Filomena

When that priest looked down at me it was like he was a giant. Maybe he was tall, but I was so little it wouldn’t have mattered. Mom had brought me to see if I would go to the parish school. I was used to adults looking down at me. They would smile and some would give me candy. The man in the black dress was stern-faced and almost yelled his question. “Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior and lord?” I was so scared I cried, and mom had to pick me up to keep me from running from the building.

Mom was very religious. She kept that picture of our precious Lady of Guadalupe years after the month pages of the calendar were torn off and thrown away, the virgin in her red gown and green and blue veil covered with stars. Still, to her great credit, mom carried me out of the parish school office and we never came back. It was not that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t understand the question.

I saw a friend recently with a long face and a far-away look. I asked if anything was wrong. I saw his eyes focus, maybe just then seeing me there. He was worrying about salvation, his personal salvation, about ‘in His name alone,’ and I didn’t know what to say. I guess I feel like worrying about personal salvation is a conceit, but I wasn’t going to say that to him. It’s like worrying about death. It’s holding onto your ego with white knuckles. It’s like being afraid God is going to mess up your case, like not trusting the universe.

But look around. Who wouldn’t think the universe isn’t being taken care of, at least part of the time? But trust is trust, a simple decision we make based on a complicated secret formula, secret often to ourselves. We trust a dear friend whether she is all together or in anguish, and trusting the universe is just the same. If that priest in his black cassock had smiled at me instead of screaming, it might have changed my life, but the universe is what it is, and he had no control over it.

And so I pray for my friend and his fear. In proverbs it says fear of the Lord is the first step toward wisdom (or something like that). A monk once told me fear of God is like fear of rollercoasters. It is a fear we will stand in line for hours to be inside of, if only for a few minutes. That is a healthy fear, fear with a racing heart and a smile.

Those of you who know my story from ‘Under the Witz Mountain’ will not be surprised I find life a bit ambiguous. There is a perfectly fine English word that is almost not part of the American language. The word is liminal, and means living on an edge, at a threshold, and between two places or two states. The Witz Mountain book takes place in a liminal space, between Christian and Mayan, the living and the dead. I have a hunch, though I am no professor, that the word limbo has to do with the luminal, a place that is not earth or heaven, a place that is nowhere, a place for waiting. A Catholic book says limbo is the edge of hell.

I see us all as liminal beings. We live every day between joy and sadness, relaxation and anxiety, anger and grace, and, like under the mountain itself, between life and death. At least in the western culture, the thinking that came with the Spanish and, for the North Americans, the English, this is not part of the thinking. There must be a part of our mind that tricks us into thinking we are not in this liminal space. It’s the same part of the mind that is hit daily with random light particles and sound waves and chemicals in the air, and turns the chaos into a stable illusion as familiar as a faded photograph. The world we see is not the world we live in, but it’s one we’re comfortable with.

This same brain creates the illusion that if we are alive in the morning we will be alive in the evening. If we go to bed moving all our arms and legs we will wake up moving them. It’s a preposterous assumption, but we don’t think twice about it. It’s the illusion they call ego, that we are discrete men and women, dots and dashes, moving smoothly through time.

It’s not that God is dead. God never existed in our illusion. Right now I am sitting with my feet in a pool of water. The water is warm. My back is against a flat rock. The rock is cool. This moment is a liminal space, the edge between past and future. Almost nobody lives here. The English word liminal is not even in my American dictionary. Every time I type it, my spell-check turns it into ‘Luminal.’ We live in that other world, the virtual space of the ego, a place where God-Ahaw, who lives only in the real moment, never existed. And never will (so stop looking at the sky).

My mama used to quote scripture. ‘Don’t be anxious for tomorrow’. I see her at the pila washing the same skirt her mother washed, humming while she worked. ‘Tomorrow will be anxious for itself’. I thought it was so sad, the washing that never ended, but she was in her moment. There is nothing in the moment that can make you anxious, not even a reminder that the world illusion might crumble to dust.

Of course it might.