More on: Essays

Sometimes it seems inane. A woman visiting my church one Sunday morning came up and told me she saw a picture of me in a beautiful yellow dress. That was it, the whole prophetic word. Me in a yellow dress.

Jesus, is he everyone’s digits, the ends of your hairs, the wife not your own, the sexless nights, the bleeding snapvine, the Lysander leaf, the dish soap, the Council of Trent, Battle of Hastings, the pill, Saint Augustine, Saint Vincent, every couplet of Shakespeare’s and each child’s drowning nightmare—does he contain them all, things lovely or horrifying, is this him, all of everything stuffed inside? How does one bear such a man as this?

The counselor says that I am in the romance phase. She is right. I am in love with heroin and with the needle, the whole ritual, in love even with the bruises on my arms.

In Ibn Arabi, a totality of faiths were convened. His heart contained within it pastures for deer, monasteries for monks, a temple for idols, a Kaaba around which to parade, tablets for a Torah, and a Quran, as he said in one of his famous verses: “I follow the religion of love wherever its caravans go.”

I was fine with the ceramic statues of Mary, flaming heart jumping out of her chest. I liked the bright blue robe, gold stars, and shell-like halo of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the big wooden crucifixes, that crown of thorns digging into Jesus’s brown locks, skinny white arms yanked above so that he’s pitched forward—they spook me the way Dracula spooks me.

In our solemn conversations about the firemen, in our statements of unconditional loyalty and trust, I realize that maybe instead of the moral authority of God in our household, I have given Toby the firemen. Brave and noble, yes, but a shabby substitute for the Almighty.

I have hurt my father two times that I know of.

When I hear my parents’ voices lilt with Midwestern shame, our pernicious lineage, I want to set the bench on fire or bury an axe head into it.

How does this resound in my heart, Lord? Do you hear it? It’s the sound of my shovel hitting those aluminum markers.

It was the season of the prayer for rain. To condense, to cloud, to empty out, to rain. And nothing is familiar but the rain.