most terrifying question: ‘Can I be?’
I remember understanding in the most peaceful way that I am not a compartmentalised or fragmented person but whole, as we all are, before a certain kind of theology and economics told us otherwise.
I don’t know if it is that people have worshipped in that site for so long, or that my own people have, or if it is the way they chant, or that I must have gone a few times as a child and remember it fondly, but I love that place.
I am a child of immigrants, so yes, I do have nostalgia and sadness for a culture whose shadows I see in my parents’ lives, but I’m not sure nostalgia is enough to account for the draw of that site for me.
***
I am dedicated to St Mary’s Church because I was born two months early and with clubbed feet. My mother prayed to Mary at Manarcadu from a hospital in Dallas, Texas, that I would survive and be able to walk. She made my dad fulfil her promise to take me there when he took me to India a year later. That must have been an awkward visit, but I suspect he didn’t dare skip it. When my mother goes to that church, she offers the little metal foil feet for my legs. Increasingly, we offer all the little metal parts, because we and all of our parts are aging. It feels foolish, and yet, I am living, and I can walk and run.
That day when I heard the voice say, ‘Get up and walk’, I started to stand up. It is a quote from the Bible, from Acts 3 – I had it read at a service when I became the rector of St Mark’s in the Bowery in New York City. The disciples ask a man waiting to be carried down to the gate of the temple to ask for alms whether or not he wants to be healed, and then command him to be healed, right then. Jesus does the same in the Gospels.
I still ask for my mother’s prayers, and she for mine. I don’t pretend to know how any of it works, except that there is this place that we get to go where we lay down all of our pain, confusion and limitation in the presence of a wonderous holiness who, like us, knows pain and loss. I know that I exercise and work my legs so that my walking draws no attention most of the time. It doesn’t always work. I use the tools I can to have the most mobility, just as the auntie I pray for daily also goes to chemo. I wonder if we are also creating a holy space among us that holds the ambiguity of our human experiences, our broken parts and our queer little community, and reminds us of our place in the long journey of a people from a particular plot of earth in search of meaning amid the seeming arbitrariness of daily suffering.
***
You might hear in my wondering the usual questions of the children of immigrants. I think that’s true. There is also a clarity and connectedness that has resisted binaries, boundaries and definitions. Something ancient and modern in tension with and formed by the Christianity that came with the colonial period. Something resisting nationalisms and the simple answers our existences defy. Something questioning and sure, like a priest at an altar, a reader of books, a lover of the sacred manifest among us.
I wonder about the sacred power of the earth and the truths our bodies carry for us. It is a learning and unlearning to recognise the baggage in our lives of other people’s limited imaginations and the true freedom of becoming ourselves. Mary and her sisters, the raging goddesses of Kerala, for me speak to the reality of women’s experiences through history. Loss and vulnerability and the rage that we would manifest, if we could, when we can, at the indignities or losses that are simply too much to bear. We don’t talk about Mary as raging, as far as I can tell, but it wouldn’t be a bad response to her life. Her beautiful baby vulnerable. Her little family threatened. Her adult son murdered. Her people conquered. She sings a pretty raging song in the Magnificat.
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
(Luke 1:46–53, NRSV)
The characterising of the sacred through the generations, the naming and defining of holy things is what religious teachers and priests get to do. Our traditions can make that expansive or quite narrow. I am fortunate to come from a broad tradition that questions and explores with confidence that God is among us, and has always been.
I remember the feeling of being loved so well.
A few hours’ drive from Lviv, Ukraine, a large sixteenth-century monastery, Pochayiv Lavra, attracts pilgrims and tourists alike. The main draw is entering a candlelit cathedral to drink water from the hollow of a rock purported to carry the imprint of the Virgin Mary’s foot. According to legend, the virgin appeared as a column of fire to a group of devout monks, leaving behind an indentation which soon filled with medicinal waters. Upon learning this from our guide, my college friend Amber said she would not be drinking Mary’s foot water, so we turned away from the spot as quietly as possible, hoping to avoid the attention of the monks who had required Amber to cover her breasts with a shawl. On the long ride to the monastery, neither of us had considered her cleavage, no longer accustomed to viewing a woman’s body as a threat to purity.
I’d been living in Ukraine for two and a half years, teaching English to high schoolers. A recent college grad, I had only ever lived in one place, the Arkansas Delta where I was raised to be a fundamentalist Christian like my father, a Baptist preacher. My father had certainly tried to keep me there, going so far as to send me to a conversion therapy facility to cure me of my sexuality, but there’s no cure for what I am, and without going into great detail here, the facility’s methods only made me resent my parents and the God who, I’d been told, didn’t love me for who I was. When I’d first settled into my Ukrainian host family’s house in the two-thousand-person village where I would live and work, I’d closed the door to a room unlike any I’d ever known and thought, Now they can never find me. I’d been thinking of my parents then but also, it seems to me now, I had been thinking of God.
Mary’s foot water. Amber, a devout Catholic her whole life, had never been forcibly separated from her faith. We were new to this cynicism, surprised and delighted to discover we were both naturals at countering the Church’s pomp. Amber had come all the way from Arkansas to remind me that life didn’t have to be all that serious. Though I loved the language, Ukrainian, inflected with the old church Slavonic to which it owes many of its roots, could often sound a bit gloomy to my unaccustomed ears. A grave orthodoxy seemed to hold the language in a tight grip. It certainly hadn’t helped
