a sacred day in holy hell
Ever since I’ve settled into what I call a Holy Hell, it’s been one long fever dream, tossing and turning with longing for the distant past, the divine presence, the delicate prayers that used to ring in my ears - fragile voices joined in unison, echoing through the pews filled with the quietly devoted and quickly dying.
“The Lord be with you,” said the priest, a woman with the most gentle voice and a fierce love of Scotch.
“And also with you,” we all responded.
We would continue with spoken choruses of prayers, prayers that I now mutter alone, one lone voice. A small voice, a slurred voice, a sorry voice. I feel a deep ache when I remember that chorus of voices that still rings out on a Sunday morning somewhere in Georgia.
Their names are scrawled in my personal copy of The Book of Common Prayer, alongside their farewell messages.
“Look in the mirror, see Christ, and know you are loved. We are all praying for you ~ Deacon Marty.” The man with a solemn face that would often break into a warm smile when speaking with me, the man who always elbowed me and muttered that I should become a deacon instead of a priest. I would smile shyly and shake my head, gesturing to my priest, my spiritual mother, as if to say “I want to be just like her.” The woman who changed my life.
(my name proved too strange and foreign for most)
I have felt such a closeness to you. I am proud of you and love and miss you. ~Julie Wolfe.” The woman with a deep southern drawl and a heart generous enough to do anything for me...not because I asked her to, but because she desired to. Pulling my priest aside, she said, “I want to pay for her to go on the retreat with us.” The weekend that changed my life.
“You were made God’s own not today but at the beginning of time. You were made my own the day you walked into my life - I love you and am excited about every one of your days to come. God Bless - Love, Dee.” My priest punctuated her name with a small cross. The mythic symbol that changed me.
I lumbered into work this morning in a daze, dragging behind me the recent months full of loneliness and the recent hours devoid of sleep. Outside the window next to my desk was darkness and rain, which I loathed until the thunder started. I felt my body start to relax in response, simultaneously building energy as the caffeine kicked in.
I was approaching lucidity when Jill wandered in, bringing with her waves of light and her ever peaceful presence. Like smoldering sage, she cleanses the room of negative energy. With the loveliest smile she tells me that her family had gone that past Sunday to meet her, the one I always gush about with bright eyes, the Episcopal church; Jill tells me that she was everything I made her out to be.
Sacred. All the ritual that the human heart craves but with none of the dogma that selfish men create.
Safe. A space devoid of fear, yet thriving on questions and doubt and inexplicable mystery.
Special. Jill struggled with the words because none of them really work. The Divine surely loves parallels and patterns, because just as no human has been able to describe The Divine despite all of their holy text and myths, no one can truly describe those spaces in which the Divine Essence is so deeply felt. It’s always indescribable,
“We want to start going as a family, and we want to take you with us.”
For a young and isolated mystic with no community (or car) to speak of, these words are the sweetest sound since that chorus of voices.
Whenever The Spirit makes Her presence known to me, my Spirit opens its eyes wide and inclines its ears in response. It sees and hears Her in everything. It sees Her in the puddles of rainwater I walk through to get that afternoon’s meal, it hears Her in Duncan Trussell’s recorded ramblings about his unconventional enlightenment and peculiar encounters with gurus.
It felt her presence so strongly when a strange old man who no one at the salon had seen before now came in with an envelope, saying someone gave it to him to deliver to my co-worker. He refused to reveal the sender, and in response to the suspicious look in my eyes (impossible to control after years of paranoia-inducing Criminal Minds binges), he simply said, “It’s not a bomb or anything.” He leaves...and my co-worker, who has spent weeks trying not to break down in front of clients due to the crushing weight of severe financial difficulties, nervously opened the suspicious envelope to find a cashier’s check for $5,000.00 that claimed to be from Santa Clause himself. She froze, and her rambunctious friend/current client, sitting in front of her with a head full of foils and chemicals, loudly exclaimed, “Whose dick did you have to suck to get that?” I burst into laughter, as did my Spirit because it feels Her presence most clearly when the sacred and the profane collide at just the right moment.
I had to retreat to the break room to hide the fact that I was crying. Her presence was too strong for me to bear. For months She had wandered in and out of my awareness, appearing one moment and disappearing the next. Now I was surrounded by Her, enclosed in Her. As that great mystic Saint Julian wrote regarding what The Christ revealed to her in deathbed visions (or as she called them, showings), "For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed." I had laid in my spiritual deathbed for months, devoid of showings other than that of the holy but lonesome space between heaven and hell (I relate well to the prophets who got all of the shitty and painful revelations), but I, like precious Julia, had life and spirit breathed back into me and felt clad in the Divine Essence. Enclosed.
When I had regained my composure and returned to work, a client asked for a glass of red wine. As I carried it to her, I felt like my priest, my lovely priest who embodies The Christ’s teaching to be as innocent as a dove and as cunning as a serpent. Eucharistic theology is so deep in my bones that it took everything in me to not cross that client with the cup and in gentle recitation say, “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation. Amen.”
And my Spirit laughed at this. So did She.
