Catholic Church - Darling: a spiritual autobiography

Ojal

One summer evening in London, many years ago, I was walking through green twilight in Hyde Park when I attracted the gaze of a large woman who was wearing several coats; she was tending to two children, a girl and a boyher grandchildren, I surmised. As I passed, the woman posted a radiant, recognizing smile. Arabie? she asked.

I smiled, too. I shook my head, as though sadly. No.

Now I am not so sure.

In the predawn dark, a young man is bobbing up and down behind the pillar of an airport lounge a few yards from my departure gate. I watch from behind my newspaper. The man turns in a circle before the floor-to-ceiling window, beyond which an airliner lumbers upward like a blue whale to regain the suspended sea. The young man cups his hands behind his ears, then falls out of sight.

One other passenger sees what I see. Someone should call the police, the woman says out loud, not to me, not to anyonea thought balloon.

To say what? A Muslim is praying at Gate 58.

In the final months of my parents livesmonths of wheelchairs heaved into the trunks of cars, months of desperate clutchings at handrails and car doorsI often drove them to the five-thirty Mass on Saturday evenings.

One Saturday in mid-September 2001a day without fog, a warm evening skyI steered my mothers wheelchair out of the church, careful of the radius of the thing, careful of her toes. All of us at Mass felt a need for congregation that evening. In the interval between last Saturday and this, we had learned something terrible about the nature of religion.

Several women of the parish leaned over my mothers wheelchair, as they often did. A few months hence, when my mother could no longer leave the house, these same women would ring the doorbell of my parents house to bring Holy Communion to my mother.

Terrible times, the women murmured among themselves, all of them in tropically colored blouses. Terrible, terrible times!

Something had happened in the sky. In a way it was more extraordinary than a mystics visionthe vision, for example, of Caryll Houselander, the English artist, writer, bohemian. London, 1918: Houselander, a young woman of sixteen, was on her way to buy potatoes for her familys dinner. She knew she must not tarry on the way home. Suddenly, above her, as she recounts, wiping out not only the grey street and sky but the whole world, was an icon of Christ the King crucified. Houselander goes on to explain, as all mystics must but never can explain, that she saw with her minds eye.

We of the congregation had not seen with our minds eyes, but through our television screens. We saw peoplethey were so far away but we knew they were people, they were not cinders or the leaves of calendars; we saw people who had no alternative but to consign their bodiestheir bodies, I say, but I mean their livesto the air, people who are loved, I believe, by God, even as I believe their murderers are loved by God. Falling.

A friend of mine, a Jew, called at about that time to ask if there was ever a time when I did not believe in God. My answer was no. Her answer was no also.

It was in the weeks following the terrorist attacks of September 11 that I came to the realization that the God I worship is a desert God. It was to the same desert God the terrorists prayed.