The following week, my cell phone rang.
“Reba Riley?”
“Speaking.”
“I’m a recruiter for a position at Orange Tiger Industries.”
My heart beat faster. I knew this company well; it was Fortune 500. Back before we’d relocated, I used to confide in Trent that I would change teams if Orange Tiger ever called.
“We’d like to interview you for a territory sales position that just opened. Are you available for a phone interview tomorrow, and—provided that goes well—could you fly to Houston next Tuesday?”
I had to sit down.
“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound like a teenage girl in the front row of a concert. “I can make that work.”
I flew to three different cities in as many weeks for interviews. How the Sickness allowed me to do this without falling asleep on the wrong plane and waking up in Albuquerque is a mystery. Drooling in window seats, I dreamed about how this new job would change my life. A promised land of blissful employment beckoned to me from my possible future, promising a small geographic territory, customers and products I already knew, and a company car with brand-new tires. No more backwoods West Virginia with lumberyard owners who kept their scary dogs and scarier hunting rifles in the stock room and suggested with lascivious winks that if the snow got too bad, I could just, “Stay the night at my house, Honeybun.” No more sleeping at rest stops. No more lubricated nails, ever.
“Sick or not sick, you are the best person for this position,” I told myself in my compact mirror in bathroom stalls. I visualized the dusty sales awards hanging in my home office, all won while my mystery illness strangled me behind the scenes. “You can do this. You can rock this.”
I got the job.
“Excellent!” exclaimed the Urban Monk when I told him the good news. “External circumstances are realigning to reflect your internal change.”
“How is changing jobs a spiritual event?” I asked, perplexed. In my mind, a dichotomy existed between my mornings with the monk and what I did to pay the bills.
He laughed. “Everything is a spiritual event. Did you think you would undertake a yearlong spiritual journey and find things unchanged?”
“I imagined changes, but . . . my voice trailed off as I considered what I’d hoped this year would bring: spiritual healing and—maybe—physical healing (if I could find the right diagnosis). “I guess I never thought life would change like this. It kind of feels like a miracle—just not the one I was looking for.”
“Continue on this path and everything will change,” he foretold. “Miracles will swirl around you.”
The Urban Monk talked a lot about miracles. He often challenged me to think about the relativity of time and space, to consider that perception does not equal reality. “Miracles are not only possible,” he said one day, “they are happening around us continually. We need only open our eyes to see them.”
On one particularly bad day for the Sickness, when I had felt the weight of my mystery illness in every word, I’d answered his miracle-talk too sharply. “I could use a miracle healing any time now, Father. Yesterday, preferably.”
He had not corrected my tone; he simply lifted his hand in a “stop” motion and gazed above my head for several minutes. It was eerie; I could almost feel his energy field expand right into mine. I finally understood why people sometimes fall down in Pentecostal churches: had I been standing up, I might have fallen over.
With his hand up, he closed his eyes and spoke: “Just because we do not feel it immediately does not mean we have not been healed. Time is an illusion; your healing already exists.”
As much as I wanted to believe his words that day, I brushed them off. They didn’t make me feel better; they didn’t keep me from missing a few days of meditation training due to the Sickness. But something about this everyday work miracle—the one I wasn’t looking for—made me wonder.
“Maybe there are miracles in my future,” I conceded to the Monk after we discussed how the job change had come about. “I think maybe I will be healed one day.”
“Don’t think you will. Know you will.”
“I know I will,” I echoed. I disbelieved the words, but the act of saying them aloud seemed a good place to begin. Church bells rang out the hour. We’d spent our whole morning talking instead of training. “I’m so sorry we’re not praying or meditating right now, Father. I know that’s why I’m here.”
“This is prayer. This is meditation,” the Urban Monk gently corrected. “Make your life a prayer. Live your meditation.”
ALTHOUGH I WASN’T QUITE sure what it meant to “live” my meditation, I did notice I wasn’t struggling as hard in my morning regimen. At boot camp, I found my muscles responding as if the miles were shorter and the weights lighter. In meditation, my mind didn’t always fight me, and minutes blurred into hours faster.
One morning I sat across from the monk, bobbing atop the meditative water as I had for months when—suddenly—I slipped under the surface tension, as easily as I used to dive into the pool as a kid. It felt like I was floating underwater on my back, breathing through a snorkel, and looking at everything from a different, still viewpoint. I breathed in and out, in and out, without thinking about it. I wasn’t conscious or unconscious, I simply was. I was part of the Godiverse, and I was the Godiverse. If I had any specific awareness, it was that I was floating in the current of Energy I’d always felt from the Urban Monk and others, the same Energy that often tingled my scalp.
Though I didn’t make the connection in the moment, the peaceful weightlessness recalled scuba diving with my dad, and not only because of the breath. Because of the reconciliation.
After my parents’ divorce, Dad and I stopped speaking for the better part of my early twenties. We were simply too hurt to engage until we made a last-ditch effort to restore our relationship: We went on a scuba vacation. Two wounded, angry family members spending seven days together in a situation where they could easily suffocate each other was probably a terrible idea, but there we were anyway—toes over on the edge of a bobbing boat, each wearing a hundred pounds of diving gear as we jumped in the ocean.
After flailing on the surface to get our bearings, we descended into a different, underwater world. A world where there was no space for our hurt, and no words existed for our anger. We were floating far beneath the surface when Dad saw something and waved for my attention.
He pointed to a pod of dolphins playing under streaming shafts of sunlight. This is so beautiful, daughter, said his gesture. I didn’t want you to miss it. My breath deep and metered, I waved back, aware of a joy that stretched far beyond the sea. Even a pod of swimming dolphins could not compare to the beauty of becoming weightless in an instant.
I passed thirty minutes in buoyant meditation before my mind bubbled up to the surface of consciousness, popping up to discover warm Energy washing over my scalp.
So this is what all the fuss is about.
I blinked a few times to reorient myself.
“Welcome back,” said the Monk quietly. “I take it you didn’t hear the police sirens?”
“No,” I answered, astounded. “I heard nothing at all.”
EVEN THOUGH THE URBAN Monk didn’t actually speak like Yoda, I started posting Yoda-esque snippets of our conversations on Facebook.
Monk: You have to learn to surrender.
Me: I’ll try to surrender.
Monk: Don’t try, do.
Me: I’ll try to do.
Monk: Let God do.
Then one day a private message popped up from Joanna, a girl I’d gone to Christian high school with. Hey, I know it’s been a long time, but we need to talk.
A long time? It had been ten years, and we weren’t best friends to begin with. While I puzzled over the message, Joanna added: It’s about the Urban Monk. There are some things you need to know. Even in print, her tone sounded ominous. My heart palpitated, beating an unsteady echo. My job interfaces with the monk’s neighborhood association, Joanna wrote. The rest I want to tell you in person.
A terrified tingle spread through my body, as if I’d awakened in the night to the sound of an intruder’s footsteps.
I barely slept, but it wasn’t the monk’s potential misdeeds that made me sweat through my pajamas. Cold fear informed me of just how closely I’d tied my spiritual journey to the Urban Monk. I’d let the guide become the path.
“What if he’s a criminal or worse?” I asked Trent on my way out the door the next morning, knowing that even if Joanna’s news turned positive—the Urban Monk had once won the lottery and given away all his winnings to the poor!—the blow had been dealt. I’d realized my mistake, and I could no longer look at the Urban Monk the same way.
“I guess you’ll have to find yourself another monk.” Trent joked.
I didn’t laugh.
“I DON’T KNOW QUITE how to tell you this,” Joanna treaded carefully, pouring us both tea. On the drive all the way to her house, my heart had rapped a staccato warning: Please don’t let him be a bad person. “The Monk is not who you think he is. He claims to be an archbishop, but no one is beneath him. He . . . he was kicked out of the Eastern Orthodox Church.”
I felt relieved. “That makes me like him more.”
I searched my mind: Had the Monk ever directly claimed to be an archbishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church? No. But he had attested that he’d taken his vows there and omitted any mention of a schism. His laugh about Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome suddenly made more sense.
“Do you know why he was kicked out?” I quizzed.
“No one is sure,” Joanna said, fidgeting with her napkin. “I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you. I thought you should know the truth before you get too involved.”
Too involved? It’s a little late for that.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” Joanna continued. “I like the monk. He’s always been very kind to me, and he does a lot of good for the homeless here.” She appeared to struggle for a balanced explanation. “I just saw all your Facebook posts and it seemed like you were buying into everything he said and, well, I didn’t want you to get hurt . . . again.”
From our messaged conversation, I knew her short pause before “again” contained her own decade of spiritual struggle. As the daughter of missionaries to Africa, Joanna also suffered from a case of PTCS and was still trying to reconcile the God of her childhood with her adult identity.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why he’s the only monk in his monastery?”
I shook my head. “I just thought it was because people were afraid of the bad neighborhood.”
She rolled her eyes. “Most of those stories are old.”
I thought back to the Urban Monk’s stories: Every day he had turned around a new situation. I sipped my tea too fast. Scalding.
Joanna continued, “It’s not as bad as he makes it seem. There’s more grant money flowing here than anywhere else in Ohio.”
“If there’s so much money, why doesn’t he have enough?” I challenged.
Joanna sighed. “He’s . . . not the best with money.”
I almost jumped out of the chair. “Is he stealing?”
In all my time with the monk, he’d never asked for money; I’d even heard him speak against tithing. (Coming from a background where tithing was about as optional as death or taxes, his perspective refreshed me.) Then again, he didn’t have to hint around: The need was so obvious it could choke you. I’d been sending checks to St. Lydia monthly.
“No, no; nothing like theft. He just doesn’t keep the most meticulous logs. He’s been alienated from some of the neighborhood revitalization funding because of it.”
I felt reassured but swallowed hard on the next question. “Is that why he hardly has help in the kitchen?”
“Well, that . . . and he isn’t the easiest person to work with,” she explained. “Everything has to be his way or the highway. And if he disagrees about how things are being done in the neighborhood, he’ll just storm out of meetings.”
“Is that all?” I asked, tongue burning. “If not, please just tell me. It’s better to get it over with.”
Joanna sighed again. “Not quite. I haven’t been able to confirm his history.”
“Do you think all his stories about making a lot of money and studying in India are less than truthful?”
“I don’t think they’re lies,” she winced at the word, “but when I asked him for specifics, he got super defensive and wouldn’t answer my questions, so it’s hard to know what’s true.”
I thought back to when I’d asked the Monk what his name was before he took his vows. “Oh, I don’t reveal that,” he’d said, almost offended. “The old me is gone.” At the time, I’d considered the answer highly spiritual, but now it made me wonder.
I fell silent for a minute, tallying up his purported sins. I trusted Joanna because of our shared past and because she had nothing to gain by sharing this information with me, but her words didn’t fit with my experience. Mentally, it felt like I was trying to solve a wooden puzzle of North America with pieces shaped like other continents.
WHEN I FINALLY STUMBLED from Joanna’s house a few hours later, I bit a lip until I could get into the car. The news wasn’t that bad: He wasn’t a criminal or even a man with an outrageous past. He was just . . . a regular guy. A human being with flaws and cracks. He wasn’t a sage, a prophet, or the Buddha reincarnate. I’d been holding on to an illusion of the Urban Monk instead of an actual person. I’d set myself up for failure by putting a leader on a pedestal. What was I thinking?
I’m like the girl who runs straight from a bad relationship to the first willing guy she meets, I thought. The Urban Monk was my spiritual rebound. I need to take a step back, gather my thoughts, take time for me. I groaned aloud when I realized that if I added It’s not you; it’s me and We need to see other people religions to the list, I’d have a full-fledged break-up on my hands.
I drifted mentally all day, unsure of what to do. I felt disillusioned, like when I found out the money under my pillow wasn’t left by the tooth fairy. Should I give up the Urban Monk altogether? Should I keep studying with him?
I mulled over my questions while walking Oxley late that evening. Preoccupied by the freezing wind whipping my face, I almost didn’t hear a ragtag group of people yell at me as they crossed the street.
“Hey, Miss, can we pet your dog?” a man called.
“Sure,” I replied, trotting Oxley over. Mr. Toothless had asked the question. He bent down to rub Oxley’s ears.
“Where are you guys headed?” I shivered, hoping they’d say a shelter.
Mr. Toothless smiled wryly, making a face at Ox: “Shelters all packed up. We’re headed to the bridge.”
I thought of the Urban Monk’s warm sanctuary with folded blankets on the pews for nights like this. “You know, the Mission Kitchen might have a spot for you.”
“Oh, the Father up a ways?” exclaimed Ms. Ponytail. “We know him. He saved Peter’s life!” She gestured to a third guy carrying a beat-up guitar case.
“Got stabbed in the stomach,” Peter explained, lifting double sweatshirts to show me his scar. “Father’d never met me, but it was a miracle that he found me on the street and drove me to the emergency room. He stayed with me all night and brought me food once I could eat again. Say, I wrote him a song—want to hear it?”
Peter pulled out an old guitar and strummed the worst, most beautiful song I’d ever heard. “Father sav-ed me / He sav-ed me / He sav-ed me from dying / Dying on the street / It was a miracle, miracle . . .”
Ms. Ponytail picked up Oxley and hummed along, dancing a little in time. Mr. Toothless joined in out of key. I swayed there under the stars, dumbfounded by the answers to my questions—standing right in front of me, dancing and singing on the sidewalk, and echoing in my own heart to the tune of their song.
It’s not about what the Urban Monk is or isn’t; it’s about who he is when someone needs him.
For Peter and me, the Urban Monk had been exactly what was needed when it was needed, but I couldn’t stay with the Urban Monk forever.
Joanna’s words had shaken me out of the comfort zone I’d created at St. Lydia. Watching the small group sway under the stars, I knew with certainty that it was time for me to move on. There is a time to heal and a time to hustle. It was time to hustle.
I called the Urban Monk the next day. I wish I could say I explained myself, but I didn’t. I was strong enough to recognize my mistake and remedy it, but not yet strong enough to confront someone who had done so much for me. “I’d like to change our sessions to once a week in the evening,” I said, without offering further explanation.
“Certainly. But if you ever need me, you know where to find me.”
I do. You’ll be where you always have been, just in front of the altar, leading the way to God—however imperfectly.
He said: “You have worked hard, Reba. I’m proud of you.”
But I heard: “The Force is strong with this one.”
I STARED IN DISBELIEF at the Aletheia church sign with a sense of certainty that the Godiverse was messing with me for the fun of it. I’d just discovered that my morning boot camp had been inexplicably moved to Aletheia’s warehouse-sanctuary. Now I’d be visiting the church I never wanted to see again. Every morning. In the place my former selves had closed in around me, forcing me to the bathroom, I’d now be at the mercy of the boot camp Torturer. I could almost see God standing off-screen, waiting for me to do something reality TV–worthy, like graffiti the sign or run my car into the building.
The cosmic joke couldn’t have come at a worse time; settling into my new job had triggered the Sickness. Even at the early hour I knew this would be a Lost Day. I’d felt lead collecting in my blood when I dragged myself into St. Lydia for meditation the evening before, and the Energy that buzzed around my head then didn’t slow the onset of the episode. Today, sitting in the parking lot, my limbs were weighed down. I recognized that no matter what I did—run the laps or not, lay down or not—nothing would stop what was coming. In three to six hours, I would be sleeping like the dead. How long I would be down—a day, a week—was anybody’s guess. But down I would go, and from the feel of things, I would be crashing hard. People with migraines talk about halos as a sign of coming pain, but with the Sickness I felt the opposite of sharp light; I felt a blurry darkness, heavy with physical weight, pooling in my limbs.
I was angry, so angry: at the Godiverse for engineering the ridiculous situation at Aletheia, and at my body for consistently failing me. I slammed my car door, stomped through the snow, and threw open the church door as if I could defy the Sickness just by showing up for the stupid workout.
My joints ached and my head pounded as I ran my body ragged in the church boot camp, completing the required exercises. My body filled with exhaustion so quickly that I could cry, and any success I’d had with meditation seemed like a far-off dream that had slipped like silk through my fingers and fallen into black waters, sinking deeper every minute.
I ran the sanctuary corridor, down and back, weaving around chairs set out for the church faithful as my mind yelled ugly things at my body, things I wouldn’t say to my worst enemy. You are weak. You are lazy. And this Sickness? It’s all in your head! You are a complete failure, and someday soon everyone is going to see you for what you really are: a crazy person, unfit for daily life. I hate you.
I moved faster, but I couldn’t outrun the Sickness or the thoughts. The only thing I could do was put one foot in front of the other. So I fixed my gaze on the altar, then the church’s rear doors, then the altar, then the doors. I ran slightly unsteadily, my tennis shoes pounding the sanctuary floor.
Then my eyes caught on a table I hadn’t noticed before. It was a simple display: a photo of a little girl, a daughter in this church, a blonde pixie with bright eyes and leukemia. Next to the photo was an explanation of her illness, followed by a list of what her family needed: prayer, casseroles, babysitting, and donations for medical bills. I lapped the table a few times, and the gravity of this family’s plight shut up my mind, if only for a few minutes. The third time I passed the table, I noticed the sign-up sheet. It was overflowing with names written in the margins and on scraps and napkins, names shouting one thing so loudly I could almost hear it: We love you. We will support you. We will bear this burden with you. We will lift you on our shoulders and take care of you, so you can take care of your baby.
My sneakers stopped; I tripped over my laces; I fell to the ground in surprise before this table-turned-altar. I didn’t hear the whistle of the boot camp sergeant or see him start to walk toward me to find out if I was hurt. I simply stared in wonder at the face of this little one for whom the congregation cried, this baby girl lifted up by the prayers and alms of her people of faith. There was no Christ child here, just a simple typed sign, yet the glory of the Lord shone round about. An entire temple—even the entire Vatican—could collapse under the weight of this faith, this display of God’s people helping one another; but here it was, in this warehouse converted to a church I did not like.
Here it was: Faith, held up by three plastic legs.
Had I been able to think, I would have given God a hard time. So this is where you would have me find faith? On a dirty warehouse floor? With the smells of stale coffee and sweat mingling in the air? Yeah, this is a great story. But I couldn’t think because it all happened too fast. One minute I was thinking about how horrible I felt, trying not to fall behind the group; and the next I was having a transcendent moment where All Became Clear. It was like a car accident I didn’t see coming until—WHAM!—I was the victim of a hit-and-run perpetrated by the Almighty.
There on my knees, I found Faith.
I saw that Faith wasn’t in the strength of an institution. It wasn’t about the institution at all. It was about this clipboard full of grace. It was about Mrs. Kelley signing up to clean this little girl’s house while her mother sat by her hospital bed. It was about Mr. Smith cashing part of his paycheck to contribute to medical bills. It was about Miss Betty, who stayed up the past four nights in a row praying for healing.
Faith lived beyond these walls, knocking them down with the force of a thousand oceans, with every person, everywhere, who chose to carry a neighbor’s burden in the name of something greater. Someone Greater. But Faith also lived here, even where I felt unwelcome; it lived here, where the sermons grated my edges and the style of worship annoyed me.
Faith lived here on this little table, doing sprints of love around me, lapping me more quickly than an Olympian.
Faith: The essence of community hoped for, the evidence of love unseen.
I found Faith on my knees, but not in prayer. I found it in a church, but not during a service. I stumbled over the miracle because it had been right there all the time, waiting for me to notice.