More on: Essays

As I watched him settle into his seat, I felt the tension in his body almost as if it were my own, as if in his taut shoulders and straight spine he was holding himself rigid against the enormity of desire pressing down on him, as I had at his age.

I offered what I could from my human heart to hers. May you be blessed with protection. May love shine its face on you. May peace turn toward you.

Our Lady of Vladimir’s tears are said to be myrrh. When she weeps, the faithful sop up her myrrh with cotton balls, pocket them, carry them home for the miracles. Sufferers are said to be healed. They speak of a scent that engulfs them, a scent like ten thousand roses.

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

Most days, belief in anything beyond the day before me felt unfathomable. But my disorientation presented me with an opening, a paradoxical invitation to entertain what I would typically have considered beyond the barometer of belief.

As children, we did not say God in anger. God was ____, was holy, meant revelation, infinity, abyss, also ______ too powerful to utter.

You must take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across.

i. MANY PEOPLE DIE in the book of Genesis, and we are, for the most part, told where the bodies are buried. We know what happens to the corpses of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Joseph. We sometimes get details about the procurement of a burial plot or the reconciliation of estranged brothers…

My mother and I are driving five hundred miles to see a replica of a mystery.

One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart.