Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (31 page)

I entered through the wide-open doors, saying hello to all the faces, shaking hands, feeling the ebullience of participation. I walked down the aisle toward a middle pew on the right. Along the way, I was handed an Order of Worship booklet emblazoned with the university’s crimson seal. Compared with what I was used to back home, everything felt so elegant, so tasteful and discreet. Even the paper—dense card stock—was several steps up from what was used at First Baptist.

I sat nervously until the congregation was signaled to stand; then I stood. A few minutes later, we all took our seats again. It happened more than once while a chamber music ensemble played, and then we joined together to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” I felt like a guest at an expensive restaurant, excited and suddenly, for no good reason, self-conscious. I’d done this a thousand times over through eighteen years of Sundays. I’d risen and sat, sung and
listened, bowed my head and whispered affirmation on cue my entire life, never once concerned about getting anything wrong. (Well—I’d visited a Catholic church once or twice with friends, and felt nervous then, but that was different. The Catholics, according to my parents, were too caught up in ritual; they didn’t know how to come to God without the assistance of a priest. There was nothing too important to worry over where the Mass was concerned because, at least according to my parents’ logic, in comparison with a Catholic, I was the more spiritually evolved.)

I looked up at the fine architecture, the high-paned windows and the Corinthian columns. The pews were pristine white with mahogany trim and looked as though they had been carved, one by one, by some master artisan. At First Baptist, the pews were rustic oak upholstered with orange burlap, as if we were all congregated in somebody’s 1970s recreation room. Sitting in Harvard’s Memorial Church, I felt what I felt in so many of Harvard’s various places: like a person of privilege, of “good breeding”—or rather, like someone pretending to be. Once I was settled in enough to forget all of these thoughts, what I heard more than anything else was what wasn’t there: the absent voices of the two elderly sisters ever present at First Baptist, the ones whose singing always scraped to the tippy-top of their register and screeched through to the end of every hymn like roller skates with metal wheels.

At First Baptist, everything was familiar, a simple dance that had worn grooves into the floorboards, but this new series of movements was almost Byzantine. I followed the other churchgoers as best I could, keeping quiet during the responses and at the tail end of the Lord’s Prayer, since I wasn’t sure which closing was preferred. There was something in Latin, the language that always reached me like a reprimand of my public school education, a reminder that I had not been born into the kind of advantage
that so many of my peers had, a reminder that no matter how smart I was or how apt I had become at utilizing the opportunities I’d been given (yes, Mr. Catania, I would by then have been willing to concede that a great many opportunities were given as much as earned), it was luck above all else that had landed me there.

When the sermon finally began, I was hopeful that some part of the message would signal our proximity to what I’d been craving, something other than run-of-the-mill religion with its white-bearded (and, unless I was trying very hard to see him as otherwise, white) God and His threats of punishment. Something that didn’t seem designed to lure me in with promises of simplifying my existence when what I favored, I told myself, was complexity. Something I wouldn’t feel compelled to apologize for or outright hide. Something that might bridge the divide between the God people always described and the one I thought I knew or wanted to know.

The reverend was black, like Pastor Gainey at First Baptist. His wasn’t the earthy hardscrabble blackness of Alabama or even Chicago. It was aristocratic. Like that of the free blacks living in antebellum America, certain of whom also happened to be slave owners. He was daintily refined. His voice was slow and melodic. There was an elegant cadence by which his words arrived—a few at a time and then a pause, a few more and again a pause—as if he were leading us along a trail dotted with petits fours. He made a point about how God was much more interesting than the Bible makes Him out to be.
Yes
, I thought,
yes, this is why I’ve come
. And about how the Gospel was an admonition to a fearless kind of submission, an invitation to a new kind of freedom. At that glimmer of paradox, a bolt of excitement flashed through my mind. What if, sitting there just then, I found myself truly caught up in belief? How would it feel inside a future like that?

In my last months attending First Baptist, I’d used most Sunday
sermons as a time to settle into thoughts I never had sufficient privacy to mull over at home. Those times, too, I’d find my imagination racing toward a future, building a model of what my life might look like in five, ten, twenty years. I’d imagine the city where I’d have settled and the home I’d come back to at night. (I’d pieced its various rooms together from my mother’s Spiegel catalogs and the advertising inserts in the Sunday paper. Sheets and towels, rugs and candles, dishes and plush couches and ottomans that added up to something sumptuous and mature.) I’d imagine walking through each of my rooms, feeling the beautiful objects collected and arranged for my own comfort. Always there was a faceless man just a room away, reading on the couch or taking a shower, cooking us pasta, filling glasses of wine, and like the couples in all the catalogs and magazines, the ones whose happiness and chemistry seem to be held in place by all the carefully chosen furnishings, that man and I would end up sitting cross-legged on the floor, laughing, leaning against one another with the effortless ease one takes as shorthand for true intimacy.

At first, I forgot to notice how tenuous my grasp upon the minister’s voice had become. Already, without sensing it happening, I’d taken two, five, fifty steps into my ready-made future, that momentous day’s sermon now nothing more than a cadence, traffic outside a city window. How warm, the room I’d built in my mind. So habitable and real it caused my breathing to quicken. Using my own recent sexual experiences as a template, I made my way toward the part in my fantasy where the man and I led one another to the big paisley bed heaped with pillows.

The minister and all the other churchgoers were by then tiny specks out on the horizon, sailing happily on the current of his homily, and I was left behind wandering circles in my mind.

From as far back as I could remember, I’d taken it as a matter of course that the death of my body would mark the beginning of something else. Sometimes, I tried to work it out in my head like a riddle:
I am not a soul, but I possess one. When I die, I will become what I possess…
But then the noise of this world always rushed back in to convince me of the here and now that required my attention, my eager participation. And just like that, the soul would vanish. That portentous Sunday was no exception, though when you believe in the soul, the idea of it never stays gone for very long.

When I was three and riding back from a doctor’s appointment, I looked up at my mother, with the sun on her face and the calm certainty she seemed to move and live within, and said, “Mommy, I want Jesus to come into my heart.” It was the received language of the Sunday school classes I had grown used to attending week after week, but what I took it to mean was this:
I feel filled with love. I’m not afraid. I want a name for what this means. I need something to call it
. I didn’t think to wonder if I was speaking in metaphors. My mother pulled over and let me say a prayer, and whatever it was felt real, as if she and I really were in the presence of a third being who had agreed never to lose track of us. Maybe we made it ourselves, but when I was by myself, it was still there. It was like being assured I was part of a story that, no matter what else, would never cease to keep me in its sights.

It would have been nice not to have had to care about anything other than the private certainty that God belonged to me. It would have been nice not to have had to worry about whether my believing was visible to others. But there were lots of things it would have been nice to have that I didn’t. I was reminded of that fact many times each day.

Left behind by the homily and miles away from the other
churchgoers, whose minds, at least from where I sat, appeared to be actively trailing the minister’s words, hearing them and chuckling or murmuring, or merely nodding to themselves as the meaning sunk in, I realized I had no idea what the story was that I was a part of. I didn’t yet know what was important to me or what would remain important years down the line, after the thrill of experiencing these first freedoms, and the weight of living with what they brought, had passed. But I wanted to believe I was right when I told myself that the God I’d learned to believe in so long ago was still there, bigger and more real than I had imagined, and that He was long-suffering, abiding, that whatever He was would blaze bright and undeniably near when the thing that led me to Him was not obligation or fear. I had no idea what that thing would be. Illness? It had intensified my mother’s relationship with God but only slightly. Abject circumstances? It was hard for me to envision a scenario in which I would allow myself to hit bottom. I felt too cautious, too conscientious for that; such a descent would seem to require an act of concerted effort. Besides, no one in my family had ever hit bottom, and they’d probably see to it that I didn’t, either. Maybe, if a powerful relationship to God were to happen for me at all, it would happen the way so many of the things in the Bible happen: by means of some unforeseeable mystery, upon a
day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of Heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone
.

Stepping back out into the late-morning daylight, I was, if decidedly untransformed, nevertheless bathed in an earthly peace. The Yard brimmed with human traffic. The clouds maintained their distance, silent and luminous with their faraway, patient knowledge.

THE WOMAN AT THE WELL

I
spent my first summer home from college jobless; the application I filed at the public library never panned out, and even the bookstores in town—the two at the local shopping mall specializing in mass-market paperbacks—lacked the need for my part-time help. So I read. I watched television. I wrote letters. I ran around town with my mother, the running around we’d always done: shopping for groceries, “junking” through thrift shops, trying on clothes at department stores. The fact that we did the same old things together made it seem like she was her same old self: healthy, taking care of everyone else, never requiring more than a tiny favor, a quick hand at something or other. And, with the exception of a new sense of relief—more than relief, of joy—at having survived the surgery and lived the many months with no new dark spots spreading like moss on her insides, she may as well have been identical to how she was before any of us learned she was sick. No, after the worry that gripped our home when I’d left that fall—worry I’d only partly been able to internalize, being so selfishly and single-mindedly fixated upon reaching the promised land of college—I returned home that summer with the distinct impression that it was
I
who had undergone the most drastic of changes.

Preposterous as it now seems, the impression had something subtle and unexamined to do with my mother’s wish that I move
within a cloud of hope or, more accurately, of ignorance to the stakes she was gambling on. Certainly, I knew then that cancer kills, but she told me over and over again that her cancer was gone, that God had healed her. And because those were the things I wanted to believe, I believed them.

Soaring over the country in the cabin of a 747 only to touch down in the strip-mall suburbs, I felt like Icarus on the descent. I’d felt it after flying home at Christmas, too, when I’d first seen my hometown through changed eyes. There had been so much I wanted to apologize for, so much I wanted to tidy up or correct, if only to protect my own sense of where I had come from. The plain, cookie-cutter houses. The acres and acres of parking lot. And oh, the people. How many of them now seemed dim and fat, trudging along behind shopping carts piled with products that seemed to confirm an utter lack of imagination and taste?

In the back of my mind that summer was a constant awareness that in three months’ time I would be describing these very days and nights to my new friends back at school—characterizing them as quaint or pathetic, editing the details just enough so as to carve out a strategic distance between me and what was beginning to feel like my old life. Without my deciding it, an air of supercilious contempt crept into much of what I saw about the place I came from. Mostly, I was lamenting the absence of freedom. The freedom to come and go as I pleased, with whom I chose and for reasons I did not need to explain. I missed the thrill of having places to be and the ease of passage that felt a universe away from life in Fairfield, where nothing and no one was knocking down my door and where I’d have been hard-pressed—carless and unemployed as I was—to get anywhere even if they had been.