By
Jane Lebak
In a totalitarian regime, can you trust the beggar at your door?
On the second trip to my door to retrieve the rest of my grocery rations, I find a man on my steps staring at the bags full of good things he no doubt has been denied for days, if not weeks. He looks up, rain-soaked hair dripping onto the threadbare shoulders of his coat. I say, “Do you need something to eat?”
He stares uneasily as I lift the remaining bags. “Well, come in,” I say. “Let’s get you a meal.”
Still in silence he follows me into the kitchen. I turn on the kettle. Using the fresh bread, I make him a sandwich thick with ham and cheese, then lay it before him along with mustard and pickles. Before I finish saying, “I have no lettuce,” he’s already set into the sandwich. At the counter I make three more, sealing each in plastic, then open a package of apples and another of carrots. When I look up the man is staring at me, a woman who is at least twenty years older and two skin-shades darker than himself.
He rasps, “I can’t get work because I’m a Christian.” I nod. His gaze hardens. “Have you already called the authorities?”
“I’ve called no one.” I pour some tea to steep, then I bring a worn backpack from the closet and load it with the sandwiches, the fruit and carrots. “I can’t give you more than a few days’ food, but this should keep you for a while.” I find the cast-off backpacks at thrift stores, and each stands ready with a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, socks, and a towel. The man trembles as I hand him the bundle, a hole carefully patched at the top, but at least it won’t draw attention like new gear.
He looks into the bag. “Are you a Christian?”
I return to the counter. “I’m actually a Dominican nun in hiding.”
His eyes widen.
“And I can recognize an informant, so you’ll meet your quota if you want to. But take that anyhow, because you’ll need food until the deposit clears in the bank, assuming the authorities pay you what they claim they will.”
He goes pale. I put three bottles of water into the backpack and hand him a fourth. He cracks the cap and bolts down the whole thing in four swallows.
His raspiness wasn’t an act—he sounds ill. “How did you know?”
“You’re not the first.” I set his tea before him along with honey and the skim milk issued by the ration cards. It’s been years since we’ve had cream or butter.
He drinks the tea as quickly as he drank the water. “You could die if I turn you in.” He sounds stunned. “You could have refused me at the door. Why didn’t you?”
“Because you just told me you’re a Christian, and you’re not.” I take a seat at the table. “But someday, when you eat your dinner, you’ll be saying grace.”
In the hospital where I work as a nurse, I count off a rosary on my fingers as I move through the day. Back in the Philippines, my mother’s generation used strings of beads, but if anyone found them on me today in Baton Rouge, I’d forfeit my life. It comforts me to consider that our Blessed Mother would rather I remain alive to pray again than insist on doing things the traditional way. Even my name had to go. I took permanent vows as Therese, named for the saint on whom I was Patterned, but my name tag (and my official ID) says only Reese.
The informant hasn’t turned me in. I don’t know if he or any of the other informants ever became Christians, but I do know there have been five, and despite the government’s rewards, none have made that call.
It’s a morning of bedpans and medications, worried patients and belligerent ones as well, sometimes in exactly the same body. Christ breaks the government’s prohibitions to dwell all around me in the antiseptic halls: in the man clasping his dying wife’s hand, in the first-time mother learning to diaper her newborn, and in the clerk navigating the system to obtain approval for a patient’s elective procedure.
In room 2856, I come to my favorite patient. A radiologist waits at the foot of the bed, her head bowed. Although it’s a private room and the door remains closed, I draw the curtains around a middle-aged black man’s bed and bow my head as well. “Good morning, Your Excellency.” And then I present him a fist-sized box with a test-tube full of wine and a wafer I baked in my own kitchen.
John Shaller underwent a back-alley consecration as Bishop five years ago with me and two other covert nuns in attendance. The Church moves around nowadays without any kind of permanency except for the people it inhabits—no buildings, no property. We’ve got a cottage industry changing IDs and moving the newly-created people from city to city. A homeless man showed up one evening and it turned out to be the Archbishop from New Orleans, come to ordain a replacement for Bishop Ruiz after his execution. Bishop Shaller spends days unloading cargo ships, but nights are for a clandestine Mass and as many other sacraments as he can.
In non-theological terms, we refer to this as burning the candle at both ends; he’s been hospitalized with pneumonia. The radiologist in the room is Sister Miriam, aka Miri. Every day I can, I bring bread and wine. Sister Miriam is able to smuggle in a page with the day’s readings. While I check his vital signs and fill out his chart, he says Mass in thirteen minutes. Once finished, the paper folds into squares tiny enough to slip beneath my wristwatch.
Before I go, he says, “Do we have access tonight?”
“Yes, your Excellency.” Then I open the curtains and push his bedside table nearer.
In the evening, I wheel Bishop Shaller to the ultrasound room. The radiologist signs off that he’s here, then escorts in a Chinese woman wearing a nurse’s uniform even though she’s not yet a nurse. Catholic nuns used to run hospitals; nowadays we infest them.
Bishop Shaller sits in his wheelchair, out of breath, while I boot the computer. It takes three successive pass codes, each one telling us, “Password incorrect. Try again” before the ultrasound machine becomes a Pattern machine. I say, “Do we have the Pattern piece?”
Bishop Shaller removes a jewelry box from his bathrobe pocket, and within it I find a single wooden bead.
“Nice.” Wood works so much better than clothing, although anything organic will do. A wooden rosary is as strong a Pattern piece as anyone could ask for. I load the machine, and it begins analyzing.
Sister Miriam sets a cap on our postulant’s head and attaches electrodes to her wrists and ankles.
The postulant looks nervous, so I say, “Whose Pattern did you choose?”
She twists her shirt in her hands. “Saint Faustina of the Divine Mercy.”
“Oh, I like her, even though she was a little snippy with Saint Therese of Lisieux.”
The postulant pauses. “Was St. Therese your Pattern?”
I nod.
Bishop Shaller rises from the chair long enough to give her Communion, bless her, and renew her preliminary vows.
The computer indicates it’s loaded the Pattern, so Sister Miriam begins the process.
Patterning takes half an hour, but it’s a half hour of intensity. When I took my Pattern, I found myself remembering long passages of The Story Of A Soul word for word as they settled into my heart and changed the way I thought. I felt an intense love of the ordinary world surrounding me, the individual moments all given me by God my Father. Later as I came back to the real world as if breaking the surface of the ocean and taking that first breath, I realized just what a treasure God had given us by creating our very lives. Yes, even a Church living in persecution. Yes, even in Masses whispered beside bed pans and Final Vows taken in muddy alleys.
The postulant whimpers, “Talk to me.” She’s pale. “Talk to me.”
It works best if the subject stays quiet, so while Sister Miriam moves the wand over her temples, I say, “You know we discovered Patterning completely by accident? God gave us this gift when someone learned something about violins. A scientist named Selah Merced learned that when you play the same melody repeatedly, the sound physically changes the wood to make the violin more attuned to that particular series of sounds.”
The postulant nods, still frightened, and Miriam asks her to keep still. Saint Faustina spent a lot of time feeling out of her depth too, so that’s probably a good sign. I continue, “Well, someone applied the Selah principle to all wooden items and discovered they picked up patterning from the alpha waves a person’s brain produces during prayer or meditation. And we can reproduce those vibrations and project them onto other organic material.”
Wood is the best for preserving patterns, but wool works too. Fragments of bone are the least effective because they picked up everything the person did, not just prayers. I’ve always wished we could take a Pattern off a fragment of the True Cross.
The postulant whispers, “I’m going away.”
I squeeze her hand. “No, you’re being enhanced. You’re having Saint Faustina’s pattern worked into your standard brainwave pattern so it will be easier for you to achieve her style of spirituality, but you were already a bit like her. You wouldn’t be able to take a pattern very different than yourself.” I watch the screen over Miriam’s shoulder while Miriam runs the wand over all the places of her brain that God might make His home, dialing the intensity in and out to train the most spiritually sensitive areas.
“There are so many different kinds of saints, so many different lights before God. You’ve found one like yourself, and you’re letting her lead your path. Relax. Try to pray.”
At the end of the Pattern, our postulant wipes the gel off her head and neck with a white towel. We lock out the ultrasound machine so it’s ready for performing ultrasounds again. Bishop Shaller hears our postulant’s final vows, and at last her soul matches the name on her ID card: Tina. Miriam brings her upstairs, and Bishop Shaller climbs into his wheelchair, exhausted, so I can return him to his room.
I hand him the bead in the box. “It feels like I’m touching mercy.”
He tucks the box into his robe without a word.
When I return from my shift, the rain-dampened informant skulks on my walkway, a dangerous habit because the peace officers are just as likely to arrest him for begging as they are to arrest me for Christianity. With each six-hundred square foot house identical to all the rest, it’s a wonder he was able to find mine at all.
He whispers, “I need to know more.”
I hand him Sister Miriam’s slip of paper with today’s readings and the collect prayer. He pockets it as I say, “Are you hungry?”
He nods. I say, “Leave, and forget your backpack on my front steps. In half an hour, remember it and come back.”
Five minutes later, as I make him more sandwiches, I think about the slip of paper I’ve just handed to an informant. It could be my death. It could be his life. The reading for today: I’ve come to set the world on fire. How I wish it were already burning. It’s burning now. Father against son, brother against sister, neighbor against neighbor. We’re well and truly on fire, and Jesus, you can come back. Except you’re still waiting, waiting to collect one more soul, and then one more, and one more after that, each one a little different from all the ones before, never to be seen again and therefore too precious to leave unfinished. Little treats for you as each of us finds you and reaches for you and our hands grasp yours. You call one more soul, and then it’s so good that you reach for the next.
There’s a rapid banging at the door, followed by the bell ringing twice. My death, indeed. It’s easy to think about arrest and martyrdom while slicing cheese, but my heart pounds, and then again someone beats on my door.
At the entrance I find a grey-uniformed peace officer, and at her side, the informant.
So this is how I surrender my life to You. Please God, forgive the informant.
The drizzle doesn’t bother the peace officer. She gestures to the informant. “He’s been hanging around. Is he bothering you?”
Is he bothering me? Is that all? Not a surrender of my life, but a chance to protect his?
“I work at the hospital, and I have his backpack. I wanted him to come get it.” I hand him the bag. “Thank you.”
The officer looks unconvinced. She says, “If he’s harassing you, tell your husband to get rid of him.”
I say, “My husband died.”
The informant exclaims, “What?”
I nod. “On a Friday afternoon, in an unnecessary police action.”
The peace officer shifts her weight.
“He did it to save me,” I tell the informant.
The informant hesitates before speaking, but then understanding dawns on him. “He sounds like a great guy.”
I’m in dangerous territory, a peace officer at my elbow, but I have to grasp the opportunity God’s given me. Perhaps this is how I surrender my life after all. “He’d have done it to save you, too.”
The informant stares at the ground. “I doubt it. It sounds like he’d be too good to ever talk to me.”
“I knew he was too good for me too. But he called one day, and I answered.” My voice softens. “He had this way of making you good enough.”
The peace officer snatches the bag from the informant and yanks open the zipper, then dumps out everything I’ve packed: the food, the fresh socks, the book. Yes, a book, its worn jacket proclaiming Perfect Uniformity Of Our Minds. Every citizen has at least one edition, courtesy of the government. Half the patients I care for clutch their copy as they die. She shoves everything back in, then barks at the informant, “Get out of here.”
He hefts his bag and leaves. The peace officer stares him down until he reaches the main road.
When she turns back to me, I say, “Thank you for looking out for me. I know it’s not an easy job, especially when people fear you, but it’s important work.”
She could have arrested us both if she’d opened the book and found the jacket wrapped around a copy of An Introduction To The Devout Life. Instead of condemning me, she says, “Well, be careful. Feed that type and you never get rid of them.”
No, and neither does God.
Sister Faustina is having difficulty adjusting after her final vows. I know it happens sometimes, but when we cross paths, she’s unsettled. “Maybe I made a mistake,” she tells me in a supply room. She’s restless. She doesn’t want to hide. She clutches my hand and says, “Reese, I’m not being careful. It’s not like me. I’ve stayed underground for years, so why now?”
I say, “Stay with me,” and I bring her to hear Bishop Shaller say Mass. His Excellency is going to be released this afternoon, so I won’t receive Communion for a while. Although there’s a network of priests living underground, they’re difficult to reach, so receiving the Eucharist daily has been like venturing into the sunlight after weeks of rain.
Faustina slips out of the hospital room while I finish the Bishop’s discharge paperwork. “I’m worried about her. There shouldn’t be this difficult an adjustment to final vows.” As I hand him the clipboard, I remember her gripping my hand during Patterning. I’m going away. “I wonder if her Pattern didn’t take.”
Bishop Shaller says, “Just keep praying for her,” and he signs his paperwork.
I push his wheelchair to the entrance, per regulations, and then he gets out of the chair and walks out the front door. Again per regulations. The hospital has designed so many routines to protect itself from accusations, but then again, those routines have helped us hide for years. Whenever I appear to be doing something strange, no one concludes I’m hiding my illegal beliefs but rather that I’m following regulations in their best interests not to know, and they already have too many of their own. By the grace of God I can juggle them all; can perfectly fulfill the hospital’s requirements so they will leave me alone to follow God’s.
In the cafeteria, I take a seat near an Urgent Care orderly whose nametag reads Kell but who is actually a seminarian named Michael who, for obvious reasons, had not been Patterned on his namesake. “Long shift?”
He looks exhausted. “This is the first time I’ve sat down in twenty-three hours.”
I bow my head as if sad for him, but I’m saying grace over the bowl of oatmeal and protein powder. I’ve been fasting for my informant for two reasons, the less obvious reason being that I can’t feed him with food I’ve already eaten, and therefore the cafeteria lunch seems more than appetizing. Thank you, Jesus, for protein.
When I look up, I say, “I need you to think about something.” Code for prayer. He nods. “There’s a new nurse who just joined us. She went to the Faustina school, and she’s very unsettled.”
He pauses. “Faustina school?”
I nod. His confusion remains, and he continues, “I didn’t think anyone from this part of the world could go to Faustina.”
I frown. “Why not?”
“No source material.” He leans closer so he can speak lower. “From Faustina, it’s all stone or metal. ”
The trade in relics is its own system of caves and tunnels, one I’ve never delved because the contacts are so very in the crosshairs. I can drop a slip of paper into an incinerator or count off a rosary on my fingers, but dealers carry their condemnation on their persons. My informant could accuse anyone of Christian beliefs, but imagine if I carried a theca with the gloves of Saint Padre Pio. Anyone who knows a dealer doesn’t even whisper that she knows.
It’s possible someone has a wooden rosary of Saint Faustina and Kell hasn’t heard about it. It’s also possible that someone unscrupulous only said he had it. The devil tempts us all, and who knows what currency he’d use against someone in that line of work? I just rejoice God never called me to it.
On the other hand, Bishop Shaller needs to know there’s a question as to his pattern-piece’s authenticity. So I peck my way through the computer system and obtain authorization for a follow-up nurse visit in seven days. An electronic summons goes out, and Bishop Shaller’s employer confirms an appointment. He’ll come to me.
Every day I tuck a sandwich and a snack in a plastic bag beneath the flowers at my fence. I wrap the fruit in a piece of paper. A clever person might notice the papers have writing on them, and a reading person might notice the writings tell the story of a special man with a special mission. Every day, the food disappears from the plastic bag, but the previous day’s page has returned, flattened where it was creased.
I continue praying with Sister Faustina, but the Divine Mercy chaplet holds no more joy for her. She’s restless. She’s been reprimanded for speaking back to a doctor. The longer we work together, the more I find myself convinced she didn’t take her sponsor’s pattern, whether through failure of the method or failure of the medium. She and I are folding bandages in a stock room when I say to her, “Do you regret your vows?”
She says, “I’ve never wanted anything else, and I still don’t. But this hiding, it’s wearing on me.”
I say, “What do you want to do?”
She crumples a bandage in her fist. “I want to fight.”
“That’s not what your role model would do.”
Her eyes gleam. “No, and I chose her for that. As a child, I got into so many fights, but everyone told me to be like her, gentle even when people acted so nasty. I thought her pattern would help me be more accepting. But now, it feels just like when I was a kid.”
I lower my voice. “What if the pattern was faulty?”
She shakes her head. “Then God let the Church destroy me, and I have to accept that.”
Cold inside, I clutch her hand. “Tina, no. That’s not right.”
She says, “It’s surrender.”
I say, “That’s not surrender. God made you the way you are, not to be destroyed.”
She walks away. I spend the next half-hour changing the dressing on a patient’s infected wound while the sick woman screams at me that I’m killing her and the one in the next bed complains endlessly of the stench. She is Christ, wounded and filled with the pus of humanity’s collective infection. I am Christ to her, maybe the only Christ who will ever touch her without flinching.
And at my fence, I imagine Christ again, starving in both body and soul, stealing an apple from the shelter of the corner post and devouring snippets of the Gospel on shreds of paper that smudge in the endless drizzle.
Seven days. My informant keeps taking his apples. My Sister settles down to her routine and abides by her improvement plan. My Bishop arrives for his appointment, and I escort him to a treatment room, fill in his chart, listen to his lungs. I murmur, “The pattern piece of Faustina may not be legit,” and I fill him in.
He makes no reply. I say, “We need to stop using it.”
“On the contrary.” He hands me the box with the bead. “You have another candidate tonight. He’s to take the same Pattern.”
I say, “It’s illegitimate. It’s done harm to Tina.”
He shakes his head. “It’s real.” And when I wait, he says, “You are under obedience not to sabotage the Patterning. You must go through with it.”
I look at the box, wondering whose spirit I hold in my gloved hands.
He says, “We don’t need another Faustina or another Gemma Galgani. Look around you. It’s time for boldness and authority. We could have fire and uprising, so why waste our saints on hidden lives? ”
Hidden lives. Tears spring to my eyes. “The Holy Spirit knows what we need. The Holy Spirit will send us the right saints for our time.”
He says, “The Holy Spirit sent us Patterns, and it’s up to us to use His gifts. We don’t need more victim souls right now, more counselors and recluses.”
“How do you know what we do need? Won’t the Church just stagnate?” I clutch the box until it hurts my hand. “Who could have predicted a Saint Francis? Who could have designed a Teresa of Avila? We never knew we needed them until they appeared, and then God sent them, and it was right. But to design them—to override our own souls—”
“It’s not an override. You told Tina that yourself. It’s a boost.” Then he pats me on the shoulder. “Don’t let this injure your pride. We can pray the Holy Spirit sends us the souls we need, or we can use His gifts to ensure we have them. You’re under obedience, and right now, we need more of Oscar Romero.”
That’s who I’m holding in my hand. A martyr Archbishop and a galvanizer of the people, and now Tina’s guiding light.
I am under obedience. I am not allowed to sabotage the Pattern, but when Sister Faustina brings down our new candidate, I make sure she sees and recognizes the bead. Our new candidate is a middle-aged man with bags under his eyes and a permanent limp. I say, “Our Bishop has left instructions to change your Pattern.”
Faustina says, “Whose is that?”
As Miri starts up the ultrasound machine, I tell her. Her eyes darken, but she says nothing, and I don’t disturb her during the process because I know she’s praying. She’s not praying for mercy. Now that she’s stopped fighting herself, she’s praying against injustice.
The rain begins to let up. I may never see the sun again, though, because at home, four police cars and a riot van idle before my house. They must think they’re coming for a dangerous criminal rather than a Christian. May God have mercy on my informant. Myself I surrender, but not him, not until he finds You.
Four peace officers meet me on the sidewalk, and a fifth shoves my informant before me. “Do you recognize this man?”
He’s just as threadbare as before, his jacket soaked and a pocket half torn off. “I do.”
The peace officer who previously came to my door says, “We know you’ve been giving him things.”
I gesture to his threadbare appearance. “I’ve been leaving him food. He was starving.”
She holds out a slip of paper. “We found this on him. Was this yours?”
I see on the page a handful of words from Luke. You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why can’t you interpret the present time Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?
The informant snarls, “I told you, I was going to plant it on her and turn her in for the money!”
The peace officers pull him back with a jerk.
I look at him. “So you’re an informant who can’t turn in any real Christians?”
“Pathetic, huh?” It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him smile.
I smile in return. “That’s why I was leaving food for you.”
He glares at the officer’s hand gripping his arm. “And no matter what happens, I’m glad you did.”
The rain drips off the state-issued tree shading my front steps. One of the officers says, “I say we arrest them both and let the magistrate sort it out.”
They conference by their vehicles, leaving me and my informant with the rain dripping on us both. Using my thumb and the rain, I trace a cross on his forehead. I murmur, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
His eyes widen. Relief.
The peace officer returns. “We’re going to search your house,” she says, but then my informant bolts between the houses and across the next street, and the officers shout even as one of them wrenches me by the arm.
The pain brings tears to my eyes, but I’m not running. I’m praying. I’m praying for a hungry man who’s been fed, praying that God gives him the dexterity to outrun a radio signal. They can search my house, and I know they will. They’ve searched before and have found nothing. More important right now is that they never find him.
They don’t find him. They don’t find anything in my house, but they spend the next week tailing me everywhere. Tina keeps advocating for her patients. I keep cleaning wounds and folding bandages. The Bishop does his work at the dock by day and at night with the people. And one morning, as I take the bus to work, I find an abandoned building spray-painted in red: I have come to set the Earth on fire.
I have no doubt the Holy Spirit sent my informant to do just that, a fire we never predicted and never would have made for ourselves. How I wish it were already ablaze.