An Excerpt from Things Seen and Unseen

I CAME TO THIS CHURCH FIVE YEARS AGO as a tourist and ended up a pilgrim. What I wanted at the time I walked in the door for the late morning mass was peace, I told myself. I believe I understood peace at the time as comfort. What I got was "The peace of God that passes all understanding," as the prayer book says, or, as an old Irish hymn goes, "The peace of God--it is no peace."

It was the late summer, I was greeted at the door by an African-American man with a sweet, vague smile and handed a bulletin by a thin woman with a sharp unhappy face. Inside, it was dark and cool; the altar stood beneath a stained glass window facing east, as is the custom in many churches. Men and women sat in lonely isolation in the mostly empty pews; the priest at the time, a dark-haired middle-aged man who looked depressed, preached a sermon about co-dependence.

For the next few months, I dropped in on Trinity a few Sundays a month. I kept wondering why I was there but couldn’t leave. The priest continued to seem depressed; the congregation dwindled: in a church that held four hundred, eighty to one hundred and twenty-five attended mass on Sunday, five or six during the week. Very few people spoke to me at the coffee hour.

Then, in the midst of this unhappy place, funny things began to happen: a couple of us started a soup kitchen in the parish hall. When the Jesuit priests and their housekeepers were killed in El Salvador in the spring of 1990, we held a candlelight vigil for them. We expected a hundred people; four hundred fifty--many from the community at large--showed up. A member of the parish wrote a letter to the Bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles complaining about the priest and, after a long process, he eventually resigned. People were waking from a long sleep. During that time, I was often frustrated, disconcerted, even disoriented but I was also waking to myself.

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow," wrote Theodore Roethke. "I learn by going where I have to go."

At Trinity under duress, I learned how to speak to a crowd, how to write prayers, how to make soup for two hundred out of discarded vegetables. I cleaned up my act, stopped rebelling against everything in front of me (and/or leaving or hiding), and claimed my piece of the pie. I helped my friend Ben Nistal-Moret die--his was the first dead body I had ever seen--and I ran up against my own nature everywhere I went--"For now we see through a glass, darkly," said St. Paul, "but then face to face."

. . .

IN THE MIDST OF IT, I learned something about faith, its mucky nature, how it lies down in the mud with the pigs and the rabble. When Ben realized he was dying, he asked me to be his "alternate health care agent." As I signed that section of his Living Will, I imagined standing in the hallway of a hospital with perhaps a few doctors in white coats making compassionate and elegant decisions, gracefully. I did not imagine what came to pass. Instead of that antiseptic corridor, I sat in Ben’s living room, jet-lagged, shoveling Chinese take-out food into my mouth, my own house strewn with dirty laundry and used cat litter boxes. I was deciding whether or not to ask a doctor to get a new drug that would help end Ben’s life. I did not imagine being so tired I wanted Ben to hurry up and die. In short, I had imagined being a better version of myself. Instead I was the same old fucked-up woman.

In that time, I learned that everything is God’s: my fucked-up self, my dirty laundry, our harrowing inability to be perfect for Ben. Everything is God’s: shame, suicide, assisted death, AIDS. Because God is inside everything, findable in everything, because-- I became convinced--I would not have made it through Ben’s death without God. God is not too good to hang out with jet-lagged women with cat litter boxes in their dining rooms or men dying of AIDS or, for that matter, someone nailed in humiliation to a cross. God is not too good for anything.

I learned about community: that being faithful to God means being faithful to others, in sickness and in health, for better for worse. In my journal in July of 1990, I copied down a quote from the Czech president, Václav Havel: "By perceiving ourselves as part of the river," wrote Havel, "we take responsibility for the river as a whole."

I began to understand that the Holy Spirit (who is clearly a scatter-brained woman at a very large computer in Heaven) may or may not give a damn about results, but cares about the human process of getting there. Each time we met at Trinity to plan a worship service, to balance the budget, to decide how to decorate for Easter, we ran up against envy, pride and sloth. And we felt grace, learned compassion--for ourselves and for others--and sometimes, even sensed rebirth. "Be like the fox," writes Wendell Berry. "Who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection."