The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I take my place on the floor, listening as the prayers I have known my entire life are recited quietly, transformed, bathed in incense and sung out beneath the frescoes of the Syrian Catholic Church, the Our Father in Arabic, the Gospel of Mark in the language of the Quran. It is only in hearing them like this that I remember what these exhausted words mean: “Atina hubzina kefafi yoomina,” Give us this day our daily bread. As I translate the words I learned in Arabic for the marketplace, suddenly made holy, I am startled to realize that for my entire life, I have been hearing this sentence incorrectly, inserting a comma in my prayer and so changing the meaning entirely, so that the sentence became a plea that I would not die before it was my time. Give us this day, our daily bread, I had always prayed. As though in my mind, each extra day God allowed me to live was a gift, a piece of bread. This was the prayer I had memorized since childhood. Lord, let me live another day.

  Now, after all those hours of learning the Arabic words for guns and atomic bombs, I am so moved to hear Arabic prayers—to hear in that language some measure of my more intimate self. How strange, to find this language, the language of Islam, of the Quran, and of Al Jazeera suddenly spoken by the voices of my own life! How strange to hear Jesus speaking Arabic, for the Psalms to find their subtle music in a new voice, so much closer to the Hebrew. As if everything taken from me is being given back a second time, new and unfamiliar, stumbling in my mouth.

  After the prayer, I eat a meal of bread and goat cheese quickly, before disappearing behind the chapel into the vast silence of the desert mountain. The prayer had brought with it a small solace of being among other people, and the walk into the desert now feels solitary, like I am leaving the entire world behind. The desert, in the monastic tradition, does not function as a landscape. The desert is instead a mirror, where the silence and emptiness become so vast that the only things left to meet there are the self and God, lurking in every corner. Here is the strange world where the blue line between the interior and exterior world collapses, where the imagination is given a body. Our thoughts take on flesh in the empty air, they leave our bodies and become visible, until the body physically inhabits the interior world. The early desert monks spoke of our thoughts as angels or demons, with heavy, tangible bodies. Until we wrestle with them they will not leave us alone.

  And so I lie down in the cold stone valley and read the First Contemplation of Ignatius, the story of the angels who turn their back on God and are cast from heaven to hell. I close my eyes. And then I wait.

  THEY COME QUICKLY, as though they have been waiting behind the stones for decades and are only now being given permission to escape. Refugees, fleeing down the mountain, startled and unhinged. The angels.

  At first, I can’t make out just who they are. But then I see their faces. A boy, dressed in a pale blue suit, his wet hair pressed against his head, parted perfectly off to the side so that the comb lines still show. I can’t tell how old he is. Eight perhaps. He has taken on the posture of a grown man, as though he has been asked by his mother to be brave. A girl of about six walks beside him, a small frill gathering at the bottom of her white dress. Maroon satin, a bow tied just beneath her chin, her curls fastened behind her ears with barrettes.

  The mother and father stare ahead resolutely, though death is written in their eyes. And strange, awkward wings are strapped to their backs, rustling in the night air.

  I do not know them or know where they are from. There is no one to tell me, and I don’t dare ask, for fear of making them disappear, though I hear them whispering to one another in a language I can’t understand. I know that they are Jews and that time has collapsed for a moment and they are fleeing somewhere. There is no sense of where that could be, or where they are ultimately going—I have only this single moment with them, between spaces. They walk past me, through ash and coal and a gray sky, and the sound of glass breaking.

  I open my eyes, the white light of the desert shocking them. I am only dreaming, after all. These are simply the terrors of my imagination, my own ghosts conjured up into the physical world. Still, I’m frightened, frightened of myself. The mind and the heart have their own landscapes, and perhaps they are more terrible than anything we could actually meet in the desert were we left alone. I remember the words of Satan, cast out of Milton’s Paradise: Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

  I close my eyes again, waiting. Now I am no longer in the desert—I am in the midst of war. In the distance, the burned-out buildings of Beirut stand, riddled with bullet holes. Weary women sit in cafés in the midst of the rubble, smoking absently, their mouths imprinted in lipstick on cigarette filters left burning in ash. American soldiers in these streets, no, in other streets, knocking down doors in Baghdad, rehearsing under their breath the few, faulty words they have memorized in Arabic for this moment, Yalla, Yalla, Nihna Jeysh Amerki, the screaming inside, the bodies tearing themselves from sleep, the woman caught with her hair uncovered, tumbling down, exposed.

  I have never been to Baghdad. Then how do I recognize the street, and the house, and the women inside and the men outside? I don’t know their names, and still they aren’t strangers. I watch them. I could reach out and touch their faces. Most of them have no wings. But I know that these are the angels I asked to see, refugees, stranded on earth. I am supposed to ask them questions. But I have no desire, no right.

  These are the angels St. Ignatius said had been cast from heaven to hell, burning, for so much less than I have ever done.

  NIGHT FALLS. In the church, I read the Gospel in Arabic silently to myself, following the lines from right to left and waiting for my nightly meeting with Paolo. He calls my name, and I slip out of the church, passing Rania in the courtyard. She has a look of fear in her eyes. I climb the stairs, taking my place at the end of a long table. Paolo quietly chants the Hail Mary in Arabic.

  Assalamu Aleyki, ya Maryam…

  Something about hearing that prayer from my childhood, so many years later and after so many losses, makes me begin to cry.

  He looks at me gently, smiling. “You don’t waste any time, do you?” he asks. I choke on my laugh.

  It is cold in the room, and I move closer to the stove, then take out the small green notebook I carried with me into the mountain that morning. I begin to read softly, in an even voice, the chronicle of my day in the desert, about the refugees in the mountains fleeing war, the burning buildings, the women awakened in their beds, the angels walking with their baskets of bread. I read strangely, articulating every vowel and consonant, as one reading to a blind man. I need him to understand, to tell me that I am not crazy. Except—perhaps I have once again gone crazy, as I had always known, in the back of my head, that I would.

  I finish, finally looked up again to meet Paolo’s gaze. Help me. I came to the desert in search of God, and he was nowhere in anything I saw this morning, nowhere in any of those visions of war. How do I know that it is only the angels and not God who is in exile, that he has not cast himself out from our presence? How do I know that he is not also wandering in the desert somewhere lost?

  Paolo takes my hand. He tries to speak in a low voice. “Stephanie, you must believe that God is like a child before violence. You must believe that he didn’t create this, but that he is wounded and grieving to see the world as it is.”

  I imagine God as he describes him, with his face in his hands, weeping, like Michelangelo’s Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel at the sight of Jerusalem burning.

  “But then, what is this talk of a wrathful God? What is this talk of God exiling people to hell? Why am I here in the desert, reading Ignatius? You can’t have it both ways. And I’m sorry, and I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I’m not afraid of hell. I’m afraid of a God who would send people to hell. Even more, I’m afraid that if hell exists and I don’t go there, then someone else will go in my place. Then all of our talk about Christian compassion is crap.”

  I wait for him to answer. He doesn’t look alarmed, just tired, almost exis
tentially tired. I think about those who watched as the Jews were shipped off to concentration camps, those who sent off the poor from my city in Texas to fight in Iraq and stayed at home and hung their heads. We walk on the bones of the suffering of others. How is that different from taking a place in heaven while allowing others to burn in hell? There was a famous story of a Jewish prisoner in the concentration camps who asked his rabbi for advice. He had learned that he could bribe a guard and obtain his son’s release. He wanted to know, was that morally permissible, knowing that if his son went free, another man would be sent to die in his place? And is not that the larger question of desiring salvation?

  Paolo takes a deep breath. I have thrown him into anguish. Somehow I don’t care. I am tired of carrying my anguish alone.

  “Stephanie,” he begins, “we must believe that God dreams of the salvation of all mankind, that creation and salvation are a single act. Nothing else works. Otherwise, we dream that we go to heaven while others go to hell, and that our going to heaven participates in sending others to hell. If that were true, then our only choice would have to be to rebel against God, to voluntarily cast ourselves into hell in solidarity with the banished ones, because we would refuse to participate in the suffering of others.”

  He pauses, looking up at me. “I just can’t believe that this is what God wants of us, for the faithful to burn in hell. The only thing remaining for us to do is to believe that, in some way we don’t yet understand, all of this chaos will one day be swept up and everything will be transformed.”

  I want so much to believe him, and yet it seems too easy.

  “You know, the Muslims have a saying,” he finishes. “They say that no one can escape from the power of God, and the power of God is his mercy.”

  I write his words in my small green notebook. Everything will be transformed. What does that mean? Like water lifting out of clothes left out to dry, becoming steam, cloud, no recollection of the heaviness it once added to a body? Like sailboats stripped of old blue and white paint and cast out again to water? What transformation could happen to our bodies to make us forget these terrors we have witnessed, which we have carried for such a long time? And could such forgetting begin to justify the journey?

  I have one last thing to ask. Tomorrow, I know I will journey into the most infamous day of the Spiritual Exercises, the journey into hell, where Ignatius asks us to lie down among the burning and the damned, to “smell the smoke, the brimstone, the sewer filth and putrid things” of hell. I have come to the desert to escape hell. With my psychological history, to place myself in hell on purpose seems like madness, no different than a scarred war veteran attempting meditation on a shooting range, a recovering alcoholic working a season in a vineyard.

  “I’ve been running away from visions my whole life, Abuna,” I tell him. “I need to know if it is safe for me to go.”

  He sighs a deep sigh, all the way from his chest. “It’s true,” he admits. “I still remember my day in hell, from when I did the Spiritual Exercises over twenty years ago. It is a very powerful event. You only wish to experience it once in your life and never again.”

  It doesn’t matter. I have to stay. What do I have to return to?

  He sees the decision in my eyes and says calmly, “Don’t worry, Stephanie. I don’t think that God brought you all the way to the desert to leave you stranded in hell.”

  5.

  IT IS MORNING, after the prayer. Last night the wind turned cold, rattling the windows near my bed. Now it moves like a knife through my body with every step, sliding down my throat and traveling into my chest each time I inhale. I climb the mountain, rising higher above the valley, passing beneath the large hermit’s cave, and then descending into a narrow gorge torn open when water once flowed. The wind dies down for a moment, but I can hear it passing in other places, whistling across the stones. I close my eyes.

  Soon, the desert slips away, and I know that the other world is coming. I wait. Now I am standing at the top of a flight of stairs, the railings dripping with water. I descend, trying to keep my balance, into the dark. The walls are almost ice, wet and frozen, like an underground cistern. There is a faint light. And then I see my mother, crouched against a window, shivering and cold. It takes her a moment to recognize me. Then she calls my name. I reach out to her, but our hands are both damp and she slips away. She keeps calling my name, as though I am still a child, and I answer her as though I am a child. She keeps calling for help.

  “Stephanie? Stephanie Celeste?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I don’t even know if she can hear me. “I’m so sorry.”

  I stare at her for a long time. “Let me see,” I whisper, trembling. She disappears, and I take her place, shivering in the cold and in the dark. I am watching her life through her eyes. Now I reach out, pressing my hand on her mother’s dead body. Kissing her father’s face, wounded and blue as the sea. Watching her younger sister passing beneath that bus.

  I cannot look anymore. I open my eyes and walk out of that gorge in the mountains, nauseous. In the Exercises, I am supposed to thank God for the fact that he has had pity on me and mercifully not placed me in hell for my many sins.

  I am not thankful. I can’t bear to see my mother like this, alive in hell. I want to take her place.

  6.

  THE DAYS CONTINUE PASSING AMONG THE RUINS, and I live with my mother and the exhausted angels. I sleep, and I awaken, and I find myself becoming grateful for the silence I once feared I would dread. Sometimes, when I am alone in the desert and my body swells up with visions to the point of breaking open, I can believe what the ancient mystics said, that the body contains an entire world. I feel as though my interior self is much older than my body—like I have inherited the past of the woman who gave birth to me, just as in some way I carry the past of the places I have chosen to live. When those visions come to me in the desert, many of them don’t belong to me. They are ancient squatters who come to inhabit my life, and because I cannot hope to evict them, I learn to live with them, to listen to them.

  Then there is memory. When I first met him, Paolo told me the story of the church frescoes, of how they had been uncovered after having been abandoned in the dark for so long. It happened slowly, over time. For many years, the frescoes were hidden beneath a layer of whitewash and forgotten. It was only when the locals burned the roof of the church for fuel, allowing the rain to come inside, that many of the faces were washed clean, staring out again.

  When the restorers came, they found one layer beneath another, and they peeled the layers back slowly. When the frescoes revealed themselves, they came back wounded. Some of the eyes had been cut out. In some places, the bodies had been scarred by the names of those who passed beside them to pray and carved their initials into their skin. Hands were missing, parts of bodies. They carried the stories of all that had happened in those hundreds of years since they were painted, they wore the smoke from the candles of those who had prayed beside them. They carried those prayers.

  “A resurrection,” Paolo had said about watching them, rising from beneath the surface. “A resurrection, with the wounds still there.”

  During this first week of the Exercises, I have sometimes felt the same thing happening inside my head. The desert is washing my mind clean again, and I can finally remember my entire life, the details of faces I have not remembered since I was young. My grandfather follows me everywhere, with his silver, curly hair and leathery skin, and so does my grandmother, whose face I remember perfectly despite the fact that I never met her. My mother calls out to me, using my full name, and my aunt speaks to me also, along with the rest of my family, their faces staring out in the dark. But now the memories are scarred by what has passed since my childhood. They come back carrying new wounds, the wounds of all I have seen and lost in the Middle East. When I remember them, I also remember streets in Jerusalem, I remember Hassan, I remember refugee camps in southern Lebanon, that baby crying, I remember those images from Iraq fla
shing on Damascus television screens. They become one memory, the past and the present. The two worlds I inhabit carry each other inside of themselves.

  Now I understand that hell is not being banished from God. Hell is the inability to save those you love. Hell is that helplessness in front of God and history, the face of a woman you love in the dark, calling out for help.

  It is the end of the first week of the Exercises. This morning I sat down and wrote out all of the sins I’ve committed in my lifetime to prepare myself for confession. I returned to my room after the morning prayer, huddled beside the gas heater, and began to write in a torrent. I wrote all morning and all afternoon. I wrote until the gas in my heater ran dry and I had to fill it up again. I wrote until I filled ten long handwritten pages, a catalog of all that I had ever done wrong, until my arm hurt and the pen was empty so I could write no further.

  It began at the age of seven, when I was mercilessly cruel to a girl in my class, who soon after was killed in a car accident.

  The list goes on. I isolated myself from my family. While they were wounded, from one death or another, I pulled away and fell into depression.

  I failed one lover after another. This accounts for several pages, and I was, I admit, trying to be brief.

  Then there was Mark, who deserved his own section: Mark, whom I had somehow been unable to make happy—whom I had made so unhappy that he had finally sent me away.

  I detached myself from my friends.

  Despite all of my years in the Middle East, I did little to work for peace.

  For almost an entire lifetime, I never really prayed.

  When I was finished writing, I sat next to the black heater in my room, and I felt a tsunami of grief welling within me, a grief I have rarely allowed myself to feel in my lifetime, and I sobbed. My body trembled, and I let it tremble, I let the tears fall in enormous torrents from my eyes. At that moment, my life was a series of failures, ten pages long. I suppose that Ignatius had wanted us to understand that the world had fallen because of our sins. I would never believe that, never believe in a God cruel enough to let that happen. Yet the world had never seemed so fallen to me as it did right then, and I could not help but wonder if those faces appearing to me in the desert might have looked different, had I acted more compassionately. Would they be so scarred? Would they carry so many wounds? How many of those were my doing?