For All Who Hunger

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For All Who Hunger Page 17

by Emily M. D. Scott


  “Stay with us,” the disciples told him. And he did. Just for a moment, they caught a glimpse of God. It might not always feel like enough. But it’s what we have.

  * * *

  —

  My last service at St. Lydia’s, we pack everyone into 304 Bond Street. Standing up to preach, I tell my congregants that I’ve found God in each of their faces, gathered around our tables, waiting and expectant for a small fragment of bread. Like all of us, I’ve experienced doubt and distance from God. “But you,” I tell them, “gave me a rare gift: that of certainty.” I have sat next to God at the table. She was there each time the bread was broken. I longed for connection. Look what I found.

  I return to my seat as Charlotte stands to lead a song. Their faces lift toward her as she lines out each phrase for them to sing back. I wonder what difference our little church has made in their lives, and how it will continue to change them.

  Ezra has made it through that terrible uncertain year of divorce. He’s started dating, and he still brings his kids to church. Charlotte has launched her own theater troupe and is putting on a series of shows at St. Lydia’s, crowdfunding them herself and storing her puppets in our basement. Phil and Wendy got married last spring, with me presiding. I invited the congregation to lay hands on them in a blessing, Peter between them, as a new family took shape. Hannah found courage to share her full self with the world, her true name, her call as an organizer, and some very cute dresses. Omar is starting art school.

  Who would we be if we hadn’t befriended Mr. Heyward and Tracey, if we hadn’t worked alongside Onleilove? Who would we be if we had never seen Sydney’s or Ethan’s photograph? Would we have plunged buckets into the cold floodwaters of a stranger’s basement in the wake of that terrible storm? Who would we be if we hadn’t had one another to pray us along, or these tables to return to when we faltered?

  * * *

  —

  After blessing the cup and doing the dishes, the people of St. Lydia’s gather around and lay hands on me. I am made heavy with blessings and grace. They send me out as we have sent out so many others, and then the grace and blessing spill out the door and down the street to a bar where we laugh and dance and have a few drinks.

  When there are just a few of us left, Hannah says, “Emily, can we see your van?”

  I have purchased a rickety 1994 Dodge Ram van that the previous owner converted into a camper. There’s a bed in the back and string lights hung across the windows. I am deep in research mode, deciding whether I should install a fridge or just buy a really good cooler. All my grief is poured into creating this small home on wheels that will carry me, I hope, across the country on an adventure that is, honestly, quite out of character. But it is the only thing I can do. I want to belong to no one for a while.

  The van is parked around the corner, and we giggle out of the bar and down the street to find it. I fumble with the locks, pull back the sliding door, flip on the string lights, and we all pile in.

  “Oh my gosh, this is so nineties,” Omar says, investigating the wood laminate built-in storage.

  Hannah says, “I feel like we should bless your van. Maybe sing a song?”

  With her newfound voice she teaches us one. It’s a new song—one we’ve never sung before.

  * * *

  —

  Next Sunday night, I am gone. They break the bread without me.

  * That’s Lutheran-speak for a regional grouping of churches.

  The cheapest way to travel to Alaska by ferry, and the most adventurous, I think, is to buy a walk-on ticket and pitch a tent on the ship’s rear deck. This is a custom on the Alaska Marine Highway System, which departs near the Canadian border from a port in Bellingham, Washington, and sails for four days and three nights before reaching Juneau.

  I’m headed north, farther north than I’ve ever been, to preside at the wedding of two dear friends. The last four weeks have been a winding journey: a tent pitched in the backwoods among puppeteers in Vermont; a sunny spare room at a friend’s enormous Victorian when my van predictably ended up in the shop; then I parked the van in a friendly driveway in Boston and boarded a plane to Seattle to visit my parents; and now, this ferry.

  My mom walks me over to the terminal. I’m wearing a backpack, and she’s carrying my cooler. We enact a whole scene in the line for the foot passengers as she tries to take my picture—she doesn’t know which button to push, and the phone keeps going back to the home screen. Soon we are both doubled over with laughter.

  We attract the attention of all the old couples waiting to board. They are the sorts of people who wear fleece cardigans and white sneakers and have binoculars dangling around their necks. The women have let their hair grow out in shades of natural gray or white, swept back into a single, long braid. Aboard the ferry, they sit on the deck and point out passing ships, birds they’ve sighted. These couples seem easy with one another. Worn in.

  I follow another woman traveling on her own to the top deck, and we both break out duct tape, pitching our tents and taping them down with long strips. We are both immediately hit on by a man in coveralls, and politely send him packing. I set out to wander the vessel.

  For the next four days, I recede into my body like a snail in its shell. My mind grows small and quiet, and the world around me slows. I speak to almost no one. As we churn our way north, I stand at the bow of the boat, wrapped in a windbreaker and hat against the wind, or curl with a book in the window seat of a closed cocktail lounge with dated maritime décor. I take hot showers in the compact stalls of the women’s locker room. I nap in corners of the various observation lounges, sample the cuisine in the cafeteria, and dash off the boat while stopped in Ketchikan to stock up on items at the A & P. I wonder about the pair of Franciscan friars in brown robes who have boarded together, setting up their tents on the deck alongside me. I complete eight rows of knitting and gasp when two orcas breach alongside the boat. We all gasp together. That they could be so close and so real and so wild!

  * * *

  —

  The table gathers. But resurrection, it turns out, scatters. When the women find an empty tomb, cavernous and cold, they experience only fear and disorientation. The natural order of things—cells that multiply in a warm, dark place; blood that moves from birth to growth, and finally, one day, to illness and age, decay and decomposition—has been reversed. They’ve come to anoint his body in death, but instead the corpse is missing and an otherworldly ambassador informs them that the world has turned backward, the sun has reversed its course.

  The disciples, too, find themselves confused and fractured in the wake of their friend’s execution. In the post-traumatic haze, they fish but catch nothing. They glimpse his face in a crowd, and their hearts stop, but it’s only someone who looks like him. They dream he is close, the heat of his body just behind them, so close they can feel it, his breath or his voice. They awaken and he is gone. They fish all night, hoping to find him because they are lost. Then, look: he is there. He tells them to cast the net on the other side, and there are fish, too many to know what to do with, and a warm fire on the beach. He is there eating, alive but also wounded, gone but present at the same time.

  What does it mean that God comes so close to dwell with us and then goes away, leaving us to struggle along on our own? What are we to make of her ephemeral arrivals, which seem impossibly tied to her unending presence? Can we live with a God who is here and yet gone? Who gives everything for us and then vanishes?

  Jesus gathered people around tables, but he also sent them out on roads. For every meal he shared, every drawing together around a heavy-laden table, there was a call to travel an unknown path. He sends us to figure it out as we go, teaching or healing or starting churches or just muddling through. Along the way, though, there are tables.

  I have been scattered; this is my road. The disciples followed their grief to the wa
ter, and I do too, letting out my net again and again, hoping I might pull up something, some fragment of who I am, a memory of my ancestors who lived in this region, a way through the memory of their sin, and mine. When I was little my mom stuffed my chubby arms through the sleeves of the baptismal gown that belonged to my grandmother, and the pastor held me in her arms and scooped water from the font.

  “Emily, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” she said, and I let out a cry. With well-worn words, she promised me that I was a child of God, and no matter how far I wandered, God would always find me. Even if I traveled to the ends of the earth, or left myself behind, or lost the people who loved me, or sank down, down, down, to the bottom of the sea.

  * * *

  —

  The last night of the journey, I sleep on a deck chair in the open air. The mountains are all cool blues and white, and I make myself a hot chocolate from the cafeteria’s industrial water heater before heading to the deck. I settle into my chair and nestle in my sleeping bag, the mountains receding as we head north, and north and north.

  There’s a group of high school kids in the tents next to me—sweet teenagers in outdoor gear who’ve come here on a school trip. One of the girls told me about it in the women’s room as we all brushed our teeth.

  “It’s a course on the ecology of south Alaska,” she said, a baseball hat holding her hijab in place, “but we drove all the way from Omaha in a fifteen-passenger bus, and we’re just…kind of tired.” I agreed that it was a whole lot of transport, and wished them well.

  Tonight on the deck, four of the girls are teaching each other a line dance. There’s no reception and no Wi-Fi on this ship; without their devices, the students have regressed to the year 1860, clasping hands with their partners and swinging them round. The leader somehow cajoles the whole group up and arranges them in two circles.

  “Right right right, left left left,” they chant before do-si-doing. Behind me one of the Franciscans, wearing a windbreaker over his brown habit, smiles and nods. The girls are lovely, laughing as they twirl. Beneath them the engine of the boat roars.

  The ferry plunges forward through a darkening passageway of ever-erupting peaks. Their beauty is dangerous and insistent. We have sailed through the Strait of Georgia. My great-grandfather’s ashes are scattered there. My great-grandmother Beatrice’s life was lost to these seas. We sail north, the engines pushing me along through waves of grief and unknowing, past the edges of my sense of self.

  I have left my apartment, my city, my friends, my church. I have left my Lydians. Who am I if they are not there to tell me? If they aren’t there to show me the way to the deepest version of myself: that person who, despite my rough edges and sharp corners, is loved? Who am I if I am not holding a loaf of bread in my hands?

  Is tonight Sunday? I wonder. Are they gathered around the tables? Is someone reading from our sacred book?

  “Please share a word or phrase that struck you in the text,” I used to ask them after the reading.

  Mountain. In my mind I hear an echo of Charlotte voicing a word from the story of an unnamed woman who goes to draw water and finds Jesus instead.

  Ancestor, someone offers.

  The well is deep.

  * * *

  —

  The girls spin and dance and throw their heads back with laughter, spiraling together. The light becomes pale and unearthly as the sun sinks down behind the ancient mountains; I have never been this far north before.

  * * *

  —

  This is the memory I can’t stop thinking about:

  Trudging over to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station with a novel tucked in my bag and boarding the A train. Finding a corner seat away from the doors and opening my book. It’s a few weeks before my departure, and I’m headed to the last stop.

  I’ve dreaded this moment for months. Telling Ula is the very worst part of leaving.

  Lutherans focus not on the person of the pastor but on the office. There will be a pastor after me to love Ula. The congregation will keep loving her in my absence. But today none of that seems to matter. I feel like I am abandoning her, and I don’t want to. All these years of building this church, she’s always been here.

  The last year has been a tough run for Ula. She was set to transfer to a better rehabilitation facility, then became ill during the transfer and landed in the hospital. Her personal items were scattered between Brooklyn and Queens and then sent to a new nursing home in Crown Heights, where she became, suddenly, extremely despondent. On visiting, I’d find her sitting in a chair in the common area, unwilling or unable to speak with me. Then she was back in the hospital, where her behavior became completely erratic.

  “She’s not usually like this,” I told the nurses. “She’s smart and she makes sense when she talks.”

  “Oh…” they said. “So this is different from her baseline?”

  Finally the doctors uncovered the cause of her dementia-like symptoms. With treatment, she began to return to herself. But she’d lost her place at the better rehabilitation facility, so they transferred her to a nursing home near Far Rockaway. The last stop on the A train.

  * * *

  —

  Far Rockaway is called that because it is far. Far from everything. Past the airport, an hour-and-a-half train ride from Manhattan. It was too far for a Lydian to go and help Ula get to church. The trip would have taken three hours, and that’s if the Access-A-Ride was on time.

  Ula was always striving. Always pushing toward a life beyond her capacity. From a wheelchair in the Rockaways she’d tell me that she wanted to finish the degree she had started at New York Theological Seminary. By that point, she couldn’t really read, and her only income came from social security checks. But still she was focused on getting there.

  After her stroke she was sweet but panicked, so rarely in control of what was happening to her—her meals, her schedule, her ability to make choices and move independently. She was always the casual subject of someone’s sentence, always a slip of paperwork in a pile.

  Once, I watched her go to pieces when the nurses at the home asked us to sort through the garbage bags of stuff she had arrived with. Bewildered, she would pick up one crumpled paper at a time, a bottle of unopened soda, and declare that she needed it all.

  “She’s been dispossessed too many times,” an old friend of hers told me.

  * * *

  —

  The train pulls into the elevated station. It’s still cold outside, with a stiff ocean breeze, but as I walk under the tracks, there are small blue flowers blooming along the sidewalk.

  ID tag on my chest, I head up to Ula’s room and knock tentatively at the door. We chat for a while, but I’m barely suppressing my anxiety, and keep taking deep breaths. I help her with her new cellphone. The touch pad is harder for her to manipulate than the old-fashioned flip phone, which had buttons she could feel.

  Ula wants to go outside, so I push her down the hall to the elevator and down another hallway. We line up with a procession of elderly men in wheelchairs or on crutches for the home’s officially sanctioned smoke break. Incredibly, a nurse appears with a Tupperware box full of cigarettes, opens the door to the roof area, and doles out the smokes one at a time to the waiting men. I guess they’re only allowed one a day, and this is their chance. She even has a selection of brands. Ula and I pass on the cigarettes, and I push her out into the fresh air.

  “So, Ula,” I begin, “I have some news.” I feel like a traitor and a sellout.

  When I tell her, I start crying.

  “Oh,” she says, head nodding up and down in understanding, her damaged hand gripping the armrest of her wheelchair. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  “Ula!” I say. “I’m supposed to be comforting you, not the other way around.”

  “You have
to go and do what’s in front of you,” she says simply.

  “I know,” I mumble, weeping. “I’m so sorry.”

  All these years in New York, I’ve been looking for something. Trying to find some wholeness or resolution that I thought a relationship might bring. Trying to reach the end of loneliness. I didn’t find love, but I found Ula.

  The two of us sit together, her in her wheelchair, me on a metal folding chair. I bring my tears under control and ask her questions—anything I can think of—which she answers in her halting way. She complains about the patient in the next room over who plays her television too loud, and tells me that she’s not getting enough physical therapy.

  “Well, let’s go visit the nursing office on the way back to your room and we can ask about it,” I say, putting my hand on her shoulder. We look out over the concrete wall, the oversized exhaust fan humming loudly next to us.

  “Ula, look,” I say. “If you sit up really straight, you can see the ocean.” I have this desire to give her something beautiful, something she can keep.

  She props herself up on the arms of her wheelchair, stretching up, reaching forward. We crane our necks together. And through the chain-link fence, beyond the storm-battered apartment buildings, past the elevated train tracks and the tangle of humanity and hope and loss, we can just catch sight of the blue of the sea.

  For my parents, David and Marilynne, who took me to church,

  and for each and every Lydian, who made one with me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book isn’t written alone. I am grateful for the community of people who helped make this one real.

 

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