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I have a recurring
dream in which I find, behind the familiar
walls of my study or bedroom, another whole house. It is always
much bigger and grander than the house I live in. Once its long
windows looked out on fields of lavender in Provence. In the
dream I think, Why didn't I figure this out before? It's simply a
matter of finding a door.
I
sat in church near the altar on a Thursday evening in April,
waiting for it all to begin. Watery blue light fell from the high
windows onto the fair linen, empty as a pocket. The altar was
wood and plain, ordered from a Lutheran catalog specializing
in church furniture. The wine, shortly to sit on the altar in a
little silver chalice that a priest found in a second-hand store,
was cheap Christian Brothers cream sherry; the wafers were
the whole wheat variety made by nuns in Clyde, Missouri. The
table, the wine, the wafers were as everyday, as ordinary as my
house, and also contained within and behind them a reality as
complex, as beautiful, and as hidden as the house in my dream.
Prayers
rose from the kneelers; I breathed in the stone-cooled
air. In a few minutes, others arrived for this Thursday-evening
service. An attorney for legal aid, an advocate for abused
children, a heating serviceman, a realtor. Someone new, a woman
with short reddish-brown hair wearing a cream-colored suit.
They walked in from the street and stood in the cool dark,
looking momentarily lost or disoriented, as if they had crossed
a border and were in need of new currency, and then sat down.
Mark
Asman, our parish priest, arrived last, in a black suit,
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Excerpts
from Practicing Resurrection ©2003 by Nora Gallagher are used
with permission from Knopf Publishers.
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