It's All Saints day today. The saints are wandering around like wraiths. But who knows what lies beneath the shadows? The saints exclaim in ecstasy, proclaiming they know the way to heaven, but the truth of it is, they just deny it all and transcend into the pain of denial and self-flagellation. I know because I was one. And I know because today I am a sinner.
It started a long time ago, in Ephesus. The days were long and I was alone. A long day, a long finger of sunlight hit the floor, and I realized among the marbles of my house I was entirely alone. And I felt a stirring in my bones, a call to something I didn't understand. So I got up, and I followed the apostles and the anchorites and I gave away all my possessions and made my home in a small cave, my neighbors scorpions, my friends the bats. I welcomed the cold of night to fill my soul with something besides the vastness of an empty land.
And so I found a peace in all the rigor of it, in the practice of it, and the stillness of it. I exorcised my rage, the rage and the stirring in me, by wrestling with my demons in the night, denying my desires in the day, by calling them all by name and cursing them.
One day she came upon me though. I was not welcoming, but she starved and needed a place to lay her head. I offered her my pillow, and wrestled with my blackest thoughts when I saw the graceful turn of her ankle. Quelling them, dwelling in them. I offered her my meagre fare, and she accepted with the humblest thanks.
She bore a boy that winter. Her reason to come to me at first, as I had assumed. She was a lone girl in a hard country, she tried to tell me how she had made herself so, but I would not listen. I refused to touch or help her until the final moment, when I held her fast and the boy came to the world. She nearly died, and I nearly let her. My saintly creed let me not offer her help, and but lay words of condemnation on her, and so I did, but my heart was heavy and the words softly mumbled, like words of love.
It was a year past, another, and still she would not move forward. Every day I prayed God to remove her from my side, to remove her warmth and all that I desired. But she persisted, and I cursed her presence as a devil, cursed it throughout the night, with soft remonstrances of wrongdoing in the tones of a father cooing to his child.
Then one day, the boy fell ill. And it was with a heart rent from top to bottom that I watched him writhe in pain with fever, struggle for breath. We had nothing for him. Only in my other world would I have been able to save him, this devil, this angel, this blessing, this curse. And I watched him all the night, telling God in total prostration that it was for him, for him, for him to decide. Until in one moment, a finger of morning light touched me and the silence told me that it was not for him, it was for me.
I rose and I took my purse of gold, the one I had laid aside for a final offering to the church with my burial, and I took the girl and the child, and we made our way back to the city and to the medicine that could cure him. And I chose to turn away from a life of saints in that moment, to instead tread the harder path, the path of offering love and life and joy to those about me, to offer it to myself. I opened the shutters of my anger and let it escape into the daylight, mended the roof of my home, and lived there with the waves of fortune buffeting me as they do so many others. I hid no more.
And so I sit upon this steeple top, a spirit on All Saints day, watching the flitting saints run hither, thither, bringing judgment, bringing miracles, while I myself enter into a family's small room and make their fire burn a little higher. Today is the day of All Sinners, too.
1 comment:
gorgeous.
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