The neighbors just sent a group text that we’re meeting outside in the garden this evening. Nice! But what to bring? Well, there was a double-size pot of pinto beans hot on the stove, just cooked. Hm…

So while they cooled off, I put a can of no-salt stewed tomatoes in the Cuisinart, and spun then around with some red onions pickled in balsamic vinegar, raw walnuts, dried garlic granules, teaspoon of coconut sugar, lemon oil, paprika, and a bit o’ cumin. There was also a little handful of Trader Joe vegan mozzarella shredded cheese, so that went in too. The beans pureed nicely, half and half with the tomato mixture.

We’ll just have to keep it away from the dogs; garlic and onions are poisonous to them. But I can serve it in a jar with a lid, instead of putting it in a bowl.

A dish of black olives can go as a side dish, and a plate of celery sticks for dipping.

Oh, that plant is a horseradish. The greens are good raw as a bite or two of spicy cruciferous vegetable. Weeks ago I put the cut root top in a dish of water and kept it fresh for a few weeks while the sprouts got started. One cut root grows a lot of leaves.

Now to pack up everything and take it to the garden.

(Jerusalem Sage. Not a missed signal; just something nice to look at.)

Here from the past week are examples of small near-misses in messaging. If only our human communications were a little more fine-tuned, it would be a safer and warmer world.

Incident 1.

This week before wakeup time, group texts were pinging to my phone. The phone number of the sender and group member numbers were all unfamiliar; so were the area codes. In the distant past I might have reached out in friendly fashion to let everyone know that I’m me, and not someone else. But I’m more cautious now, and simply deleted them. There’s a history of incorrect group emails from mysterious social clubs, and from online retail advertisers. What’s more, for the 18 years that I’ve had this phone, the former subscriber to this number (we’ll call him Morris) has received texts in Spanish, urging him to vote or fill in a survey or enter a contest or open a link promising alluring photos of ladies wanting to meet & greet.

To this soundly sleeping person, the group texts (probably meant for Morris) bypassed the thin veneer of good nature, and seemed like a nuisance. The texts had an official now-hear-this tone, commanding us all to await orders on where to go, and when. The texts kept coming in, this time in Spanish, insisting that we all had to be patient and wait to be escorted out. It sounded like instructions for people picked for jury duty, but they named landmarks that were nowhere near here.

What?

In no cheerful mood, and wondering why people can’t proofread the phone numbers in their subscriber lists, I hauled out of my blanket roll and logged in to the computer to look up the phone numbers. There was no online information on any of them. But some of the area codes were in Dade County, Florida. That called to mind news of the week, reporting heavy rains in the Southeast. Huh. Sure enough, a quick check of weather alerts showed a flash flood warning at “Catastrophic Threat” level, with many Florida area people stranded and waiting for orders and the safest route to evacuate.

Oh Goodness! That put-upon feeling can vanish instantly, once one knows the back story. Perhaps some sheriff or county agent was trying to contact as many residents as possible? I considered texting back to let them know the error, but decided that emergency services had enough to worry about without being corrected by some former grammar teacher.

Instead I prayed about it, hoping that Morris and all of them got out okay.

Incident 2.

On the back of the bus I sat enjoying my book and the evening commute. Idly I glanced out the opposite window up front, and noticed a man resting on a street bench who looked to be no older than in his forties. He was very pale and thin, stooping over with his back bent at an angle of over 45 degrees. As passengers filed on to the bus, the man stood up in an unsteady manner. It took a moment for it to dawn on me, that he was trying to walk to the bus stop. It took another moment to realize with concern that he wanted this bus, and actually thought he might make it. I couldn’t fathom why he was out without a walker or even a cane. It was alarming to watch him shamble off balance, trying to pick up speed.

“HEY!” I called to the driver. “Somebody here is trying to –” But the driver had already closed the door and pulled out. At that point drivers are not allowed to stop the bus and swerve back to the curb, because injuries occur when passengers fall off the curb or run into traffic after the bus.

Another bus was due in 15 minutes. But it was sad to see this man left behind. The college students all around him looked up from their phones, registering the problem as we drove away. Hopefully they were able to step up and intervene to flag the next driver, and perhaps lend the man an arm.

Incident 3.

One of our neighbors has never spoken to or looked at me. That’s fine; everybody has the perfect right to privacy and to be left in peace. I still give him a nod and a smile in case he looks up, but so far he hasn’t. The other day I smiled again, and he passed by looking distant and unaware. I dropped off my recycling, and passed his door on the way back.

Behind the door there was the sound of a man sobbing bitterly.

I stood there frozen, wondering what to do. If this were any other neighbor I would have knocked to call through the door, asking whether they were all right. At least I’d have slipped a note under the door. They would do the same for me. In this case, a strong inner intuition ordered me to back off, leave him alone, and walk away. I did, but it troubles me. What if he just needed somebody to talk to?

He passed by me yesterday. I said hello.

Incident 4.

About twenty steps from the bus stop, on a recent warm sunny morning, a young man stood swaying and stumbling about on the sidewalk. Despite the unseasonably high temperature, he stood in the sun overdressed in a ski hat and puffy coat. Judging by his gestures and speech he was unaware of his surroundings and was in a labile emotional state.

That’s normal. Every day on our streets there are people who seem unaware of their surroundings, and/or in a labile emotional state, and/or saying things which seem unconnected to situational awareness. They have every right to stand on the street and talk to themselves as they wish. Still, to watch for the bus I preferred to step out of sight around a corner to the front door of a restaurant. It felt more comfortable to be in sight and sound of the restaurant staff and other shopkeepers right nearby.

A little girl came along, no more than 10 or 11, with long fair hair and skinny jeans and a cute little summer top. To me she seemed a bit young for traveling by herself. She was dragging an awkwardly made and inadequate child’s luggage cart in bright colors. The cart kept tipping over and dragging on the pavement, hampering her progress. Every few steps she had to turn around and bend over to right the cart. That made it impossible for her to stand straight, to walk at a normal pace, to keep balanced, to keep her hands free, to watch where she was going, or to take in the scene on the street. My first impression was annoyance that her responsible adults didn’t give her a usable cart or better still a knapsack.

She dragged the cart around my corner, spotted me, and instantly shied away to go wait at the bus stop.

Reluctantly I left my hiding place to keep an eye on the girl. The man nearby seemed unaware of us, and went on talking and waving his arms. But soon his speech grew louder; there were general random threats with profanity.

At that, I spoke to the girl. The goal was to get us both out of view in a respectful discreet manner without provoking attention. “Let’s stand behind this corner,” I said to her quietly. “We will see the bus from there.”

Now mind you, I was not inviting her into my car, into a phone booth, or behind a shrub. I was inviting her to an open populated parking lot with shops and pedestrians and drivers. But she gave me only a blank look, clearly uncomfortable with I had approached her. Perhaps she had been trained to never speak to strangers under any circumstances. “Huh?”

The man turned and noticed us.

“We. Can. Wait. Over here.” Shifting into mom bear mode I beckoned, and pointed. Let’s GO!

That gesture works quite well even on dogs; dogs are good with hand signals, they understand pointing, and they know real fast when you mean business and want them to move. But apparently to the girl, given a choice between two strangers the suspicious one was me. (In his books, my hero Gavin de Becker teaches parents how to teach their children to assess strangers on the street, and to pick out likely people (= women) who are likely to help when needed. Any kid of mine would get a bazillion hours of field work on checking out people around them.) But this girl turned her back to the man, and ignored me. She stood gripping her little cart, aiming for an air of sophisticated nonchalance while the man stood looking at her. I stayed nearby, but felt it unwise to speak again to an underage girl who wanted no contact with me.

A neighbor from our building spotted this drama from the supermarket far across the street. He charged right through the traffic to stand and watch over both of us. He kept up an outspoken friendly assertive presence until the bus finally arrived.

The girl got on, and sat in a side-facing seat. I got on, and beelined to the back. The bus was nearly empty, but the man with the puffy coat sat down right next to her. In response, she shrank down in her seat, pulled up her cute summer top, and used it to cover her nose and mouth. What a startling sight in this day and age, to see a modern child strive for safety by looking smaller and covering her ability to breathe and use her voice!

At last she did get up and move to the back near me. I wanted very much to seize that chance to talk to her, to say that we women on the street need to watch out for one another. But she was back there only to ring the bell. She hopped off, yanking her cart as it caught on the door.

But here’s a happy ending: I got to tell it all to Angelina and the women tonight, as they sat outside with their dogs; it was very satisfactory to hear them all talk at once, about how outrageous it was and how we-all as a culture need to empower our girls.

And, Mrs. Wing gave me red and gold raspberries, just picked from her bushes, along with a glass of some kind of delectable health-giving transfusion of juice, made from a blend of berries and other fruits.

Here’s to good neighbors, and people everywhere who look out for one another!

(There were lots more berries, but I wolfed them down on the way upstairs.)

Every day, walking down the street or waiting at the bus stop or passing a weedy lot that at first glance seems unattractive and dull, I feel so fortunate that they all feature some kind of plant right nearby. Whenever there is a moment or a bit of ground, it’s good to look at plants and to learn them one face and name at a time, and to marvel at them all.

A special interest is, how do people recognize or decide which plants are welcome? Which ones belong where they bloom?

Nature and plant devotees have a social image of being peaceable folks. One might think that fondness for plants would always draw people together. It came as a surprise, to read and hear that plant people can differ about which plants belong in our local habitat, and which ones do not. There are good collegial and neighborly relationships which have frayed apart over this issue. One native plant advocacy group were called “purist Nazis” because they wanted to preserve a restoration site for only those plants which flourished before the city was founded. Another example of the complexity of these debates came from a bulletin courtesy of our dedicated and sincere local extension service. They advised that from now on, the Syrian Bean Caper Zygophyllum fabago should be called just Bean Caper; it reasoned that former names like that one had a nationalist and exclusionary origin, and could stoke xenophobia. But it gave me a chuckle to see that the same extension service cautions about the invasive nature of Russian thistle, Canada thistle, and those pesky English holly and English ivy.

Our food coop, an upscale place with very conscientious product sourcing and social awareness, has a lovely display of Chameleon plant for shoppers to take home for their gardens. They probably don’t know that the dear little thing happens to be classified as an “extreme invasive”:

Chameleon plant is a variegated cultivar of plain green fish mint (Houttuynia cordata), which has cheerfully spread all through our little vegetable patch. (Our fish mint makes a sturdy ground cover, and Mrs. Wing will harvest the roots in the fall for traditional Chinese medicine remedies, so for us it’s all good.) But both have a habit of taking up all the space they can.

That’s a complication in deciding which plants belong here: our nurseries can make a good profit stocking plants which easily jump the garden wall and take over whole landscapes, because many are attractive and reasonably priced and easy to grow.

It’s surprising to discover that some plants which strike delight and awe should be grubbed out and dumped in a garbage can. A neighbor’s yard holds this treasure, with its hooded flowers and showy stalks. Until today I thought it was some rare woodland Jack-in-the-Pulpit. But yikes! no, it’s poisonous toxic Italian Arum (Arum italicum) or orange candleflower, classified as a noxious weed. Don’t even touch without gloves! Keep the kids and dog away!

Adding to more confusion, some other invasives were introduced deliberately as food plants which then got out of hand. There is one local that I’d like to find but will not name or picture here; apparently it’s a healthy cruciferous with good flavor. It would be nice if we could just harvest it into extinction. But I won’t forage any until I can go with an expert. It’s not safe to pick stuff and taste it without solid knowledge.

This morning for the last day of spring, I took an early walk at a favorite small pond. It used to be a weekly year-round destination to a neat clean little body of water. But today I didn’t recognize the place. It was so choked with brown algae and green scum that the herons and usual water birds were nowhere; a few Mallards hung around, but instead of swimming they were huddled on a bit of mud flat. Along much of the walkway, the water wasn’t even visible; there was a massive amount of invasive thorny Himalayan Blackberry about fifteen feet high, along with invasive hedge bindweed, spotted jewelweed, butterfly bush, knotweed, and unfamiliar new plants like the ones below.

The hardwood forest side of the pond is muffled up with masses of this white-flowered overgrowth. Silver lace vine? Goat beard? Old man’s beard (wild clematis)? Some kind of knotweed? None of the on-line images quite fit. There certainly is a lot of it.

Update: This might be Ocean Spray (Holodiscus discolor), a native shrub. The wood has been put to many uses, carved into utensils and tools.

Scruffy little yellow-flowering trees have taken over one bank. It looks like a member of the legume family, some of which are poisonous, so I didn’t touch it.

My guess on this is Hardhack or Spiraea douglasii, in its fluffy cotton candy season. It’s crowding around on the shore. The county extension calls it “aggressive” when grown under moist conditions.

What could have happened? At our local pond, there was an army of retired folks who really knew their animals and plants. Their houses adjoined the pond, and one of them even donated the land. They were out there every day at all hours with their cameras and dogs, checking on the system; I once saw a group of them with butterfly nets, patiently scooping up algae and bagging it up for the trash. But those neighbors were in their eighties and nineties; perhaps they don’t have opportunities to cut down these out-of-balance plants any more? Now I’d like to find out whether anybody is still keeping an eye on the property, and whether there are cleanout days planned.

A lot of nature seems off kilter at the moment: cropland coping with feral hogs, songbirds coping with pet cats, the Everglades coping with pythons dumped out of aquariums, on and on. One python hunter made an excellent point: “The pythons didn’t ask to be here.” And when it comes to invasives, a compassionate co-worker reasoned that when a plant is thriving in its very own habitat, then it co-exists peacefully with a whole range of other plant types, and the necessary insects and animal predators that keep the whole ecosystem in check. When the plant is part of a supportive network, everyone can thrive. But when a plant is torn up and dragged in to unfamiliar turf, it has lost its original connections. Then its survival is more precarious; to grow at all, it has to grab up all the space it can.

Her view is very compassionate. I don’t feel that compassion yet for the Poison Hemlock taking over our main walking trail, but she has a good point. It also makes me wish for some picture of what our lovely landscape looked like in former times, in all its lush variety and balance, before just a small handful of species were dumped here and started rampaging around.

Here is the delicate social balancing act: in order to honor and protect our unique indigenous native plants, perhaps we really do have to make some firm decisions about which plants belong in one defined area, and which do not? After all, we know that for good health our inner microbiome needs a rich assortment of bacteria so that disease-causing strains don’t take over. I used to be delighted at the sight of a uniform carpet of Yellow Archangel or Herb Robert or Shiny Geranium blooming in a whole colorful patch. But now I know: that kind of uniform thriving prettiness probably means that some other plants got crowded out.

That pond walk was food for thought. It inspires me to learn more about our changing ecosystem. Hopefully I can help with good plant stewardship to cultivate balance, for the sake of the plants themselves and the creatures around us.

Ten days ago I took a different walk home from work. I felt like a nostalgia visit to the 2012 site of the Orthodox church, at its rented room upstairs in the community building. I wanted a look at Mother N.’s old garden too. Back then, Mother had it planned out so that the plants stood in height order like children in a class picture. The tallest (giant sunflowers) were against the south wall. Next were tall hollyhocks. Then, the flowers bloomed in layers and stages, drawing the eye in and upwards, with different colors every season to give us something beautiful to see all year.

Well, I should have known better than to take that scenic detour. At the old site, nothing was in bloom. There was shrubbery and undergrowth crowding around the community building, but even in mid May there were no flowers. After a little hunting around I found just this brave little volunteer:

What can it be? My search terms didn’t turn up anything similar. It looks like a yellow version of Platycodon, or blue balloon flower.

Update: Just figured it out — it’s Lysimachia punctata, Large Yellow-Loosestrife. Live & Learn! -m

The overcast drizzly day got a warm ray of setting sun as I turned away for the walk home. And right there was a great field of dandelions, the biggest and healthiest that I’ve ever seen. This was no wan fading garden, but acres of edible greens knee high and thriving between the bus station, the bridge underpass, and the interstate highway — enough nourishing food for the whole summer! I sure was tempted to pick them. But I didn’t pick any dandelions, because the field is home base for men living in tents and in cars parked all around. That is why this photo is so narrow and cropped; it wouldn’t do, to bother the men by taking pictures of them or their setup. I photographed only a discreet little snippet aiming away from them, and then I hit the road.

If Mother were around, and just maybe she was, she would tease me and make fun about my looking for signs of life in an old garden left behind. Then she would have been delighted by Life being Life at its medicinal best right across the street. Yes, the visit to the old garden felt like a wee bit of a letdown. But that walk was just one of the rituals that we create, to fill in the empty space and make meaning out of losing someone dear.

As a consolation prize, at home I searched for and looked through a couple of views of the old church. Mother made every possible effort to deck that little upstairs sanctuary with flowers, often from her garden at home or the garden right outside. This first view is from a warm day, when the woodwork in candle light enhanced her peach-toned lilies.

The other view is a cold day, when the very last ray of sun shot in against a white chrysanthemum.

Mother’s church has moved away. Her garden is gone, and so is she. What comes next? It’s up to me to honor her by tending our own little patch outside with the neighbors, and by appreciating flowers all around us, wherever they grow and whatever they are.

For one life topic, Mother N. had no mechanical aptitude or herbal remedy to share. It came up during one of our car junkets. As we talked I shared with her that despite my best efforts at attitude and actions, life alone was a lonely place. Mother thought that over during a long reflective silence. After all, her life was teeming with people day and night, all of them needing her for everything. Her answer illuminated my perspective. “I’ve never in my life had a whole day off of rest.”

For other life contingencies, Mother was flat-out in charge with a workaround in hand. She was everywhere, a strong deft limber woman in sensible shoes, always neat and tasteful in long colorful dresses and long light head scarves, with keen bright eyes and cameo skin and a thick crown of pure silver braided hair. She moved with endless energy and endless equanimity and precise soft speech and self-effacing humor. She had earlier careers in agriculture and textiles, and still created installations of fine artisan metalwork on commission. After raising her own children she welcomed other young ones into the home as well. She kept chickens, knitted sturdy winter hats and gloves in rich colors, farmed and preserved a family garden, taught evenings at a local college (her students posted sparkling online reviews), foraged for herbs, and crafted herbal tinctures and essential oils.

At their Orthodox Christian church, Father was the head — and Mother was heart and hands and feet. The two served a devoted united congregation, speakers of Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Armenian, and Georgian, with new American converts coming in. Mother trained and rehearsed and directed the choir. She supervised the renovations and cleaning of their little rented sanctuary. She managed donations and expenses. She coordinated the sumptuous potluck dinners cooked on the premises after every Liturgy, vestments for all the men serving on the altar, the flower beds outside, altar breads and beeswax candles and icons and chrism and holy water, baptisms and weddings and funerals, lists of prayer intentions, counseling for new converts, emotional support and car rides and home nursing and hospital visits and child care for members in need.

Their sanctuary and altar and iconostasis were in a lavishly reconverted rented room, upstairs in a nondescript community building; for years I’d peered out the bus windows of my evening commute, pondering the enigmatic little plaque on the door. In 2012 I was in their neighborhood searching for an office holiday party. Hopelessly lost, I finally gave up on the party and tried their door. The chanted candlelight Vespers service was so beautiful that I came right back for Sunday Liturgy. There the women brought bags of groceries and cooked a whole feast. Then the men washed the dishes and watched the babies while Mother and the women walked in pairs out in the park, arm in arm, singing Russian folk songs. I fell in love with these people and their faith. It was a sad loss when the church moved to a larger space farther away. That meant three bus rides with a stopover early Sunday mornings in the riskiest part of town, away from home for up to 10 wearying hours every Sunday. Considering the history of Orthodoxy, and how the faithful faced tribulations unto death to practice their religion, it is humbling to confess that when pandemic lockdown made the downtown more openly dangerous I gave up altogether on the intention of regular attendance.

But Mother never gave up on me. On special feast days she would call and offer me a ride to church. Every few months she would pick me up for a shopping trip to the produce markets for vegetables. I loved her conversation about the Desert Fathers, the wonderful Orthodox monastics and families she’d met in other countries, her personal witness of miraculous answers to prayer, her gifts of home grown greenery and herbs and knitted gloves and natural remedies. Any free hour that she set aside for me over the years was a privilege and a blessing.

Mother’s emails were always sent at wee hours when the household was asleep. They were missives warmed with reflections on faith, housekeeping, and wry humor, signing off as “your unworthy, MN.” In one of them she let me know that she and Father were leaving for another summer pilgrimage, and that she would contact me for a visit upon their return. It was a pleasure to see the lovely trip photos on the church website, and to anticipate her stories. I emailed her back that I greatly missed our church, but was not leading a totally unflocked life: for the time being I was walking to a friendly little Bible-teaching church right up the street. While Mother was away I prepared a packet to give her at our next meeting. It held readings for her to enjoy in case she ever had time to sit down and open a book. One was The Kitchen Madonna by Rumer Godden. Another was by Kathleen Norris (not the author of Cloister Walk, but an earlier author of the same name), the 1911 novel Mother written as a tribute to motherhood.

Summer ended, with no word about the pilgrimage. There were no more email replies. Messages on her cell phone went unanswered. As time passed the realization dawned: many Orthodox Christians would feel concerned and hurt to hear that I was attending services at another denomination. Mother must have given up on me after all.

Then, a cryptic text email appeared from an unknown phone number account. It arrived by chance; the sender had inadvertently used an outdated church contact list from years before. The message was one sentence announcing the funeral for the departed servant of God Mother N____.

I stared at the message, then tracked down the phone number to a member of the congregation, and called her. During our conversation she told me that after the pilgrimage, Mother had made rueful jokes about the sin of sloth, accusing herself of chronic laziness. But she kept soldiering along for months. Finally her family compelled her into the car and took her to a doctor. By then, it was too late for treatment. The women of the church cared for Mother through a long ordeal of immense suffering. (One Orthodox tradition cautions believers to never be scandalized or disillusioned, if a patient has an especially difficult death. It can be one way for God to truly perfect an especially pure soul, and a means of atonement and relief for the sins and sufferings of others.) Holding the phone, I thought what a grace it would have been, to be on hand to perform any service of care for her. Apparently during that illness Mother mentioned my name to the women, in the certain and hopeful faith that they would all see Mary in church again very soon. She was right.

The funeral was profoundly heartbreaking and beautiful. In a bank of candles and bouquets Mother was laid out in her coffin facing a white wreath at the Golgotha, the large Crucifixion icon before the altar. The customary Trisagion band of white embroidered cloth crowned her shining silver hair. The customary icon of Christ and the Harrowing of Hell was clasped in her hands. Father sat straight and still on a chair beside her. Every man woman and child, gracefully suited and gowned and veiled all in black, stood at attention with candles in hand, rapt in absolute reverence. Our choir director was gone, but the service was chanted by her grown children standing at her feet. The celebrant priest serving the funeral concluded with a solemn ritual prayer for the forgiveness of every possible type of sin that any deceased person might ever have committed over a lifetime. But after the service he added a personal word of his own: what a profound honor it had been for him, to serve as confessor to a soul like hers.

Each member of the congregation venerated the icon of Mother’s body. Each one took turns handing over their babies and their candles, then approached her for three full floor prostrations. Then they leaned close to kiss the image of Christ, then her forehead, then her hands; they lifted their children, who reached out to her with eager warmth and trust. Then family by family they picked up their bouquets and slipped away to prepare for the drive to the cemetery. As an outsider, I spent the service out of sight off in the farthest corner. Later I left by the back door, passing through the dark parish hall filled with boxes and bags of groceries, casseroles, and baked goods. The congregation had prepared it all, to return from the burial and share a funeral meal and final prayers.

I waited and tiptoed last to the foot of the coffin. Too timid to attempt those three floor prostrations, I only made the Orthodox sign of the cross. With one arthritic trembling hand I touched her fingers, and rested the other arthritic trembling hand to touch her crown. I stood staring in dumbfounded wonder and warmth before backing away.

Do I remember all that? No, not in the emotions of the moment. But there must have been a tiny movie camera tucked in at Mother’s feet. My YouTube recommended algorithm presented a startling display of me to me: clown-sized bunion boots and velcro felted lymphedema leggings, a dumpy bowing torso, a head scarf slipping all agley, arthritic hands looming in front and center, and finally an awestruck final gaze. Now it’s a public spectacle for the internet: a meeting between two faiths, from two sides of the veil, of two loving women. One of them at rest.

“…Do Thou, the same Lord, give rest to the souls of Thy departed servants in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away.”

Mary: Whenever I take Bingo on walks myself, he really gravitates to that phone pole there.

Angelina. Yes he does. And there he goes. Who’s a good boy?… So! Mare! Back to you. Just read your latest blog page. I’m intrigued! It describes a whole new side of you. One that only people in churches get to see. But I do not, because I don’t even know anyone else who is more inclined to the heart of Christ.

Mary: Bingo is.

Angelina: That’s a given; Bingo is a pure soul. But please walk me through the steps of how these church encounters happen.

Mary: It’s every church. They all have a different path which has always worked beautifully for that community: baptism as an adult vs. baptism as an infant, baptism as triple immersion vs. 1950s forehead dab, fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays and other fasts year round. I fall short at all of them.

Angelina: So first, people meet you being there all quiet and polite, and they underestimate you in a wildly drastic manner or find you threatening for some reason. Second, they walk up to you and just say this stuff, while you sit there listening patiently.

Mary: It really hurts. I mean, how hard can it be to just blend in and be normal and abide as a good church member? Maybe God only put me here as some hapless anthropologist unawares.

Angelina: Now before you step in to churches, do you first put on a pair of Dumb Eyes?

Mary: Yes, the eyes are very large with rolling googly beads. Like on Planarian flatworms, when you view them under a microscope in science club.

Angelina: Then, you stand there looking like a raving idiot?

Mary: Uh. I guess?

Angelina: Thus prompting people to diagnose you with lust, and fleshly desires. Do they even know that you handwash your socks in the sink?

Mary: I did go buy that Mexican scrubby washboard. That counts as a labor saving device.

Angelina: No. That still counts as self-flagellation.

Mary: And I do have a fleshly desire for an Excalibur food dehydrator. Then I can make my own apple rings.

Angelina: Well meanwhile, you’re getting pasta. Here’s some Tupperware; I made lots. You can eat it tomorrow for lunch. Night, Mare! Bingo, we’re not gonna chase that bunny now; let’s go home.

Another Thought, 4/8: Just reading Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. One of the points is that to engage in a negotiation (and many personal conversations are exactly that), we have to settle What are we talking about? Who are we? How do we feel? Well, in the conversations described here, let’s suppose that the other people were peacefully tending the home base of their faith, and I was crashing into the china shop with these big sandbags of unresolved grief and then expecting all sorts of understanding and approval? It would be good in the long run to circle back with all these good people and explore how they are, and how they felt. Maybe some day when my plumage grows back in.

The Big Disclaimer: This is not the path of “God must grant me the ideal life that I imagined, or I will not believe!” Nothing in this post is cause for complaint compared to the immense suffering in the world. Religious faith is an immeasurable blessing, and I am very happy for my friends whose faith is flourishing right now. This is only the rumination of a melancholic sort who is alone too much and would benefit from having someone at home to set her straight and help process these experiences the day they come up.

A friendly neighbor, young enough to be my grandson, called “Hi Mary! Heading to work again? Why not just retire?” For this common question I usually have a cheerful joke all ready to hand back. This time to our mutual dismay I just said “Because I’m really tired of being alone.”

“Whoa,” he cautioned. “You know, there is such a thing as being TOO desperate. When women hit up on me I show them this wedding ring and say ‘Thank you Lord Jesus, for giving me such a beautiful reason to say No.'”

In other news on the Christian front, a sweet warm-hearted acquaintance with a delightful family saw me when I stopped in at her church for some quiet time. I confided my bewilderment with the Gospel message, and how I’d tried to live up to it all my life. She kindly sat down for a heartfelt pep talk with me about my spiritual walk. She mentioned the salvation verses of the Romans Road, and our hope of heaven. She gently questioned whether my salvation years ago was really certain, whether my own faith in my salvation was secure, whether at the time I had really been aware of my inherent sinfulness and need of Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross, whether I fully accepted the church as God’s chosen family for me, and finally the barrier in the way: my fleshly desires. Of course, the fleshly desire she meant was the wish for a family of my own at home, but at first I just stood there with a dumb look, thinking of my bed = yoga mat, and breakfast that day = split peas, with weeds foraged from the tree farm near the post office. I am sad to say that my response was to finally take my leave and blunder off waving my hands in disconcerted surrender; later on I’ll go back and thank this gentle sweet soul for her kindness and concern. (Culture note: the Romans Road to Salvation topic is long long familiar from my years in the Bible Belt, where it came up as a caring everyday pleasantry everywhere — at gas stations, at the Jesus Laundromat, in line at the bakery to buy doughnuts. The town phone book even had little fish symbols to designate businesses owned by Christians. I was sincerely whole-heartedly saved there in 1980. The problem is that no one since then witnessed my conversion, so how can they be sure it was genuine?)

Last year I was attending a beautiful church. After two wise and welcoming interactions with a member of the clergy and his hospitable family, I booked a counseling appointment to discuss membership. He and his staff welcomed me to their office. There I openly confessed the greatest impediment in my spiritual life: exhaustion and despair caused by utter loneliness. “I expect to die alone and to be forgotten right away, and that’s just life for many people. But I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like, to love someone who would actually like to be loved by me. Someone that I have the right to talk to about anything, and the right to touch, in a relationship where no one is assaulted or humiliated or screamed at. I want to go home to my husband, and to lie down and be at rest.”

“Let’s just call it what it is: Lust,” he smiled. “You’ve chosen to feel lonely. You make sadness your comfortable choice, with fantasies about the pleasures of the married state. Our society believes celebrities like Dr. Ruth [Westheimer] — that to be happy, we need to be having sex!”

“No, it’s that… to be human, we need other humans,” I told him. “We need to know and be known as our whole selves. I experienced that one time long ago, with a deeply serious young man in Russia. Right before I left the country he and I became acquainted and spent several days with his family, taking walks and talking about life, and he asked whether I would ever consider a future with him. I took that very much to heart, and I think of him every day. But we never saw each other again.”

“You could have married him, yet ended up right where you are today,” he laughed. “He could have died in a year or two.”

[Momentarily speechless.] “He did.”

“Well, see? There ya go!”

He compared me with my adamant family-life wish to a little kid with his fist stuck because he’s trying to get a pebble out of a precious antique vase; or to an elephant chained up as a calf, who grows up and doesn’t understand that she can just break the chain and walk away.

Then for two hours he encouraged my path forward: renunciation of earthly desire, and union with the true Bridegroom of my soul. He told story after story about martyrs of the flesh, centuries ago in other countries. One young man was so enamored with prayer that he had himself walled in, standing up until he died; his remains are still there, and people come to his grave to pray for special intentions. Another woman in her devotion to God became a pilgrim, and spent the rest of her short life walking. Passersby discovered that she gave clairvoyant answers to their questions, though she lost all awareness of her past and her own name as her clothes fell into rags and her body wore away. “And YOU can have this same divine Eros, this same joy in the Lord! You can have the same trust in God that my children have in me.” He concluded with suggestions about texts to read, and ways to incorporate weekly fasting.

He’s a radiant generous person in general with a warm manner, someone I would ordinarily be happy to see again in his church. Still, as he talked I sat twisting my mind into a Mobius strip, pretzeling out the logic for that cosmic step of renunciation into ultimate fulfillment. I’d walked in looking forward to a meeting of the minds about deep spirituality. I walked out feeling like a naughty little girl harboring carnal thoughts, and haven’t had the heart to return to that church since. Being too dissociated to even remember saying goodbye, I left the church whimpering and groping along in a strange inner darkness to the bus stop. The bus was empty. I huddled up in a seat. The driver checked on me in the rearview mirror. Before starting the bus he turned and nodded to me and smiled with remarkable kindness. Getting off the bus later, still whimpering, I smiled back at him.

I arrived home and packed up all my Bibles and religious books, and boxed them in the closet. “I’m sorry,” I told the icons on the wall with their sad eyes, as I took them all down. “Something is wrong with me. Some day I’ll be ok, and we can all live together again.” That night, and every night for weeks after, I woke up in the dark gripped by fear: for the first time in my life, the night sky was an empty shell. Outer space held no heaven any more. Time was empty too; history had lost its meaning. There was no sense or plan for the full circle of eternal redemption or heaven, not for me.

The day after the session, my dear former dental hygienist passed me on the street. I watched myself cracking jokes about a real estate poster on a phone pole, making hilarious fun of the stylized commercial euphemisms and prices. That night she contacted me to follow up. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Something was wrong today. You didn’t look or sound like yourself.”

She had a point. The counseling encounter had hit like a concussion, a head injury that still hasn’t gone away. Now church services that mesmerized with their beauty seem like a nicely decked out puppet show. Decades of memorized chants from Liturgies and Mass and feast days and akathists and hymns (in Slavonic, Old Russian, Latin, Greek) have disappeared from memory. Those cherished daily prayer books are just obsolete words on a page. The favorite luminous promises and prayers of Scripture sound like trampled dust. God’s whole historic united body-of-Christ plan has marched off without me; he’s in some other part of the cosmos, a pleasant well-meaning guy with good ideas and care for better people.

Maybe the real fleshly desire, other than Trader Joe 72% chocolate, has been the lifelong desperation to belong to a church, to follow all the advice, to feel saved enough, to feel included like everybody else. Along the way of trying so hard, I lost my faith and want it back. I miss the words in print and hearing, the eyes on the wall. Most important I miss myself, and the way God used to lead me — a prompting of intuition that cut cross-wise right through my ordinary thoughts and showed the way, and was always always right. It’s time to find that again.

In fact, after my neighbor had the gentle word with me about salvation, she urged me to try prayer, asking Jesus for guidance. That night I did, and right away there was an inner flash of intuition. “You can be lonely, you can be sad,” that awareness seemed to say. “That does not interfere at all with the work I gave you, of sitting with souls in pain. But do not ever, EVER, speak to them the way those people spoke to you.” Maybe I needed to hear everybody’s advice, to feel exactly which words do not help.

Meanwhile, back to that driver on the empty bus. His silent nod and smile were holy, the sacrament I’d been looking for. He inspired me to carry that kindness forward, to kindle sacramental meetings ever since, all day every day, one human being at a time.