Baptism

Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, Jerusalem!
Return to your God!
How lonely she is now, the once crowded city!
Widowed is she who was mistress over nations;
the princess among the provinces has been made a toiling slave
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears upon her cheeks
with not one to console her of all her dear ones;
her friends have all betrayed her and become her enemies!
Judah has fled into exiles from oppression and cruel slavery;
yet where she lives among the nations she finds no place to rest:
all her persecutors come upon her where she is narrowly confined.
The roads to Sion mourn for lack of pilgrims going to her fests;
all her gateways are deserted, her priest groan,
and her virgins sigh; she is in bitter grief.
Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, Jerusalem!
Return to your God!

Oh, the luxury of the grief brought up to God at the offices, and then the length of the service that was not a Mass. Once Jinny had been to St. Antonin's on Good Friday. She had not stayed the whole time. It was much too long. But today people have come from all over. They must have even come from the surrounding towns. This whole space is so crowded, and Virginia O’Muil does not feel crushed, but found. She is home in this. The nuns’ church is draped in purple, and the Passion is sung by a deep voiced young priest with dimples, black glasses like Isaac’s, and a serious face. Jinny is deep in the crowd next to her sister and to Jayson. Now comes the beating of the tympani, like a giant's heartbeat, thump, thump, thump announcing the arrival of something and then, very slowly, the Cross rising up out of the sea of people and making its slow entrance through the church, the people dividing as the it is brought to the altar by Sister Catherine and two other nuns, and then the deep voiced priest with the dimples begins to sing:

“This is the wood of the Cross, on which the Lord suffered and died.”

And everyone chants back, "Come let us worship!"

Jinny does not look at Jayson because she has heard him say, "It's just escapist. Religion just helps you escape life.”

But this lets her escape nothing. All of Lent was touching her. These three days lift up her skin, and today she feels like every nerve is being touched. She doesn't want to cry. Unbidden, the picture of Joe comes. Joe, talking about how he wants to cry because Jesus loves him so much. His eyes were always wet with unshed tears.

No, Jinny doesn’t want to cry, but she feels really alive, truly raw. She usually only feels like this when she and Isaac are twisted together in bed, flesh damp and soft, the room close with the smell of their sex. But this is nothing like sex even though she feels like she is with Isaac right now, like he is very near, and all around, and all inside and there is no one she isn't with, and she is just really too tired to make any sort of judgments about who is worth being with and who is not.

They file out of the church quietly. Jinny and Anne and Jayson don't even talk to each other. After they’ve walked out onto the guesthouse lawn and are walking away from the monastery for some time, Jinny finally speaks.

"Isaac got a call. He was just hanging around being nothing, really, and then God spoke to him, and suddenly he's a Catholic and he knows he's doing the right thing. But me," she confessed. "I have never really thought about it too much, And now I'm not sure that there even is a right thing."

Anne, looking sagacious as ever says, after a thoughtful pause, "Maybe that is your call."

"I feel like I got crucified myself," Anne said, stretching out across the bed.

"Aren't we all supposed to be in separate rooms?” Jayson asked.

"Maybe we are, but I don't think there’re enough rooms here anyway," Jinny told her cousin. "I'm tired too. Maybe it's that we didn't get enough sleep, but I just think it's all the drama of Good Friday. My God, I am tired.”

"So, Anne, have you found you calling?" Jayson, taking his assumed place on the floor.

"I didn't come here to find my calling," Anne said, as she flounced into a chair and let Jinny take the bed. "And if you mean do I want to join this convent, then no. In fact, I may not want to join any convent."

"Can you do that?" Jayson said. He yawned. His eyes were closed. "I mean, and be a nun?"

"I can do whatever I want," Anne told her cousin and turned her back to him after taking off her glasses.

Then she turned around suddenly and said, "But I will take issue with you about the whole religion is an escape thing. Your whole atheism thing."

"Sometimes I just talk to hear myself," Jayson told her.

Anne was caught up short. She wanted to fight with her cousin. For nearly eighteen years this had been one of her chief joys.

"Oh," was all she said.

"Escape isn't necessarily a bad thing," Jinny threw in. "I mean, if Jews were running from a concentration camp… or say, you're running out of a burning building… then you'd want to escape, right? Everyone says escape is bad, but really, it depends on what you're trying to escape, doesn't it?"

She goes walking in the early dusk because she needs to be alone. She’d say alone with her thoughts, but she’s not really thinking anything. Jinny doesn’t know how long she’s been walking until she hears the bells for Compline and comes to the chapel. She is walking in through the front door and prepared, now that the church is not crowded, to sit down in the visitors’ section which is gated from the larger part and the choral stalls when Sister Catherine touches her hand. Beside Catherine stands the young priest who sang the Passion, and he is grinning at her.

“Come on,” Catherine says, and Jinny shrugs and follows them through the little gate into the chapel proper and into the stalls.

“We’re guests,” the priest says, smiling.

They certainly are. She isn’t a nun and he isn’t a woman.

“It’s Good Friday,” Sister Catherine whispers. “We should all be together.

The rest of the nuns give polite finger waves, demure smiles. They are not all alike despite their habits. Some are black and brown, most white, some old, many plump. They rise and begin to sing,

“Oh, God come to my assistance! Oh, Lord make haste to help me!”

They cross themselves and begin to sing the last office of the day.

Answer me when I call to you,
my righteous God.
Give me relief from my distress;
have mercy on me and hear my prayer.

His name was Kevin. He was strangely animated for someone she thought so dignified, for a cantor, for a priest who had sung the Passion that day. He was twenty seven years old, and Catherine said, “Well, hell, I’m twenty-five.”

They were sitting in the almost empty, almost dark breakfast room of the retreat center overlooking the tree covered hills as night fell.

“I’m so envious,” Jinny said. “I’m so… stupid.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

Kevin looked a lot like Isaac, but not quite as cute. He was taller though, and his black spectacles were round, his eyes green like a dragon’s. She wondered if he smoked. There were those dimples in his cheeks. She should not have been thinking of his broad shoulders. He should have been wearing his habit instead of jeans and a cream colored pullover. His hair was black and buzzed.

“It’s just that, Father—”

“Please don’t call me that,” Kevin put a hand out.

“Well, you are.”

“It sounds really strange from anyone my age.”

Kevin turned his eyes up in thought.

“Or any age, really. Since I just turned twenty-seven.”

“You all knew what you wanted in life, and here you are. And i… I don’t know anything. That’s the real reason I came. Not cause I’m holy. It’s because I’m… fuck it, I’m full of holes.”

Even as she said it, she knew that aside from being a pun, there might not be that much difference between holiness and being broken. Anne had come to Compline, but she had been in the balcony, deep in prayer. She hadn’t even seen Jinny until her sister had found her.

“Am I going to sound strange to you,” Anne had begun, ‘if I say I just want to stay in the little chapel tonight and pray?”

“That sounds right to me is what it sounds,” Jinny said.

But Jinny was here with this priest and with this nun, and she was laughing at Kevin and when Catherine rose and said it was time for her to go to bed, Jinny made a noise of protest.

“Oh,” Sister Catherine said, “I’m not telling you all to go to bed. I’m saying I am going to bed.”

Catherine began to walk away and Jinny told Kevin, “I’ll be right back.”

He nodded, and she went to the nun who was going down the hall to the door that led to the chapel through the chapel and back to the convent.

“You are leaving me alone with a man.”

“That’s true. Who is a priest.”

“Who is a man,” Jinny said.

“Well, you’re a woman, so,” Catherine shrugged and smiled.

“Good night,” she said, and the nun was gone.

“Do you want to get out of this dark room?” Kevin said.

“And do what?”

“There’s nothing to do here,” he told her. “We might go into town. There’s an all night Wal Mart. It could be fun.”

She was leaving tomorrow and would be gone with the sunrise. As she rode through the hills in the comfortable car of a young priest, Jinny though of what Sister Catherine had said to her.

“I used to be an atheist. For a long time I said I didn’t believe in God, because I didn’t believe in the lies people told me. And then God appeared to me as grass. Christ was a leaf in bud, Jesus a song in my heart, and I didn’t know who he was because he was none of the things I had been told. In the learning of love I learned God had many names and the way to meet him was not belief but love.

“And then came the time when I tried to hold onto God. He called. I heard. I ran after. I tried to grasp Jesus and almost wept for the failing. But how can you catch God? How can you grasp what’s already inside?

In the convent I am Sister Mary Catherine of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus, but in the outer world I was and remain Anigel Graciela Raez of Geshichte Falls Michigan, and I know that if the Body and Blood is not in me, it isn’t anywhere. ”

“You think you’re not sure,” Kevin was telling her as they drove back to the convent, “but none of us is sure.”

“That’s sort of a relief to know.”

“I’m not staying,” Kevin said.”

“What?”

“I have no business being a priest. I’m not staying. I’m here to do the Easter masses and then I’m on my way to getting out.”

“That is…. Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Kevin said.

“I would say I was never sure of anything more in my life, but when I went into the priesthood and was ordained, I was never more sure of anything in my life either.”

Standing at the gate before the walk between the guesthouse and the convent, Kevin says, “I’m just going to get this out of the way and not make it awkward.”

“Ooh,” Jinny says. “That’s already sounding awkward.”

“Yes,” Kevin admits, breathing though his nostrils and chuckling. “It is.”

Then he says, “You’re really beautiful.”

“I am not… I am… God, are you hitting on me?’

“Yes. And I don’t want this night to end. Not here.”

Jinny takes a breath and decides not to be silly.

“Kevin…”

“Feehan.”

“Oh, God, I should have known you were Irish too. Kevin Feehan, it sounds a lot like you’re asking me up to your room. I don’t want to be making things up, but—”

“You are not,” Kevin jams his hands in his jeans pockets, and he is looking up at the sky, not daring to look at Jinny as he sighs, “making things up.”

“You’re a priest.”

“I’m on my way out.”

“On your way out is not out. And besides, I’ve already slept with a seminarian.”

“Then this is a step up.”

She looks at him horrified.

“Oh, my God—gosh. God. I’m just joking, I shouldn’t have said that!”

“I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Maybe not,” Kevin agrees. Then he says, “Definitely not.”

“My life is a real mess,” Jinny declares. “I mean, I’m totally on the pill and if anything happened I would pawn the baby off on my fiancé, but—”

Now it is is Kevin who looks shocked, but Jinny says, “Just thinking out loud, and you don’t get to be shocked. I wonder, did Catherine whore me out to you.”

“Ani,” Kevin replies, using Sister Catherine’s actual name, “assumed we would hit it off. And she was right.”

“Because you think you shouldn’t be a priest, but are still going to keep on being one for a while.”

“I am leav—”

“Don’t tell me that,” Jinny says quietly. “I know what it’s like. I’m getting married to a man I’ve loved for a long time who I think… Well never mind what I think.”

“Jinny,” Kevin speaks her name tenderly, placing his fingers on her elbow, and turning to walk away.

Suddenly Jinny asks: “Where is your room?”

Kevin turns back without smiling and says, “Come and see.”