Articles

I am underground,
on a path through small rooms
lit only by delicate chandeliers
of finger and knuckle bones
wired together, shedding a soft
light on the group of worshippers
who tiptoe through.

When will I have time to do
that which I desire,
that which I can’t make
myself do, ever?

What I lost in my exit from a fundamentalist faith movement, I found inside the closed chamber of my camera.

The boy inside me is watching, frowning.
But something else is watching him,

saying, sweetheart, saying, it is so hard.

Come up behind me. See through my eyes.

Suffering, I once believed, was a human privilege,
but in that moment I watched as God
died, as God witnessed.

We watched from behind ballistic glass and mounted guns and steel doors with hinged openings large enough for a rifle barrel or for a bunch of contorted fingers to press through and wiggle return greetings, muted waves, as we rolled on and up the mountain. We engaged with no enemy combatants.

Unknowing might be a way to relate to God anew. You might call this mystery.

In our information age, we need spiritual exercises of ex-formation.

What is more frightening: that God does not exist, or that God offers us no comfort?

The dead who walk the streets might be a relic of the past, something your Sicilian grandma might tell you about, but the Sanctuary of the Souls of the Beheaded is very much alive.