DAY 2

By the time I reached twenty years I had grown so accustomed to God’s presence that the mystery of it was like breathing and while many find breathing to be quite commonplace, as an asthmatic, I never did. There is a majestic fullness to breath that we only recognize in its absence and so it is with all things Transcendent. The absence of breath is gripping and terrifying – it is not particularly painful in the sense of being stung by a bee or thumping your little toe. The pain is of another category that only comes through the awareness that we are not taking in air; and in this way, I have come to find better definitions for damnation as I mentioned yesterday.

I am in fact hungry today, but it is beautiful here. I slip outside to catch glimpses of sun while I still can. The sky is a rich, deep blue and every cloud an angel. There is no one here, no gathering of spectators, no press. Hunger strikes are meant to call attention to things, but I find no more need of earthly eyes. I am alone with myself enjoying the crisp, clean air. When Gerald Manley Hopkins speaks of the “dearest freshness deep down things” perhaps the most basic of these is the smell of clean air.

I remember when was eleven I had the worst asthma attack of my life. My grandparents were ‘grand’ farmers, people of the earth who loved God and soil and fresh crops. Of my many regrets in this life, one that stands out and often bubbles over is the fact that I spent too few hours watching them work. I suspect I could have learned a great deal from them.

It was difficult to exist in close proximity to my grandparents for two reasons. First, my grandfather was a heavy smoker through my childhood years. He would willfully exchange clean air for the gray wisp of what the hellfire consumed. The cloud of it would billow around him, around the house and skate toward me like some living entity, some devil of malicious intent working its way up through my nostrils and past the cilia; ushering my dark, fleshy places to coil up defensively and restrict my breathing. I’ve come to recognize in my years of asthma what it means to truly gasp, and as a clergyman of some sixty years, I’ve come to recognize in my many hours of asthmatic gasping what it means to truly breathe; and now as related to this confession, how it is that these two methods of retrieving air are quite dissimilar in the body, as in all things spiritual.

Second, despite my love for the many animals that filled every waking day with clucking and deep bellowing sounds (Nature’s collective tongue moving from skeleton to skeleton), the truth was that I was allergic every one of them. My grandfather had a large barn and there are few experiences that children today can enjoy as profound as swinging from barn rafters to hay bales under the constant, methodic grinding of bovine teeth as they patiently work sprinkled oats in a trough. It is one of life’s rhythms hardly available to them anymore, replaced instead by flashes of color beamed down from metal antennas onto thin plasma, which serves to compound the Great Ignorance. Television fills our minds like grandpa’s smoke and our entire species while oddly unaware of its own breath, remains perplexed as to why we gasp.

At eleven years old on a Christmas Eve, my lungs decided they’d had enough foreign contaminant, as each sticky Alveoli underwent the flypaper-wandering, from a mouth that followed its eyes and from eyes that followed its soul to these people I loved so much. Christmas Eve, while I was constricted and gasping, we piled in together as a family and drove to the hospital, a house of concrete and epinephrine, so my gasping could be relieved and my breathing restored. From manger to manger we traveled, not as wise men, but as shepherds.

Even at eleven, I felt terrible for that sweet nurse who at the expense of her own family Christmas would treat my gasp and give respiratory birth to me in the form of my own bronchial Jesus. These nurses are dear souls and through my years of ministering to the dying I have come to see them as angels in their own regard, like the puffy clouds above me today.

She never once complained about working the holiday, as I would often do in as a pastor; and in that sense I suppose she was a better minister than me. Her presence was calm and sure, the prick of the needle and draining syringe brought quick relief to my lungs, like mammalian labor – like our old grey puss which after having pressed out the nine could once again breathe easy and lick the sticky nutrients of creation off the entire artistic production.

The nurse smiled gently toward me, like a great composer of orchestral oxygen and I took in a glorious, immaculate breath.

That year, Christmas was particularly sweet. I could breathe again, but more than that, my grandfather was still alive. Although he’d forgo his smoking habit almost immediately after my respiratory emergency, it would be the accumulated cigarettes that ultimately took him to the ground he loved. I remember still the last time we ever spoke. Laid up from radiation treatments, he seldom emerged from the bed. A week before he died, he managed to get up and walk over to the window and gazed silently outward toward the pasture. We were alone in the house as I had elected to stay with him while the rest of the family enjoyed the catfish ponds. He placed one hand on the window sill to support his weight and pointed out silently for a few moments, occasionally pecking the glass. He finally turned to me and said in a struggled voice, “Do you see those cows? Those are my cows.” I nodded a strange acknowledgement and he returned to bed.

I suppose that had I known these would be his last words to me I would have thought of something gracious to say, but I did not. In the remainder of our time, he slept in his bed, and I, through an open door, laid on a sofa listening to sullen gasps for air and uncontrollable coughs expelling the cancer in clumps.

That was late July or early August, I forget. The space and time has been far removed from the Christmas that defined my notions of breathing. In the time between, my mind and spirit had grown enough to know there could be no other profession for me than that of a clergyman. The great web of dead kittens and asthma would lead me to a Universe of sputtering light with a bag of candles and a deep recognition of a secluded, cosmic Nativity.

It would be the response to that Nativity, not the foretelling of it, that produced a Great Star; it would be the utility not the essence that I would lay as a neatly wrapped package of myrrh in the manager.

But I mean not to draw too many similarities and I must return inside now, lest someone notices me.