vitalwholeness

Gina Ochsner teaches at Corban University.  She is the author of two short-story collections and two novels, the most recent being The Hidden Letters of Velta B. Her work has received the Flannery O’Connor Award, the William Faulkner Award, and the Kurt Vonnegut  Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in The North American Review, The New Yorker,  Ploughshares and Image:  A Journal of Art, Faith, and Mystery.  To find out more about Gina, please visit   www.ginaochsner.com

“What is the meaning of life? What is the answer? Tell me!” A man demanded at a recent reading. I stammered, looked longingly at the exit. Two elderly women in fold out chairs leaned forward slightly. I was trapped. “Well, it’s the pursuit of truth,” I said. In another context I might have added, divine incarnational Truth, with a capital T.  “Well, have you found it?” His tone was combative and, again, in a different venue, I might have laid all my cards out on the table, recited the Nicene Creed, told him the reason why I even breathe or want to keep breathing is because of Jesus. But his tone put me off. I’ve learned to be cautious at public libraries. I arranged my mouth into a smile. “Tell me!” he insisted. 

“In the research and travels I’ve done I’ve been asking people that very same question. I think it’s at the heart of being human. We are designed with a desire to have purpose and find meaning.” I said, my gaze again locking in on the exit door. “Stories are a powerful way of organizing the chaos of our world. I’m searching for stories that work like maps guiding us toward something worth finding.” Oh, the slippery slope of the vague.

A few minutes later he cornered me at the cheese and cracker table. 

“It seems to me that you have spent a fair number of years and energy searching and questing for something. I just hope you find it.” He said, grasping his briefcase and storming out of the library. What I wished I had said, “I have found it. But in finding it, I must keep up the search.”  This is not to say that God has hidden himself from me. Seek and you shall find. I have sought. I have found. But this is a continual, continuing journey. I am searching for intersection, convergence, that collision. The search has compelled (even propelled?) me to travel to odd places.

***

Medjugorye, the town where I’m headed, appears as a small dot on the map of eastern Bosnia-Herzogovina. I struggle to pronounce the name. Medju in Croatian and Serbian means between. Gorye means mountains. To get there I travel by train from Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, through the Neretva Valley. The dark river cuts through the jagged limestone mountains, like wire through cheese, hewing a path through massive stone outcroppings, some of which hang precariously over the water. Others protrude from the mountainside looking as if enormous stone fists had tried to punch through.

Fog hovers in the dark valleys, hangs over the water, rises and falls as if it were breathing. I’m entering a world of tremendous beauty and tremendous heartache. A haunted world that bears wounds. The crumbled remains of bombed houses and barns dot the hillsides, a grim reminder of the war in 1992 in which so many lost their lives. But atrocity, I read in my travel guide, is nothing new in this part of the country. In 1941, the Ustashe, a Croatian ultranationalist military group, rounded up Serbian monks from a nearby village and threw them into pits not far from Medjugorye. A few months later, thirteen hundred Serbian civilians were, like the monks, thrown into pits and left to die. Forty years later, against this backdrop of violence, six teenagers living in Medjugorye began seeing Mary and receiving messages from her. These sightings would no doubt have been dismissed as a hoax, or the collective hallucination of suggestible teenagers, had not Mary continued to visit these mystics—and others as well, over a period of many years.

Since the first sightings over thirty million people have journeyed to this small village, about one million each year. My reason for travelling three thousand miles to this remote pilgrimage site, is by my own estimation, ambiguous. I could say that I am a pilgrim by proxy. A good friend of mine had for many years wanted to come. For a variety of reasons, she couldn’t, and I could. But I know, as I walk from the tiny bus stations toward the catholic church where throngs of pilgrims cluster beside the outdoor stalls, I don’t belong here.

Raised a Presbyterian, I learned to love the quiet, somber God of the Presbyterians. That God crept silently form one stained glass pane to another, casting long swaths of color over the pews, the clean floor, our shoulders. After ten years at that church, our family left and joined a Pentecostal assembly. I loved and feared the God of the Pentecostals. This God rushed like wind, alighted as fire, visited people in dreams and delivered prophetic messages. This was a God of miracles. Some years later, I put the Pentecostal assembly behind me and went to graduate writing school. But as I passed the Catholic church on my way to classes each day, I thought of my friend. I remembered her ardent intellectual and spiritual enquiry and how it led her to Catholicism. I remembered her devotion and how for her, the church was a sanctuary and a refuge. At that point in my life, I needed a sanctuary and refuge. I was in an abusive relationship and as close to flunking out of grad school that a person could be. Rather than buckle down and prove to the program director how serious I was about writing, I took a job at a cheese and puppet shop, enrolled in Russian and Polish language classes, attended a martial arts club. And joined the Roman Catholic Initiation classes for adults at St. Thomas Aquinas.

The little parish of St Thomas Aquinas became the oasis in my spiritual desert, a burning coal in the deep mid-winter of my heart. I loved old white-haired Father Dismus and how he skipped down the aisle for the altar. I loved the other communicants and their pursuit of the holy amidst the profane and ordinary. I loved their deep generosity. And then as I so often did, I left.

Special tour buses convey pilgrims to Medjugorye from all parts of Europe and beyond. No pilgrim, it seems, journeys for precisely the same reason. Some are here to see a sign. Some are in desperate need of healing; their afflictions are obvious, their crutches and wheelchairs are obediently parked nearby. Some are veteran pilgrims; they have spent and will spend the rest of their lives visiting holy sites. Some are seeking a spiritual cleansing and are willing to stand in long lines outside the row of confessionals for their turn in a stall. I skirt the confessionals. Four are designated for those wishing to confess to a Croatian priest, four for those wanting a Serbian priest. None are set aside for English speakers. I sigh in relief and head for the stations of the cross trail. A placard at the trail head depicts an ice cream cone, a camera, a phone, a book and pencil. A thick white slash cuts through each image. No eating. No photography, no talking, no reading and writing. No problem, I mutter as an elderly couple with alpine walking sticks breeze past me.  I pant hello and they point to the picture of the phone and shush me.

Tall and wide and set on end like enormous coins, the stations are made of grey limestone. Each station has a scene carved in bas relief and each is placed about three hundred yards from each other, connected by a path of steep switchbacks and treacherous inclines. My many years of treadmilling has in no way prepared me for this. A Swedish couple with upscale hiking boots notice my flimsy shoes. My camera hanging from my neck. My notepad clutched in one hand. They don’t know about the power bar melting in my pocket and which I fully intend to eat anyway. Amateur, their gazes imply. Or worse, imposter.

The sharp rocks puncture the thin soles of my shoes. I’m questioning this hike. I’m questioning my motives. Why did I come here? As I reach station seven near the top of the trail, I am arrested mid-step. A man, wearing what looks to be a very expensive suit, has flung himself against the station. He hugs the stone, kisses the carved image of a suffering Christ. His shoulders shake and I can’t tell if he’s sobbing from sorrow or ecstasy, but it’s a moment of such spiritual ardor, such naked devotion, I can’t look away. I tiptoe past him, my eyes on his clasped hands, my cheeks burning.

His passion shames me. I realize as I slide on my butt down a steep wash of rock that at some point along my spiritual journey I had settled for comfortable Christianity. Now I am very uncomfortable and not just because of the razor-sharp rocks slicing my backside. The gospel is wildly disruptive, extravagantly revolutionary. How had I forgotten that? When and why did I become a spiritual surfer, sampling Christianity as if it were a large buffet from which I could pick and choose what pleased me, piling high my plate with what I liked, turning my nose up at what I didn’t? How did I become a voyeur, pleased to observe other people in transformation, applauding their growth and discovery, unwilling to ask why it wasn’t happening to me?

How had I so thoroughly abandoned any pursuit of holiness?

Around five p.m. I head for Apparition Hill. At the base of the hill, Mary is everywhere: Mary in the shops, Mary on printed prayer cards, small figurines designed to sit on end tables or desk tops. Phalanxes of larger statues meant for hallways or yards, line the sidewalks. Stickers of Mary, serene with her eyes downcast, plaster wine bottles and small vials of rose-scented perfume. I follow a group of Japanese pilgrims who sing and chant the rosary. At the top of the hill, a large group of Italians and another group form Spain have claimed most of the real estate around the enormous marble statue of Mary. It’s 5:50 p.m., Mary, if she’s going to show, is supposed to make her appearance in about twenty minutes. Some, I read in my guide, don’t actually see Mary, but instead observe their rosaries changing color, or the sun spinning or growing smaller and then larger, brighter and then dimmer. At 6:00 pm. A number of people move closer to the statue and kneel. I keep my gaze on the sky. At 6:08 I feel something bubbling inside my chest. I choose to call it hope. I believe in miracles. I have witnessed many, been the recipient of a few. I believe the supernatural and natural overlap seamlessly. I have spoken to an angel, received a miracle, and observed that angel vanish before my eyes. At 6:10 I stare at the sun. Nothing. At 6:11 I squint at the other pilgrims. They are praying, chanting, singing. They are not looking at their watches. I return my gaze to the oily sky. And I wait. And I wait. I can’t look at the sun without seeing spots and feeling the op and buzz at the base of my neck that signals an impending migraine. But I am strangely content. Something in my inner calibration has been gently readjusted. I am absurdly happy sitting on the sharp rocks seeing and doing nothing.

Sitting there I recall a story from Buber’s Tales of the Hassidim. A young devout Jew rushes to a fro, maintaining a blistering pace through his day. But he is profoundly dissatisfied. He meets with his rabbi. “Rabbi,” he says, “I pray, I fast. I do all that the law says; I do this to the best of my ability and with all my heart. Why is God so far away from me?” The rabbi studies the young man carefully, then says, “Stand still and let God catch up to you.” 

That night, as I lay on the little bed in the hostel, darkness folds around me. I think about my own strange journeys, so many of them undertaken without purpose or plans. God, overtake me, I murmur. Overwhelm me. Let it happen in my life, in my work. 

***

“We think your manuscript holds signs of real promise,” an acquisitions editor wrote in response to a novel draft I had sent. At that point, I’d already spent nine years on the novel, the editor had already acquired it, contracts had been signed. I had high hopes that further revisions would be minimal. “We like the boy with enormous ears and the magical powers of his hearing; he can hear the planets carving their silent traceries, he can hear the dreams of eels, he can hear what the dead talk about in their underground warrens. But we have a problem with all that God stuff.” 

“All the God stuff?” I murmured.

“Yes. There’s an awful lot of it. We think you should take it all out. Because isn’t this really a story about political, social and economic divide and then forgiveness and reconciliation?

Well, yes; it is about those things. But also, I wanted to point out, it addressed matters of spiritual divide and reconciliation. 

“I promise you, taking the religious stuff out will make it a better book,” the editor assured. “It will sell more copies.” 

The call ended, I sat at my desk and pondered the suggestion the editor made, the implied promise of commercial success. And I wrestled. Is this a book about the body or the spirit? Isn’t the body so enmeshed to matters of the spirit only death, that implacable crowbar, can separate the two? Jacob wrestled with an Angel (my Russian KJ version says it’s God, not an angel) and it was a physical bodily struggle that bore spiritual implications. His name was altered to announce the fact that this was a man who had seen God. When you see God, I imagined, you can’t un-see God. You will see everything else around you in a new light. As I sat in that chair I wrestled with what it meant to be a writer of faith writing for people who also wrestle, who are also wounded in that act. I thought about how many of the characters I have grown to love in the works I read and some I’ve written bear scars. A scar says once you were divided, and now you are becoming whole. The scar is a map of one’s undoing, it is a map of one’s reconciliation. I thought of the man clinging to the stone station of the cross. He was wounded, scarred. He had been touched by God, and if not by God, then by his longing for God. I wonder if those sobs wracking his body weren’t his soul’s pangs and groans, that acknowledgment that there is so much more waiting for us, something so much more beautiful and better and it is our burden to know it.

 Oh God, I pray, let this conviction fuel my vision, my apprehension of all that is around me. God, put me on a precipice of what I think I know and pure mystery. Let me peer into a widening darkness. Let the light behind my body cast a long shadow. God, be in that shadow hovering and brooding over all I say, do, write. Let me be wounded and blessed by that wounding.