I met Mary Magdelaine in the emergency room as I was bleeding out from a miscarriage. Shivering, curled up into a ball, she brought me a heated blanket and held my hand. Nurse scrubs, nurse white shoes, and a white arm with Irish freckles. I never saw her face as they scraped me out again, the fourth time but not the last, but I heard her voice crooning to me, a lilt, a lullaby. Shhhh, it’s ok love, rest easy, this all comes out right in the end, and for that moment, I believed her. Who else but the Holy Sinner could comfort me in the dark?
I met Buddha a few times when life got brittle, everything cracking, the ice, the sidewalk, the plaster, my heart. He showed up to shovel the snow from my driveway without being asked, never rang the bell so I could say thank you, just shoveled and shoveled as if to say, keep at it. It gets better. It gets easier. Try not to care if it’s snow or sunshine. Ditch your attachments, honey. That’s the ticket.
And Jesus. Don’t even get me started on Jesus. He had a favorite spot to panhandle in front of the health food store I could afford to shop in but he couldn’t. I’m not talking a white Jesus here. I’m talking dark skin, long hair. I always offered him money, never said don’t drink, eat healthy, find a place to sleep tonight. I gave him money but wouldn’t drop it in his bowl. Instead, I handed it to him and looked into his large brown eyes. They were liquid. They shone. And if I was really lucky, he’d close his hand around mine and bless me. And listen, I was raised in a pretty Jesus-free home; he wasn’t someone we talked about at the dining room table, but wouldn’t you say that to be blessed by a beggar is as sacred as the million words translated by scribes?
I do not know what faith is, or what people mean when the say they have it, or found it, or want me to have some of it too.
And when I’m asked if I have faith, I say that’s between me and the holy dark, between me and the radiant mother, the nesting bird, the budding tree, the roaring ocean, the atom, the moon saying look, look again and be astonished, and holy hell the eclipses that dazzle even the blind. And I say what kind of a question is that?
All I know is that I have been in the flow of life at times when the love that created this whole chaotic gorgeous mess comes cruising along with a shovel or a heated blanket or a blessing that falls like rain from a mouth with bad teeth and I know for sure that there is a giant blueprint unrolling like a huge red carpet and we can hop on and let it take us for a ride, let it unroll and unroll until it is all a blessing, a miracle, until it’s all love only love and apart from that there’s nothing else I need to put my faith in.
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Read mores stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available from Amazon.
