(This is the last part of a three-part series about dark nights and warm afternoons of the soul, about prayer and not-prayer, and, as always, about beginning again.)
Forget your promise and potential. Forget your accomplishments and your failures. Forget your future and your past.
Take a picture of a sunset over the Family Dollar parking lot. Take a picture of the hydrangeas outside Burger King.
Receive the question: “What have you been doing these days?”
Think of all the answers you could give. Writing, you want to say, which gives you the air of respectability and mystique. Think of other answers: Holding the screwdriver while your mother tightens the bolts on her toilet. Coaxing the hulls off lentils your mother has sprouted. Making a good, then an underwhelming vegetarian risotto. Sitting in waiting rooms. Thrifting for supportive shoes. Flossing your teeth. Lifting your leg with light weights strapped to your ankle, ten, twenty, thirty times. Drinking three liters of water. Watching the flowers blossom: day lilies, dahlias, marigolds your mother grew from seed, orchids she nursed back to life.
Watch your mother garden. Lettuce and spinach, arugula and greens. “I mixed up the seeds,” listen to your mother say. Look at the labels she wrote: MYSTERY TOMATOES. Wonder what they will be. Marvel at the two small green fruit beginning to grow.
Let life become very simple. Every day, read a short passage from the Bible. Write a page in your journal. Read a poem. Copy down one good sentence. Number your gratitudes: one, two, three.
Sit on the Starbucks patio that overlooks the parking lot where you parked in college. As a man approaches to tell you he’s hungry, tell him you don’t have cash. Listen to him say, “It’s okay, they take cards.” Listen to him ask, “Could I get a chocolate power smoothie?” Listen to him say, “I’m a veteran.” Swipe your card and look at the total: seven dollars.
“I think God is giving me remedial lessons in how to be a Christian,” text your friends, who are kinder and wiser and holier than you. Read their responses: “Maybe not remedial. Maybe just real and true.”
Keep going to church. Receive Communion: a prepackaged kit from the Disciples of Christ church, a wafer and cup of grape juice from the Presbyterians, a sip of strong wine from the Episcopalians. At one United Methodist church, keep yourself from laughing as you receive a tiny square of bread, no larger than a crouton, served to you with salad tongs.
Close your eyes during the Great Thanksgiving. Stop yourself from mouthing the words.
Walk to physical therapy twice a week. Notice that you are the youngest person there by thirty years. Read the note in your MyChart: eight weeks. Overexert yourself, with exercises, with hiking by the river, with carrying a loaded-down backpack and hiking poles for seven miles.
Feel the numbness in your lower back, the ache in your knees. Struggle to describe it to doctors, to physical therapists, to your mother. Try to rate it on a scale of one to ten. Start a log in your phone that you will abandon after three days. Weeks later, while scrolling, rediscover it, a note titled “Pain.”
Listen one day as Nirvana plays on the radio at physical therapy. Text your friends, “At least it wasn’t Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Watch a white-haired man wearing jean shorts work out on the stairstepper. Watch another squeeze an exercise ball to strengthen his hands.
During dinner one evening, watch your mother turn off Jeopardy. Lucille, your favorite Sunday School teacher from when you were seven or eight, is on hospice. Agree to go see her. Watch your mother’s brow unfurrow, her mouth relax into a smile as you say yes.
Travel through time. Drive past The Pied Piper music store where you bought reeds for your clarinet. Drive past the golden-domed State Capitol where you were knighted by the oldest governor in state history for scoring high on a history test.
Go with your mother to sell your father’s coin collection in the next town over in Kentucky. Watch as a man in a white sport coat holds each up to the light, counts them, tells you what each one is worth.
Remember how you drove an hour every evening the summer after college to see your boyfriend, who would become your husband and then your ex-husband, that summer when he was happy and you were hopeful. Remember driving over the bridge from Ohio, after you finished your shift delivering for Papa John’s, how you would study the Bible and then kiss.
On the way home, listen again for the first time to your mother’s story about when she drove across the country from Washington to West Virginia to take her first nursing job. How she stopped at churches and was offered food and a place for the night. How slept in her car off this road in Ohio during the last stretch. How she lived on stale donuts in the hospital break room until she felt her first paycheck in her hand.
Walk behind your mother as she carries a bag of gifts, each carefully wrapped, donated by the group for widows she started at her church. Carry the poster board cards the Sunday School students have crafted.
Listen as Lucille asks about each one of them by name. Listen to her describe being on hospice. Listen to her name the children she teaches, from your brother and you, all the way to the red haired nine-year-old now. Try not to feel proud as she tells you, “You were always one of my favorites.” Smile as she adds, “I had a lot of favorites.” Count the soft spurts of her oxygen tank. Watch hold your mother’s hand as they recount a presentation one Sunday. “They were so good!” hear your mother say.
Laugh as Lucille tells the secret: “I told them that if they would be quiet and listen, I would give them each one dollar.” Delight at the glint in her eye.
Watch her as she rocks back and forth in her rocker. Listen to a story about a teenage boy who lived with them for a year when he was struggling. Listen to a story about when the youth group sold candy bars in the ‘80s, and one of the girls lost the money. Listen to her describe how the girl, embarrassed, never came back again.
Do not stop her as she names her regrets. Reach for her hand. Say, “We always remember, don’t we? The things we did wrong?”
Listen to a podcast again that you listened to nearly a year ago about St. Teresa of Avila, one of your favorite saints.
Teresa to Jesus: “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.”
Teresa, to another sister horrified at her appetite: “When I fast, I fast. When I eat partridge, I eat partridge.”
Teresa, in a prayer you used countless times at your churches, that you printed and gave away, that you wrote in cards, that you forgot: “Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours.”
Cry again as you remember what you have received. Remember the money your church gave you that paid for your journey on the Camino, the gift cards that bought your backpack, your socks, your shoes. Unzip your backpack to find a stack of cards, held together with binder rings, messages of encouragement.
Remember your spiritual director, who crafted a service of blessing and letting go. Remember how you wrote in black pen on dissolving paper all the things you wanted to release. When you stirred it in the bowl with a pencil, the water grew darker, darker, darker still. Remember how she disappeared with the bowl of dirty water, and returned with water clean and new.
Soak in the lavishness. Count each gift, each word, each kindness, each thing that helped you survive, each thing that made you live. Remember. Remember. Remember.
Say silently, then in a whisper, “Was that you?”
Ice your hip each day with a bag of organic frozen peas. One day, when the bag explodes, refuse to keep ignoring what you know. Text your friends, “I can’t walk across Spain right now.” Text your friends, “I guess Spain will still be there.”
Change your plan again: B, C, D, E, F. Lose track of letters. Open a tab you had bookmarked a year ago. Email a Spanish school in Peru. Read their response: “Yes, we have space in three weeks. Yes, you can stay a month.”
Buy a plane ticket to Lima. Pack your winter clothes.
On Pentecost, do not go to church. Drive again to visit Jenn in Virginia. Let Waze route you through curving mountain roads without a center line. Sing along loudly to the bluegrass band you loved in college. Eat strawberries, ripe and red, out of a Ziploc bag.
Drive down the interstate through the hills of Virginia at golden hour. Notice the bales of hay in the fields. Remember passing square bales of hay as you walked through the brown, flat, dry, brown beautiful, meseta in Spain.
Notice the cows grazing on the hills. Remember when you talked to cows in Spain in Spanish. Remember when you talked to cows in Scotland in the most ridiculous Scottish accent. Somewhere in the Psalms or the prophets: The Lord made the cattle on a thousand hills.
Say to yourself, “I don’t know how not to be this person.”
Drive to North Carolina to go to an ethics training but mostly to see your friends. On your birthday, when you turn 42, sit on the beach where you used to walk on Fridays when you tried to rest. Walk on the beach where you practiced your first sermon for your first church, worrying out the phrases while you paced through the sand. Put sunscreen on yourself the best you can.
Pass the Moose Lodge where you emptied your recycling bins, the pub where you ordered hot wings and fries when the church made you cry. Sit on a barstool next to Heather and eat shrimp and grits. Sit at a coffee shop across from Laura and drink an $8 iced coffee.
Feel it again, pain and elation, exhaustion and energy, cruelty and kindness, ache and love. Think of the people who had it worse than you. Blush as you remember the stories you told to so many people, as if you wanted someone to say, I see you. As if you wanted someone to say, it mattered.
When you undress that night, look at your back, burned bright red in a spot you couldn’t see and couldn’t reach.
Scan through your emails. Read the prayer requests, unsubscribe from the spam, skim an email from the Clergy Health Initiative that describes practices of flourishing. Read the subject line of one email: Further Resources for Staying Alive.
Remember the day of your ordination, how the bishop placed the red stole around your neck. Feel the smoothness and the weight of it, how she gave it a tug.
Forgive yourself. Tell yourself, I see you. Tell yourself, it mattered.
Drive to your old consignment shop, where you sold all the clothes you could sell before you moved. Dig through the bargain bins. Buy three bags of clothes, two dollars a piece, in a size that fits you now.
Enter the city limits of the town where the United Methodists of eastern North Carolina gather every year. Remember driving there for the first time nearly ten years ago, fresh off an airplane, through a thunderstorm, your cat in his carrier, meowing from the passenger seat of your rental car.
Remember when you interviewed for your first pastoring job with a chipped tooth, when you had time for six round trips to North Carolina from California in a year, for four interviews, for a master’s thesis and a hundred pages of theology, but not a dentist’s appointment.
Sleep in the second bed in your friend’s hotel room. Meet your friends at a Mexican restaurant. Meet your friends at a pizza place. Meet your friends for wine in one of their hotel rooms. Hold your friends to your chest as you say goodbye.
See acquaintances you know in the elevator. Tell them, “I’m not here.”
Drive down the green highways of North Carolina. To your right, see bodies bent over, farm workers in the heart of the day laboring in the fields. Him, to his friends: The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.
Remember the weekend you were ordained, when the president ordered children separated from their families at the border. Think of the people ordained today. Wonder how they will remember it, how amidst the ICE raids, on the day of the president’s military parade, the bishop laid her hands upon them and placed a stole red as fire around their neck.
On your way back to West Virginia, stop for a protest.
Pull into the parking lot of a Michaels. Picture all the things you bought to make crafts when you were trying to make yourself feel peaceful. Stop trying to feel peaceful. Buy a piece of poster board, a Sharpie marker.
Park in the parking lot of a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Picture all the things you bought in their going out of business sale when you were trying to fix yourself. Stop trying to fix yourself.
Let the engine run as you write. Make one side of the sign nice: IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA GREAT. On the other, write: SOME OF Y’ALL WOULD HAVE DEPORTED JESUS.
Stand across from a Maserati and a Mercedes Benz dealership and hold up the sign. Watch cars drive by. Look around you, at the mile of people, shoulder to shoulder, stretching on both sides of the highway. Revel in being one among many. Raise your arms as the cars honk.
Travel down Interstate 40 as the day fades. Read the names of the towns on each exit sign. Picture the colleagues who work there. Imagine them, the love they are given, the hurt they endure. Say their names. Say, “Help them.”
Pass the exit for your REI, your Trader Joe’s, your Aldi. Pass the exit for the state’s largest display of Christmas lights, where your ex-boyfriend took you as a surprise. Pass the exit for the state park where you got lost and were lectured by a ranger for being on site 30 minutes after close.
Pass the exit for the nursing home where you drove an hour to visit a church member two days before Christmas. Remember how you propped up your iPad to play the video of the Christmas concert for her. Remember how you took a small kit of Communion out of your bag to eat together. Remember how you sang.
Travel in time until you arrive home. Glance up at your mirrors. See a pillar of cloud in your rear view.
Look at the photos your mom opens on her phone. “7 years ago,” she reads. Look at the picture of you smiling, your arms around your friends and mentors, the bus full of church members who rode 4 hours round trip to see your ordination. Notice that the red stole around your neck is already askew.
Gaze at the orchid plant in your mother’s living room, that she bought for an elderly lady at her church, that the lady kindly rejected, that your mother has watered carefully for a year.
Ada Limon, in a poetry book you bought with a gift card from your church in Raleigh: Tell me how you took something that needed repair and repaired it.
Marvel at the purple flowers: four at once in full bloom.
As you cook dinner on one of your last nights in West Virginia, hear your mother breathe a deep sigh. Hear her say, “Lucille passed away.” Embrace her. Listen to her talk.
Say to her, “I’m so sorry.” Say to God, “Help them.” Say to yourself, “May she rest in peace and rise in glory.”
Remember the day you visited, how you held her hand and your mother’s, the three of you in a circle, praying and prayed for. Feel her skin of her hand again, loose against the bone. Blush at the intimacy of it, how you rubbed your thumb against her knuckle, back and forth, without realizing it.
Remember how she stood up from her chair, how she embraced you, how she looked at you with love, this woman you hadn’t seen in fifteen years.
“Honey,” hear her say, “I love you. I pray for you every day.”
Let your mother drive you to the airport as you leave for Peru. Tell her she does not need to wait to watch your plane take off. Smile as she refuses. Take the peanuts, the oranges, the apples she offers you, the granola bars and bags of Oreos she has saved for you.
Once you are on the plane, watch the sky go black, open up. Groan as the employees who are loading the bags abandon the ramp when someone sees lightning. “It will pass,” says the captain. Put out your hands and receive the drinks and water and Biscoff cookies the flight attendant brings.
Wish you had a piece of poster board, a Sharpie. IT’S OKAY, you would write. IT’S JUST WEATHER. IT’LL PASS.
Talk with the woman across the aisle from you, also named Kristina, on her way to Seattle to be interviewed for a documentary because of her mother’s sighting of the Mothman. Listen as she tells you she fell yesterday and is nursing a black eye. Try not to stare. Talk with the flight attendant, who brings a bag of ice and then sits in the seat next to you, talks about how she will work her other job at a nursing home tomorrow morning. Look at them and love them, these fellow travelers you do not know.
When you finally take off, an hour and a half later than expected, look out the window. See your mother appear again, holding an umbrella as she watches the plane begin to taxi.
The flight will be turbulent. It will shake and careen on the way to Charlotte until you break through to blue. Your prayer will come, quick as breathing: Please let us be safe.
You will lose your way on your second day in Cusco. You will try to make your way home alone, wandering up and down streets for an hour until you find the correct bus stop, next to a monument to the founders of Cusco and a bakery that sells tres leches cake.
You will make mistakes, a hundred, a thousand, a million. Me tambien for yo tambien. Eres seguro for estas seguro. You will take a bill you think is a ten from your wallet to pay for a Gatorade and realize it is a hundred. You will lose your debit card in an ATM. You will need to ask for help from one, two, three people, your mother, the school, until a new one arrives.
You will listen as the stream of sounds the ticket-taker shouts every morning eventually form themselves into words: Amauta, Clorinda, Garcilaso, Real Plaza, Hospital.
You will watch the Jesus TV show again, this time in Spanish. You will cry at the things you are able to understand, usually simple phrases, using the imperative: Don’t run away. Don’t worry. Listen to him. Stay close to me. And the last phrase, which in Spanish is a single word: Follow me.
You will marvel every day at the skies over Cusco, the way the stones in the Plaza de Armas glow gold in early evening, when the lights of the city turn on. You will look nearly every evening at the snowcapped mountain in the distance, from the rooftop terrace of your homestay, as you hold a thermos of tea in your hands for warmth.
You will take a bus trip to walk around lagoons where llamas and alpacas graze. You will eat bad food at the buffet and stay in the bathroom for the weekend. You will swallow the antibiotics the kind doctor at the school gives you. You will read a test result—not one but two strains of bacteria residing in your gut.
You will swallow antibiotics again, the fifth time this year. You will vomit in the bathroom of a karaoke bar. You will text your friends, “Not for a fun reason.” You will allow yourself to be pulled out on the dance floor as your friends and teachers scream-sing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
Your appetite will come back in spurts—a plastic cup of queso helado, scooped out of a tub, a bag of popcorn popped in a cart on the street that you eat while walking. You will pray thank you when you realize that you are hungry.
One day, you will mix up your class times and find yourself with hours to kill. You will wander through Qoricancha, the Incan temple robbed of its gold. You will wander through the church that adjoins it. You will hear a voice, amplified, saying rhythmic words. When you look over the balcony railing, you will look at the child, dressed in white, held by her mother, as the priest pours water over her head. You will whisper the words along with him, the priest in Spanish, you in English. You will say a prayer for the child whose name is Isabella. You will cry. When you come home that evening, you will text your friends, “I think I’m still a pastor.”
You will walk under a ladder as a workman paints a wall a vibrant blue. You will wonder if the paint has dripped on you, someplace you cannot see or reach. You will ponder to yourself: Maybe the kingdom of heaven is like opening a bright blue door.
But you do not know this yet. How could you?
Settle into the plane. Let the Biscoff cookie dissolve on your tongue. Nurse your can of ginger ale, cold and sweet. Look at the Kristina across the aisle. Do not stare as she holds the pack of ice to her face. Notice how when the light hits the ice, it refracts on the cabin wall. Smile at the tiny rainbows.
Look out the window. The fog and mist are rising over the hills. The lights of the houses are coming on. As you make your way skyward, see the river winding its way through the valley. Glory in how green it is, this place that made you. The chemical plants spit out smoke, but from here, it looks like cloud.
Stop trying to decide which is which, natural or unnatural, pollution or grandeur. Let your eyes and your mind unfocus.
From here, it is beauty.
It’s been much longer than I expected since I posted here! Sorry about the wait/thank you for your patience/hi, remember me? Since I posted last, I was in Peru for seven weeks and am now at the Ghost Ranch Retreat & Education Center in New Mexico, working in the museums until mid-October. (I just pressed send next to a lovely blue door.) Hopefully I will have some news to share about my next steps soon! I’ve been working on several other pieces simultaneously about Peru, New Mexico, and all sorts of other things and trying to finish a first draft of the novel that’s been sitting in a drawer for ages. Thanks so much for reading - it means more than I can say! -C.
Keep thinking what you’re thinking and writing what you’re writing and sharing it with those of us who love you!
Your writing transports my soul is a higher ground. Thank you