#SOL16: Blind Faith

Blind Faith (M.A. Reilly, West Milford, NJ, 2008)

I.

She wasn't what I expected. She was ordinary looking--like a former neighbor you might bump into at a supermarket one afternoon in fall. I expected exotic and yes there was incense and holy water, and rose spray, and tuning forks and the quiet intimacy one might expect. But Anne Marie looked more like a woman from the suburbs, than a 50s hipster.  She was funny and kind and I realized as we began and she called upon St. Michael to bless our encounter--deeply religious.

Mostly, she was genuine.

I had not been to a psychic-medium before yesterday and I want to say here that the experience that stretched across 90 minutes was wonderful. For the first time since Rob's death I felt a deep measure of peace.  It's hard for me to explain how unsettled my life has felt during these last six months. Every minute is a reminder of the loss.  Every minute. But yesterday as Anne Marie scribbled on the pad and asked me to help interpret what the dead were showing her, peace and contentment settled over me like a favorite blanket, like a chance encounter with a lost friend whom you suddenly meet.

I went to see Anne Marie mostly because I wanted to know that Rob was okay. I needed to know this. I also wondered about his spirit--was he still of this world in some manner?  I learned he was both okay and of this world.  I also encountered my mom and dad and a former neighbor.

II.

In prior years, I may well have been the least likely person to seek a medium or a psychic. I'm more of a skeptic, than a believer. But perspectives change with experience and that's the overarching lesson I want to remember. Perspectives change. And how grand is that? Ok, well sometimes those lessons come with a cost. But these costs are often what we most need to bear as they are doorways of a sort that open us to other ways of being in the world and that surely is grand.

When I arrived home, I shared the encounter with Devon, who makes me look like a true believer. But even he was surprised, especially when I shared aspects of the encounter that focused on him. Who knew he had his eye on a black sedan? Certainly not me. We talked physics in the kitchen as I finished preparing dinner. We talked about energies being neither created nor destroyed, but rather transformed. And as we talked, I wondered less about Rob's or my mom's or my dad's human body and more about their spiritual energies. There's great comfort in knowing each is present in some manner.

Anne Marie told me things she could never have known--details long ago forgotten or just recently encountered. Early on she asked me why my mom was showing her the place where Anne Marie's husband works. I asked where he worked as she said the Archdiocese of New York. I couldn't fathom why my mom would be showing her this and then she mentioned Cathedral High School, which is located within the archdiocese. And I knew. My mom graduated from Cathedral back in the 1930s. Then there was the specificity of what Rob wanted to thank me for--things only he and I knew, or the chance encounter with a cardinal I experienced only hours before or mentioning Devon's acceptance at the very college he most wants to attend--the same college who sent him an invitation to apply priority status this afternoon.

III.

Not everything Anne Marie mentioned could be understood. For example, Rob showed her a tree with cherries and cherries in a bowl and I still don't know what to make of either. He mentioned someone named George and that name meant nothing specific to me. And I find I mostly like this--the unsettled and unexplained--the space where silence reigns and talk is not present or needed.

 Last night I was reading another book by Thomas Merton (it's like he's whispering directly in my ear). About halfway through Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings, Merton writes:

But there is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss" (Kindle Locations 431-433). 

The substance of silence. Oh my.

Mysteries abound and surely that is for our good.

What it Was I Was Listening For

                                               ...The space we stood around had been emptied
                                               Into us to keep, it penetrated
                                               Clearances that suddenly stood open.
                                               High cries were felled and pure change happened.

                                                                                - Seamus Heaney, from Clearances, VII


I.

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

On a too early day in May, I watched my mother die. There is simply no easy way to buffer that truth. I stood beside her bed, touching and not touching, hearing even now, fifteen years removed, her chest rattle as I bargained with an indifferent God. Just a bit more time though I knew she suffered. And regardless of all of those years I spent on my knees--the hard kneeler a kind of penance for sins committed and not--God was mute. Tight-lipped. Taciturn.

I never quite knew what it was I was listening for.

II.

Time passes like a list begun more than once, left tucked inside the pocket of a winter coat worn last season. This is how grief moves and fails to move. Memories arise from the least provocation like a wave that swamps me. And I am drowning here on a Tuesday morning on day too much like the day we set her in the ground--a too beautiful, too early spring day at that.  I sit next to the grown daughter and her mom--both out for some talk, out for a pair of pedicures--nothing too goddamn special.  And it's the ordinariness of it that most undoes me.

I am desperate for Heaney's pure change.

III.

There's little to know when burying the dead. Knowing is a false balm that does not soothe. Knowing is a way to stand still, like that cup of tea made and remade that is still waiting on the counter, long cooled and forgotten.  With each lived moment, I edge closer to leaving and nothing terrifies me more than the thought of my son bargaining with some god on a too early, too spring morning. What words will he proffer?  Have I even taught him how to listen?  Language is a vice--one part fixed, one part moving--a bolt through the heart.

I tell you love is nothing if not epic.

Tell All Your Heart: Ferguson & A Mother's Heart

Another Mother's Grief (from M.A. Reilly's Collage Journal made on 8.11.14)

I.

Tonight, I am wondering what I might say to my teenage son who stood 6 feet tall next to me, unwavering, as we all listened to Bob McCulloch tell America--tell the world--that a St. Louis County grand jury returned no indictment of Police Officer Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown. Officer Wilson discharged 12 shots at an unarmed teenager--just two years older than my own child. These are facts not disputed. Wilson fired his gun 12 times at Mike Brown, killing him with a shot to the boy's head.

Tonight, I'm trying to find words, knowing the inadequacy of speech, as I watched my son turn away and walk back upstairs closing the door to his room after telling his father and me he was not surprised by the outcome.

This is America, he says.

He sees the United States as an unjust place--a place of racial and economic injustice. He has already known the repeated sting of not being white discharged by white boys who enjoyed protection from their acts by white teachers and administrators at school. Places where white principals say, We don't notice color here. We don't see color.

Really?

White privilege is a fearsome thing.

This absence of indictment confirms what my son has told us he knows: America is the land of institutionalized racism. It runs through our blood.  A river that is centuries old. It is deep. No white sheet can hide such savagery.

II.

Tonight, I'm thinking about the long, long list of parents who have had to endure injustice when their children's blood was spilled. When their babies were cut down. When their boys and girls were murdered by men sworn to protect. I am the granddaughter, the niece, the cousin, and the sister to police officers--those sworn to protect.

Tonight I am worried that my son, a Korean teen, cannot count on the police to read his intentions correctly. To see him as his mom and dad know him.  Given the history of our country is it possible to believe that in a time of ambiguity a police office won't read his difference first? Won't read him as not white? Won't read him as other. Won't read him as threat?  Is he a young man who will be allowed to make a foolish mistake without it resulting in his death?

No amount of Abercombie & Fitch, Apple or Yankee accessories will reverse his status of other.

So what do I tell him?  What should his white mother say to him?

We talk again, after he asks me to help him study for an English exam he'll take tomorrow. After we talk about The Things They Carried and Romeo & Juliet--about needless deaths that span centuries and I talk to him as only a mother can. I make him promise me that if he is facing arrest, like 1 in 3 young men do in this country before the age of 23, that he'll submit. He'll lie on the goddamn ground. He'll put his hands up. He'll keep his mouth shut. He'll do all this to keep himself alive cause facing a white man with a gun could well be his death.

III.

Tonight I'm tired. Tonight I am remembering the original definition of courage--a definition that in the 1400s meant to tell all of your heart. Tonight I am feeling a keen kinship with mothers across the globe prompted by that definition, by the actions reported in Clayton, MO. Prompted, perhaps because I began to cry once the prosecutor mentioned the conflicting issues of witnesses because I knew with certainty that no indictment would be forthcoming.

What we tell our boys and girls, what we say from our mothers' hearts, we should tell out loud. We should tell all of our hearts. Keep safe in this unsafe world we've made. Work to make it better than we have done. Know our failure and be undeterred. But keep safe, first. Be safe.

To remain silent is to be complicit.

Birds Lifting

Birds Lifting (Reilly, 2012)

I.

I'm driving. Dev, my 15-year-old son, turns in the seat and says to me, "There's no getting to what is needed without first protesting."

I'm silent, thinking.

"Not even things that should just be given cause we all know that they're good. These days you can't get to it without a protest."

I listen, refuse to rush in and fill the space his words have opened.

"It's our interests against the corporations and the only way to get our government to actually work, to do what we've put them in office to do, is to protest," he adds. "Everything requires us to protest."

More silence. More space opening.

"It hasn't always been this way," he says in a voice that feels somewhat younger--almost as if he wasn't making a statement.

Or perhaps that's how I want to hear him.

I feel his absence of faith.
Perhaps, I'm feeling my own as well.

"You're right. It hasn't."

As we almost crest the hill that leads to our home, I slow the car and we wait there in the middle of the road. An unsafe place for sure, just below the crest of the hill. We wait as hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of black birds ascend from tree branches, shrubs, and lawns--darting across the road towards the woods. We sit and watch. The car idles, the windows are down, the roof is open and the birds fly--a steady stream of black interrupted now and then by bits of slate grey sky.

"Wow, a Hitchcock moment," I say to Devon.

We are of few words.

II.

I'm putting away groceries thinking about my son's declaration and I'm reminded of a far earlier time--one where I'm talking loudly with my Da. It's dusk, a half-hour or so before supper and I'm explaining to him how we have a caste system akin to India and he's arguing back, a Manhattan at his ready, saying it's not quite so bad. There are still possibilities.

I think he's being less than truthful, choosing his words with some care. I watch as he takes a sip of his drink, pauses. Yes, he's being careful not to deny that a caste system of sorts exists here or at least that's how I'm hearing it, how I'm remembering it. This is the man who took us across the country to the Painted Desert to see what our government had done to the Navajos.

Love is so inconsistent.

They won't teach you this at school, he tells my older brothers and me.

We head towards Interstate 40 traveling East on a road that is marked only by a thin single grey line on the map. I can still see the face of the girl who looked to be about my age, who stood opposite me in that harsh desert light each us bound by the heat. I can see her hand as she takes the few coins from my palm. Her nails are dirty, mine ragged. I bought a small totem she had painted. I still have it, decades later, packed away in a box stashed in my dead father's' attic. This is the way it is. Regardless of where we store the trinkets we've collected along the way, we continue to bear their weight.

And so, on that late day I'm thinking he should know better. I've been telling him about Vicki Battle and how we're friends on the field, just the field. I play third base and she's our short stop. We know how to work the field, back one another up. We've been doing it for years. My Da has watched us play.  But I'm telling him now with some urgency that she and her family live down by the tracks on a block packed with narrow, attached two-story houses. The train runs behind her home.  He knows the area and nods. And it's just like Caesar's place I add. A boyfriend with a notable name, Caesar Chavez, who lives just a town away, who lives above a bar. Trains run behind his apartment too, rattling the windows that are lit by neon.  Between us is such distance--a möbius strip that keeps us from touching.

We live further up the hill where there are no trains, no tracks, no neon. Here, narrow driveways separate one house from the next.  An odd repetition.


III.

I wonder what stories my son will tell when I am no longer here, no longer alive. We are always moving towards death. I wonder who will witness his tales. Who will hear his voice?

Will he remember a fall afternoon thick with black birds?
Will he tell about the time when he first recognized that the only way for right to happen in the world was to first protest?

Injustice is a constant that connects generations.

I wish I could be more clever, more in the moment. But the moment has gone. What I wanted him to know, but failed to tell him, was that difference has never been an antonym for sameness.

3 Minutes of Video You Must Watch

My mom, Catherine, on her wedding day.

I. Entering

My friend Robyn sends a link via email with a brief note to watch a video.  He's been doing improv work with medical students and a former student sent him the link.

3 minutes. Yeah I can work that in.

II. Remembering

My mom was asymptomatic when she was diagnosed with lung and liver cancer. She had some type of required screening done prior to cataract surgery that revealed these growths. Her spirit was crushed with the diagnosis that she had advanced stage cancer in her lungs and her liver. This is a woman who 30 years earlier had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and beat it. This time though, my mom would be dead 10 months later.

III. Dwelling

The film, If Only for a Second, is about human spirit and human bodies--how our spirit resides within and beyond our physical selves.  It is a brave and spirited work and one that having lived alongside my mom while she succumbed to cancer speaks to me.

Please make/take three minutes to watch it.  I know my next contribution will be to the Mimi Foundation. They so get the largeness of spirit.



Here's a link to the website.

My Mom and Dad

My friend, Jane has repeatedly asked me to show pictures of my parents, especially my mom.  I recently came across images made at my parents' wedding (1945 in Manhattan) and scanned them.

Here are a few.

Catherine M. Curnyn (June 1, 1945)

Catherine and Bob Reilly (June 1, 1945)

Catherine and Bob Reilly (June 1, 1945)

Love is so very powerful.
So very essential.

Thank you Jane for asking this.