“Isn’t that fascinating?” Susan cried. “Maybe you can get this place some publicity!”
At that moment we were joined by Brother Brendan, the quiet and bespectacled monk who served as the guestmaster.
“Rachel here is a writer,” Susan said.
“That’s wonderful,” said Brother Brendan. “It’s a joy to have you with us, Rachel.”
“I’m not Catholic,” I said, regretting it instantly. For some reason I wanted to get that out of the way, to divulge it up front, lest I be found out through some clumsy, accidental sacrilege and thought a imposter. But the announcement came out as abrupt, defensive.
Brother Brendan seemed unfazed and went about carefully sprinkling salt on his spaghetti, but Susan looked as though I’d just informed her I’d been orphaned.
“Oh. Are you a . . . person of faith?” She fingered her necklace protectively—a silver Jesus on a gold cross.
“Oh yes. Definitely.”
“And where do you attend . . . services?”
“Well, I grew up evangelical, but I’ve been rethinking things lately. Our last church sort of dissolved, which was a painful experience. Now I’m not sure what I am. I guess you might say I’m searching.”
Before the words left my mouth, I knew I’d just violated rule number one of conversational self-preservation: never tell a religious person you’re searching.
Susan seized the moment. She told me about her favorite Catholic writers, jotted down the names of four books she thought might help me in my quest, and shared her own story of growing up Catholic, leaving for a while, and coming back again, drawn, she said, by the feminine presence of Mary, which helped her heal from a difficult childhood. My inner Protestant carped now and then, but I found myself moved by her sincerity and impressed by her knowledge of Christian history and theology.
“Do you ever doubt?” I asked both Susan and Brother Brendan.
It is a question I often ask of the devout, and I can always guess the answer within seconds of posing it. For those who have doubted, a flash of warm recognition spreads across their faces, as if they’ve just discovered we share an alma mater, a hobby, or an old friend. Those who haven’t look back at me perplexed, like I’ve begun speaking Swahili.
Neither Susan nor Brother Brendan had ever doubted.
“In fact,” said Brother Brendan, “my faith was strengthened after the tornado.”
Months before, in April, an F-4 had rolled through Cullman, ripping the roof off the county courthouse, leveling several homes and businesses, and killing three people. Upturned oaks and maples lined Route 278, their maze of ancient roots exposed, and signs advertising shingles and roof repair stippled the farmland. Overgrown driveways led to heaps of siding and Masonite that, were it not for the foundations and inexplicably erect mailboxes, you would never guess had once been homes.
“It came so close to campus we could hear it roaring,” Brother Brendan said, as Susan leaned in closer, eyes wide. “All around was destruction, and yet we didn’t lose a single tree.”
“It was the blessed Mother’s protection,” Susan whispered.
They looked at me, expecting some kind of a response, but I didn’t know how to tell them this was exactly the sort of thing that made me doubt. Christians like to claim divine protection when a long line at Starbucks miraculously saves them from the fourteen-car pileup on the interstate, or when a wildfire just misses their home to take out a dozen others, but I’m always left wondering about the victims, those whose supposed lack of faith or luck or significance puts them in the path of the tornado instead. What kind of God pulls storm clouds away from a church and pushes them toward a mobile home park? And what kind of Mother would only shield a few if her arms were wide enough to cover all?
I studied my plate, feeling both guilty for asking these questions and resentful of those who don’t. No matter where I went to church, I realized, doubt would follow, nipping at my heels. No matter what hymns I sang, what prayers I prayed, what doctrinal statements I signed, I would always feel like an outsider, a stranger.
“It’s a miracle nothing was damaged,” I finally said, wondering for the first time what exactly I’d hoped to find in this place.
August in Alabama isn’t something you trifle with. It’s the time of year newspapers across the South run dozens of stories about kids passing out at football practice and band camp, punctuated with sidebars extolling the virtues of proper hydration. So after a brief stroll through the grounds of St. Bernard following lunch, I escaped to the abbey chapel, which, in the stifling afternoon heat, waited cool and quiet as a cave.
With the place to myself, I ambled through the sanctuary, studying every window, alcove, icon, and plaque, listening to the church tell her story. A journey through a church, though a modest pilgrimage, can be an instructive one if you pay attention, if you follow the signs.
The floor plan took the shape of the Latin cross, with the massive stone altar at the crossing. In the north transept rested the veiled tabernacle, which housed the Eucharist—“God made present for us in food,” the guidebook said. In the south transept sat two confessionals, over which shone the Holy Spirit window, depicting the familiar white dove amidst a swirl of red, blue, gold, and green. The east end, by the choir, boasted a forty-four–rank pipe organ of approximately 2,400 pipes, the west the resurrection window—a modern piece made of rows of little stained-glass squares. But the soaring parabolic arches, clerestory lights, and everything about the place drew the eyes upward toward the centerpiece: the flat Byzantine-style cross, suspended over the altar as if in amber trimmed with gold. On the side facing the congregation was Christ crucified, the scene painted in dreary black, copper, and brown tones. On the side facing the choir was Christ victorious, levitating in a bright blue sky spotted with gold stars, a white robe over his shoulder and a medallion of the Sacred Heart blazing as a seal on his chest.
Along the north and south aisles, twelve alcoves corresponding with the twelve stations of the cross invited visitors into prayer and meditation with icons, candles, prayer benches, and artwork. In one I found a moving pietà, a reproduction of a thirteenth-century wood carving in which Mary holds a broken Jesus in her arms, every mother’s anguish etched into her face. In another, I found a statue of the Infant of Prague, which unnerved me at first, having never seen baby Jesus so royally decked out before. In another I found a pricket stand lined with red votive candles. I slipped a dollar’s worth of very loud quarters through the slot for donations, struck a match, and lit three—one for healing for a sister-in-law diagnosed with breast cancer; one for thanksgiving for my friend Ahava, who weeks before had left a prayer for me in the Western Wall; and one to acknowledge a relationship in need of repair. The flames shimmied and waved, moved by the rhythm of unseen currents in the air. I lit one more candle for myself, calling to mind the words of Milton, “What in me is dark, illumine.” Then I kneeled on the prayer bench, put my head in my hands, and in the quiet of that sacred space, talked to God.
It’s funny how, after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.
During mass, I watched a young Latino family go forward for communion—the woman veiled with a mantilla, a cooing toddler in her arms, her husband’s hand on her back—and was surprised by the hot tears that ran down my cheeks. They approached the altar with such confidence, such joy. How I longed to be as at home in my faith. How I longed to be so sure of my footing.
Benedictines recite the psalms every day, at morning, noon, and evening prayers, working through the entire Psalter every few weeks. Immersing themselves in the rhythm and imager
y of these ancient songs brings the power and pathos of Scripture to life, for the psalms have a way of reminding the reader—or, in this case, the chanters—that whatever joy, agony, fear, delight, or frustration one is experiencing at the moment has, in fact, been experienced before. In this sense, a psalm can be both intimate and communal, deeply personal and profoundly universal.
At Vespers that night, in the company of twenty men who had taken vows of poverty, chastity, community, work, and prayer, and with whom I seemed to have so little in common, I intoned the words of Psalm 39:
Show me, LORD, my life’s end
and the number of my days;
let me know how fleeting my life is.
You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you.
Everyone is but a breath,
even those who seem secure . . .
Hear my prayer, LORD,
listen to my cry for help;
do not be deaf to my weeping.
I dwell with you as a foreigner,
a stranger, as all my ancestors were.
Look away from me, that I may enjoy life again
before I depart and am no more.
And even in the Grand Silence that followed, I felt a little less alone.
I nearly skipped a tour of the famed Ave Maria Grotto on my last day at St. Bernard. It cost seven bucks to see and I’d already gone all Martin Luther on the gift shop, scandalized over the sale of holy water, which, when you think about it, isn’t much different than evangelicals selling Duck Dynasty–themed Bibles in their bookstores, but still . . .
Thankfully, a blue sky and a generous breeze beckoned me, and a smattering of other tourists plus a tabby cat, down the shady trail that meanders through the strange and charming world of Brother Joseph Zoettle.
Brother Joseph came to St. Bernard from Bavaria in 1892, when he was just fourteen. Informed by the abbot that he could never fulfill his dream of becoming a priest because his hunchback proved too much of a distraction, Joseph was put to work, first in the quarry on the grounds of the abbey, then as a traveling housekeeper to parishes across the Southeast (including, I learned, Dayton, Tennessee), and finally as the keeper of the abbey’s powerhouse—a job that left him stoking fires, shoveling coal, monitoring gauges, and troubleshooting all manner of malfunctions, often for seventeen hours a day. Joseph hated the work, and wasn’t shy about sharing his troubles in his journals and with his fellow monks. But in 1918 he discovered the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, whose famous “little way” inspired him to go about even his menial tasks with love.
Beginning with a single small grotto near the quarry, Joseph used his precious free time to fashion miniature buildings and shrines out of concrete, glass, trinkets, and an array of discarded building materials. When his Little Jerusalem began attracting visitors from outside the abbey, the abbot asked Joseph to make miniature grottos to sell for charity. Joseph made more than five thousand such pieces before he was finally released, at age fifty-four, to devote the rest of his life to tending his tiny world. By the time he died in 1961, Brother Joseph had cobbled together Jerusalem, Bethlehem, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Monte Casino Abbey, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and more than 120 other grottos, markers, towers, and shrines spread out over four acres, each constructed from an amalgam of stones and shells, cement and chicken wire, marbles and ash trays, jewelry and tiles, even toilet bowl floats—gifts to Brother Joseph from pilgrims from around the world.
The monk still watches over the place, his slumped shoulders and impish face preserved in a bronze statue near the entrance of the now famous site, collectively known as the Ave Maria Grotto, after its seminal work. In the black-and-white photos in the museum, Brother Joseph wears overalls, a poor-boy hat, and a furrowed brow—exactly how I imagine an elderly Owen Meany.
At first, the unapologetic ebullience of the site overwhelms. One gets the sense that Brother Joseph responded to every creative challenge he encountered by adding just a bit . . . more. The result is an explosion of cement, color, and religious kitsch that at once amuses and confounds. Wandering down the concrete steps, I turned my camera first to a miniature Tower of Babel dotted with mosaic tiles, then to a crucifix made of blue ink bottles, then to a gaudy shrine built around a tiny souvenir-style Statue of Liberty, then to a seashell-encrusted birdbath out of which grew a bouquet of dessert bowls attached to “stems” of iron rods. The tabby cat followed close behind, scratching her back on the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes before peeing all over the Parthenon. Next I found Hansel and Gretel’s Temple of the Fairies, a crowd favorite, featuring a tiny pumice organ fit for a grasshopper, an altar and baptismal font made of cold cream jars, and a winged cement dragon with red marble eyes hiding in the basement.
There was a certain playfulness about the haphazard arrangement of things, with St. Peter’s Basilica (its dome made from a birdcage) sharing a neighborhood with the Alamo. And there was a tenderness in the details: the potted cacti around the Spanish missions, the designated chipmunk crossing drawn across the path, the veterans’ memorial lined with dozens of tiny crosses “in memory of the St. Bernard boys killed in World War II.” The on-site literature acknowledged that the scale of Brother Joseph’s miniatures are noticeably distorted—towers, buttresses, and doorways too large or too small—but the monk’s inspiration came almost entirely from postcards and books. He walked the streets of Jerusalem, Rome, and Paris only in his mind.
At the center of the garden stood Brother Joseph’s magnum opus—an artificial cave made of concrete, stone, and shells, twenty-seven feet deep and twenty-seven feet tall, where Our Lady of Prompt Succor was assaulted by a lightning storm of white marble stalactites. (Brother Joseph hit the proverbial jackpot when a train derailed on the L&N about twenty miles from Cullman, and he scored a freight car full of damaged marble.) Rococo meets folk art proved a bit much for me; I wasn’t sure where to point my camera. My self-guided tour concluded with the Tower of Thanks, a lopsided cement spire inlaid with shells and topped with four glass balls—sea green in the sunlight—once used as fishing net floats in Ireland.
It was a lot to take in, but along the trail I developed a special affinity for the site’s many wayside shrines. Spaced out at the intervals in the path, they represented some of the artist’s most charming and inventive work and imitated similar roadside markers that are common across Europe. Often erected on highways that lead to popular pilgrimage sites, wayside shrines resemble birdhouses or tabernacles and, according to my guidebook, “provide a place for travelers to stop and offer praise, turning heart and mind to God.” They signal to the pilgrim that he’s on the right path and invite him to worship right where he is.
While the wayside shrines of Europe typically house images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, Brother Joseph, of course, added his own flourishes, haloing his subjects with bottle caps, marbles, costume jewelry, and hermit crab shells. I stopped at each shrine and smiled, their presence something of an affirmation that pilgrimage isn’t always a bad idea, that even here, in a garden of kitschy folk art in Cullman, Alabama, I was on the right path.
From one, a ceramic bust of Jesus that Brother Joseph probably picked up from a gas station somewhere looked back at me, and with a goofy grin more befitting the Dude than the Son of God, seemed to say, “Keep going, Rachel. Don’t be in such a hurry. Remember I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”
I took a picture and said a prayer of thanks—for St. Bernard Abbey, for the Mission, for Grace Bible Church, for Bible Chapel, for youth events and college chapels and airport prayer rooms and Christian conferences, for the Methodists of Jackson, for the Baptists of Waco, for the Catholic monks of Alabama, even for Presbyterians, for the Catedral Metropolitana San Sebastián in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the Chapel of the Transfiguration in Grand Teton National Park, and for all the wayside shrines of this world where I’ve found sanctuary, if even just for a time.
Madeleine L’Engle said, “the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”58 I think the same is true for churches. Each one stays with us, even after we’ve left, adding layer after layer to the palimpsest of our faith.
Thanks to evangelicalism, I don’t need Google to tell me that the book of Ezra follows 2 Chronicles or where to find the words love is patient, love is kind. Thanks to the emerging church, I know I’m not the only one who doubts or the only one who dreams of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Were it not for the Anglicans, I’d have never found The Book of Common Prayer or fallen in love with the Eucharist. Were it not for the Mission, I’d have never known the depth of my own resourcefulness or the importance of taking risks.
The journey comes with baggage, yes. And heartbreak. But there are also many gifts. In a sense, we’re all cobblers. We’re all a bit like Brother Joseph, piecing together our faith, one shard of broken glass at a time.
Just a week after my trip to St. Bernard, I visited a Quaker community where one of its members, a barefoot young man with a ponytail, put it this way: “I spent a lot of years journeying through a bunch of religious traditions, looking for a place where I fit. But now I feel perfectly at home here with the Friends, or in a Catholic mass, or swaying and clapping at the AME church down the road. When the Spirit lives within you, any place can become a sanctuary. You just have to listen. You just have to pay attention.”59
The difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that a labyrinth has no dead ends.
The famed eleven-circuit labyrinth inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France has just one path, which takes the pilgrim in and out of four quadrants in a spiraling motion through dozens of left and right turns, before reaching its rosette center. Such a pattern invites meditation, the mystics say, and reminds the pilgrim the journey of faith is rarely a straightforward one.
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Page 15