A Faith Observed by Taylor Leigh Harper

I wasn’t a cute baby. I had jaundice when I was born, my ears were too big, I was bald for so long that my mother taped bows to my forehead. The ribbons marked me, “It’s a girl!”

There’s an album of evidence for all of this. The book is black, leathery. In the front, someone’s handwriting claims the years 1996-98.
               There’s me, swathed in a blanket particularly white against my sallow skin.
               Me held in the lap of a costumed rabbit during Easter. My ears as large as his.
               Me at Disneyland squeezing Winnie the Pooh’s nose, delighted and hairless.

I was baptized in the same gown that my father wore when he had been immersed in a stone basin of holy water. My father’s father first wore the dress. My brother was the last to have worn it. The gown hangs, beaded and beige lace, in the back of my old bedroom’s closet. The material itches, dusty.

There’s a photo of one of us wearing the christening dress. We can’t figure out who it is: him or me, boy or girl. No date in ink. Same bald head. Eyes shut and mouth open, joy or fear or hunger.

Later, my skin has darkened, my teeth are slightly bucked, and I have hair. I’m at the Getty, blurry, mid-spring across the garden lawn. I’m on the beach, hip cocked, fully clothed, facing the shore, unaware that from behind, a wave approaches. I’m in white, tulle skirt ballooning as I twirl, adjusting my floral veil, re-strapping my shoes before my First Communion.

In one set of photos from that particular day, my hands are clasped. As if in prayer. Like I’m pleading.



We went to Church on Sundays, though not regularly. Almost always during the holidays.

I liked morning mass because there were pastries and drinks served after the service. I liked to be the first in line. I liked the doughnuts with pink frosting and sprinkles. I liked to say “Good morning,” and “please,” and “thank you.” I’d forget to cross myself on my way out, skipping past the display of votive candles.

There was Father John, Father Patrick, Father-Who-Looks-Like-Jesus, but the Jesus in our Sunday school workbooks. Long hair kinked with a wave, not the rib-exposed Jesus hung above the alter.
               The one preaching made me flush, nervous and excited.
               The other made me nervous too, but also bored.

During the sermons, I’d count: twelve pews before us, twenty-two women, thirty-five men, seven hats, eight cream sweaters, many white blouses, two babies, one sleeping, the other staring. That baby watching me watching him. My mother’s hand on my back, patting me as we rose for song. She never sang. She hummed, a mumble at most. I watched when and where her eyes wandered. Looking together at the door leading out to the parking lot. Fiddling with the manila offering envelopes. Tapping out of tune on the back of the pew. Just under three minutes, then we sat again. Then we’d kneel. Bowed our heads. Peace be with you. And also with you. And I watched, counted, waited.

When I applied to an all-girls Catholic high school, I told my interviewer that my favorite authors were King, Plath, and Steinbeck. I was honest about The Dead Zone and The Bell Jar. I’d hated The Pearl, never even finished East of Eden.
               I also enjoyed my mother’s paperbacks, which smelled of sweet smoke, ashen and dog-eared. The ones with that shirtless Jesus-lookalike on the covers.


Hoc est enim corpus meum.

               The first time I received the Eucharist, the wafter stuck to the roof of my mouth, my tongue covered in paper. I gagged, nearly puked. Took the chalice with both hands and drank until I realized it wasn’t grape juice, but something more bitter, deeper, warmer. Sunlight through the stained-glass windows like a spotlight, and the Madonna watching over. At our pew, I kneeled, face wet and hot, and swallowed whatever came back up, and prayed for forgiveness.



If I’ve got nothing to do with my hands, I might as well pray.

My grandmother is of a certain generation, or perhaps a certain rural geography, of dairy farms and greenery and sweet tea, where churchgoing is not a choice, but a compulsion.
               “Pumpkin,” she’ll say, “I pray for your health. For the man you will marry. The most important thing when picking a husband is religion. You’ve both got to have God. Then a sense of humor. He must be kind. And if you have common interests, that’s nice, too. I pray that you always have a good heart.”
               And she pats my hand, kisses both of my cheeks, staining them with pink lipstick.
               “You’re a good girl.”

Consider what Mary Oliver wrote: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Are you there, Mary? I’m already kneeling. What do you mean I do not have to be good.



It used to take me twenty minutes to pray. I would pace my room, door locked. Now I lay me down to sleep. Our father who art in Heaven. Are you there, God? I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please keep my parents and sister and brother and friends and family and pets safe. Please let me be good. And deliver us from evil.



There was no death, then there was a lot.

Before N. overdosed, I’d declared a firm agnosticism. The infinite universe overwhelmed me. How could I know what was or wasn’t out there?
               Well, for one, she stopped being here. She died a week before she turned twenty-one. On my twenty-first birthday, I was at her funeral. She’d always been three days older than me. Suddenly, I was older than her, and would become older still.
               After she died, there were more. Linda’s ovarian cancer. Jordan’s father’s heart attack. Jess’s girlfriend, whom she met at her Bible study, hung herself. One of my former classmates—small, Jewish, gay—killed by a white supremacist—big, closeted, another boy with whom I went to school.
               My sister’s mother-in-law was the first open casket I saw.
               And my nephew kept asking, “Why does she look like that?”
               Like what?
               “Like not herself.”

I’m trying to constellate these losses. But those that are missing will not rise again. I’m starting to forget things about them. I can’t remember what their voices sounded like. If they sang or hummed. What they looked like with hair. How they were before the body breaks down and bloats. Have you eaten today? When was the last time you slept? Are you listening to me? Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I just can’t believe I’m never going to see her again. What I wanted to say. If I should or shouldn’t pray. If I’d still want them back, after all.

Lord have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.
Pray for us.
Pray for us.
Pray for us.

Suppose I were to say I wrote this out of fear and love.
               Fear and Love, if you will.



My mother drives me home. I ask her how she still believes in God after Jeffery overdosed.
               And she says she had to believe. “That is the only thing that got me through rehab and out again. My faith. God’s strength.”
               “No,” I say, putting my feet up on the dashboard as I look out the window. “You got yourself through that. You do it every day.”
               “No,” she says. “Not alone I don’t.”



In a different car ride, my father takes me back to school after winter break. The night navy, nearing midnight. There’s no traffic between Orange County and the city at this hour. Just a few scattered brake lights, neon and bloody.
               “You were always skeptical,” he says. “Even as a little girl.”



Omitted consciously: my confusion about Christianity and Catholicism; my mother’s conversion from the former to the latter; art school and what I learned there; photos of my sister, where she looks like our mother, like she could be my mother; photos of me dressed as Cinderella, a Freudian slip, the eponymous mouse from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie; the time in church when someone spilled the blood of Christ.

God knows what I have left out unconsciously. Or what’s missing yet.



All art is an effort to be remembered.

I cry often. When Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “And in that same brightness, I sometimes, not often, see another light, which I call “the living light”; when and how I see it, I cannot express… all sadness and all anguish is taken from me,” I was alone, misty-eyed on the couch. Curled my toes under the cushions. The fireplace lit. The living room light buzzed.
               The living light, as opposed to—



The picture of me in the pool for my first swim documents another baptism. The chlorine cleansed me. Imagine my mother also in the photo, not just my father. She is already well, recovered. She’s never left or gone away. I’m wearing a float device. My ears sticking out under my white sunhat. I’ll be sunburned, slathered in Aloe Vera later, but we can’t know that, not yet.

I knew someone resurrected. She drank so much, too much, just enough.
               “If she wakes up it’ll be a miracle, and who knows about the trauma to the brain.”
               They brought the priest in to give her last rites. Then she came back. There was no trauma, no sign that anything had happened at all. The living light stayed, at least for a while.

I have done little, actually, to observe faith. I have done far more to repress it, reject it, reconfigure it, bear it. As I will. As you were.

The walls of my childhood bedroom were covered in photos: from photo booths and Polaroids, cut out from magazines and yearbooks, ticket stubs, unframed prints, parties and dances dated in illegible handwriting, the ink smeared, faded from the sun. But I know from where these came. Where we were. Who’s in them.

When I moved out for college, I stripped the walls. Some paint pulled off with the tape. Only the holes from the pins remain. The walls too white, overwhelming like light.
               I kept a postcard that my grandmother sent me from the Panama Canal. She described the birds mostly: their size, the colors of their feathers, songs they sang. She wrote, “My heart misses your heart.”
               And I cried. I folded it, put it away in my keepsake drawer. Closed it.
               And I haven’t looked at it again.

To be missed is a miraculous thing: you were not just seen, but your absence observed, noted, your little life remembered.

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Taylor Leigh Harper’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SPALSH!, In Parentheses, Westwind, and The Bridge. She is a contributing writer and curator for agoodmovietowatch. You can find her on twitter @misstaywrites when she is not writing. She lives in Southern California.