DAY 4

Having undertaken a spiritual fast before, I know that the stomach cramps begin to get easier after the fourth day. I never fasted beyond seven days however, and that was late in my ministry career. I was seasoned then, or perhaps cured like leather. The process of spiritual ripening can take a lifetime, but unlike my son, I was fortunate to have great people around me when I first started the clergy profession.

I took my first parish at the age of twenty-four. Probably not a wise move, but I had an elderly Latin professor who knew of an opening in a local congregation and he strongly urged me to apply while finishing up my advanced degrees. “Real ministry would do you some good,” he used to say to me, remarking often on my sullen gazes and intentionally offensive translations of Virgil’s poems. I remember he had a kind face, the sort that would furrow up at the first sign of discomfort or offense; and I suspect the old fellow never said a dishonest word -- his face would have revealed too much. I said as much of him at his funeral many months later.

The church my professor sent me to was very much in need of a pastor – and not just because their pulpit was empty and no one was capable of delivering the homilies. They were an elderly lot and overwhelmed with the grief of having lost nine parishioners in thirteen short months. I was honestly taken back by the way they received me, being so young and inexperienced. I stumbled through the opening months of this first placement, but these dear souls were always gracious; better still, they were amazing cooks and often visited me, arms loaded with freshly baked pies and casseroles. I gained fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks and although the conversations never reached any real intellectual fulfillment as they had with my seminary companions, I found that I never grew tired of my parishioners company either. My professor was right, “real ministry” was doing me some good.

I kept up my trips to the cemetery during my tenure at this church and found myself writing some of my best sermons there in the quiet of the tombstones. I had planned to one day publish them as they reflected some of the happiest moments of my life. There was a particular sculpture there under which I did my best work. Carved above the entrance to small mausoleum was a pair of children holding hands and looking upward to the east. Their faces were smoothed and polished and time had not worn on them in anyway. The inscription said, “In hands and in hearts, in life and in death, all things are bound together.”

I sat there on many cool mornings reading Walt Whitman, trying to piece together the unitary ideas of life and death. My regularity was noticed and after several weeks, a young suburban jogger stopped beside me to catch her breath.

“I see you here nearly every morning at this hour,” she expressed. “Same place, same time.”

I looked up from my book and took in her face and form carefully, so as not to be seen staring. She was stunningly beautiful, with a long slender body suited for running. Her hair was very short, cut with almost masculine features, but upon closer examination I realized that it helped to reveal her gorgeous blue eyes and slender, supple neck. Her complexion was clear and her cheek bones glistened with beads of sweat from the run.

I stood up and brushed myself off slightly. “I regret never having noticed you noticing me,” I said wryly and she smiled. We exchanged pleasantries for a moment and she returned to her run, neither of us ever asking for the other’s name.

Over the coming weeks, I continued my routine and took note of hers. She was a Monday, Wednesday, Friday runner – perhaps Sunday too, but I was never there on Sunday mornings. She had two running outfits, both very modest by the day’s standards. She kept a great pace, a modern rhythm in her step which neatly matched the way she swung her arms as she moved. That led me to believe she was perhaps a musician or a poet because such kinesthetic rhythms are not exerted by most people without great mental concentration and training. She stopped again sometime later and through our chatting I came to realize that I’d been wrong on both counts. She was hairdresser, which I supposed was a type of artist, and more relevant to the point of my observation of her natural rhythm, she dabbled in martial arts.

She too had discovered my profession and to my great surprised was seated among my many blue-haired friends the Sunday morning following. She was stunningly beautiful and although I had never been the nervous sort, something about her presence led me to stumble my way through the text as if I were being graded by one whose opinion I found extremely precious. She was cordial afterward and said nice things about the homily. It was good to finally get a younger person’s perspective, as the older congregants would always compliment me while coupling the compliment with phrases like, “You’re going to be a great preacher one day.” I never quite knew how to take that kind of praise back then and sometimes even found it offensive. I know now that my parishioners recognized all too well my need to mature and find my own rhythm as both an artist and a shepherd. Perhaps they sensed that I had not yet come to fully grasp my profession or adopt the cultural expectations that accompanied it.

After the sermon that first morning, I invited her to lunch and she agreed. We talked about the things we loved about life and she was amazingly open about her lack of a spiritual upbringing. Still, as I have found repeatedly throughout life, some of the people nearest to Jesus have lived lives far away from the formality of the Church. Perhaps it was this unfiltered and honest approach to life that most attracted me – her positions on truly spiritual topics that had not passed through the antiseptic rinse of religion. It was the beginning of something wonderful.

That very night I had a terrible dream. I was standing in the sanctuary of my church enjoying the beauty of the stillness, when suddenly there came a deep rumbling from beneath the platform where I preached week in and week out. The rumbling grew stronger and its location increasingly specific, thereby ruling out any thoughts I had of it being an earthquake. In my dream, a small trap door appeared near the pulpit leading into a dark, musty basement. Fearfully, but with great curiosity, I descended into the darkness.

When I was fully inside the small, hidden area there beneath my church I was greeted (as we often are in dreams) with an odd conglomeration of objects. Some were ancient candlesticks and holy relics mixed right alongside modern items like laptop computers and microwaves. In the center of the room, the source of the rumbling was covered by a large painter’s tarp. Streaks of dried white paint covered the bluish cloth, which was shaking with intense vibrations and emitting mechanical noises that sounded like a wound-up child’s toy under the Christmas tree.

Timidly, I removed the cloth and beneath it stood what I could only guess to be a life-size, fully robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex. It makes me chuckle to think of today, but in my dream the machine sprung to life and what began as an eerie dream quickly became a nightmare that I would only recently come to understand.

Still dreaming, I sprang from the hole beneath the pulpit and found myself staring blankly into the faces of all my elderly friends who’d gathered as they would normally for a Sunday morning service. The ground gave way beneath my feet and the mechanical T-Rex emerged to the horror of my parishioners. Knocked to the ground, I could only watch in terror as it gripped them in its jaws, sometimes one entire row of them at a time. Shaking its head violently back and forth, their bodies crashed into lifeless humps beneath the cracked and broken stained glass windows.

My dream ended with me standing among the wreckage of the sanctuary, looking intently back into the darkness of the room where a solitary figure stood with a device in his hand. I could not make out his features, not even in the slightest, but I did see him wave the device and heard him laugh as he pressed a button on it. The button controlled the robotic destructor and he would turn it on and off again in glee as I was powerless to reach him.

I woke up and immediately wrote the dream down, if for no other reason than to try and make sense of it. After pondering on it all day, I could only surmise that I had some latent fear of unleashing something very old, something even extinct, upon my parish. This creature wasn’t merely something ancient, but something ancient and recreated through modern, man-made means.

I grew extra careful in my preparation for most of that entire year with the dream never too far my thoughts. But even that careful eye and guarded demeanor would soon be drawn away and I would cast all my thoughts wistfully toward my wedding day where in hands and in hearts all things are bound together, whether in the granite, mechanical wastelands of T.S. Eliot or in Whitman’s softer folds of leaves and grass.