"Churches and Mirrors"

A letter about the sanctity of body, soul and spirit.

My dearest A,

Allow me to begin by addressing and admiring your patience. It has been over a month now since I’ve been welcomed into this written cosmos of yours, and what an honour your hospitality has been.

From the bottom of all that is me, I thank you.

It is never a gentlemanly thing to rush matters of the heart, and writing to you belongs to that holy order of things. I know also that we are constantly at the mercy of the Universe’s timetable, and to resist the rhythm of this grand orchestra is to abstain from partaking in life itself. I know, deep within me, that His plan must be submitted to obediently, faithfully. Timing is not a human currency, but I do wish I had gotten back to you earlier regardless.

The past year ended for me confusingly. One night, between the highs of Christmas Eve and the lows of what followed, I found myself standing in the House of the Lord, alone, crying. Lost in prayer – my eyes open, quietly bright with tears – I sensed the outline of a small woman dressed in black walk past me. I was afraid to be noticed and approached, but she did no such thing.

She noticed. She smiled. And she walked.

It is amusing to me how some still think a Church not holy; how they reduce its sanctity to meaningless abstraction, or an idea one agrees with rather than a consequence one inherits. Where the eyes of the uninitiated see a building, a relic, a failed institution, they fail to see a body. And among the primary qualities a church and the human body have in common is the generous gift of memory. A body remembers. Blood remembers. Experience is stored in tissue; our vessel is the original journal. Our pain is the ink on the paper of our bones, and the ink never leaves the paper. Bones break, and souls do too. And how many broken, afraid, grief-stricken and lost human souls have silently, like me, found refuge in an empty church, and like a helpless child begging for mercy have laid before God what they could not survive holding alone? Grief, terror, regret, hope: these are truths of what is to be human, cruel truths. And what is spoken with such seriousness does not vanish – it settles, it lingers, it remains. It latches on to walls and bricks and benches, and to the air itself. Fragments of soul press into the wood and the stone like breath into a lung. Stone remembers what flesh confesses, for blood has memory, and I bled in that church.

Brought silently to my knees by life I learn again:

I am strong, but I am not armoured.

I am alive, and it costs me.

To stand inside a church and feel nothing is not sophistication, but a lack of intuitive and bodily knowledge that is insulting to the profundity and depth of the human experience. And to reduce it merely to a building is not scepticism; it is a grotesque failure in perception. If one is intelligent only in mind, then one is only a knowledgeable fool.

Now I have sat on this letter for weeks, a fool in my own right, afraid not of saying too little, but instead of saying too much. A maddening dilemma, for it’s precisely that excess which gives my writing its moral perfume. But you wrote to me without armour, your wounds visible. Like a pilgrim arriving barefoot. That is either great courage or great exhaustion, though in your case I suspect it’s both. So, to avoid correspondence turning into performance, I have now decided, however imperfectly, to simply end this letter now, tonight. I cannot hide behind intelligence, style, or sensitivity because you have abandoned those defences yourself. And if I wish to end the letter — truly end it — then I must resist the temptation to be clever, and I must resist the temptation of completing it. Completion is a vice of the insecure, and the most elegant thing a man can do in the presence of sincerity is to refuse to be clever.

It is in this manner that your letter and the church are siblings –
for with both it would be a mistake to handle what should be held.

That now being said, let’s get into the letter.

I’ve listened to it slowly and carefully, and certain parts have not left me.

To begin:
I feel what you describe is not loneliness, though it wears its coat. You are not lonely in the ordinary sense, for you are constantly accompanied by your gift of observation – you are solitary, in the way poets are. You spoke of two opposing textures to this loneliness: “peaceful” and “heartbreaking”. Your pain of heartbreak does not come from absence of company, but from excess of perception. You suffer not because your life is empty, but because it is overcrowded with meaning. That is a good thing. You wanted to know if you can bask in the waters of independence, and you discovered you can…and that the cost is evenings alone at your dinner table that feel both holy and cruel. But you have also learned that you are enough to keep the depth of your own soul company – that is where most don’t go, and where the few who try usually fail.

The cosmic imagery – Saturn. It could so easily be mistaken for excellent poetry, but it’s not. Here is a simple human cry: “See me. Do not reduce me. Do not be afraid of what you see.” You truly feel this way, there is nothing decorative about it. If anything, it strikes me as diagnostic. To me, you have the temperament of someone who cannot remain on the surface of things. The dance floor of life has provided you only with two songs: cosmic distance or microscopic intimacy. Do not reduce yourself to the foolish belief that life is lived somewhere in the middle – it’s not. The world is cruel, this life unjust and the rings of Saturn are lonely and cold, yes. Sometimes. But you still blush at kindness, do you not? You understand the helpless gaze of a stray dog, correct? You photograph deserts and people not in submission to beauty, but against erasure, am I right? These are not affectations, my dear, they are confessions. Confessions of a soul that stares the ugly of this world in the face and still hopes and prays, tearfully even, for the good and the just. You travel to ancient places with history and hardship not because you need to escape, but because shallow places won’t hold you. That is alignment. That is the alphabet that enables you to write your poetry.

Sewn into the fabric of your letter, and I believe also your constitution, I see clearly the very bravery your grandparents have instilled in you. It is alive, breathing in your refusal to abandon duty, honour and responsibility towards yourself, your mother, your sister and the world at large. You speak of your despair, but you speak with dignity and nobility. Even in suffering you celebrate the magnificence of human life, however cruel it may be to you and the world around you. You speak of losing faith, but that’s nonsense too. You have simply stopped pretending your faith is simple. Do you notice your own stubborn flame? You do not surrender to the easy religion of cynicism. Your faith lives in action now — in care, in work, in children, in justice and empathy. In gentleness. That’s a grown faith. You are closer to Christ than most claim to be, and this makes you dangerous. And that is what you are, A – you are a dangerous woman, and I mean that in the best sense. Not because I feel you would harm me, but because I sense you would not allow me to remain small. To stand near a soul like yours is to stand near a mirror that refuses to flatter, which also perhaps better explains why responding proved a more difficult challenge than most. For you are very far away, but still reveal yourself to be a mirror, and the reflection looking back at me is a man, stripped naked, asking a formidable question:

“When you read her words, Aleksander, what frightens you more?

Her sorrow, or the part of yourself that recognises it?”

With love, admiration and deep appreciation,

Yours truthfully,

A.P.L.