LITMIR.BIZ

       GARRARD

       Phantom Pain

      A few hours’ drive from Lviv, Ukraine, a large sixteenth-­century monastery, Pochayiv Lavra, attracts pilgrims and tourists alike. The main draw is entering a candlelit cathedral to drink water from the hollow of a rock purported to carry the imprint of the Virgin Mary’s foot. According to legend, the virgin appeared as a column of fire to a group of devout monks, leaving behind an indentation which soon filled with medicinal waters. Upon learning this from our guide, my college friend Amber said she would not be drinking Mary’s foot water, so we turned away from the spot as quietly as possible, hoping to avoid the attention of the monks who had required Amber to cover her breasts with a shawl. On the long ride to the monastery, neither of us had considered her cleavage, no longer accustomed to viewing a woman’s body as a threat to purity.

      I’d been living in Ukraine for two and a half years, teaching English to high schoolers. A recent college grad, I had only ever lived in one place, the Arkansas Delta where I was raised to be a fundamentalist Christian like my father, a Baptist preacher. My father had certainly tried to keep me there, going so far as to send me to a conversion therapy facility to cure me of my sexuality, but there’s no cure for what I am, and without going into great detail here, the facility’s methods only made me resent my parents and the God who, I’d been told, didn’t love me for who I was. When I’d first settled into my Ukrainian host family’s house in the two-thousand-person village where I would live and work, I’d closed the door to a room unlike any I’d ever known and thought, Now they can never find me. I’d been thinking of my parents then but also, it seems to me now, I had been thinking of God.

      Mary’s foot water. Amber, a devout Catholic her whole life, had never been forcibly separated from her faith. We were new to this cynicism, surprised and delighted to discover we were both naturals at countering the Church’s pomp. Amber had come all the way from Arkansas to remind me that life didn’t have to be all that serious. Though I loved the language, Ukrainian, inflected with the old church Slavonic to which it owes many of its roots, could often sound a bit gloomy to my unaccustomed ears. A grave orthodoxy seemed to hold the language in a tight grip. It certainly hadn’t helped that, before coming to this country, I’d received extensive teacher training in cultural sensitivity. People behave the way they do for a reason, my cross-cultural workbook explained. Once you understand the reason, you’ll no longer be surprised or upset by a particular behaviour. I was afraid to offend my new home with my Yankee laughter, so I took everything I saw very seriously. At the same time, I also wondered how the workbook would have described my Baptist family to a foreigner. Parents torture their queer kids for a reason. Once you understand the reason, you’ll no longer be surprised or upset.

      We returned to my Soviet-era apartment and drank two bottles of wine and, since there was no internet, talked well into the night. Each sip of wine was holy foot water. But before long I started picturing her, the babusya I’d seen in the cathedral, bending low to the ground, her knees sinking to the floor. Even as I turned from the sight of her warped back to laugh with Amber I knew she would haunt me. I completed her gesture in my mind, watched her lips kiss the shallow pool. The same thrill always passes through me whenever I see faith made physical.

      In my travels through Europe I’d studied rounded stones where people pressed their hands to a spot rumoured to have been touched by a saint. In my childhood it had been a King James Bible worn from devout study, the red knees of a congregant who’d spent all night praying for a lost soul. Many nights after hours of prayer I’d surveyed with pride my own carpet-burned knees, twin pointillist paintings for God. But I had nothing to show for all those hours now, the marks never permanent, no longer visible to the naked eye. Only a bitterness now that began to rise with the wine from my empty stomach and yes, that little thrill as I pictured this stranger exhibiting the faith I’d once known. I envied and resented that woman, just as I envied and resented Amber, who would soon leave the Church on her own terms, a gradual, progressive awakening displacing her faith as she and her queer friends fought for their lives in Arkansas. I’ve often wondered what kind of person I might be had I not lost my faith in one blow, how it would feel to have the option of leaving my faith, though the question flirts with another I once asked myself after my first sexual experience, a rape: What would it feel like not to lose something while crossing into a new territory?

      Her lips kissing the medicinal water, suddenly young again, illnesses cured. In my first year of college, while still searching for a cure for my homosexuality, I’d jumped into a nearly frozen lake and convinced myself that my body’s euphoria was a sign of approval from a God who’d taken note of my sacrifice. I’d got the idea from reading Puritan diary entries in an American Literature class. The Puritans, those colonial precursors to present-day American evangelicals, always so interested in subjective religious experience, saw signs of God’s approval and disapproval in almost every part of their lives. If the weather was bad for crops, they prayed and fasted on account of their presumed sins. If someone died, God was likely teaching them a lesson. Much has been exaggerated in their history, since not all Puritans were so consistently dour or uniform in their beliefs as popular imagination would have us believe, but when I read one of their diaries, say of Jonathan Edwards or David Brainerd, I see the germ of my own experiences with faith. After I’d written my first book and moved on to writing a novel about the Puritans, I discovered a volume of Edwards’ sermons in my father’s office: another sign. When I questioned him about it, we bonded in a way we hadn’t in years. We both wished to study the origins of our religious experiences, though for vastly different reasons: he, in order to channel the fear of hellfire Edwards famously inspired in his most popular sermon; I, to write my own cross-cultural handbook of sorts, a novel that would, I hoped, answer the question as to what America’s obsession with religion and sexuality was all about.

      From Edwards I leapt to David Brainerd’s diaries, leaving my father, who would have found the man’s longing for God a bit excessive, to his own studies. ‘I remember, then, as I was walking in a dark thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the view and apprehension of my soul.’ I like picturing this lonely man, this missionary in an unfamiliar territory, wandering the forest at dusk in search of God’s love. His search is absurd, of course; he’s mistaking shadows for reality, though in truth the lion’s share of my frustration, after reading dozens of his entries, is how predictable any faith narrative becomes when you’re watching someone practise a faith that no longer holds sway over you. These men are always searching, always wandering, always undeserving. Then comes the moment of beauty and light.

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