Becky phoned me the morning of Thanksgiving. “Can you please bring a salad?” she asked. A super-hostess, my mother-in-law never requested that I bring anything.
“Of course! I’d love to!” This will be the salad to end all salads, my contribution to the holiday, my Salade d’Resistance! I thought, trying to pep-talk my way out of bed. Instead, I fell back asleep, awakening with barely enough time to trade my pajamas for clothes.
I forgot the salad. The thought squeezed me as I pulled up to Becky’s house alone because Trent had gone ahead of me. I was so tired that I wasn’t sure how I was going to walk into the house, let alone produce a salad out of thin air. I wish I could tell you I did the reasonable thing that normal people would do in this circumstance: go to the grocery store. But I was not a reasonable person. I was a sick person. And chronically fatigued people make chronically fatigued decisions like buying salads for a crowd at a fast-food drive-through window.
“You want how many side salads?” the attendant exclaimed through the intercom.
“Fifteen!” I shouted. “With packets of balsamic and Italian dressings.” (Why not full-size salads? the reasonable reader may wonder. Well. Nothing says drive-thru Salade d’Shame like rubbery hard-boiled eggs and crispy chicken.)
I’m not sure that there is another image that captures the lengths I would go to disguise my Sickness—and seem like a normal, functioning person who could do normal, everyday things—than the picture of me parked in front of my mother-in-law’s house with fifteen side salads, crying over a bowl and tongs I’d stolen from her kitchen cabinet. I dumped the salads and all of the dressings in the bowl in the passenger seat, tossed it together, walked in through the garage, and placed my Salade d’Shame on the buffet table.
“This salad is delicious!” said my father-in-law, Denny, a little while later, his plate heaped high. My shame grew exponentially.
“Reba brought it,” said Becky.
“Did you make it?” Denny asked.
“I threw it together,” I said modestly, because I did.
EVEN THOUGH I’D DONE the drive a hundred times, I took a wrong turn on the way home from Thanksgiving dinner. A really wrong turn. I ended up in a neighborhood I wouldn’t visit in the dark, not even with Trent and pepper spray.
On one side street, I passed a tiny stone building: St. Lydia Eastern Orthodox Church, the sign proclaimed. The orthodox part stopped me because I’d been trying unsuccessfully all month to figure out the Greek Orthodox service times. According to a Greek friend, the time of church meetings is a Big Fat Greek Secret. “If you don’t already know,” she’d teased, “no one is going to tell you.”
Interesting, I thought about St. Lydia. The steps and small garden were filled with loitering people—several of whom looked pretty scary. I clicked my locks, sped off, and determined to keep calling the Greeks.
I made the same wrong turn a few days later—and wondered if the Godiverse might be trying to tell me something. Maybe it was the right turn.
“I’m thinking about going to a service by Smith Park this Sunday,” I told Trent.
He looked mildly alarmed. “You’d better leave your wedding ring at home and drive my car.” Trent’s ride was Old Lady Buick, circa 1993. We loved her and hoped she’d survive through law school, but no one in their right mind would try to steal her.
Before I even got out of bed that Sunday, I felt an energetic pull, a phenomenon I named the “Siren Song of St. Lydia.” As I dressed for the service, I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen, but the day felt significant somehow.
The pull helped me exit Old Lady Buick and stride quickly and purposefully to the church’s entrance. The red wooden door was ajar and the service had already begun. I crept into the sanctuary of this stone jewel-box of a church. With only twelve wooden pews, six on each side, it was maybe twenty-five feet from the front door to the altar.
The calm I experienced just inside the doors did not match the fear I’d felt outside. Maybe it was the incense. (Could it be? An incense brand I wasn’t allergic to?) Maybe it was the lighting—sun cascading through stained glass, bright flecks of candle scattered around the front. Or maybe it was the holy hush of the thick, worn carpet under my feet and the soft background soundtrack of monks chanting. But for the first time since beginning the project, for the first time in nearly a decade, something within me stirred in recognition in a church. Peace be still, It whispered, and—also for the first time in a long time—I was.
I slipped into the second row on the left. There were only ten people present; I was the only Caucasian until the priest appeared from a side room, dressed in ornate robes. From the church’s website, I knew this priest was a professed monk who lived here in the church “dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor in the inner city.” He was absorbed in the preparations for the service and helped by a teenage boy who—also robed—looked like a handsome, dreadlocked angel. I couldn’t see most of what was going on because it took place behind a partition, but when the Urban Monk (as I immediately named him in my head) came to the front, he faced away from the tiny congregation, as if leading us directly to God.
The pageantry of the service—the use of color and incense and ritual—felt Eastern; though it was decidedly Christian, it reminded me much more of the Buddhist meditation center I’d visited than any church I’d ever been to. The whole service was elegant, even though people seemed to stream in and out as they pleased. Time moved slowly, but in a good way, like the wax dripping from the candles on the altar. As the Urban Monk sang and chanted long prayers with his back to the congregation, I realized what felt different. This place was real. There was no separation between the church and the community: the front door opened straight into the sanctuary. There was no vestibule, greeter, or program. The liturgy, incense, and candles lent a surreal feeling to the hour.
Eventually the Urban Monk turned around, and I found myself smiling. He looked just like Santa Claus: long white beard, red cheeks, wire glasses, jolly grin. “Welcome,” he beamed to the eight of us still there. As he transitioned to the homily, our eyes met briefly, and the Energy sent a shock down to my toes. He’s important, the Energy told me.
The Urban Monk spoke without preamble. “Zechariah the priest, father of Saint John the Baptist, questioned God. His wife Elizabeth, mother of Saint John, questioned God. Sometimes we question the ability of God to come in and change things.”
As he spoke, I knew what had stirred when I walked into St. Lydia—my heart, I realized with a jump of recognition, perhaps like John the Baptist’s in Elizabeth’s womb, when he recognized, even before he was born, the arrival of his salvation.
“The Scriptures tell us to ‘come and see’ the goodness of the Lord. Come and see for ourselves. Not because it’s what someone else told us, but because we have firsthand experience.”
I flashed back to the wizened old teacher at the Buddhist center. “Ehipassiko,” he had said. “Come and see. Your life is a laboratory for the Dharma. Test the teachings. Question the teachings. Truth exists in the value it brings to you.”
My heart fractured wide open. Tears streamed down my face because I felt as though the Breaking, Thirty by Thirty, and my whole life had brought me precisely to this moment, to hear exactly this:
“We may not recognize it,” the Urban Monk said, looking straight at me. “But the moment we ask the question is the moment the miracle happens. The answer comes with the question, the miracle with the asking.”