To Believe In, To Believe In

There are two senses in which you can “believe in” something. You can “believe in” a thing, meaning you put your faith in that thing and trust it with all of your heart.  You can also “believe in” something, in the sense that you think it really exists. There are days when I honestly, truly believe in God. There are other days when I merely believe in Him. And there are days now and then when I can hardly even do the latter.

I call it “intermittent agnosticism,” but people much holier than I have called it the Long Dark Night of the Soul.

The situation being what it is, I’m still reeling with panic and shock. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go to Mass and confession again without a panic attack, but I certainly can’t just at the moment. Just at the moment, I pray by going for hikes.

Yesterday when it was so warm and beautiful out, I went to the Wildflower Reserve on the other side of the West Virginia chimney.

It is still early for wildflowers. The trail was still mainly brown and gray, muddy in the most inconvenient places. The creeks had died down a bit– sometimes the bridge just went over a stagnant indentation with a puddle at the bottom, instead of a stream. The local flora is waking up, slowly; the wildflowers won’t really crescendo until the end of next month. But I saw Harbinger-of-Spring, and I saw Spring Beauties.

I heard signs of spring as well. A brown and black bird was singing most gloriously in a scrubby gray tree. I stopped to listen, entranced. It wasn’t a bird song I recognized– not chicka-dee-dee-dee or cheeriup-cheerio. It was something else. Foolishly I snapped a photo, but all the phone got was a picture of a scrubby gray tree. The bird was invisible. And I didn’t think to take a video so I could remember the song and look up what kind of bird it was later.

Everything I profess to be true about Christianity tells me that everything is terribly important. You are united to Christ through your baptism and so am I. Christ descended to earth to be one with you and I. What we suffer, Christ suffers in His passion and offers to the Father. Whatever we do, great or small, we either do in union with Christ or blaspheming the image of Christ we bear. If you do what Christ would never do, you blaspheme. But everything that isn’t blasphemy is sacred.

If this is all true, listening to the song of a bird whose name you do not know is sacred.

I once knew someone named Robin, who grew up in a Catholic household, self-conscious that she didn’t have a saint’s name. All the other children in the catechism class could write a report on the patron they were named after, but her name was just the name of a bird.  As an adult she traveled to Italy, and said her name to an Italian nun. The nun looked confused because she’d never heard the word “Robin” before. My friend described a bird with a red breast and the nun was excited. She said the name of that or a similar bird in Italian. “Do you know why he has a red breast?” And she told my friend a folktale. It seems that a plain brown bird landed on the cross to comfort Christ in His last moments, and that bird flew away with a breast stained bright red. So from that day to this, all robins are red with the Blood of Christ. My friend was thrilled– she had a Catholic name after all.

It could be that every name is a Catholic name.

It could be that every bird is stained with the Blood of Christ, that every tree is the cross, that every time a bird sits on a tree and sings for somebody, the bird is on the cross comforting Christ.

If the crucifixion is what I was led to believe– the junction between Heaven and Earth, the point in space and time at which God chose to take all of human experience to Himself, all gathered into one and offered to the Father in Paradise– then I don’t see how it could be otherwise.

I continued down the trail.

Eventually there was a sign warning me that the way I was going would dead-end at a “vernal pool.” I kept on that way, to see what a vernal pool was.

It turns out that a vernal pool is a giant puddle. It’s a low muddy place where collected water sits after the snow melts, forming a temporary pond. The water was stagnant and glossy, looking more like a bubble of oil than water. The grass that was swamped by it floated under the water’s skin. The fallen logs all around were covered in a particularly luxurious moss. Skunk cabbages poked their heads out of the banks of the vernal pool, looking shiny and alien like skunk cabbage does. That part of the trail is going to stink in a week or two.

I stood there for a moment, contemplating.

If all are one in Christ, then He contemplated the skunk cabbage with me.

Eventually I found my way back on the main trail.

There was a place further on where a lot of new trees had fallen. The ground there was nice and dry, thanks to the sawdust from whoever had cut up the logs so the trail could still be hiked. That person had even dropped a flat slice of a fat log onto the next muddy patch for a stepping stone.

I sat down in a mossy place.

“God,” I said, in case He was listening.  “I would like to know your presence again. I would like to find a way to forgive you for creating me, and bringing me to Steubenville, and ruining my life. I would like you to get me out of here to a happy ending.”

I heard nothing in reply.

I have heard nothing for the longest time.

The good thing about things that are real, is that you don’t have to constantly believe in them. They remain real anyway, patiently waiting until you can see them again.

Perhaps I do believe in Him after all.