Today, I sit and watch him as he passes by James and John in their boat on the Sea of Galilee with their father Zebedee. They are preparing their nets for the day’s work. I can smell the sea, can feel the waves swelling up around them, the wind skirting across the surface of the water.
Jesus calls to them. They go.
It is just like that, a brief moment. “I’m just getting my nets ready,” I whisper to Jesus. “I’ll leave the boat and my father, I’ll come soon.”
But I don’t. I just sit and watch him. I watch him all day long, wandering from village to village, the sick rising beneath his hands, the crippled walking, and those with seizures shaking and trembling until he holds them like a storm-trodden sea and begs them to rest.
11.
I HAVE COME TO THE END of the second week of the Exercises, the week of the famous choice. I’m nervous. What if I make a choice that hurls my life in the wrong direction? But I need this moment. I’m tired of living like a gypsy, moving from country to country every few years, and I need to root myself in a life. And yet what life will I possibly find happiness in? I have lost any faith in poetry and have little desire to return to school. I was never a particularly good journalist, and the idea of daily sifting through images of bombs and natural disasters doesn’t really appeal to me. A career in Arabic translation is certainly out of the question. What’s more, the last time I made a major choice was when I decided, against all odds, to stay in Boston and try to make a life with Mark. I don’t have a very good track record when it comes to choices. I don’t even trust my own instincts. When I used to get lost in Jerusalem, I would ask myself which way my gut feeling suggested I should go and promptly walk in the opposite direction. It normally took me straight home.
So it is that tonight, when Paolo raises the question in our meeting, I have little to offer him in response. I was hoping that he might suggest something.
“I could be a writer,” I say. “I could go back and get my doctorate and become a professor. I could continue journalism. I could become a nun.”
As I say those last words, I try them out in my mouth for the first time: I could become a nun.
It seems an odd suggestion. And yet not unnatural, coming from my mouth, with all of the casual tones of any other sentence, phrased slightly in the form of a question, the last word lilting up. What do you think, should we catch an afternoon movie? I could become a nun?
The idea has been secretly forming in my mind ever since the Incarnation, and I suppose I say it aloud to try it out, to see if it sounds ridiculous. It is not as though I am the first person in my family to consider a religious vocation. There is something in my solitary nature that suggests monasticism, so that my theology professor had told me just before I left for Syria, “To be honest, I would much rather see you become a prioress than a professor.” Besides, I am slowly finding a home in the monastery, and I have not felt at home in any place in a very long time. I relish the underground library with its dusty books, the hermits’ caves hidden in the mountains. I am growing to love that church with its ancient frescoes staring down at me, the fresco of the angel with a towel in his hands, the painting of St. Simeon the Stylite, the famous local saint, sitting atop his pillar in the sky. On a few nights I have even slept in the church and awakened in the morning to light flooding in from above the altar and landing on my face.
Most of all, I love the possibility that I might have power, that I might play a role in that history that until now I have always witnessed from the wings, the tragedy of my family, the larger tragedy of the Middle East. The miracle of the monastic life is the belief that as humans we are not spectators, but that we can engage and struggle with God—that perhaps we might even change his mind.
I was half expecting Paolo to burst into laughter at my suggestion, but he doesn’t seem surprised by my words.
“I was hoping I could study,” I hasten to add.
“Don’t let that worry you. You can finish your studies first, or study in Rome with the others in the community. You could even teach sometimes if you would like.”
“What could I offer to the monastery if I stayed?”
“Don’t ask what you can give,” he tells me. “Ask what you can receive.”
I smirk. Sometimes I am not in the mood for his Sean Connery wisdom.
He smiles. “You think about it for a few days,” he says. “And then you ask God to give you an answer.”
I THINK ABOUT IT. In fact I think about almost nothing else. There are no answers for a long time. Instead, whenever I close my eyes, I see an endless desert road stretched out in front of me, with someone waiting on the other side. I stumble along it, exhausted, and beside me walks the angel with a basket of bread.
“Get up and eat,” the angel keeps saying. “The road ahead of you is long.”
Something about those early visions in the desert, of devastated cities and people in hell, makes it difficult for me to make an ordinary choice, to decide to return to life as I had previously been living it. I can’t just become a tax attorney or even write novels when the world is falling apart. I can’t turn my back on them. I can’t live as though those images never existed. They demand something from me, and I don’t think they’ll disappear from my life in the desert until I discern what that something is.
Yesterday, after dreaming of that same desert road, I thought I had found the answer to my searching. Perhaps it was a real road—not metaphorical, and I was supposed to walk on it. “I want to go to Baghdad,” I announced to Paolo. “I want to walk from Baghdad across the Middle East, without money or food, as a witness to peace in this time of suffering.”
He sighed into his hand, and then looked at me sternly. “You’ll be killed, Stephanie. I know that you don’t want to hear this. But that would be a spectacular waste of your gifts.”
Perhaps I am beginning to lose my grip on reality. How can I know? Watching visions in the desert all afternoon is not exactly normal human behavior.
So I read the Gospels. The days pass by without an answer. I think about what it means to be a monk or nun, the stories that said they take the entire world inside of themselves and transform it through their prayers. I still carry those visions of devastated cities, of my mother in hell, and I want to do something. I want to fix some of what has been broken.
Sometimes I lay in bed at night, and I remember my mornings with Mark in a room in Cambridge, drinking smoky Chinese tea. They seem part of another life now. I think of him in the way I think about the dead, or about a country I have lost forever. I don’t long for him, because there is no use in longing for a past that can never be retrieved. I only regret what I might have done differently. I might have been kinder, more understanding, more able to forgive. He is gone forever now. But the desert allows me to watch over him from a distance, to take care of him, to make amends. I can love him from the desert in a way I never could when I was by his side. That comforts me.
Paolo asks me every day, Where do you want to go from here? What do you want? I don’t know how to answer. I want the war in Iraq and the war between the Israelis and Palestinians to end. I want people in my family to stop dying. I want to right the wrongs of my past.
Are there limits to the question? Must the answer be grounded in reality? I want to be a saint. I want to transform rooms I enter, to make the world whole again. I want to take the world into myself.
Sometimes, when I am alone out there in the desert, I see them all at once, lined up in the desert in front of me: Iraqis, American soldiers, Palestinian refugees, Israeli soldiers. I look at their faces, one after another, and then I ask myself, Stephanie, suppose you could, even for a day, make some of their sufferings disappear. Would you say no? Would you even dare?
Then I summon up all of the faces of my family. I summon up Mark’s face. I look at them, at those blessed, dear parts of my life, of my heart, and then I ask again: Stephanie—what if you can give them life? Would you say no?
Paolo once told me t
hat the world is anchored by our souls, that if one person finds God, finds prayer, then they become a link in a chain that helps to heal all those who came before and will come after them. I have heard this before in Syria, from Muslims and Christians both, a local legend. A person who finds God can intercede seven generations in the past and seven generations into the future.
An impossible sentence. And yet.
What if what the ancient monks said remains true and we can transform the world inside ourselves? What if by offering myself, I can truly save them?
12.
December
I HAVE BEEN LIVING WITH JESUS for more than two weeks now, and I can hardly remember what life was like before I came here. There is no space between us any longer. I walk in the Roman markets with him and his disciples. I watch him speak on the mountaintop, real as any human being, reciting his bizarre parables: the eye is the lamp of the body, see how the lilies in the field grow, enter through the narrow gate… I see him calm storms. Remove demons. Bring a girl back to life.
He seems content to let me watch him. He even seems lonely, like any man walking through so much confusion without a companion. He sometimes calls to me. As though he needs to be seen. As though he needs me to witness the leper’s hand unwithering, the paralytic rising from his bed.
I watch him moving beside people, anticipating their gestures, the way they change in his presence. I watch his hands. He is so quietly beautiful. I try to keep from thinking while I watch him: Please, don’t die.
Now, Jesus is walking through the streets when he sees the tax collector Matthew. “Follow me,” he tells him, and Matthew gets up and follows him.
I am shocked at the speed at which it happens. I forget to be shy and pull Matthew aside. “Why did you follow him?” I ask.
“It wasn’t me who followed,” he says. “My heart listened and followed his heart.”
I don’t believe him, and so I ask Jesus, “Why did you call him?”
“I didn’t call him,” he says. “I was simply walking by, and my heart called him.”
13.
EACH EVENING, I tell Paolo about my visions in the desert, noticeably avoiding any talk of making a choice.
“Do you still want to choose a vocation?” Paolo asks.
He doesn’t know that I am terrible at making decisions. I have no way of knowing whether or not I am supposed to be a nun. It takes me an hour just to pick a video at Blockbuster.
Put it before God, he says.
He makes it sound so easy, as though a monastic vocation is a recipe we need to try, to see if it is hopeless or perhaps just needs more salt. I can’t blame him. His own choice to become a priest came when he was still a teenager, and he had never lost the conviction that he had been called. I had met many other monks, nuns, and priests who had received their vocations in much the same way, a miracle that stayed within them, a kind of love at first sight moment between them and the Divine. Yet I am not accustomed to letting God participate in my choices, and since he has not taken the initiative to call out to me like he did to Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, I don’t know how to begin asking him what he might think.
I’ll just ask God for a sign, I decide. If God really wants me to become a nun, then he will give me a sign during the Mass tonight. There will be a sign in the moment when the bread is raised to the sky.
IT IS ESPECIALLY DAMP AND COLD when I take my place that night in the back of the church. Outside, the wind is howling. We light the candles and make our prostrations to the ground.
As the readings in Arabic begin, I watch closely and wait for a sign. Yet the Arabic vocabulary of the Mass is too complex for me, and I understand nothing. The first reading passes, and then the second, and I have no clue from which books they are taken or what they are about. I am as lost as I was when I first arrived in the Middle East years ago, not knowing a word.
I won’t lose hope. As the Communion approaches, I still wait for the smallest possibility of a miracle—a flicker of light, even a deep feeling in my heart. Paolo lifts the bread into the air, imitating the words of Jesus to his disciples: “Take this, all of you, and eat from it. This is my body.”
No, there is nothing, nothing at all. Not even a faint gleaming.
Though it hardly seems possible, the Mass gradually becomes increasingly baffling, a Monty Python skit of the nonmiraculous. During the Communion hymn, everyone sings so off-key that they finally begin the song from the beginning, trying to salvage a tune, to bring forth at least some semblance of music. Again, I do not recognize the song and cannot join them. If it were not so depressing, it might be funny. It is not simply that God will not give me a sign. I am beginning to wonder if he has made everything deliberately obscure, as if to warn me never to ask for one again, as the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it.”
After the Mass, I barely eat. By the time I return to my room, night has already fallen. I lock the door behind me, feeling, in that quiet room, betrayed. It is not so much that I desire to be a nun. I want to know that God is listening to me. I want for my life not to be anonymous, for it to be witnessed by someone else. I want to know that I am not still that eleven-year-old girl, waiting all afternoon, speaking to the empty air.
I climb into bed and then, changing my mind, climb out again, standing in the center of the room. Listen, God, I whisper to the walls. I am going to give you another opportunity.
I remove an icon of Christ from the wall and take a candle to light in front of it. I find the box of matches, only to realize that they have all become damp during the course of the day. I strike one match after another and watch as the ends crumble into powder. Finally, the last match lights—catching the wick just in time.
I sit down in front of that candle, in the dark, and read the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. I have read that story so many times, but only now do I touch the agony it contains. I ask them to appear to me. I watch Abraham saddling his bags onto his donkey, his fingers stumbling over the knots, the way he places his head against the saddle just for a moment, breathing. I follow his slow and tortured walk up the mountainside with his son, pressing the brush aside so that it will not scratch against the child’s face. I can see it in his eyes, his desire to give up everything in obedience to God. I stand beside him as he lays his son down on the altar. I close my eyes, seeing the faint candlelight through my eyelids, and pray. God, I am offering a second chance. I am willing to give you everything. I only ask for a sign.
I wait. And wait. I wait until the wick wears down to nothing and the night is finally drowned in darkness and silence. The last thought I have before sleeping is that even God no longer wants me.
14.
I SLEEP LIKE A STONE. In the morning I awaken to a pulsing of joy and relief flooding out of my heart. The storm has passed, and now light is coming through the windows in full force, illuminating everything in the room. From my bed, I look down at the candle wax on the ground and remember the events of the night before. Suddenly it seems so very long ago. Perhaps God has not abandoned me after all. Perhaps he simply sent an angel to me in my sleep to whisper in my ear, Don’t worry. You don’t have to go through with this.
After the morning prayer, Rania intercepts me in the dry riverbed on the path to the mountain, clearing a flat stone so that we can sit side by side to talk. I reason that God must surely understand that, even during a month of silence, women in their twenties sometimes have to process.
“What happened last night?” she asks. We are following the same schedule, both of us in the section of the Exercises where we are asked to make a choice. Like good Syrians, Dima and Rania always manage to know what is going on in their neighbors’ lives. I would not be surprised if they met my Jesus on the way down the mountain, just to press him for details.
“I waited for a sign to see if I should become a nun,” I tell her. We live in a bizarre microsociet
y, where one can mention waiting for signs and witnessing visions with the same nonchalance normal people use to discuss the weather.
“And?”
I smile. “Nothing happened. I mean, many things happened. But none of them were good.”
Rania wrinkles her brow in confusion. I am sure that she thinks I have said the opposite of what I had intended in Arabic. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“But you look so content today,” she says. “I haven’t seen you look this happy in a long time.”
She has a point. Why has God giving me the silent treatment put me in such a good mood? Could it be that I simply love the rush of impossible relationships? Yet for some reason, this relationship doesn’t feel at all impossible anymore. It feels so manageable. So fitting to my life.
“I think I know what I want to do in my life,” I say, realizing this is true even as I say it. “I want to have children. I want to fall in love. I want to get married. I want to become a writer, I want to find poetry again. I have just been so scared of wanting anything, for such a long time, that I haven’t been able to admit this.”
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 15