{"id":2365,"date":"2021-02-01T03:23:53","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T03:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/oxmag\/?page_id=2365"},"modified":"2021-02-01T03:30:51","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T03:30:51","slug":"a-faith-observed-by-taylor-leigh-harper-3","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/oxmag\/a-faith-observed-by-taylor-leigh-harper-3\/","title":{"rendered":"A Faith Observed by Taylor Leigh Harper"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Glory Be<\/i><\/div>\n
I wasn\u2019t 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, \u201cIt\u2019s a girl!\u201d\n
\n
There\u2019s an album of evidence for all of this. The book is black, leathery. In the front, someone\u2019s handwriting claims the years 1996-98.\n
               There\u2019s me, swathed in a blanket particularly white against my sallow skin.\n
               Me held in the lap of a costumed rabbit during Easter. My ears as large as his.\n
               Me at Disneyland squeezing Winnie the Pooh\u2019s nose, delighted and hairless.\n
\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s closet. The material itches, dusty.\n
\n
There\u2019s a photo of one of us wearing the christening dress. We can\u2019t 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.\n
\n
Later, my skin has darkened, my teeth are slightly bucked, and I have hair. I\u2019m at the Getty, blurry, mid-spring across the garden lawn. I\u2019m on the beach, hip cocked, fully clothed, facing the shore, unaware that from behind, a wave approaches. I\u2019m in white, tulle skirt ballooning as I twirl, adjusting my floral veil, re-strapping my shoes before my First Communion.\n
\n
In one set of photos from that particular day, my hands are clasped. As if in prayer. Like I\u2019m pleading.\n
\n
\n
Sign of the Cross<\/i><\/div>\n
We went to Church on Sundays, though not regularly. Almost always during the holidays.\n
\n
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 \u201cGood morning,\u201d and \u201cplease,\u201d and \u201cthank you.\u201d I\u2019d forget to cross myself on my way out, skipping past the display of votive candles.\n
\n
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.\n
               The one preaching made me flush, nervous and excited.\n
               The other made me nervous too, but also bored.\n
\n
During the sermons, I\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019d kneel. Bowed our heads. Peace be with you. And also with you. And I watched, counted, waited.\n
\n
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<\/i> and The Bell Jar<\/i>. I\u2019d hated The Pearl<\/i>, never even finished East of Eden<\/i>.\n
               I also enjoyed my mother\u2019s paperbacks, which smelled of sweet smoke, ashen and dog-eared. The ones with that shirtless Jesus-lookalike on the covers.\n
\n
\n
Hoc est enim corpus meum.<\/i>\n
\n
               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\u2019t 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.\n
\n
\n
Act of Contrition<\/i><\/div>\n
If I\u2019ve got nothing to do with my hands, I might as well pray.\n
\n
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.\n
               \u201cPumpkin,\u201d she\u2019ll say, \u201cI pray for your health. For the man you will marry. The most important thing when picking a husband is religion. You\u2019ve both got to have God. Then a sense of humor. He must be kind. And if you have common interests, that\u2019s nice, too. I pray that you always have a good heart.\u201d\n
               And she pats my hand, kisses both of my cheeks, staining them with pink lipstick.\n
               \u201cYou\u2019re a good girl.\u201d\n
\n
Consider what Mary Oliver wrote: \u201cYou 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.\u201d Are you there, Mary? I\u2019m already kneeling. What do you mean I do not have to be good.\n
\n
\n
Our Father<\/i><\/div>\n
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.\n
\n
\n
Litany of Mary<\/i><\/div>\n
There was no death, then there was a lot.\n
\n
Before N. overdosed, I\u2019d declared a firm agnosticism. The infinite universe overwhelmed me. How could I know what was or wasn\u2019t out there?\n
               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\u2019d always been three days older than me. Suddenly, I was older than her, and would become older still.\n
               After she died, there were more. Linda\u2019s ovarian cancer. Jordan\u2019s father\u2019s heart attack. Jess\u2019s girlfriend, whom she met at her Bible study, hung herself. One of my former classmates\u2014small, Jewish, gay\u2014killed by a white supremacist\u2014big, closeted, another boy with whom I went to school.\n
               My sister\u2019s mother-in-law was the first open casket I saw.\n
               And my nephew kept asking, \u201cWhy does she look like that?\u201d\n
               Like what?\n
               \u201cLike not herself.\u201d\n
\n
I\u2019m trying to constellate these losses. But those that are missing will not rise again. I\u2019m starting to forget things about them. I can\u2019t 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\u2019s anything I can do. I just can\u2019t believe I\u2019m never going to see her again. What I wanted to say. If I should or shouldn\u2019t pray. If I\u2019d still want them back, after all.\n
\n
Lord have mercy on us.\n
Christ, have mercy on us. \n
Pray for us.\n
Pray for us.\n
Pray for us.\n
\n
Suppose I were to say I wrote this out of fear and love.\n
               Fear and Love, if you will.\n
\n
\n
Prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas<\/i><\/div>\n
My mother drives me home. I ask her how she still believes in God after Jeffery overdosed.\n
               And she says she had to believe. \u201cThat is the only thing that got me through rehab and out again. My faith. God\u2019s strength.\u201d\n
               \u201cNo,\u201d I say, putting my feet up on the dashboard as I look out the window. \u201cYou got yourself through that. You do it every day.\u201d\n
               \u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cNot alone I don\u2019t.\u201d\n
\n
\n
Prayer of St. Francis<\/i><\/div>\n
In a different car ride, my father takes me back to school after winter break. The night navy, nearing midnight. There\u2019s no traffic between Orange County and the city at this hour. Just a few scattered brake lights, neon and bloody.\n
               \u201cYou were always skeptical,\u201d he says. \u201cEven as a little girl.\u201d\n
\n
\n
Act of Faith\/Act of Hope\/Act of Love<\/i><\/div>\n
Omitted consciously: my confusion about Christianity and Catholicism; my mother\u2019s 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\nwhen someone spilled the blood of Christ.\n
\n
God knows what I have left out unconsciously. Or what\u2019s missing yet.\n
\n
\n
Hail Mary<\/i><\/div>\n
All art is an effort to be remembered.\n
\n
I cry often. When Hildegard of Bingen wrote, \u201cAnd in that same brightness, I sometimes, not often, see another light, which I call \u201cthe living light\u201d; when and how I see it, I cannot express\u2026 all sadness and all anguish is taken from me,\u201d I was alone, misty-eyed on the couch. Curled my\ntoes under the cushions. The fireplace lit. The living room light buzzed.\n
               The living light, as opposed to\u2014\n
\n
\n
Apostles\u2019 Creed<\/i><\/div>\n
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\u2019s never left or gone away. I\u2019m wearing a float device. My ears sticking out under my white sunhat. I\u2019ll be sunburned, slathered in Aloe Vera later, but we can\u2019t know that, not yet.\n
\n
I knew someone resurrected. She drank so much, too much, just enough.\n
               \u201cIf she wakes up it\u2019ll be a miracle, and who knows about the trauma to the brain.\u201d\n
               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.\n
\n
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.\n
\n
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\u2019s in them.\n
\n
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.\n
               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, \u201cMy heart misses your heart.\u201d\n
               And I cried. I folded it, put it away in my keepsake drawer. Closed it.\n
               And I haven\u2019t looked at it again.\n
\n
To be missed is a miraculous thing: you were not just seen, but your absence observed, noted, your little life remembered.\n
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\n
\n
Taylor Leigh Harper\u2019s 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.\n\n\n\n

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Glory Be I wasn\u2019t 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, \u201cIt\u2019s a girl!\u201d There\u2019s an album of evidence for all of this. The book is black, leathery. In … <\/p>\n

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