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Rapture at the Mosque
On “Rapture Saturday,” I crossed old town Nicosia’s Green Line to wander the Turkish side of this divided city: a shabbier copy of its Cypriot twin, boasting a similar rabbit warren of half-shuttered shops but a higher density of dumpsters and fake leather goods, and so more potent wafts of these sharp perfumes. The wares were dull and the sun was hot, so I quickly examined the quarter-mile of worthy curiosities and then wound my way to Selimiye Mosque....
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What Would Jan Say?
I don’t know if preachers still ask the impassioned rhetorical question: If Jesus walked into church this morning, what would He say to you? The question was a staple of my childhood church-going, and it always provoked a collision of the two Jesuses I knew: the stoic, gentle, hippie-haired Jesus of Sunday School quarterlies, and the brusque, haunted Jesus of the Gospels, striding Galilee in dirty sandals and a well-worn robe. The latter Jesus always won; when a preacher asked the question, I invariably saw Jesus bust through our sanctuary’s swinging doors....
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God’s Love
The porthole of sky from my new bedroom is periwinkle in the early morning, a small candle of color. It’s January as I begin to write this post, and I’m still waiting for my husband to serve me with divorce papers. My heart is open to him, as much as it is sunk in its own long repentance and the odd attrition of divorce, which seems to prefigure old age in its quick loss of all the particulars: friends, home, family, money, material goods. The things went quickly; a hasty move helped me clear my life of most of our wedding gifts and the objects that served primarily to remind me of him....
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The Scent of Life
Two autumns ago, the autumn I would have given birth, I went to London and spent days wandering, working my sadness to sweat in the chilly gray rain. On my first aimless morning I walked from Notting Hill to Hyde Park and on to Brompton Oratory, in whose dark turrets candle smoke hung like clouds and at whose Sacred Heart altar I found a novena leaflet that read like a chain letter. I considered the leaflet’s bald promise that in fourteen days of novenas and leaflet-ing, my dreams would come true. I pocketed it, knelt at the dim Mary Magdalene altar, and wrote my child’s name in the register of prayers....
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Risking the Heart
Confessionals have always fascinated me: the photo-booth dimensions, the heavy red drapes or wooden doors; the imagined intimacy of a close, grated space where another’s breath is audible, but his face obscured. I have never stepped inside a confessional, either to inspect or to partake, but I can conceive of the slight warmth, the achy give of the kneeler, the shadow on the screen of another face, another life. I have only gone to confession once, about two years ago....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
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