back to Issue 17
by Nora Catlin
I am following a nun through a vacant building: TV on wheels like elementary school, metal chairs strewn about, air cold and blue, lights off. She opens the second door in the hallway, a small room set up like a counselor’s office, and turns the noise machine on. I take the seat closer to the window, facing inward, pressing my tongue into the bleeding hole in the back of my mouth.
Tastes like pennies, the flesh is soft: something is missing. Maybe a wisdom tooth quite implausibly growing back in, or an infection in its empty space? I wonder if it’s a sign that I should leave. I want it to stop hurting. I want to feel like I belong, like I’m loved, like it all matters. I want too many things. I wonder why that is, why we want things. If it still bleeds tomorrow, I tell myself, then I will leave. I push my tongue against the tissue and sit, waiting; a feeling of pain is still a feeling.
Sister Chris closes the door with a soft click and pads about the room like an elderly woman does, with a slight stoop and careful steps, before taking the seat across from me. In her presence I feel much less afraid: on the landline that morning in the guest house, she asked why I had missed our earlier meeting. Oh, it was a misunderstanding, I said to her. After driving my body six hours to a bluff in Iowa to visit nuns I had no connection to, I spent the day in disbelief—crouched in the dark, reading their brochures, and imagining what went on inside the so-called “candy factory” and the completely off-limits convent compound. Yes, why. To Sister Chris, my unsaid excuses were: I didn’t know where to meet you and was too afraid to ask.
But she and I sit here now, and the sun bleeds in behind me, illuminating my back, her hands, her lap. Fabric covers her head and the length of her figure, and a thick rope is wrapped loosely around her waist. Her cheeks are soft, wrinkled gently, like a bottom sheet in morning. The hymns sung by the nuns echo through me, blend smoothly into the drone of the white noise machine. She sighs softly, her eyes like a billow falling across me, a feeling supreme: a loving gaze.
“What brought you here?” she asks.
I think about the real reason, the fiction. The story I’ve been trying to write is about a girl, a woman, not unlike myself, becoming a nun. In the dark isolation of winter, the story fell out of me quickly, then faltered, incomplete, unsure of its resolution. Stuck and confused and alone and online, I emailed the abbey, seeking a space to retreat and get closer to the nuns, to reflect them aptly in the story, which had thus far been built entirely from imagination.
I shift, swallowed by the comfort of the heavy armchair, musking me in the familiar smell of my late grandma’s basement, memories stored neatly on shelves, small rugs to temper the cold concrete floor.
Then I stumble on my words, tripping on the start of repeated narratives. How can I tell her I am hollow, empty of personhood? I am the film on the bottom of the bathtub left behind when the water drains away, sitting there, cold skin, reading a book I found in the guest house, underlining, “It is only by becoming divine that we begin to become fully human.” I want to feel alive; I want to feel human. I want to shed this depression; I want to fill an absence. I pause.
I guess I’m lost. My voice wobbles from my throat, the wave of my emotion moving slow enough to lose its consistency of note. Slow dribbles in the photons of feeling.
She says, “Well, thank goodness you recognize it, and that you are searching! We have a passage in the Bible where Jesus tells us, ‘Ask, and you’ll receive, seek and you’ll find, knock and the door will be opened.’” She smiles, showing the pink edges of her gums. “I think God brought you here.”
She is like a balloon, elated with feeling, floating high above me. I want to tug her down, right to my face. I want to say, yes, sister, I understand the concept of faith. God can be a salvation after we realize life is an eternal letdown. “We” being the disillusioned, the ones who have looked everywhere and still found no point. Nonetheless, we must hold onto something we can’t see, spin our emptiness into awe. A leap of faith may be the only thing to save us from darkness. Sure, all this I know, but it has not moved from my head to my heart. I don’t know how this happens. And this is the story, the obsession, the idea that brought me here: how a girl who is completely self-absorbed and apathetic one day can wholeheartedly follow God the next. I need to know: is this madness or prophecy? How does God manifest?
I stumble again: How are you sure about God?
The magnitude of her happiness emanates as brightly as the sun from behind, heating me two-sided. I want her to know I am scared. We are misery and serenity, sitting closely together in a 10 x 10 room, tilted towards one another, a soft triangle with the remaining empty chair.
“I always knew God loved me, but I didn’t know if I was okay,” she said, her voice becoming more narrow, losing its glissando. “Then, I experienced so much goodness in my life, and people along the way helped me understand that the negative things are not God. He has made me a beautiful person because I am in His image. I lean on Him and trust in Him to see that I am okay. God loves me—not because of what I have done, but because of what His Son has done. It’s through His death: he took all our negativity and sins upon Himself, died on the cross, and rose again.
“You see,” she continued, “we’re in time, but God is beyond time; He’s swept it all up in His Son and put it to death. And now, we have the affirmation that He loves us and wants us together for his kingdom in heaven. He became one of us to redeem us. It is in knowing that He has saved us that we can rejoice in the love that is life.”
I nod, picturing a universal vacuum puffing all of time into Christ. Like, how? She pulls the Bible off the table beside her, turns to the book of Matthew, chapter one, when Joseph is visited in a dream by an angel who encourages him to stay with Mary and protect the child.
She speaks in a whisper: “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.”
She looks up at me, awe in her eyes as if it was the first time reading the verse, as if the meaning of the passage was sitting right on top of the words. I am still. I sense that my body has moved from the back towards the front, less a part of the chair and more a part of the room. Should I ask Sister Chris about my dreams? Could those be God too? Where is the line of delusion?
She continues to read passages of the gospels gleefully. “Oh!” she says, several times. “And this one!”
My attention wanders, studying the border where the wood floorboard meets the carpet. I need to shed myself, exit my ego. I am so far stuck in the spiral of my own demise. It is a heavy feeling; it is stifling; and I can’t hear a thing from outside. I’m aware of the warmth of the room.
“Jesus did all that for us,” she says, looking back at me. “He died so we can be free and live unburdened by sin. I just can’t believe it,” she says.
Something lifts in my throat, hot and hard like anger. I want to say to her, but you do believe it. Isn’t that the point? How is it that you do?
In the book I read in the bath last night, cold skin, empty house, I came across the line Sin is self-perpetuating isolation. Salvation, the restoration of relationship. I desire to live how she lives, in a community of women who live to honor someone together, seeking to craft a singular truth out of something much grander, the larger story of finding God, of remembering, or maybe just uncovering what has been there all along.
“Jesus really suffered; he did it out of love. He wants us to know how precious we are to God’s eye. The thing is, we try to be good, we really do, but we flop.” She laughs, and I nod; we sure fucking do. “Our victory is not about what we do; it’s what He did. We just have to say I believe in you! Help me! Work through me! Ask for forgiveness, and He forgives us. And one day, He will take us to Himself, and we’ll be with Him forever and ever. We will see how great his mercy is. We’re walking with God, and then God carries us through the difficult time.”
The image of someone carrying me is a comfort, the chair holding me, the room, the space. The knot in my throat spreads outward as I ask how she listens for God.
“It can be silence, no feeling, nothing,” she says. “Often, we take God’s word, reading it slowly, seeing what sticks to us, what message it brings. We take an hour with the Lord in lectio each day. Then we have meditation; just sit still, maybe with a mantra. And listen, the feeling in the body.”
In my head, I build a list of the steps towards achieving it. It being God, being good, feeling well. The action towards access: how I will learn. I try to swallow knowledge from my brain into my chest and listen to her stories. A slow light trickles through me, a path out, a way towards God. Maybe it’s not something I figure out, maybe it’s something to forget: myself.
When our meeting ends, we stand in the vestibule of the empty building, two beings about the same size. She asks if she can hug me, the sun streaming in, brighter than the day before when the light was half dimmed with the eclipse. I say yes, and so we embrace. It’s the first touch I’ve had in days, and it feels familiar, and it feels like how it felt to sit beside her in the room. I feel the front and back of myself. I feel gratitude.
I walk back towards the guest house alone, drawing my tongue over the swollen space in my mouth, a part I can’t see, indistinguishable between hole or new growth. The metallic taste has receded, and the bleeding has stopped, but the spot is still tender, so I move my tongue away, let it heal.
The sky is a spotless blue, and birds high above soar in circles determined by the air. I turn instead to take a path into the valley, past the convent on the bluff, down to where the grass rolls into a trickling stream. I see it now: the world is a bounty, abundantly giving; we must decide to look. The landscape here is beautiful and for nobody’s sake. I am a witness, I am a part.
I let my body carry me down the hill, walking with a childishly large step, loosening the bounds of my being. Perhaps God did whisper the fiction into my fingers, typing with me to the part that got difficult, then lay with me in the darkness, then brought me to this place, to learn, or rather unlearn, for myself. Maybe the story doesn’t need an ending, or maybe there doesn’t have to be a story at all.
Nora Catlin lives in Chicago, Illinois, and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Theopoetics and Writing at the Earlham School of Religion. Her publications and writing can be found at noracatlin.com.