Swimming them dwelling: Gregory Maguire on grief and prayer

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, printed posthumously, 1947 

Last month I misplaced two mates from my childhood parish in Albany, N.Y. One was the previous pastor. As he started his tenure at St. Vincent de Paul Church in 1972, and I used to be readying to attend school domestically, dwelling with my of us, he invited me to launch a recent music group. Back then we known as it a folks group, what with its Peter, Paul and Mary sonorities and its civil rights period aspirations. Since the congregation swelled each September with an inflow of faculty college students, a few of whom have been completed college students of music, the group’s ambitions and its competence grew rapidly.

Rev. Leo O’Brien was a person who did all the things in his energy throughout the rubrics of his place to create a radically hospitable church. He was no flame-thrower or rabble-rouser, however quite a quiet, dignified man with a simple Irish smile and a beckoning gesture to anybody who got here by the door. And I imply anybody.

For practically twenty years, my associate was a training Muslim who got here to church with me for our excessive holy days. At that time I had left the choir and left Albany, however I used to be welcomed again into the ranks of musicians after I was on the town. My boyfriend skated in behind me, flipping pages of the hymnal and having somewhat downside with pitch that nobody, particularly me, dropped at his consideration. Father O’Brien and his second, an administrative assistant named Sister Joan Byrne, known as him their favourite Muslim. When he and I broke up, they continued to ask after him till they handed away. 

Father O’Brien died about three weeks in the past. The multitudes of monks assembled. The choir swelled with outdated voices like mine coming again to pay respect and assist have fun the lifetime of this gravely beneficiant man. He was 94 and had been retired from the parish for about 20 years. Yet the church was full to the final overpacked pew. 

Just earlier than the Bishop Mark O’Connell started the doorway procession for the Mass, a telephone name got here in on somebody’s cellphone. An alto who had been singing with the choir for half a century had taken an surprising flip for the more severe and may not have the ability to final the week. Debbie Kirsch was 78. She’d been in ache from extreme scoliosis for many years, and her grip on self-governance had grow to be precarious. But she knew that Father O’Brien’s service was starting that morning. 

After the final echoing notes of the recessional, I rushed to go to her. She informed me she had had a imaginative and prescient on the very hour when Leo died per week earlier. She had seen him as a boy, she mentioned, after which as a younger priest. “Absolution,” she mentioned, cryptically, not explaining who was absolving whom.

She was nicely conscious that every one this is likely to be a little bit of hypnagogic fancy, or a visitation, a waking imaginative and prescient. “Inspired maybe by ‘Touched by an Angel’ starring Della Reese,” she intoned. She was dropping cognitive grasp rapidly so I used to be impressed by how clear and clinically proved her evaluation was of the potential roots of her expertise. Holy second or delusion? “Well, or maybe both,” I replied to her, and he or she nodded: skeptical, noncommittal, noncombative. 

I mentioned goodbye to each good outdated mates on the identical day, successfully: to Leo in his coffin, to Debbie in her mattress within the ICU. I drove dwelling to Massachusetts understanding I’d not see both one on this life once more. And as I’ve by no means seen “Touched by an Angel” starring Della Reese, I couldn’t have an expertise precisely like Debbie’s. Neither hear her confession nor ask for her forgiveness. “And just to clear the air….” 

But none of us have moments of readability or of surprise that match some other second, or anybody else’s second both. Epiphanies are shining, insubstantial and evanescent. They fade earlier than they are often quantified or categorized. They are custom-made for every of us by our personal hearts and minds and, even when we by no means watched TV, by the templates of our understanding of transcendence. 

Back in Massachusetts, I booked myself a lane on the native pool to swim out my grief. I typically pray as I swim. It usually begins with childhood prayers from my earliest catechisms. They morph and torque just like the visions that flag throughout the within of our eyelids simply earlier than we go to sleep. I ought to add I’m neither a scholar nor a tutor of prayer. In the room throughout the corridor from the pool, step-class instructors have been barking at their college students to do that, do this, however I can’t even hector myself. I simply abandon myself to the prayerful second the way in which I tiptoe into the water that I belief will maintain me up. 

This specific day, as I thought of what Father O’Brien, that good man, had accomplished for me, I turned away from the inventory if beloved phrases of the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. I simply let myself really feel what I used to be feeling within the water—motion, extra grace than I can exhibit on stable floor: a welcome sense of isolation, a tightening of focus.

I’ve at all times been keen on analyzing my very own apprehensions—I suppose that’s the curse and good thing about being a author, being inside and out of doors one’s expertise on the similar time. What, I mentioned to myself, does this really feel like, this swim, as Leo O’Brien leaves my lifetime of hours and months and turns into a legacy? 

I started to sense—to think about—that I used to be swimming him dwelling. He was swimming beside me. We have been accompanying one another with out acknowledging one another, precisely—no smiles, no speaking, no gestures. Just adjoining. I used to be swimming him in his journey to not the promised land however to the One True Sea. I’d flip again, at a sure second, and he would go on forward. 

This morning, having completed writing the obituary for the choir member named Debbie Kirsch, who died on Wednesday, I swam her alongside as nicely. For a long time Debbie had been handicapped by wasted muscle groups, a bowed backbone, fierce pains. She’d been confined to her wheelchair and a Barcalounger the place she may handle to get some sleep. Her life had grow to be consumed by the efforts it took to get to Mass and to cherish her mates. She couldn’t at all times handle the previous however she by no means gave up on the latter. 

I swam Debbie onward this morning. Amazing what a dip in a pool warmed to 82 levels can do for one! In my thoughts’s eye she was robust and filled with intention. She had someplace to be, and now the mobility to get going. She was assured and joyous in that a part of my peripheral imaginative and prescient which you could’t draw into focus once you’re swimming. 

“Oh daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?” wrote Walt Whitman in “Passage to India” (1871). Frankly, I don’t know the place Whitman was. He’d gone on forward, possibly? Father O’Brien was catching as much as him. But Debbie and I, we have been like dolphins this morning, a pod of two, making our means dwelling.