By this light shall I come to know that you,
Eternal Trinity,
Are table
And food
And water to us.

-Catherine of Sienna

October 31, 2005

Last night I was very sad. It was my birthday and I wanted to be petted and celebrated. But for the past couple of decades I’ve been telling people that I don’t need a big deal made out of my birthday, that it doesn’t really matter. So they didn’t. But it does.

In the midst of my sadness I decided that I needed a date with a holy place. So I came to the chapel of St. Ignatius–serene, artfully serene in a way that only taste and money can accomplish. The only thing that disturbs me about this beautiful place is the crucifix, stolen from Denmark, and hanging not at the center, to but the left of the high altar. Perhaps the architect was not a catholic, although he was obviously and deeply connected to the holy. My favorite room at St. Ignatius is the antechamber where they store the reserved host. It’s a room full of filtered light. A large red-branched madrona stretches up and across the ceiling. An eternal flame hangs from its branches glowing warm and gold. The walls are coated with beeswax and when the day is warm there is a faint sweet scent. St. Patrick’s breastplate is pressed into one wall, St. Catherine on the other. Two kneelers are tucked into the corners, with chairs resting near them.

There are never any clergy here. The space is always empty, devoid of students, visited only by pious middle aged women with silver hair and imported jewelry – doppelgangers of my woefully predictable future self. But today, in my mind’s eye, a priest comes and sits besides me, queries me about my tears.

I am sad, Father. I am tired of not being cherished by my history, by my inheritance, by my faith. I tell him stories. The story of Cate and the Orthodox priest who forbade her from entering the holies of holies – because a female presence would defile the space. Stories about how sad and angry the girls are when there are very few women in the Bible stories they read, their confusion over why God never looks like them. I give him the story of Eden’s anger that her namesake, St. Clare is forgotten while St. Francis is honored — even though Clare began the work first, came up with the ideas, heard from the divine just as well and perhaps better. I offer him my own deep-seeded need to deny myself: my attractiveness, my intelligence, my knowing, my ritualistic ways, my right to be cherished as the kind of creature that I am. In my vision of this conversation, the stories spill out of me so fast I can hardly sort them. They are related and separate, entwined and distinct.

“My child,” he says, “you must make confession, you must forgive.” He leaves me, as I have gone silent and still.

Then someone new enters my waking dream. A nun arrives, simple and unhurried, precise in her work. She wears a knee-length garment of blue rather than black, with a neat white apron and a simple wimple, more like a nurse than a nun. She does not see me at first, as she deposits a stack of texts on the flat top of the altar rail. “Oh!” she says, and “My.” She comes to sit besides me, puts her arm around my shoulder, lets me lay my head on her starched lap to cry. She smells like fresh laundry, warm from the dryer. She strokes my hair, sings a wordless song.

When all my tears are gone, I rise, wipe at my wet eyes. She pushes back my hair. “Come now.” She invites. I follower her to my favorite room, the beeswax antechamber with rose light. She breaks the seal on the heavy marble box at the room’s center, extracts the bread and wine, lays it on the marble top. We pull up two chairs. We dine under our madrona arms.

Later, I will become small without decreasing in value. I will shrink into my most elemental self, curled like a resting child. God will come, smiling and wrapped in sunlight. She will carry me in the palm of her hand, lift the lid of the silver font, and set me afloat in the baptismal waters in a rose petal boat.

And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
-St. Julian