Given Up for You Read online

  Hector’s occasional but emphatic directives no longer startled me. In fact I had come to crave them. I wanted nothing more than for him to tell me what to do. That night I told my boyfriend I was moving out as soon as I could find an apartment, and the next morning I began my search.

  By March I was living in a new apartment, far from the leafy residential neighborhood where I had lived with my boyfriend, and a few blocks from Hector’s office. “I’m so happy,” I told Hector. “And there are so many things I want to do, you know? Things I didn’t expect to want. I feel like going dancing. And last night I bought cigarettes and smoked in the bathtub.”

  Hector laughed. “Those sound like the things a child would do with this new freedom. But you aren’t a child. And you didn’t leave because you wanted a chance to do those things, did you?”

  I looked away. “No,” I said. “Of course not.” This is what I didn’t say: I’m twenty-three years old, Hector. That is exactly why I left.

  Hector was impatient. I might have been young, but he wanted me to get moving. He suggested that I read Thomas Merton’s spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. I bought the book and read it on the subway, on a stone bench in Rittenhouse Square, at my small kitchen table with a bowl of cereal holding the pages open. I finished the book on a warm Saturday afternoon and did not know what to do with the rest of the day or what to do at all, ever again. It was one thing to read about Merton’s love for poetry and jazz and drinking, about his early and earnest search for God in basement chapels. His wit, his impulsivity, his narcissism—they were all enchanting and familiar. But the book’s later chapters, which chronicled Merton’s conversion, hurt my eyes with their brightness, their ardent cataloging of one renunciation after another, each one required—insisted upon—by God. On that Saturday afternoon in my Philadelphia apartment, I finished The Seven Storey Mountain, closed the book, and wedged it between two others on the shelf. I went to my dresser and picked up a few dangly earrings and a tube of lipstick. I opened my closet and flipped through the hanging dresses. You want all this, I told myself. I didn’t mean the actual things, the clothes and the jewelry, the material possessions. I meant this world, this life. I was trying to remind myself, in the only way I could in that moment, that I was in the world and of it, which was exactly where I wanted to be.

  “Why do you think you did that?” Hector asked me when I told him what I had done when I finished the book.

  “Because I was afraid,” I said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of what I wanted when I finished the book.”

  “Which was?”

  “God,” I said, surprised at how easy it was to say, and how there, in Hector’s office, I was not frightened of anything at all.

  At the end of the session I asked Hector what he thought I should read next. “How about the Bible?” he said. “You could start with the Gospels.”

  It seemed like a strange suggestion. Did people like me read the Bible? Couldn’t I just read something about the Bible? I knew some standard verses from a few years of Sunday school at the Methodist church my parents joined when I was eight and they—two lapsed Catholics—decided it was time to get their children some religious education. But I couldn’t recall a single story about Jesus—the very idea of him seemed rather embarrassing. It was the physicality of him, how ubiquitously and oddly he was depicted in American culture. The long hair, the flowing robes, the sandals. Jesus sandals. All over Philadelphia I saw images of him on billboards and buses, demanding repentance, loyalty, and the end of all abortions. He was human but strange. He was a caricature.

  But despite all that, I read the Gospels, and they stunned me. They were nothing like I had imagined. The language had a hard and declarative edge that was as poetic as it was spare. Not a wasted word. After a few nights of reading I could hear Jesus’s voice when he spoke. I liked his obtuse metaphors and his starkly beautiful language, something that I had assumed belonged only to the Psalms or the prophets. I loved the healing stories, especially the story in Mark about the blind man who, when asked by Jesus if he can now see, says, “I see men, but they look like trees, walking.” Jesus touches the blind man’s eyes again, and he is fully healed. Later, much later, I would think of that story. I would think that in those early days of faith I was like the blind man, only I had been touched just once and what I saw of God, what I knew of him, was a shadow, a trick of my eyes. Like trees, walking.

  When I was too tired to read, I would lie in the darkness and think of Jesus. I was both excited and overwhelmed by the idea of him. How had I, in these few short months, moved from a general interest in spiritual matters to the uncool and oft-ridiculed world of Jesus lovers? Suddenly I didn’t care how. I was there, and I was besotted. I began to read the great Catholic thinkers, the philosophers and poets and mystics, and in everything I read, Jesus seemed to fly off the page—he was a feeling, he was a voice, he was sweet relief from the loud world and my new loneliness in it. And then one spring night he was in my apartment.

  I was sitting alone on the edge of my futon and suddenly Jesus was next to me, right there on the edge of my futon, and he was wearing the softest flannel shirt in the world. His hands were rough and his voice was warm and low, and for the moment he spent with me, he was extraordinarily good company. And in the moments that followed, when he had vanished and left me to wonder if he had been there at all, I looked at my hands, at the worn edges of my sheets, the stack of books on my bookshelf, and I wondered if being alone would always feel the way it did right now, if solitude would always feel this warm, this brimming.

  The morning after Jesus came to me, I woke and went to work, as I did every weekday morning. I was working for an early education project in the Kensington neighborhood, which was poor and dense with the detritus of poverty—broken strollers and burned out cars by the curb, electric lines strung with sneakers. It had taken me a long time to get used to the sharpness of the place, the absence of shelter and shade. But I did, and I loved my job and the people I worked with, although I didn’t live in their world. So I did my job that day. I cataloged Spanish children’s books and helped a woman fill out her childcare license application, and then took the subway back to Penn Station and walked the six blocks to my apartment. All day I wondered if Jesus would come to me again. He didn’t come that night, or the next, or ever again, at least not in the same way. But I continued to feel him near me, and I came to know him in a way that I knew nothing and no one else. What I believed he knew about me, and what I knew about him, had little to do with time or circumstance or language. Moments when I felt him with me were bent in time, so that even an instant contained my every embarrassment, my every mistake and excess of pride, and I sensed that I was entirely visible, and treasured. Being with him was like being in a room filled with mirrors, only without the impulse to look down or away. Let’s just look, I could hear him say. Let’s look and not be afraid.

  In late spring, a few weeks after my visitation from Jesus of the Futon, and a few months before I would meet Chris and fall in love with a woman for the first time in my life, I walked past a Catholic church and decided to go in. Not into the church itself, but rather into its basement, where doors were propped open to a small and dark chapel, so dark that its stained glass windows remained black where they were meant to be sky blue, reddish yellow where they were meant to shine golden on the face of Christ. The walls were lined with chipped and fading statues, each one edged by several rows of candles in metal holders. People knelt in front of the statues and lit the candles with thin wooden sticks, then extinguished the sticks in a shallow tray of sand.

  I knelt in front of a statue of Mary, her blue robe swirling at her feet, and I lit a wooden stick, and then a candle. A small woman with a scarf tied around her head knelt down next to me and gestured for my still-lit stick. I carefully handed it to her and as I did, as I knelt there in front of the statue, beneath the stained glass windows, surrounded by the smell of incense and the
coolness of the stone floor and darkness of the pews, I was certain—absolutely certain—that I had found what I was looking for.

  I returned to the basement chapel the next day, which was Saturday, for five o’clock Mass. The service was odd and campy and tinged with magic. Sit, kneel, stand, cross your forehead, cross your lips, cross your heart. Pass the peace. Call out to God, to the priest at the altar, to whoever was listening. I could barely follow. I loved it.

  The next Tuesday I told Hector that I had gone to Mass. “I wanted to take communion so badly,” I said. “I know there are rules, I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I did. I couldn’t help it.”

  Hector laughed. “I love your spirit,” he said.

  I was stunned. Was he supposed to say something like that? Was he supposed to love anything about me? But if I was stunned, I was also thrilled. Thrilled that I could be out on this unexpected and unexplainable edge of myself and be loved.

  And now it was September, and I had been seeing Hector for a year; I had been attending Saturday afternoon Mass at the Catholic church—which I now knew as St. Patrick’s—for several months. I was enamored with St. Patrick’s by then, though I still didn’t quite understand how, or even why, an uncertainty that had made me only more dependent on Hector—on our time together—to animate my new ideas, to explain my unexpected desires. My life didn’t make sense without him. But now he was telling me I couldn’t see Chris.

  “Why don’t you talk to the priest at St. Patrick’s about it,” Hector suggested. “Ask him if he thinks it’s a good idea right now.”

  Even then I knew this was a manipulative suggestion. It wasn’t a Unitarian church I had wandered into that Friday afternoon in spring. I was caught up in Catholicism, one of the most harshly and unapologetically homophobic denominations in the world. And while I was certain that Father Dowling would have no qualms about me being in a romantic relationship (he saw me as just another curious young woman, not the fledgling mystic Hector fancied me to be), both Hector and I knew he would disapprove of Chris simply because she was a woman. How much of Hector’s enthusiasm for my Catholicism was now tangled up with his censure of my lesbian love affair? I was too afraid to ask. All I knew was that I didn’t want to lose Catholicism or Chris, and I most certainly didn’t want to lose Hector’s approval.

  “I’ll talk to Father Dowling,” I said, even though I had no intention of talking to Father Dowling.

  I had waited until the end of our session to tell Hector about Chris and now we were out of time, and so I gathered my things and said good-bye and told him I would see him again next week.

  A few hours later Chris came to my apartment and I didn’t mention anything about Hector, but in the morning I woke and immediately thought of him. I heard his voice in my head: she’s a distraction. I got out of bed, took a shower, and when Chris and I were in the kitchen half-dressed for work and drinking coffee, I told her that this was happening much too fast, that my life was much too complicated for this to work, although I never actually said what “this” was, never actually explained why my life was too complicated for it.

  “I like you so much,” I said. “And I can’t be with anyone, not now, so I think we should stop before . . .” I paused, not knowing what to say. “You know, before.” I didn’t finish the sentence.

  “I understand,” Chris said. She told me that a relationship wasn’t what she wanted, either. I smiled, and nodded, and tried to appear confidently and maturely resigned, as though I slept with people and then stopped sleeping with people all the time.

  We left the apartment together, went downstairs to the street to say good-bye. A few seconds later she turned and called back to me, “You know, I think it might already be too late.” Then she waved to me with a swing of her briefcase and turned around again. For a moment I didn’t know what she was talking about, and by the time I did she was gone.

  3

  The Long Loneliness

  In early October, a week after I broke up with Chris, I joined a class at St. Patrick’s for people who wanted to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. I didn’t know that I wanted to be confirmed, but I did want to be more than a visitor at Mass. I told Hector I was thinking of joining the class even though I wasn’t really sure it was the right thing to do.

  “Join,” he said. “Keep moving and see what happens. You know,” he continued, “eventually you won’t need the Church. If you continue on this path, you will move beyond it. But for now, the Church is a good place to be.”

  I was intrigued by this idea of becoming some sort of post-Church visionary, but like so much of what Hector said I might someday be or have, the possibility belonged to an excruciatingly distant future. Still, I joined the class. It met at the rectory on Monday nights and was mostly composed of women who were engaged to devout Catholics. There was one young man in the class, a doctoral student in religion at Penn. He had taken the class twice already.

  We met in the rectory’s dining room around a gleaming wood table; the priest sat at the head. The class was intended to be an introduction to Church doctrine, which I suppose it was, albeit a unique one. Father Dowling was a deep thinker. He spoke in what sounded liked an epic religious poem, a rhythmic and repeating stream of words that he sustained for nearly the entire hour. By the time the class was over, his cheeks were flushed with exertion and my head hurt. Later I would look over my notes and see that they were nothing more than a list of words: the distance of sin, broken world, seeking union. Clearly I had missed something. Perhaps that is always the case when someone speaks to you in poems.

  In reality I think I was only tuned to certain things Father Dowling had to say. In those days I wanted the fire; I was all about the rigor. When someone asked me if I had found comfort in the Church, I was taken aback. I wasn’t looking for comfort. I wanted transcendence. I wanted Thomas Merton’s astonishment. Later when I had moved away from Philadelphia I wrote to Father Dowling at Christmas and he wrote back, his tiny print covering one side of a St. Patrick’s correspondence card. How glad he was to hear from me, he wrote, and he truly hoped that I was well and happy and loved. The card thrummed with affection and cheer. Had I received such a thing from him in those days in Philadelphia I would have been disappointed.

  In the days when I knew Father Dowling I was seeking two different—and equally unobtainable—faiths. I wanted an ecstatic and consuming one, but I also wanted a softer one I could wear like an old coat. One that I had steeped in since birth, so that it was as inalienable as my own hands and inoculated against the prejudices and constraints of organized religion. The trouble with the first faith was that it was both too rigid and too vague; the trouble with the second was that it would have required a retroactive conversion, a divine grandfathering in. But I couldn’t discern how untenable my desires were. So to serve the first possibility I read the Desert Fathers and The Cloud of Unknowing and taped lines from Hildegard of Bingen poems on my bathroom mirror. To serve the second I kept rosary beads on my nightstand and knotted palm fronds on my bookshelf. I never missed Mass, and when I was there I began to receive communion, despite the church law forbidding non-Catholics from receiving. But I didn’t care. I wanted it. So I took my place in line, held out my hand for that tiny slip of wheat, and let it dissolve in my mouth. “The body of Christ,” the priest would say to me before handing me the wafer. And even though I was certain about little in those days, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  I can see now that communion was why I decided to be confirmed with the rest of the class. I could have continued to receive without confirmation, but I wanted the Eucharist to be mine in all the ways it possibly could. And I wanted to keep meeting Jesus there in front of the altar. I hoped that soon the Jesus I was certain of and the God I was not would become—as I had been promised they were—one.

  On a good day I was hopeful that such a time would come. But as fall ended and winter began, there were fewer and fewer good days. I couldn’t stop thinking of the verse in Mat
thew that tells us not to store up treasures for ourselves on the earth: “For wherever your treasure is, there will be your heart too.” This frightened me. My treasure was not my wardrobe or my filled bookshelves or my sixty-dollar haircuts. I loved those things, but they were not my treasure. My treasure was Chris. And it was becoming increasingly clear that breaking up with her hadn’t made me love or want her any less, and it wasn’t likely it ever would.

  In mid-December I was, once again, in Jen’s kitchen. I was nervous; I knew that Chris had also been invited to dinner and seeing her didn’t seem like the best idea. Of course if I had been serious about keeping my distance I could have declined Jen’s invitation. But I wanted nothing more than to see Chris. I thought of her every day.

  At dinner Chris and I sat across the table, careful to avoid each other’s gaze. Jen asked for news, and I announced my newly hatched plan to leave Philadelphia, at least for a little while. “I’m going to Colorado,” I said. “Next fall. I’m planning to take a three-month sabbatical from work, although I might not come back.” I looked at Chris, who was looking down at her plate.

  When we had all finished eating, Jen and her husband stood to clear the dishes and the other guests went to the porch for a smoke. Suddenly Chris and I were alone. She looked directly at me for the first time all evening. “Come home with me,” she said. And I did.

  The next month was scattered with nights we spent together, awake until three, four, five in the morning. The clock had never spun so quickly in my life. In the morning one of us would leave and I would say, I can’t do this, and Chris would say fine, but please don’t call me, and I would say I wouldn’t call. But then I would, and after a few cool minutes she would ask me where I wanted to meet.