to compose her thoughts.
She was more than a little startled by movement on the far right of the room. It was a huddled shape down near the front, and Maddie recognized with some relief that it was just a fellow pray-er, maybe the one whose shift ran from three to four. She watched as he gathered his things and then slowly stood to his feet. He was an elderly man; Maddie could now see that much. She smiled at him as he made his way past their pew, and he gave her a broad grin. The door knocked mutely as it closed behind him, and then it truly was Peg’s turn—and Maddie’s—to adore the host.
She gave it her full attention. That only light, coming from an unseen source in the ceiling, was focused on it, shining down on the cross, which was centered on the altar. If Maddie hadn’t been told it was there she would have missed it completely, but even from their somewhat distant pew she could make it out: a matte disc at the heart of the ornate silver ornament that surrounded and held it in place.
That was all it was. A dull circle of bread, maybe an inch in diameter. Even from a distance she knew it, having tasted it monthly for most of her life and now weekly since her conversion. She knew from experience its frailty, its thinness, how it would snap in two under the smallest pressure, how it melted so readily on the tongue. It seemed an insubstantial thing to summon them from warm beds before the sun was up in winter, yet it summoned Peg every Friday, and presumably also that old man, and other people before him. It summoned people every day, every hour—generations of medieval monks and other faithful through the centuries. Now Maddie wondered what, exactly, she should do—other than bow her head.
The Eucharist (had they called it that?) in the Bethel Hills Church of Holiness appeared only during the Communion service. It made its way down the rows of pews in a wide saucer, and the discs of bread slid over one another like coins. The ushers moved along the ends of the rows and sent the saucers down them, then followed them with the juice—never wine—pre-poured into small plastic cups. All of it was prayerful and steeped in meaning: “My body, broken for you.”
Sitting next to Peg, Maddie contemplated it for what felt like the first time. She wondered what, if anything, she had expected from that monthly ceremony. What did she expect now from Mass, the weekly ingestion of actual body and blood?
Then, in a flash of perspective, Maddie was shocked by the strangeness o
f Christian belief. Whether symbolic or actual, the Eucharist presented itself as an obviously primitive ritual. More than that, it was savage. Communion, Maddie saw, was a barbaric practice, bordering cannibalism. It was cannibalism, in its way—but for the fact that they also believed it was the God-man they consumed.
What to make of that, Maddie wondered: Consuming God? They ate him and drank him—monthly, weekly, some of them daily, and they did it—Maddie had always done it, anyway—without much at all in the way of thought. Now the idea nearly panicked her; she felt she had been deceived. If there was meaning in the practice, then taking Communion was not to be taken lightly. And yet, all her life, pastor or priest had regularly instructed her in this cannibalistic practice; worse, had invited her to partake in the deliberate ingestion of God himself. And the instructions had been meted out—always, she thought—with bland deliberation, without a hint of fear or warning, as if the entire enterprise were commonplace and, on the whole, relatively insignificant.
Perhaps there was comfort in that, Maddie thought, calming herself. She had taken Communion all her life, largely innocent (until this bracing moment) of its weight. And she had been fine; they all had been fine. Who could know, she asked herself, the true meaning of this metaphysical practice? She couldn’t—could anyone?—be expected to understand, to fully acknowledge or even grasp what lay behind this ceremony. Her task as believer was to accept it and to obey—and not (she reminded herself) to analyze it. Sitting there in the presence of the Host, of Christ himself, Maddie told herself that nothing would happen. Nothing happened to Peg; nothing happened to the old man who had just left the room—and this was, for them, weekly practice. No, nothing needed to happen, she told herself again, and she felt genuine relief. Nothing would happen; it was dangerous to think otherwise.
Now, some seventeen years later, Maddie was remembering this again for what felt like the first time. She had sat there with Peg and had managed to keep Vincent’s year in her life behind her, the healings that had occurred and those that hadn’t. In those days it had been easy to pretend that none of her history mattered. Frank was new and exciting to her at the time, and Catholicism, with its liturgy and mystery, had quickly overwhelmed her earlier Christian experience. She had been able to deny that history for a long time—but now she knew she had been pretending.
“Do you want to be healed of a paper cut?” That’s what Vincent had asked, as if it were simple and straightforward, as if—in the scheme of what might be the eternality of things—arthritis, cancer, and even death were the equivalents of a paper cut. “Do you want to be healed of a paper cut?” he had said.
She was thirty-eight years old, but the answer swelled nonetheless in her throat. “Yes!” She would shout it now if she could choke the words out, if she could stand again in that early spring parking lot with the rain water pouring down the drain. “Yes!” She would shout at Vincent if she could make herself heard over five hundred miles and twenty-odd years. “I do want to be healed of a paper cut!” she would say. And could it be wrong to want such a thing? “I do want to be healed of cancer!” she would scream it. Only a person who had never suffered from it, who had never suffered at all, who had known and enjoyed only physical strength and health could suggest otherwise. She would tell him, “I do want to be healed of death!”
And she would also tell Vincent—if she could find him, corner him in some western Pennsylvanian shopping mall—that she hadn’t been healed of cancer. That God—just as Vincent had intimated—hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t been bothered with the paper cut cancer that would have eaten her whole had she given it the chance. She hadn’t been healed; she was in remission—and it was medical science that got her there.
Vincent had been right—and that had been the problem. God could heal. Sometimes God did heal. It was the if that had always vexed her; his inscrutable whim, his inaccessible ideal, his unattainable perfection that made her hold him at arm’s length. She recalled her posture, the stance she had taken years ago when she married Frank: she would go to Mass, she would take Communion, and she would keep her distance from this capricious and terrible God.
What harrowed her anew was that old thought of ingestion, of body and blood, coming back to her: she was attending Mass, receiving Communion—real or symbolic—on a weekly basis. She was ingesting the God-man routinely, and despite the fact that she no longer had any expectations of him whatsoever, there was no way she could pretend to be keeping him at a distance.
R
On the Wednesday after Vincent prayed for her, Mrs. Adams visited the youth group unannounced, eyes streaming.
“Some of you were there last Sunday when your friend Vincent prayed for my hands.” She held them up, but Maddie detected no difference. They were still knobby and knotted, the veins blue in translucent skin. “I wanted you to know that I haven’t had any pain in my hands since Sunday, since, Vincent, you prayed for me,” and she nodded in his direction. “I haven’t taken any medication, either.” Here her eyes welled again, and she dabbed at them with the handkerchief. “At first I thought I should take the medication, but then I thought that wouldn’t be acting in faith.” She looked at Vincent again and then at Nicky, as if asking assurance of her boldness. “And so I didn’t take the medication, and I haven’t needed to. The pain is gone. Gone!” She raised her hands and spread her bony fingers, and they did seem more flexible than they had; maybe her fingers looked the slightest bit straighter. She held her hands there, palms toward the teenagers, upturned to the ceiling in an attitude of worship. “All gone!” she said, her voice, strained by tears, now coming as a whisper.
The reaction of the youth group was a bit slow in coming. The spirit of expectation that dominated the Holiness Church was always watered down among its teenagers, who, in this instance, didn’t know what to make of a sixty-something-year-old woman suddenly commandeering their meeting. Yet Mrs. Adams was unfazed by their delay and continued standing before them, wiping her nose and looking around at them expectantly. Nicky came to the rescue.
“Well, praise God, Mrs. Adams,” he said, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Isn’t that fantastic, you guys?” Someone in the back of the room began to applaud and soon the others joined in.
As she headed out of the room, Mrs. Adams turned to Vincent and said, “Thank you for praying, Vincent.”
He was the only one in the room who didn’t seem the least embarrassed. He was leaning back in his chair, rocking on its two back legs, and there was a kind of glowing rapture on his face. He grinned at her and said, “You’re welcome.”
R
Maddie had been silent through the youth group meeting, listening to the barrage of questions that erupted after Mrs. Adams left the room. She followed Nicky’s and Vincent’s answers, which curtailed understanding to recent events: Joey, Mr. Pavlik, and, of course, Mrs. Adams. And she endured Justine’s smug smile, certain now that her friend had encouraged Mrs. Adams to ask Vincent directly for prayer.
Afterward, finally alone with him in his car, Maddie gave reign to her welling anger. “I don’t get you, Vincent Elander,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Vincent seemed surprised.
In truth, Maddie wasn’t sure what she meant. But by the time the door closed behind Mrs. Adams, Maddie was already angry, and her anger had grown throughout the ensuing youth group meeting. Afterward, sitting next to him in the car, she discovered she had been angry with Vincent for quite a while, since long before Mrs. Adams had called plaintively down the pew. But words failed her; she couldn’t grasp the source of her fury, and so she landed on what was nearest to hand. As they drove off church property, she practically shouted at him, her voice charged with accusation: “Vincent, you are the most confusing person I know. You are always saying one thing and then doing another. How am I expected to keep up? Am I expected to keep up? I hardly think so. You and Nicky handled it all just fine, almost as if you had planned it.”
Vincent didn’t venture a r
esponse, and in the moment she took to catch her breath, Maddie stole a look at him. His face, lit by suburban light and oncoming cars, was calm. He was listening, interested, unoffended, and perhaps still somewhat surprised.
His silence had no impact: Maddie’s anger was enough to sustain the argument. She had new realizations and, alarmed by them, she went on: Had they planned it? Were Nicky and Vincent working this up? Had they asked Mrs. Adams to come and cry at their meeting so that they could then, in some half-official kind of way, tell the youth group about Vincent’s gift? More realizations and accompanying alarm: Had they put Justine up to it, too? Vincent had said he wanted people to ask him to be healed—and Mrs. Adams was the first one bold enough to do it. Had Vincent asked Justine to talk to Mrs. Adams? Was that what was going on here?
“Maddie, Maddie,” Vincent said soothingly, and his low tones made her recognize just how hysterical her own voice had become. He reached for her hand—but she pulled it away from him, decidedly gratified by this unkindness. Vincent sighed and returned his hand to the gearshift. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Maddie was exasperated, furious that he might fail to engage her out of ignorance, and newly certain that he had been keeping all manner of things from her.
“I mean, Vincent,” she said, “that I’m not even sure that you want to heal people, and then all this happens.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘all this,’” he said quietly. “I was just as surprised as anyone that Mrs. Adams showed up tonight.” He paused, perhaps reflecting on all of Maddie’s accusations, as if wanting to be sure, in this window of Maddie’s silence, to meet each of them in turn. “And I don’t really know if I want to heal people, Mads. And what do you mean about Justine? She told Mrs. Adams to talk to me?”
Healing Maddie Brees Page 25
