In my last piece, of this rather rambling “memoir in pieces,” I wrote about a beckoning to enter an Episcopal church in Provincetown MA, where I lived for two years. That was in my late twenties. I ignored the invitation, and walked away. Yet, during that same time period of time, I experienced the Presence of Christ in very vivid form. On an Easter morning. Granted, I was hungover that morning, but it was real. And that day changed me. If slowly.
In this second story, that also takes place in Provincetown, it is fourteen years later. I have been a minister, of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, for five years. I am on sabbatical. This time, in need of healing, I do go in the door of the church.
Provincetown Massachusetts, at the end of the spiral of land that is Cape Cod, was virtually empty in the winter, except for the bars, which were always bursting at the seams. The year round population was around 3,000. Down from nearly 80,000 over the summer months. In the dark of winter the fishermen and wash-a-shore women cast their nets for each other, sprawling drunk into the empty streets, whether by day or by night, clutching at each other to break a fall, or cop a feel maybe.
I was what was called a “washashore,” though not one of the women clinging to a fisherman. A washashore being someone who has come to the end of the spiral of earth called Cape Cod, either to hide, or to heal, or both. I had come to heal.
On Sunday mornings I would slide down icy, snow covered Commercial Street to the only open restaurant, The Post Office Cafe, for a weekly brunch splurge, and my Sunday New York Times Reading Ritual, as I had done back in the eighties. But this time, one Sunday in late February, as I walked past the little gray shingled church that faced the bay, I turned around and went back. Just like that. No thought.
I walked through the archway from the street into what would be a colorful garden when spring arrived. It was late February and cold, and there was a foot of still white snow on the ground. A peeling, sun-bleached rowboat was turned on its side in the yard and in it sat a tumble of flower pots, fallen on their sides. Through the doors I could hear the voices of the congregation rising and falling together.
I snuck into the back pew. The unison reading was something about the sea and storms and asking God to protect the fishermen and their boats. It was beautiful and compelling. I craned my neck around the people sitting in front of me to get a good look at the priest. He looked normal enough. Probably gay, my gay-dar said, this being Provincetown after all. I relaxed.
Later in the service the priest asked the congregation to come forward for a healing blessing. Two old women took their places at the front, one on each side of the altar, facing out. My attention was drawn to two grizzled old men with big round, balding heads who sat in the front pew together. They shared the pew in the way of two people who have shared a lifetime together, the molecules in the air around them forming one invisible membrane. They even rose simultaneously, when it was their turn to be blessed. I assumed one would go left and one right, to keep the balance, and not give more work to one server. But unable to part, they shuffled over to the woman on the left. She blessed first one then the other old man by placing her hands over their temples and murmuring soft words. A shy, ecstatic smile lit up her face as they approached. The first of the men to be blessed waited for his partner to then be blessed. After which they turned and together shuffled back to their pew, faces luminous.
I wondered if the two old men would be here every week, and if every week they would be reborn like this. I knew that watching this ritual would be reason enough to return. My marriage to my partner, Lisa, which had been non-legally solemnized in our Unitarian Universalist congregation in Virginia before the entire congregation and both of our extended families, had just ended. I needed to find a container for loss, a ritual of closure. After watching the two mens’ bodies light up from within I thought, maybe it could happen here, the emotional closure part, somehow. I will come back, I decided.
I stayed in the back row for a couple of weeks, and each week I waited for it, the vision of the two old men dying and being reborn as the old woman blessed them. I myself didn’t go forward. There had always been in me some resistance to doing what might be best for me, if it meant breaking the bubble of my splendid isolation.
However I could not evade the priest forever. As a clergy person myself I knew it was his job to be the most compassionate person in the room. He’d corner me at some point. Sure enough, maybe week two or three, the priest beat me to the door. My name is Father Joe (not his real name), he told me. Yes, I know, I said. And in answer to his questions, yes, I am living in Provincetown, no just for a few months. I’m on a sabbatical. I live in Norfolk Virginia. Yes, I can’t wait for the snow to stop and the spring to come. Sure, maybe I’ll check out an adult class one day. As I left I prayed he’d forgive me for borrowing his religion for a few months without giving much back. Except for the money I’d faithfully add to the collection plate each week.
It was the liturgy I was drawn to. In the Unitarian Universalist congregation I served the wisdom of every one of the world religions must be recognized on a regular basis, without being misappropriated. I needed to dive deep, follow a single narrative thread, not a dozen. Most of all I needed the sharing of ancient rituals, expressed in a way I would once have considered rote, but now suspected might allow the kind of deepening I’d only ever experienced by allowing myself to sustain boredom.
As I sat with the liturgy week after week, in this little church in P-town, the rhythmic repetition of symbols and stories, the ancient narrative thread, began to re-order my neuron pathways. And they needed it, badly.
***
One Sunday, late in March, I learned that the congregation was gearing up for Easter. Father Joe explained to the whole congregation ahead of time how the “whole loooooong drama” would unfold. The congregation groaned in well practiced unison. The resurrection was the whole point of Easter, but before that could happen, everything leading up to it would have to be thoroughly experienced by us, as a group. It seemed the lengthiness of the ritual, with which they were so very familiar, was something they enjoyed rolling their eyes and sighing over. At the same time it was clearly something they’d never want to change. I pondered this jolly paradox.
Father Joe stood up front and directed his flock: “This year for Palm Sunday I want us to pick up our Palm Fronds in the Narthex. Then we will parade through the garden, under the archway, onto the street and then back in the front door again. Jesus walked down the streets of Jerusalem. We’ll do the same. None of this lame waving our little palms from our pews!” he said sternly. Again everyone laughed. I figured I could always slip on my shades when we got out to the street.
Then he explained the rituals that would follow Palm Sunday. Apparently one night during the week we’d be washing each others’ feet, since Jesus did that for the disciples at the Last Supper. “You can pass if you wish,” Father Joe said, deadpan, and again they all laughed, as one body.
Then there would be a night when they kept vigil, all night long. The Great Vigil. I figured that must be about making up for Jesus’s disciples' failure to stay awake two thousand years earlier, in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus had said to them in the garden, “Won’t someone stay awake with me?” I’d once delivered a sermon on that story, linking it to Buddhist ideas about being “awake.”
Actually, as I now know, the Great Vigil is re-enacted on Saturday, the night before the resurrection, which is Easter, so it must be about staying awake at the tomb. I must have needed to imagine it happening in a garden. But as my Jewish husband would say, Iceberg, Goldberg, garden, tomb. Either way (and every day) it’s about staying awake with Jesus.
The drama of the week long rituals, the story, and the opportunity to be a character in it, was just what I needed. I wanted to be alone in the dark church at night guarding Jesus. So after the service I went to the narthex where a sign-up sheet was posted on one of the rough wooden pillars, and put down my name for one of the two eleven p.m. to midnight slots. I hoped no one else would sign up for the same time. I wanted to bask in a feeling of solitude, and not have it sullied by the presence of someone who might turn out to be annoyingly talkative.
***
The day of the night I was scheduled to stay awake with Jesus a seal washed up on the beach outside my rental condo on the Bay. My unit was on the first floor and there was a shared wide deck across the entire front of the building. A solid wall of windows lined the front of the apartment. Though spare and simple, it was more than a step up from the P-town hovel I’d lived in, back in my twenties. But like the hovel, all that could be seen from the front windows at high tide was water and sky. The day the seal appeared on the beach, it was about two p.m. and it was low tide. At low tide you can walk way out on the Cape Cod Bay. I saw group of about a dozen people congregated on the sand. I went out on the deck to rubberneck. A man holding a clipboard was clearly the leader of the group. All the rest were silently staring at the seal, who was lying on his side.
I went down the wooden stairs from the deck, and hurried over to the group. “What happened?” I asked a man in the half circle, as it widened to make room for me.
“He’s hurt,” the man told me.
“It’s a Harp Seal,” the man with the clipboard said. He wore a shirt with a crest on it that said Coastal Studies Center. “This one is pretty young. But when he is fully grown his colors will come in and then the shape of a harp will emerge on his flesh.” I looked at the seal in awe. A harp! This had to mean something!
“How can you tell he’s a male?” a woman asked.
“He has no nipples,” the expert answered.
“But human men do,” the woman said. Her husband rolled his eyes.
“Why has he washed ashore?” another woman asked.
“We can’t really be sure. It looks like he’s been in a fight, see the blood on his side? There’s a gash there.” We all leaned in further to see and then fell silent again, staring.
“Will he die here?” someone asked.
The Coastal Studies man shook his head: “Probably he just needs to rest. He’s kind of a little guy, life is real tough for him out there. Maybe he wasn’t making it as a hunter.”
“Does he have an infection or something?” I asked. “His eyes are all bloodshot.”
“No, that has nothing to do with being sick.” The energy in the circle shifted.
“Really” said the expert, “It’s normal. In fact, a seal’s eyes are always bloodshot.” That shook us up pretty badly. Seal eyes were supposed to be soft liquid brown, lovable, as in the post cards and posters. Maybe this guy didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Do you guys do anything?” I asked, rather aggressively. “I mean when a whale washes ashore, aren’t you the ones who try to get them back out there? Can’t you give this little guy some medication or something?”
“There’s really nothing we can do” he said. “You guys can keep watch if you want.” It sounded like he was giving up. “People do that sometimes around here.”
A new person had joined the group with a child. The boy pushed through the adult legs and cooed to the seal, walking slowly closer, hand out. “Ma'am please pull your child back,” the expert said. The mother did. “That’s why it’s great when a group decides to keep watch,” he said. “Seals have sharp teeth, in fact they’re deadly.” The mother looked shocked.
“Look, you need to stay at least this far away.” The expert picked up a stick and said, “OK everyone back, more, more, more, yeah about that far.” Then he ran in a big circle, drawing in the wet sand, a radius of maybe thirty feet from the seal. “That should keep you safe. If you ever get a seal bite it could kill you, bacteria sets in in a matter of hours.” We glared at him, as one. “Sorry! They’re not as cute as they look.”
“If he’s anti-social, why would he want to come onto the beach?” someone asked, “where there are people walking back and forth bothering him?”
The expert shrugged, “Maybe he’d rather shiver in the sand, in the sun, than in the cold water. Wouldn’t you? Shivering is a good sign for him, unlike for us humans.” He smiled at us. We didn’t smile back. A woman to my right and I exchanged knowing glances. Another thing he was wrong about. Shivering is a good thing in humans. It shakes off fear.
“Why wouldn’t he hide somewhere else?” I asked, “Like out in the rocks on the jetty or something?” The guy shrugged again. He was getting tired of us.
“So what happens now?” someone in our circle said. “I mean you can’t just leave him here, there are people out for walks, dogs.”
“The dogs are what I’m worried about,” the expert admitted, “though not for what they would do to the seal, it’s the dog that will get hurt. Remember the teeth.” He laughed. We didn’t. “There’s nothing much I can do. Like I said, if some of you want to stand guard you can. You could take turns.”
We all stared at the Harp Seal.
“I guess he’s used to danger, living out in the wild ocean” a man said.
“He certainly can protect himself, with those teeth,” someone else said.
The expert shrugged, “You guys decide.” He detached himself from our circle and left.
The nipple and eye-rolling couple engaged in silent, intense, eyeball to eyeball combat, then gave their excuses, something about making the next ferry back to Boston, and left.
Another couple said: “Well, we want to see more of the town, maybe if he’s still here later, we’ll take a turn before the last Ferry leaves.”
“I’ll stay!” I said, too vehemently. I hoped no one else would volunteer. I wanted this, like my time at the church that night, to be a solo vigil. My personal, sacred time with the Harp Seal, my fellow wash-ashore.
“I will too,” said the woman who also thought differently about humans and shivering. I had seen her around town, maybe hanging around outside the Foc’sle Bar, I wasn’t sure. “I live right over there,” she said, pointing to a two story home.
“And I live up there,” I said, pointing to the condo. “I’m going to run in and get my jacket since I’ll be sitting. Why don’t you stay? There are some folks down the beach heading this way. Then I can take the first shift, you can leave, and you can come back and relieve me later on.”
“I think the seal would be OK alone for a few minutes” she said gently, “but go ahead.”
I ran up the steps to the deck, shoved the sliding door open, got my black fleece jacket, and ran back out. The woman was sitting and it was clear she wasn’t planning on leaving. Shit.
I sat at the edge of the circle the expert had made in the sand, the sun at my back, a few yards away from her. We stared at the seal who, after a few moments, lifted his blood shot eyes to glare at us, then let his head fall, dead weight, onto the sand.
I felt the woman watching me, felt her gather up thoughts and questions and carefully sort them in her head. She probably could tell I was going through something, and was debating how to deal with me. I wished she would go away. I wanted to drop further down into my sense of loss and aloneness and be as damn maudlin as I felt like.
A couple with two Dachshunds approached the circle in the sand. “I’ll take them,” I said, and dashed over to intercept. I explained about the circle and the teeth. They decided to return the way they had come. I loped back to my spot. “There are some more coming from the other side, do you want them?” I offered generously.
“No, you go ahead,” she said.
I ran over to the pack of people, three dogs amongst them, and delivered my message, greatly emphasizing the harm that could come to one of their dogs. A plump middle-aged woman gasped and clutched a ball of fluff in assorted browns, to her chest. I ran back to my spot in the sand and watched as they made a wide path around the seal, sending him looks of exaggerated disapproval, even horror. A laugh pushed its way out of me, sounding very much like a seal’s bark.
My neighbor looked over at me and smiled. She so clearly wanted this to be a shared experience. “Can you take a turn?” I said, “I need to rest.” I laid down on my side, my back to her, and stared over at the seal, my head on my extended arm. Studying him I learned, with great surprise, that a seal has fingers and toes. What looked like a mermaid’s tail sensuously separated itself into two very long narrow feet, which he wrapped one around the other, rubbing the feet together like an old man in a nursing home bed, seeking warmth. After I noticed this, and the way his arms slapped periodically at his sides, there was nothing new to catalogue. And yet I stared hard, hungry for more.
There was nothing more. The seal really is trying to rest, I thought. The expert was right. He needs to recover his strength. He probably hasn’t slept in days after his battle for territory. I thought about the story of Jesus I’d been hearing in church this Holy Week. I thought, hell, maybe what Jesus was saying was not, won’t someone stay awake with me, but won’t someone let me be the one to rest damn it? He had to have been exhausted carrying the message to so many thousands who’d chased him down so often he had to flee to the hills, or out onto a lake, or the sea. In order to get some alone time.
My arm hurt. I sat up.
Immediately my neighbor said: “My name is Renee, what’s yours?”
I told her mine. Then I asked her what she thought of the Coastal Study guy’s opinion of the seal’s fate. I figured if we talked about the seal’s story I might not have to tell my own.
Renee and I hashed over the details and came to the conclusion that yes, the expert had been right. When the tide came in, the seal would probably swim back out, or just be carried back out. Nature knew what it was doing. There was no real reason to worry about him, only about dogs and children who might get too close.
A young couple without a dog approached, the first to pass by in a long while. Word had probably gotten down the beach to stay away, maybe via the drama queen with the little brown dog. “What is it?” they called out, “is it a seal?” They kept their distance and only slowly came to stand above us, which earned them some respect in my little universe. Enthusiastically I told them about the blood shot eyes, and the harp on his coat, and especially the teeth. When I finished my neighbor engaged them in the kind of chit-chat she had been unable to draw out in me. Where were they from? What did they do? How long were they here? I stared at the horizon.
“What about you guys?” the guy said. “Is one of you a writer? Is a story going to come out of this? Maybe ‘Ode to a Harp Seal’?”
I laughed as if it weren’t embarrassing to realize how transparent the day, and I, had suddenly become. “I’m not a writer” Renee said. “Many, many writers in my family, but not me.” The sentence was fraught with meaning.
“Well, take care.” The man grinned directly at me, and they continued down the beach.
Renee had made a decision. Every story must have a turning point and a climax, and she was going to force a turning point for ours. She began to talk, slowly, and carefully. I studied her as I received her history. She had a look that might be called left-over hippie, with clothes of the flowing variety, long, beautiful chestnut colored hair, untamed. She told me she had inherited her family’s summer house on the beach. “I realize that sounds like I’m very lucky, and I am, but my life isn’t really that easy. Because I don’t know what to do with it. Everyone else in my family did something important, everyone else is famous or at least successful.” She went on to tell me of her two brothers successes. She was not bragging, simply stating facts, very baldly.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to be aligned with her life trajectory. As if failure were somehow contagious. Women often connect with each other by offering up sympathy and common experience. I knew she wanted my back-story as a return favor, but I was deeply tired, after only five years of ministry. And now the work of ending a marriage. I had nothing to give.
She got bold. “Are you married?”
“No,” I said, trying to figure out which word to use. “Separated,” I said. Before she could ask questions I said, “How about you?”
She nodded slowly, gathering up her thoughts. “Divorced, twice to be exact.” She took a deep breath and said each sentence slowly and deliberately. “Then I had a boyfriend, a fisherman from here in town. I decided not to marry again. I loved him a lot, He loved me. We didn’t have much in common. I bought us a house in Maine, and we moved there, he did some work there. Then I found out he was cheating on me.” She waited.
“That must have been awful,” I said dutifully.
She nodded, “It was. It was terribly painful. But when he wanted to split up, I gave him the house in Maine. After all, I had bought it for us. I didn’t have to, we weren’t married, but I did. I did it. That was huge spiritual growth for me. So I left and came back here to this house.”
The sun was going down, it was cold. The seal hadn’t lifted his head to look at us in at least an hour. “It must have been difficult to trust anyone after that,” I said.
Renee reared back and smiled at me, her eyes lighting up as if she’d seen a vision. “Oh no, no” she said, “I will always keep my trust, that is something I will never let go of. There is always more room to trust.”
“I’m going in for a blanket” I said, “and something to eat, I’m hungry. Are you hungry? I think you’re right, he’ll be fine. We could both leave and it would be OK.”
“How long are you going to stay inside?” she asked.
“Oh I’m coming right back out. I have to see how the story ends.” I smiled at her, feeling a tad bit guilty, and spiritually ungenerous, about not sharing my own humanity.
“I’ll wait” she said, “until you get back.”
I tried to relax as I walked away. I knew I had looked very intense all afternoon to anyone who was really watching. And she’d been watching. I willed myself to walk slowly to the deck, slowly into the apartment, and once inside even willed myself to walk slowly over to the refrigerator. I watched my breath, in, out, in, out. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, poured some chilled white wine to the tippy top of a large coffee mug, gathered up a blanket, and sipped the overflow in the mug as I slowly walked back outside. Renee then left and came back with some popcorn, a coke and a blanket.
“I’ll stay a little while longer,” she said. A bit grimly, I thought. “Maybe an hour.”
I told myself to be generous. It wasn’t like I owned the Harp seal for God’s sake. “Yeah, I’m getting a little tired too,” I admitted, and when I said that I felt suddenly, strangely, light.
The sun sets on the other side of the curved arm that is Cape Cod, on the ocean side, not the bay side where we sat. Sometimes though, the bay catches color from the sides of the sun’s descent, melting into an unsentimental canvas of pastel pinks, greens, and blues. This was not one of those days. On this evening the twilight was simply, comfortingly, gray.
My neighbor huddled into her blanket. It was her turn to withdraw. Maybe she’d pressed too hard on her sore spots. Or, maybe she simply thought I was a cold, withholding bitch and had decided it was her turn to withdraw.
Inside my blanket though I was warm enough, I shivered, and my teeth chattered. What if Lisa didn’t make it out there alone? What if she ended up on the streets? What if she went out again? Drank again? After all her years of sobriety ended up in a halfway house again. Just a week earlier I’d met up with her at Barnes and Noble in Hyannis. She’d remained sitting on a stool at one of the tall cafe tables while I went up to the counter to get a latte. When I’d turned to look at her I’d felt a stab of fear in my gut. The image of her face that day, her eyes, would haunt me for years.
That same night I’d had a nightmare about a cat being cooked in a microwave. Presumably I was the one who had cooked the cat. The cat’s eyes were huge, black rimmed, with orange hued irises, staring out from deep sockets. That was the way Lisa’s eyes had looked, sitting on her stool, staring at me from all the way across the room. Both the moment in Barnes and Noble itself, and the dream were terrifying. When we’d walked to our cars she’d said, “Are we really doing this? Is this real? I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
A young woman approached us out of the gloom and stood looking at the seal. “Is he yours?” she asked. I laughed, much too hard. Her face smooshed up and then I felt like a bully. “I heard there was a vigil happening down here,” she said.
I explained why he couldn’t be “ours.” The teeth, the distance we were keeping.
The woman had an accent and told us she was from Sweden. “Hey! This mug has Swedish words on it,” I told her. “Can you translate them for me? I’ve never known what they mean. It belonged to my Swedish grandmother.” She walked over and took it. Squatting down in the sand, she studied the words very soberly.
“This is Norwegian” she said.
“What! I’ve always assumed it was Swedish, because my grandmother was! But my grandfather, who died very young, was Norwegian.”
She studied me for a moment. “It says something about liquor and how easily it flows, but I’m not totally sure, my Norwegian is not so good.” She sniffed the empty mug, looked at me sharply. “Was someone in your family an alcoholic?” she asked.
I held out my hand and took the mug back. “Probably,” I said. The Swede sat down. Her face was so sad it looked stripped bare. There remained a plainness so simple it was arresting.
The seal lifted his head and gave out a strange yelp in the direction of the sea. The Swede jumped up, took a gigantic camera with a foot long lens out of her backpack, and circling around him from all directions, began snapping pictures of him, one after another, though it was getting quite dark.
She joined us again. We three sat in a row, all facing west, arms clasped around our knees. In the cold gray evening, lined up that way, the humorless Swede, my formerly loquacious neighbor, and I, the withholding bitch, looked like women in an Ingmar Bergman movie. Which one was it? I couldn’t remember, but I laughed hard, and loudly, so they would look up suddenly and thereby see us. The way I did. The two of them looked over at me with uncertain smiles. They couldn’t see us the way I did. Of course not. Everyone has their own particular wounds. And in the case of the three of us our wounds were our eyes on the world.
I explained, “we look like women in a Bergman movie, you know, Wild Strawberries, or The Seventh Seal or something.”
“I’m going,” said Renee, and stood up.
“What will happen to the seal?” said the Swede.
“He’ll be all right,” I said. “It’s almost dark, he can take care of himself. Anyway he needs rest, that’s the important thing. That’s what he’s doing here. He’s safer here than out in the water.” The Swede looked doubtful. I no longer had the energy to deliver the full sermon on seals, nor the requisite passion.
She said, “He’s going to have to go back in eventually, so I think we should help him, prod him back into the water. That is where he belongs, that is his home. A seal does not belong out here!”
“No!” said Renee and I at the same time, with equal vehemence. We smiled at each other.
“Let him be,” I said. “He needs to rest!” The sad Swede was easily cowed. All three of us left.
***
Now and then, as I cooked dinner in my little apartment, I went out on the deck to see if the seal was still there. He was by now a shape easily mistaken for driftwood or shadow. He would be safe. He could rest alone at this time of night, with no people and no dogs around. The tide would be in around midnight and the sea would carry him back out. Hopefully, by then, with the help of the waves, he could at least float. And eventually be rested enough to swim again.
An hour or so later Renee knocked on my un-curtained slider. The windows were steamed up from cooking, and I was humming with pleasure at how healthy it felt to be cooking couscous and broccoli, instead of opening up a can of Chef-Boy-Ardee Ravioli.
When I opened the sliding glass door Renee came in, planted herself deliberately, and said with a hint of mischief: “I was out there, and you couldn’t see me, but I could see you.” The sentence was fraught with meaning. Obviously she believed she saw me in ways I didn’t see myself. I suppose she did.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Did you hear what happened?”
“No. What?”
“The Swede! Do you want me to tell you how the story ends?”
“Of course.”
“This is what happened. She returned with a friend and just shooed him right into the water.”
“What! When did it happen! I didn’t see! I didn’t hear a thing! I’ve been checking regularly! How did she do it! The teeth!”
“Well, I asked her that. She said they just ran around in a circle, waving a stick and making noise.” We shook our heads, and clicked our tongues, like wise, old-world, old women.
“He wasn’t done resting yet.” I intoned. She nodded.
I should have invited Renee to stay for supper I suppose, but I didn’t. I saw her once more, from a distance, months later, standing outside the Foc’sle, the Fisherman’s Bar. If she saw me she ignored me, which probably served me right. She looked very hopeful and pretty, talking to a good looking, muscular, brown skinned Portuguese fisherman. She was wearing a jeans miniskirt and looking for love, brimming with a deep, innocent trust.
***
At five minutes to eleven p.m, a few hours after the Swede shooed the seal into the sea, I remembered I had made a commitment to Jesus. I’d almost forgotten! It no longer felt psychologically necessary, as I’d already done a vigil for one of God’s wounded. And I felt so good now too! Wasn’t that enough? But I had made a promise, so I grabbed my coat and ran the few blocks down Commercial Street to the Episcopal church.
The ten o’clock watchers had already left, or maybe, like the disciples, had failed to stay awake for Jesus. The church was dark. Only the one light, a ship’s lantern holding a candle, burned at the front. I walked slowly down the center aisle, as if I were a bride, toward the deep-set area Episcopalians call The Sanctuary. It was two steps higher than the front pews, and receded into an even deeper darkness. That was where the little choir usually sat and where the altar was ordinarily spread with ritual objects, and behind which the priest stood to dispense the Eucharist. The altar had been stripped bare at the end of the Maundy Thursday service. I had seen it happen. The lights had come down, and one object after another had been removed, after which the altar cloth had been swiftly, dramatically, wrenched away by the priest. Everything that had become familiar to me by then, the various sacred objects, the embroidered cloths, the candlesticks, even the cross, gone.
We had then filed out of the dark church silently, onto the dark street, both together and alone. We carried the sacred emptiness with us. Time had collapsed. I was in the streets of Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, and I was in Provincetown Massachusetts, in 1999, simultaneously.
I sat down in the second pew on the left. The church was so empty. What would I think about for a whole hour? What should I do? Should I pray? Meditate? Just listen to the sounds in the sanctuary?
After a few minutes I heard someone come in, and felt certain it was Father Joe. He sat behind me, a few rows back. I welcomed his presence. I knew he wouldn’t try to get me to talk. Maybe he was praying for me. I would like that, I thought. To be watched over by a spiritual watchman, a kind of shomer*, guarding my spirit while my old shell of a life passes away. I imagined the priest’s silent prayers landing on my head like the hands of the old women on the old lovers’ foreheads when she blessed them. After about ten minutes I heard him get up to leave. I waited a few seconds, then turned so I could verify that it had been him. It had.
Why did you leave? Why did you leave? I turned to the front as my body doubled over in the pew, held on tight, knuckles white on the rim of the pew in front of me. Everything in me wanted to leap up, run down the aisle, out the church door, and back to my apartment, away from this pain. Who were you, I screamed, so loudly inside of myself that my soul felt scraped raw, hoarse. I acted out every minute of our story with you, faithfully, and even now I don’t really know who you are and I can’t save you. I can’t save you. Then the shivering set in.
In the end there were no big answers, no epiphanies. Finally it was just time to go. Our hour together was up. I suppose the struggle of trying to make a decision: Stay or go, stay or go, stay or go, eventually becomes so much stronger than the mystery of what remains as possibility that you have to choose. I chose to go. Complicated things sometimes end very simply. Sometimes you simply write the end of your part in the story, recite the long history, reenact it in the company of others, and read the signs. Shivering is a good sign for a human being.
I stared into the dark tomb, the dark garden. The night has teeth. Somewhere out there a seal was looking for a place to rest. I had broken every vow I’d made. I did not stay for the worse, the poorer, the sickness, or until death did us part. But an hour of this sorrow was enough. I did not have to remain in the tomb all night long. And you know, much was very fine about our time together. And there was this: I did stay awake with you. This hour, one vow I did not break.
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*In the orthodox Jewish tradition a shomer (watchman, keeper, or guardian) is someone who watches over the body of a deceased person until burial. “In ancient times the shomrim guarded corpses from thieves and rodents. Today, the custom remains primarily as a sign of respect for the dead, whose souls are said to linger near their bodies until burial.” From the article: “An Ancient Vigil” in the L.A. Times.
I love your Provincetown stories! The harp seal, the vigil, alone and with others, the teeth--wonderful!