A Miracle is a Change of Perception

I have this thing I have been doing lately I call them holy holidays. I just take a day off from life, whatever it is that I fill up my days with that I call life and I go to a place that is considered sacred. Perhaps it is an outdoor labyrinth, or a mid week healing service at a Catholic church where many come to reflect on a deceased holy man queues up in Rome for Canonization.

These holy holidays are not typical Sabbath Sunday practices.  They are excursions taken to tend to the weedy landscape of my mind and soul. Now in retirement my life is formless and aimless. Often I am a lost pilgrim seeking refuge and connection.

These events have been a solace for me.

 I do not schedule them but intuit when my soul is in need of replenishment.

When hungry I go seeking.

On a golden Wednesday autumn day I went the friars chapel. It was full up of congregants.

I could tell by the stir of my agitated heart that tears were waiting a spill. The music had not even begun and already this nameless sorrow wants to reconcile itself with my heart.

 I have not yet become wise. Wise woman always have tissue at the ready. Wise woman accommodate for tears by being prepared.  Eternally in denial or just a bad girl scout I have nothing on which to blow my nose.

Crying is hard. Crying and not blowing is the worst.

At least I have evolved into the knowing ”It’s okay to cry.”

There are lots of little old ladies at this place. I may be demographically one of them, but these are the sweet types whose bag matches their shoes and they put a rinse on their white hair so that it looks like they have snow halos. These are women who are prepared to cry. They have cried much and come prepared.

(Tears are like tooth fairies and Christmas; it is all about the surprise.)

Just adown the pew from me sits a lady whose erect posture tells me she is all about form, I am certain she has a tissue.

I bend past our seatmate a very elderly man that seems her partner. (In the rulebook of my mind men do not carry tissues but have hankies, used hankies).

I whisper. Church whispers always seem louder somehow. She roots in her purse and pulls me out a perfect little Kleenex.  A comradeship, a women with Kleenex in her purse understand a woman who needs to cry.

I chat some pleasantries.

“Shush!” says her husband as he glares at me. I have violated some sanctimonious code of church ethics.

(Maybe this is why I church shop on weekdays and can never quite figure out which box to check under religion. I have been shushed away from to many homes, hearts, and altars.)

Sitting there in the pew I next to the crotchety old man who chastised me I go to my safe heaven of my clangy armor of character defects. I begin to judge him. I am thinking ill thoughts about him, wishing him ill will.

 The organist begins to play the familiar refrains of hymn.

Tears take hold and they spill themselves. The dark heart is not heavy.

The shusher man talks out loudly many times during the service, “What did he say?”

It seems he cannot hear. I notice his hearing aid protruding like a growth from his hairy ear. He did not wish to silence me, but he lives forever in a place where all sound is noise. My chatting just reminds him of the cloister of his silence.

Softened by this knowledge, I sing the refrains of the Mary hymns loudly, in worship. Glad for the freedoms, of spilled tears, and the miracle of my change in perception regarding my seat mate and my unburdened heart. I settle in hoping the service alters the desert landscape that drew me hear on a fall afternoon.

The brothers in their brown robes mingle giving the microphone to the congregants so that they can claim their miracles, express their gratitude or ask for divine intervention of some looming disease or life trauma.

The church glows more golden in the autumn light. All have born witness and they ask us to close with the Lord’s Prayer.

“Our Father …”

Now I am slightly agitated, in a quandary should I hold the hand of my seatmate or not? I am no longer angry but how much can a heart expand in one day?

I swallow hard my pride. I take his hand. Or does he take mine?

 It is spent, his flesh worn from time but lifeblood’s pulse warms his palm. We are palm to palm. Intimate with some unspoken thing. His hold is firm and fast.

The prayer proceeds.

I have said the words of the Our Father so often that they can be perfunctory, redundant. This day though as we come to the words “ forgive us our trespasses,”

he talks to me. Not in words but in his grip of my hand. A radiant heat courses from his palm to mine. He asks me to forgive him.  I can feel this even though he does not speak. Forgive me the shush, my need to exert little controls in a world in which I has so little power. Forgive my envy of your hearing, and jealousy that my wife speaks to you but I no longer can hear her sweet voice.

The prayer ends, “As we forgive those who trespass against us…” And a same fire flees through my flesh to his, my flaws, judgments, the ways I fall away from love, turn away are redeemed now. And that day I understand while holding hands with an old guy in the church the refrain of the prayer that says, “for thine is the kingdom the power and I have an instant glimmer of God’s glory. Amen