Author’s Note: This will be an overly Brontëan and self-indulgent spiritual memoir of sorts, if spiritual memoirs were written in hotel lounges on cocktail napkins stained with cigarette ashes and the outline of a glass of an amaretto sour. So, there’s language. Please feel free to skip; the next post will be on “Oppenheimer”, inter alia.
“You know how everyone’s always saying, ‘seize the moment’? I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around. You know, like the moment seizes us.”
— “Boyhood”, Richard Linklater (YT)
I live my life in a state of near-constant disappointment in authority figures, as well as in the populace writ large, and I wear this disappointment as a kind of fashion in my psyche, as if it were some vintage beret. Many people have tried to talk me out of this: all have failed. I justify this forever-put-upon attitude by saying, “Well, I’m very seldom actually angry”. It’s not that I fear being actually raging mad, but that I generally regard it with some degree of disapproval. Perpetual disappointment, to me, seems more the moral high ground for coping with a post-Edenic world.
And so, in that vein, I of course have been disappointed with many spiritual authorities throughout my life (thinking particularly of my Anglican pastor Father F, whose commitment to making my confirmation as exciting as eating a slice of twenty-seven-grain toast was a source of special disappointment and very surely contributed to my eventual ex-Anglicanization) but, even in the case of Father F, I was not angry, even though I was at the time a young teenage girl, with all the emotional highs and lows that entails. Even so. I was just disappointed.
Only two spiritual-slash-religious authority figures have ever made me feel actually personally angry. The first was an elder Boomer priest who refused me Communion on the tongue well after the “return to normal” post-COVID era, in a church named after St. Padre Pio, no less. In the narthex leaving Mass, I graciously gave him a wide enough berth because I was so enraged that I was already in my mind composing letters to his bishop holding this man personally responsible for the downfall of all society, and he stepped quite out of the way to shake my hand, clearly out of unadmitted guilt, which, upon hearing no apology forthcoming, I refused — I do not absolve you and I hope the spirit of St. Pio glowers at you over your bed at night until you are properly chastened! I wanted to say (but didn’t). The second, certainly by far the worse offender of the two, was my parish priest, who lied to me in a homily on the Feast of the Epiphany.
I didn’t uncover this lie until later, however, when I had a kind of theophany of my own.
His Dark Descending
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.— “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I’m hardly immune to religious experiences. I was a very spiritually-minded child; it complemented my imaginary flights of fancy and love of books quite well so there was no reason to discard it. At some point in my itinerant schooling journey, I wound up as a Protestant in Catholic school, which provided me very fresh fertile ground for my religious sensibilities. Although I detested the schooling, I was completely enchanted by the aura of Catholicism that permeated everything, loving religion class the best and particularly looking forward to the weekly school Mass.
Mass was a singular experience. I was no stranger to high church, going myself weekly to an Anglican parish that largely resembled the Novus Ordo rite, but something about the school church, and the Catholicism itself, gave it an air of gravitas I could perceive even at my young age. The church was always dimly lit, dark, which provided a welcome relief from the long summers in the South and only added drama to the mystique. The stained glass suffered from having its origins in the American Church’s lost era of the 60s and 70s, but I did love it as I would see the sun pass in and out of the clouds by watching the shimmering, fragmented colors change in brightness across the floor. One of my most vivid memories there is watching our priest cense the altar as my class sat on the front row of the pews. My teacher told us, in hushed tones, that our prayers were going up to God. I craned my head upward, watching for the point that the smoke from the incense seemed to disappear into the air, and trying to piece together the exact point at which God had heard our prayers.
In religion class, we were shown many videos — if you’re Catholic, you know — of dramatized renditions of historical accounts of young women receiving apparitions: The Song of Bernadette, for example. It was never made clear to me at the time that these were considered very exceptional experiences, and as far as I could tell at the age of nine from religion class, the criteria for receiving an apparition seemed to be that one be young, female, devout-minded, have no friends, and have a penchant for spending inordinate amounts of time alone. I checked all these boxes, so really it seemed only a matter of time and a little effort before I received my apparition. I would kneel on my bed (too precious for the floor) and pray on my blood-red fake crystal rosary beads with my eyes closed. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” I prayed, furiously opening up my eyes to see if the Virgin herself had appeared in my room — I was always expecting her somewhere in the vicinity of my armoire — only to find that it had not yet happened and so I closed my eyes to finish the rest of the prayer. “PrayforusnowandatthehourofourdeathAhhmen,” I quickly muttered under my breath, my eyes flashing open again to find still no Virgin before me. I had never quite planned what I would say to her; I assumed she would lead the conversation and set me on a quest that would involve sainthood and surely worldwide fame before adoring masses. Who would play me in the movie? I wondered.
I was always looking around for God, as if He were some celebrity I might happen upon if I was diligent and out-and-about enough. In college, I would almost indiscriminately attend multiple Christian student groups throughout the week: I’d pray the Divine Mercy chaplet with the Catholics, sing the good, old-fashioned hymns with the P.C.A. group, go to Vespers with the Orthodox, and rock out to the hipper music with the P.C.U.S.A. group. Streams of mercy pourin’ from His side... My hefty study Bible was worn out and marked-up from so many highlights and sermon notes scribbled in the margins, prayer requests received for passing exams and ill pets back at home.
My own home those years was, for all intents and purposes, the campus library, which sat on the top of a hill overlooking most of campus. Each night, the library closed at midnight, and I would ride, glide really, on my mountain bike down the hill back to my dormitory. At night, the campus was dark, hushed, the well-manicured trees and foliage along the windy pathway to my dorm lit by the only occasional warm orange of the sodium-vapor lamps. It was a sacred time; I was alone with my thoughts at the end of the long day. I would pray, sing hymns as I rode with the fresh night air hitting against my face. A hymn to which I often returned was “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”. There was a line at the end that always struck me — “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love, here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above”. Did I sing it with particular passion on those rides through the night because I knew, on some level, that I needed to say that, to pray that to Him Who sits above?
Because, for all those years, from the time sitting in Mass as young girl to the time I found myself hunting for God all the time and taking classes on the Old Testament and reading books and holding debates with the Calvinists, the Orthodox, the atheists and going to as many different worship services as was almost humanly possible and reading and making notes through my Bible until the cover almost fell right off — I never felt Him. I had no sense of Him as a Person, even though I fully acknowledged His existence utterly, entirely, without reservation. I was some fresh-faced hire in the mailroom, and He was on the top floor, CEO corner suite, of a very tall skyscraper. We were in the same hierarchy and I acknowledged Him as sovereign, but we were hardly grabbing a coffee in the break room together. Worse still, I’d never seen Him, never met Him, never known Him, beyond seeing a Name at the top of the interoffice memos on the company stationary, and that was the extent of my relationship, despite all my work.
And so it was one midnight, singing a hymn down the hill, that I felt that I was singing a song of love to no one at all, and the sudden ache of loneliness I felt in my heart, coupled with all the social isolation I already felt from the world around me, ringed like a deafening silence.
You know where the story is going, at this point at least, because it’s a very ordinary response to a very ordinary arc. After college, I slowly and largely unconsciously fell into a kind of generalized and extremely unexamined agnosticism. As I migrated to a hip, happening city, jettisoning some of the social restrictions that come with Christianity allowed me to explore all sorts of new things, edginess, a vague contempt for the rural political right, and the culture of my contemporaries for the first time, so this was a choice that was almost immediately rewarded with social approbation by those whose affection I’d been lacking my whole life long, my peers. Breaking into this world at long last was like leaving Topeka for Tokyo: everything was glittery, technicolor, full of excitement, and it was difficult to even imagine ever leaving it.
My religious sensibilities could never hide for long, though, even against the long-sought after approval of my peers, and so they in time bubbled back to the surface. Eventually, I got it together enough to find myself into the world of meditation and Buddhism. I checked out from the library centuries-old texts written by Tibetan monks; I listened to Daniel Ingram; I got a zafu and a zabuton. I read The Three Pillars, The Mind Illuminated, Suzuki, Shambala: The Way of the Warrior, Crazy Wisdom, Pema Chödrön. I sat in Zen centers and on my zafu for many hours, journaling the length of my sits and trying to work my way up and up to that blessed “no-mind”, worked on a koan, got myself up to fourth jhana on laying the floor, gazed at candle flames, took long meditative baths in total darkness. I am not aware of a flavor of meditation that I didn’t cycle through in this period. I was still looking for something, though, beyond this reality we see daily, convinced there was a secret behind it all I didn’t know. If I was being honest, though? Perhaps I was not looking for something at all. Perhaps I really still wanted to have an encounter with Someone.
Eventually — thank God — I grew up a little more and finally found my way into the Holy Roman Catholic Church that had impressed itself upon me so much in my youth. It didn’t come easy, and I resented a little losing the specialness that came with being a syncretic Buddhist. Now I was just a boring Christian again; Catholic, even worse. I would gain no social points at all with this choice, but it was the only one that made any sense to me and I could hardly practice anything as personal and meaningful to me as religion without it making sense in my core.
With my arrival into the metaphorical space of Rome, I finally started getting somewhere at long, long last. I started having religious experiences on rare occasion, and I attributed this to finally meeting the Person of Jesus in the Eucharist — and I would be remiss not to mention the very important help of the Virgin Mother, who never did appear to me but gave me many things far more meaningful instead.
There was something capital-R-Real Catholicism offered me, something tangible. There were icons and statues and anointing oil and rosaries and Our Lady of Lourdes lampshades and Holy Water and St. Christopher visor clips and the list went on and on and hardly stopped. I could get my arms around it, I could hold it, have it. I started feeling from time to time what the saints call “consolation”; these feelings of almost rapture and intense love for God. He felt so close in the moments, as if I could almost reach out and touch the hem of His garment. For the very first time in my life, I felt like I was having an actual relationship with Someone Who loved me and maybe even wanted me to love Him back. These were rare moments, but frequent enough to lead me on. I could — and did — love a Person now. I had moved beyond, in a sense, knowing a lot about God to knowing Him personally, at least to some degree. My faith and commitment grew deeper and deeper every Triduum that passed from the one in which I had stood in front of the parish and officially become Catholic.
I thought that there was all there was to the spiritual life. My trajectory seemed straight ahead of me: I’d grow older and wiser and I’d love God more, just like this, in this way. I’d keep praying the rosary every day, sprinkling in novenas as needed for special requests. It would all be very ordinary, just as I had come to be accustomed in my relationship with the courts above.
But that wasn’t true.
In the Space Beyond Words
“Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at the bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry. “it’s alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth, and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power through which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God”!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything.”
— Miracles by C.S. Lewis
It all happened when I had an occasion to visit a friend in another city. This friend is one of these extremely intelligent types, many standard deviations above the mean in IQ, absurdly well-read, and strangely also somehow simultaneously possesses the disarming quality of being rather kindhearted, a characteristic which, despite the fact that the chasm between our levels of intelligence and attendant grasp on the world feels almost unfathomable to me at times, seems to dispose him to act as if this is just no big deal and he quite understands that not everyone can be as intelligent and well-read as he is and he would hardly hold that against anyone. We get along well in part because he lets me ask him many questions and then answers them in such a way that illumines my understanding while very generously minimizing any reaction that would suggest he might consider me a sort of female Forrest Gump.
Was it because he is so different? Was it being in a new place? Was it something about where I sat in relation to the Earth’s magnetic field? The angle of the sun in the sky over the city at midsummer? It’s difficult to parse out why this happened to me there, then, and not anywhere else, at any other time. We visited over lunch and I was running him through questions about politics, philosophy, religion. It wasn’t anything particularly remarkable on my part, but as we worked through the conversation, I somehow found myself aware of something else — Someone Else — parallel to the conversation. Was it something that he said? I don’t know. All of a sudden, I was suddenly aware of this sense that I had completely, totally, abjectly failed in apprehending God. That I had been too obsessed with words, with knowledge, with all the things that could be spoken or articulated. I had acted as if I could know God in the same way I could know a book. The entire experience ran at a different, more meta level in my mind than the level at which I was having the conversation, in the same sense that one can continue to hold a conversation while also being aware of the weather or the time. I didn’t say anything, of course. It’s already embarrassing and socially shameful enough to be a Christian as it is, without adding to it (as I now have) confessing also to being the sort of Christian who has a religious experience over a plate of pork loin and roasted red bell peppers. I mean — I know how it sounds. But I also know how it was.
It was exactly as Lewis describes in Miracles: I’d come to — or maybe better to say, been forced upon, as it didn’t feel at all natural — some awareness in my mind that there was a burglar in the hall when I’d been playing at a game, that there was Someone Else breathing right next to me unexpectedly. It was far past a feeling, or a word spoken by the Holy Spirit in the mind — no, all of that is cheap theater compared to this. It was like a piece of my awareness had been yanked straight out of our world and into the source code underneath it. It was an abyss, but worse — an abyss with a Face.
And perhaps, I realized later, this is what René Girard talks about, the horror of seeing the Innocent Victim, but alive, resurrected from the very crimes we committed in killing Him. To know that is terrifying. It is knowledge one wants to immediately run away from, as fast as possible. Jonathan Pageau’s comments here echoed this perfectly:
“And it’s weird because then you see in Scripture, right, it talks about ‘the lamb that was sacrificed before the foundation of the world’. So the Cross is actually revealing something — it’s not just an answer to sin; it’s revealing a very deep mystery which is at the very origin of Creation itself. Timothy Patitsas has a wonderful image in his book [The Ethics of Beauty]. He’s speculating, obviously, but his speculation is quite powerful.
He has this image, where when Adam took the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and he was able to see the Tree of Life. It worked, right, if you take the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then you have access to the Tree of Life. Then when he came to the Tree of Life, he saw the Cross, and he saw Christ on the Cross and he couldn’t handle it. It was way too much. That’s not what he thought he would see there, and that’s one of the reasons why he freaked out and covered himself and ran away basically, because it was just too much.”
Leaving, I had to drive down the side of a mountain, no less, because symbolism happens. I wanted to throw my head against the dashboard. How could I be so stupid? Of course. Of course. I’d been on an actual, literal mountaintop. Damn it, Jonathan Pageau, why did you have to tell me? Why did I have to know? Why did I ever click over to “The Symbolic World” on YouTube? I thought it was some fun, nerdy hobby at the time. No, not at all. Now I was saddled with knowledge, and all the wrong kind of knowledge — the knowledge about what was happening to me, what would continue to happen to me. I could see all the steps of my own deconstruction in the wake of almighty God, because what else was I going to do? What other choice was I going to have? I was like an oncologist who wakes up one morning and feels a lump on the back of her neck. I knew exactly where this was going, the treatment, the therapy, the medication, the fault line, right here, that would forever demarcate my life.
A memory came: my parish priest, Father C, giving his Epiphany homily. Father C is, without a doubt, the nicest priest I have ever met, a sort of human yellow Labrador Retriever, or maybe a slightly thinner, mid-40s Santa Claus, complete with warm eyes, a very light beard, and a soft but pleasant face that is always wearing a gentle smile. As the memory flashed back, I wanted nothing more than to rage at him, scream at him. I was beyond disappointed. I was actually angry. I’d been lied to.
I’d always loved — then! before! — the Feast of the Epiphany so I always paid the homilies on it extra attention. That day, he wore the dark gold vestments traditional to the feast, pacing back and forth in front of the altar as he expounded on Matthew 2. He’d taken a fairly standard approach to this passage, focusing on the three wise men from the East who had gone to see Jesus in Bethlehem and “returned to their home country by another way”. “What it means to go home another way is that, when you meet Jesus, nothing is ever quite the same!” Father C had said in a slightly boppy, happy way. “You’re changed forever!” he chirped, grinning and slightly pumping his fist in the air.
No, Father C, I seethed in my mind, all too aware of the damn mountain as the elevation lowered on the drive down. It was never like that. It can’t ever be like that. My life didn’t feel “changed” in the sense that I had won some moderate four or five digit sum of money in the lottery, an event that might make me grin and pump my fist in the air. Not at all and far from that. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach; like the air had totally been taken out of my lungs. My entire way of seeing the world and understanding it in my mind had turned upside down. I could hardly think past the next moment. How would I write again? What was I even going to write about? I’d not only felt something, I’d seen something horrifying to me — a world beyond language, an Ultimate Reality that underpinned everything and I hadn’t known. I simply hadn’t known. Someone Else had crept into the room next to me while we were talking. No, Father C. It isn’t like that at all. My life isn’t changed now. My life is completely fucked up now.
So I found myself eventually sitting on the plane on the tarmac at six o’clock in the morning, literally weeping, tears streaming down my face, for reasons I was completely unable to articulate with any degree of clarity at all, even to myself. My inner critic, really the most vibrant part of my personality, immediately sprung into action:
“Gawd, Kristin! Stop! You’re a grown woman. Why are you crying? It’s not like anyone died. Get a fucking grip. Jesus Christ.”
The flight attendant concerned me; she was in her 50s, with bleached blonde hair, heavy black eyeliner and mascara, and had that sweet, caring, high-estrogen face. She looked too maternal for comfort. In my peripheral vision, I could see her attention flicker over to me. What if she asked me what was wrong? If I was okay? I’d sooner scramble out the emergency exit door and hitch myself to a baggage cart. I love nothing more than to bolt and run away as fast as possible from my problems; perhaps I could find a flight to Hawaii, Fiji, the happy isles of Oceania, somewhere warm, tropical, muddy. I could be a perpetual nomad. A fugitive from God, I envisioned myself in the shelter of some far-flung tiki bar, donning a wide-brimmed hat and grotesquely oversized sunglasses that would make my eyes as large and keen as a fly’s. Try and catch me now, Jesus. I’d order a lot of piña coladas — “and pour it heavy, please,” I’d say to the bartender with a forced smile as I slipped him a folded $10 bill, U.S. — not so many drinks that I couldn’t run if need be, but enough to forget what I was running away from.
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. Don’t remind me that I’ve run out of words, please. The words were all I had, and now they’re gone. I’d seen, felt, perceived — whatever you want to say — that there was a place beyond language, my precious, beloved words, and He — He! — was there. What was I going to do with that information?
What if she asked me why I was crying, if I’d gone to a funeral? What would I say?
No, I was just eating lunch, glancing up at this art on the wall, and then something he said made me think about Strauss and I realized suddenly, what if everything in this world is esoteric because it hides the horrifying reality of God? And what if God keeps Himself so secret because He knows what He’s like? We beg Him to reveal Himself to us, but no one really wants that. We don’t know what we’re asking for, but He does — He alone knows the weight of it. All my life I thought I wanted to know —
I’d become a nameless, cautionary figure in a book of fairy tales, an ingenue skipping off into the deep, dark woods carrying a picnic basket in the crook of my arm, all because I was too curious and looking for knowledge. The little girl comes to meet a monster in the woods, only to much belatedly discover that the monster is her. This is what happens to little girls who ask too many questions, mothers would scold their daughters, pointing to the illustration on the page.
Were the Magi on the road to Bethlehem like me? These were men who sought knowledge, who had studied the stars, who looked for a map by which they could understand reality. Had I, like them, been cursed by Adam and Eve, to seek knowledge, stupidly not following the story all the way through, not knowing that I too would want to run away and hide from the Lord stepping through the Garden? Or, even worse still, as my hand reached up for the apple, I’d come to see Christ, strung up on the Tree of Life, nailed there by my own hands, my own desire to get along, to be accepted, to avoid shame, guilt, blame, responsibility. But here He was, not a stepping stone on the road to knowing reality, but the very foundation of Reality, of Life, staring back at me.
And perhaps the Magi expected to be validated in finding the Christ Child. They’d figured it out, after all. They’d solved the puzzle of the arrival of the Messiah with all their hard-won knowledge. For certain, I too wanted to know that I had discovered God by putting in the work — or I wanted God to know and validate me for having worked so hard and been so exceptionally smart, diligent, curious, intelligent in finding Him. It isn’t like that at all, though, and I doubt it was for the Magi, either.
The knowledge-seeker isn’t validated in the Presence of God, because the Presence of God is the Innocent Victim, and the Innocent Victim does nothing less than to tear apart all your self-constructed understanding of who you are, who you have been, and who you will be. There’s almost nothing left when He’s done with that, let alone your knowledge.
We began to taxi away from the gate. I couldn’t escape looking out the window at the city. I was leaving the mountaintop, and all the terrain that surrounded her. No more, I knew, wiping my eyes and gathering myself, could I escape God, even given all my foolish fantasies. I was a Christian with a charismatic bent; even as I sat in this airplane seat, crying, I gripped a rosary in my palm. I’d already gone to the lake one spring day, some years prior, and honestly and fully surrendered my life over to the Father, which was, of course, exactly how I had ended up on that mountain. The days of my wandering heart were long in the past. I had gone too far down the path to Him to turn back now. There was no running away in store for me, only deeper and deeper surrender to this Ultimate Reality. I wouldn’t decide for myself who I was anymore: He would tell me and, in this relationship, somehow lure me deeper into this terrifying abyss where I might come to change, come to repent, come to be not what I had imagined myself to be, but who He had created me to be.
I’d asked, again and again, to find God, and He had answered. I’d come to a kind of new knowledge, but certainly not any that I’d gotten for myself, only the kind that had been directly given to me, and the kind of knowledge that evades good description. I’d be able to write again, but only in the shadow of knowing the ultimate emptiness of my words against the Logos Himself.
The plane gathered speed and took off, the wheels tucking in under the body as the wings caught the air, sailing up into cloudless, cotton-candy-blue sky. We headed out west for a moment, over the ocean. The surface of the water glittered in the early morning sunlight, drawing my eye downward to it, as if it were taunting me in a reminder of all the secrets that I didn’t know. The pilot then gently arced our course around to the east, toward our destination. How many times had I journeyed back home East from the West? Too many times to count. This time was different, like one short line in a gospel that belies all the heaviness of its unspoken meaning: I went home by another way.
Then I open up and see
The person falling here is me
A different way to beAaah, la-a-la-aaah
La la laaaa
La-a-la-aah
La-ah ah aaah
— “Dreams”, The Cranberries (YT)
Thanks for this. I relate on so many levels! I've been Orthodox for 11 years and I feel stuck in the Narthex. I'm always more comfortable on the threshold looking in. I last about 20 minutes in a service and then I start getting very very anxious. What do you make of this situation? I'd rather commune with the Logos in a field or by a stream.