Apocatastasis at the Essex

“You have to choose the places you don’t walk away from.” —Joan Didion

This one’s for Sarinah Viya Kalb, who was there. With love.

And so the season of death returns: the leaves now in their last burst of red and gold before starting their descent, and at night, sometimes, a stiff wind scuttling down my hilltop street. From now until Easter—Pascha, as we Orthodox have it, signifying both Passover and passage—is the evocative time of the year for me, and I’ve written about it on “Good Letters” so many times before that I’m afraid I’ve become an annual broken record. (But Mommy, Anna Maria asks, What is a record?)

I want to tell you about a religious experience I had, in this season, about thirty years ago.

I say “religious” in contradistinction to the more acceptable, these days, designation of “spiritual.” (More than one friend of mine and I have joked about our desire to print Café Press T-shirts that avow that we are “Religious But Not Spiritual.”)

The truth of the matter is that I have spiritual experiences all the time, whether in wildflower fields with my children, or listening, in the wee hours, to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

This was different, in that what I’d term here a religious experience was one that I not only had a feeling about, but which seemed a specific call to action. It required something of me, and I have lived in the light cast from the experience ever since. I should also note that the experience was not a specifically Christian one, but one which cohered—enfleshed, even—the transcendent Christological order in which I already believed.

With that kind of preamble, I’m afraid, the experience itself can only be underwhelming.

It was a chilly Saturday night in Boston in 1984, during the years when I was in boarding school in a small town out in the suburbs. My fellow Tucker House dorm mate, Sarinah Kalb, and I had permission to take the bus into the city for the day, and it had been a long cold day that was unremarkable and perhaps the faintest bit disagreeable—two teenage girls at loose ends, with a limited amount of cash roaming through The Garage in Cambridge, drinking cappuccinos at the Café Pamplona, browsing record stores, and Filene’s Basement.

During those years the suburban bus line that ran the half-hour up to old industrial city Lawrence, with a stop in our town on the way, had its Boston departure point outside the old Essex Hotel on Atlantic Avenue, near South Station, Chinatown in what was then called “The Combat Zone.”

The Essex was an old brick hotel from the 1920s or 30s, its grim red neon lettering stark against the New England sky, hoisted up on rusted scaffolding. Its grimy plate glass windows, hung with sagging drapery, gave view to a long-faded lobby and the ghost seating of a restaurant—the Colonial Room?—that had not been open in years.

It was a dodgy place indeed, and considered to be a scary one by our coterie of boarding school students—many of whom probably had a wad of cash at their disposal in an era before the presumed safety of cell phones. The recommendation was to stay outside on the sidewalk until the Trombly Bus lumbered up to the corner for its departure.

But that night, Sarinah and I went inside. I wanted coffee (even back then), and both of us liked the idea of going beyond the perimeter of the Beautiful People.

We went to the lounge, the sole thriving remainder of the entire establishment. There was a backlit central bar, a shimmer thrown by the towering rows of bottles, a live jazz combo, and a hell of a lot of hardcore alcoholics. There was no coffee, so I think I ordered a club soda.

The lead singer of the jazz combo was outfitted for nothing less than a homecoming dance in 1958, with a giant tulle skirt, and a winking rhinestone tiara set in her nest of hair.

Sarinah and I were mesmerized. Tentatively, I asked the bartender to request “Mack the Knife.”

It is at this moment, I think, that I began to believe that the worship of God required grandeur, and a strange and paradoxical beauty. For in this faded hotel bar, awash in its dim glow, the assemblage of drunks—upon hearing the opening Brechtian lines—proceeded to sing along, at once grim and joyful, all of them in unison, with the tiara wearing diva playing along on the electric organ.

What I felt then, and what I wanted, was nothing less than apocatastasis: the belief and hope that at the end of time, all things could be saved—though perhaps through fire. All of us, we sinners, in this improbable but immensely holy congregation.

For this is what I felt and learned then, and found expressed later in these words limned so well centuries ago by St. Isaac the Syrian:

What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation.

The song came to its end, and then everyone in the room clapped at once. But by then it was time for the bus to leave, and we raced from the light back to the dark on the street, our faces still radiant and warm, as if a fire had been touched to them.

I believed then, and believe now, that there would be succor for all of us, in all of our sufferings.

A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston is a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is a widely published writer and essayist, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”