Daughter of Abraham: Unbound

     Economics determines everything on Flint’s east side.  The human print is muddy here.  Paths through yards of refuse to porches with stacked cases of Aquafina plastic water bottles and oversized sofas worn-out and brown from the press of heavy bodies in unwashed clothes.  These houses were once the equivalent of tenements when Flint was a boom town—housing for white workers up from the Missouri boot heel.  Now the neighborhood is racially mixed but universally destitute.  Halloween decorations—plastic pumpkins, an odd skeleton, and purple lights—add to heaped disorder and general sadness.   

Charles Burchfield, Haunted Houses

       I drive through these streets, drawn to St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Franklin Street in Flint to be set free.  It is a very simple brick building—like the Flint Shelter one block south—not a church created to impress anyone.  In fact, the only things that differentiate it from the other houses of this poor neighborhood are its size, its small steeple (not much taller than a chimney), an in tact roof, a stack of bells at the entrance, and a man wearing a wooden cross who opens the door on Sunday mornings for those who make it on time.  Once inside, the church holds the familiar smells of candle wax and a touch of holy oil or incense.  It’s small enough to feel homey and the colors of the cheaply done window glass are warm kitchen colors—oranges and yellows with cool pools of lavender.  I slip into the pew next to the Last Supper window and feel that I am sitting across the table from Jesus.  In this home, talk is not taboo and communion depends on remembering.  “Without seeing you, we love you; without touching you, we embrace.”  After my father died, I was told not to look back.  One of the few memories that stayed (because it is a bodily memory) is the feeling of his hand on my shoulder, pulling me toward him in the pew at some Sunday mass.  He was Lutheran and never converted but went with us kids to the Catholic church, Our Lady of the Annunciation, anyway.  He must have wanted to share the experience … to be there with us.  It has always seemed mysterious that intimate moments with my father and even with my mother (though she never touched me) happened in church pews. 

     At St. Mary’s, the people are not well-heeled, and since coming to Mass here, I’ve stopped buying extras on ebay or from catalogues.  Although the people make an effort to be clean and neat, it’s obvious that they wear what they have:  windbreakers and shorts even in the chill of autumn, polyester hugging imperfect bodies with arthritic lumps and rolls of fat, sequins (Walmart glitz) for the godparents of the baby to be baptized today.  The shoes are heavy, functional (mainly black), and cheap.  In the communion line, I see some sandals, a pair of rubbers, sneakers, work shoes.  There is no place for the poor to hide, they look back at me with bright eyes and uncovered gray, pock-marks, and wrinkles.

This is the only picture online of the interior of Saint Mary's, Franklin Street, Flint

       There is a feeling of freedom here, which is strange because the Catholic liturgy is much more choreographed than, for instance, that of the Russian Orthodox Church:  there are specific times to kneel, to sit, to stand, to shake hands, to raise your hands, to cup your hands, and so on.  Although the movement can feel mechanical, at its best it works to help us remember all the good things we can do with our bodies and, especially, our hands.  We lift them up.  We offer a sign of peace to our neighbor.  We make the sign of the cross on our head, lips, and heart.  Our movements are accompanied by congregational response, prayer, homily, and song.  Today, it felt fluid, almost as if I were dancing.  A few rows ahead, I watched an African-American man rock back and forth as if there was music in him, sort of like the mother, who holds the baby and sways him to and fro so gently.  When we lift our arms, it signifies the lifting of hearts.  We come forward with cupped hands to receive a round white wafer.  “This is the body of Christ.”  It looks like what I imagine manna to have looked like, and the manna collected everyday by the Israelites, tasted different to each person, tasted like her favorite food.  In the repetitive movements, expressive of so many different things, I feel restored to my natural self.  The trick is how to stay this light, this fluid, and to feel this loving when I return to the world, where even though I still want to reach, touch, lift, and move, something holds me back.  I feel strangely confined.

     Outside the church, I am thrall to my schedule, my duties, and my books.  We think we are free, but in fact, my movements—and maybe yours—are, on any given weekday restricted and minimal:  I drive the same roads to Katya’s school.  I stare at my email Inbox.  I read books and review my notes in the same room.  I teach my classes that never go as well as I wish they would, I sit in my office, and I feel as lonely and desperate as if I were in solitary confinement.  At home, my husband and I live like roommates.  No one touches me, and I go through my day almost like a robot.  But it was a Renaissance play that sensitized me to my own bodily constriction.  Doctor Faustus, who signs his soul away to Lucifer, wants to repent through much of the play.  Even at the end when he sees Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament, he wants to lift his arms toward “My Christ,” but he feels devils pulling them down.  Because I was a slave for ten years to an abusive man—locked into waiting for phone calls and utterly dependent on him—I may be more sensitive to the way sin turns our natural bodies into something grim and mechanical.  I was one of the dead, sitting on my porch puffing away at a cigarettes, sometimes one after the other, watching the sparrows and spiders, and longing to be something other than human.  I was very like the woman in Luke 13:10-17, who for eighteen years had been crippled by a spirit.  Even though she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect, she continued to go to the synagogue.

When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said,
"Woman, you are set free of your infirmity."
He laid his hands on her,
and she at once stood up straight and glorified God.

      If I could begin every day by dancing at Mass, then maybe I could begin again in my life.  And Mass today reminded me of starting over because we all had to participate in the baptism of Douglas Lee.  His parents were ushered up to the front of the church.  From my place in the back, I saw his flower of a face—white with dark eyes and petal lips swaddled in a fleece blanket.  As the priest anointed the crown of his head with the sweet smelling chrism oil, I was happy to be reminded that we all have a crown on our head—that spot that is still soft in newborns.  His mother held him over the font, the waters of baptism washed away his original sin, and the priest spoke of the way God used water:  His spirit brooded over the deep at the creation, after the flood He pulled back the water to enter into covenant with all mankind and animals, and when His chosen Israel was enslaved he walked them through the Red Sea to a fresh start in the wilderness.  All of us come into the world through water as we push out of the motherland between knees and are drawn up to breasts.  In baptism, God’s water breaks over us, and out we come, wearing a white garment and given a human angel (a godparent), who holds a candle to light our way.  The white garment symbolizes the soul that we must bring unstained to paradise.  It’s a nice thought, but how many people return to the Father unstained?  How many godparents keep that candle of faith burning?  For most of us the candle is boxed up and collects dust on a shelf or is forgotten.  We all need renewal.  We need to be asked the questions and to answer on behalf of a baby and because we are all young in spiritual things:  Do you reject Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises?  Do you believe in God the father, and his son, our Lord Jesus Christ?  

After this dance and this song I feel almost as new as Douglas Lee.  I go to communion.  I long to rest my hand or head on the shoulder of the gray-haired man, who goes before me in the line.  When my turn comes, I hold out my hands, and I place the manna in my mouth:  “this is the body of Christ.”  Hastening back to my place, I kneel and bury my face in hands.  There is just enough time for a simple prayer before the song begins.  “God, I want to be a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a child.”

This daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now,
ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day
from this bondage?"