Faith (February 22nd, 2024)
Faith sneaks about in the between-spaces, in brief, slippery moments when and where one isn’t accustomed to looking very often. Here I would usually present a list of such places: doorways, unrequited gazes, the chopping sounds of an onion, etc., but truthfully the list could contain anything; presenting a handful out of the infinite here wouldn’t quite capture much. Still, if one isn’t careful (when have we been careful about anything in this life? We trample about in experience like children with handfuls of crabgrass and dandelions until it’s too late…) these moments are quite easily missed. So much so in fact that we tend to forget their appearance—their curved shapes, their thin, traceable edges and long, milky surfaces—after only so long, the only sensible option left, the one in which we save face, the one where we remain intelligent about it, seems to be the denial of their existence, a great chalking-it-up to life, indeed.
Most of us have done it, really. Tossed it aside like cheap scratch-off ticket, hastily ripped through in vain; finding nothing, we’ve no use left for the thing, nor it for us. Still, when we glance, occasionally, regrettably, at the pile we’ve left in the corner, we feel that there’s perhaps something we’ve missed, glossed over, as if one could collect the remaining gray latex from their scarred surfaces and construct our missing prize—the one that’s owed to us, of course—from there. Though perhaps one can make something worthwhile with that pile of greasy dust, perhaps it’s simply just the process we must undergo when we try to makes sense of our faith (or lack thereof) like a pair of wings eclosing from their chrysalis.
But sometimes, in a rear view mirror, we catch moments of real faith by the tail, or they catch us, and we see our scratch-off piles as but silly and feeble attempts to convince somebody of something vague and impersonal—their unexpected entrance into our lives bursts a bubble we’d been hoping to break free from, and our shabby house of cards, newly exposed to the atmosphere, combusts into thin air.
It was one of such tails I caught—in the place one would least expect to find it of course, as always: in temple—in the periphery of my vision, which then quickly flooded into its center. Absentmindedly (or rather, my mind was full to the brim. Just not anything of substance), I turned to look two young boys with their mother when all of a sudden: the screech of tires against wet road, a kiss, and the falling of the older boy off his chair.
The three acts, sequentially unfolding into the warm air, weren’t what I’d call sacred, divine (words which bear the sour taste of stale religionism) per se, but rather it was the manner in which they overlapped that produced in me the sensation of faith. First the screeching tires: this was perhaps the most important step. Since the start of the war and its subsequent escalations, I’ve been subjugated to a number of air-raid sirens (I am, of course, the lucky one here, as none of them have become anything other than just that, a siren) and aside from thoroughly terrifying me with their ominous yelping in the middle of the night, I believe have permanently sensitized me to loud noises of any kind. Any kind of screech, crash, slam, night or day, squeezes my heart through my chest wall into my throat; a thunderstorm the other night confirmed that this was still the case six months later… The lightning lit up the sky in a flash, and I thought, awaking from the inner depth of a dream, that the Iranians had decided to exact revenge on Jerusalem with the fullness of their secret armory. And so the importance of the tire screech becomes clear. In no less than a second or two, I was immediately plunged into a heightened, sympathetically aroused, state of awareness wherein a bolt of lightning is easily and automatically mistaken for nuclear hellfire.
Next, the kiss. The younger of the two boys—light blue eyes, golden hair peeking out from underneath his oversized, woolen skullcap, fair, almost semi-translucent skin—was buried firmly in his mother’s bosom, and almost immediately following the crash, or perhaps nearing total simultaneity (my memory fails to retrieve this crucial piece of film, just at the moment I reach for it), she bends over to kiss him gently but firmly on the crown of the head, having too heard the loud screech and most likely, like I was, mid-way through the process of swallowing her heart back into her chest. His eyes close, and she (a large woman whose features that reach me now consist of a tightly-checkered headscarf, out from either side sneaking thin wisps of brown hair—her boys must’ve gotten their blondeness from their father—and thick, dark eyebrows) squeezes him tighter into her embrace.
Perhaps what I felt was release? No. Security. The kiss sealed away the danger of the outside; it could hurt me no less than demons and curses affect her child. The kiss had cauterized the wound, but in the stained-glass-filtered light—straw-blue February sky permuted through the splitting of a multicolored Red Sea—the final sign was yet to come. The larger boy of the two, sitting atop his plastic lawn chair with his feet where his bottom should’ve been, the latter precariously balanced atop the back of the chair, clearly experimenting with the virtue of balance, and testing his relationship with randomness in the way an adult is too-well-acquainted with the properties of matter and gravity to do, glanced back at his mother and younger brother. In the next and yet the same moment, once again time here folds over itself (again, an illusory property of my memory’s interaction with time), his little feet lift off the plastic, and the thin plastic spine of the chair no longer able to support his full weight, twists and folds like a rolling flag in a sudden gust, and the whole situation—not just the boy and his chair, but the window and the kiss and the screech—collapses as quickly as I came to notice it in the first place.
Prayer in the room is interrupted. We were stuck somewhere in between admiration and supplication when he fell, and now the room is taking turns stealing glances at the sniffling child, uninjured and upset; their glances are as if to say, “one second, God—you’re great and all, but something’s going on here.” But they’ve already missed the subtlety nestled away in the moment—faith was just there, you see? Now it’s gone. “Everyone,” I’d like to say, “get back to your scratch-offs, return to your dust piles for now. Perhaps, hopefully, your moment will come sooner rather than later.”