Madison, WI

I have recently begun a sort of pilgrimage, traveling back to all the places I have lived, revisiting the many different kinds of churches I attended, trying to make sense of my life, my faith. Here is an excerpt of some of my writing on my visit to Madison, Wisconsin this past February.

The sanctuary is dark when we walk in. The only light illuminating the space is filtered in through the stain glass windows which are everywhere. The hair on my arms stands up. The air is thicker in here, but not stale, no it is moving, alive, mysterious. Some churches feel dead on the inside. You can taste the bitter words that have been spoken, smell the despair that weighs people down. This space feels different. It feels like the prayers of the congregation are still lingering around the pews, like whatever source of strength they fed on came in large quantities and there are leftovers here still.

“We used to sit right there,” my mother points to an overflow area in the back left corner. I spot a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe upon the wall nearby; underneath her is a small table that holds candles and matches for prayers. I love that she is there, the divine mother, pregnant with hope looking over those in despair, the young woman who appeared on the hills of Tepeyac and commanded her presence known to the bishop—to the world. Many thought she was an apocalyptic image from Revelation, her belt a symbol of pregnancy, her sash holding the cosmos. The end and the beginning together in her.

Mom snaps a photo of me by the baptismal font which is up front by the altar. But something is not right. In the pictures of my baptism, we stand against white walls, not in the illuminated shadows of the sanctuary.

“Mom, is there another chapel in the church?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember much about this place.”

We walk around the hallways until we find a sign that says, The Good Shepherd Chapel. We stand outside the closed wooden door and look up at the skylight at least two stories above us. The sun illuminates one giant painting on the wall in front of us. Thick strokes of browns and pinks muddy the canvass like watered earth. Tucked in the shadows and mire, a small white sphere emerges, fragile yet forceful. Is it the pearl of great price? Is it new life itself? It reminds me of a photograph I saw recently taken inside of the womb just after the egg has been fertilized. I was haunted at the sight: before limbs or head or a body can be seen, we are all cliffs and valleys, we are desert. We are all Adams—which in Hebrew simply means ‘earth creature’.

My mother is fascinated with a different picture, a smaller one in the corner—one of the empty tomb. It is colored in the blackest black, shiny and thick like oil. A single ray of light points to a white linen once wrapped around a body no longer there.

I wonder who thought to put these two pictures side by side. Did they hope we would see the tomb and the womb together?

Inside the Good Shepherd chapel my mother’s memories are not stirred. But I think it was here, against this plain wall, in the small cozy place of this modern chapel that I was baptized. I take a picture of the font—a colorful ceramic bowl atop a square blond wooded stem.

“This is style is totally 70s,” my mother remarks, confirming my intuition. I remember the photograph well, my grandfather is holding me. I am in a long white dress, only a few weeks old. He is wearing a mustard shirt with his clerical collar and a beige blazer with elbow pads. My aunts and uncles are standing around me, young kids in paisley prints and dark horned rimmed glasses...

... On the drive back to the cabin, my mother talks about her father’s death. It’s about four in the afternoon now—that time right before the twilight, where the day begins to mix with night, when two worlds overlap and for a few moments become one. There is regret in her words. And longing...All around us the hilly farmland glows orange. The last rays of sun spread over the thin layer of snow like twinkling warm molasses, melting the spaces between us, warming our skin, like our ancestors and their unseen world are close.