When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” - Isaiah 43:2
Another November gray day. Somehow it seems like it’s always November in this place. This gray day is broken up by wind; wind is plucking off the few remaining leaves a handful at a time. Sara sat at home, as always of late, occasionally breaking up her time staring at the fire blazing in the fireplace by staring out of the windows at the front of the house. Gray sky and bare brown tree limbs, the trees getting ready for their long winter slumber. Sara knew that she could feel it in the autumn when the trees went to sleep, a long, lonely feeling of arboreal abandonment. Much more pleasant the sense of the trees awakening in the spring, the quickening of sap running again beneath their rough cold skin.
That vivid imagination again. Friends and family had always told Sara that she imagined such things, that she could not really feel them. When she was very young, her heartfelt and openly shared perceptions were considered cute. When she got older, they marked her as quirky and maybe a bit strange. But none of those judgements ever changed what she felt.
She turned away from the window and went back to her chair by the fire. Now that the kids were grown and had moved out, she had placed a favorite old wingback chair very close to the fire, facing the fire, so that she could have an easier view of the flames while supported in the chair’s loving embrace. The golden floral upholstery shone in the fire light dancing nicely in her vision with the warm honey wood of the fireplace mantel.
She allowed herself to sink deeply into her chair, and her eyes found the glowing embers. She sat and breathed and felt that the house breathed with her and melted into the curves of the chair. And then, suddenly, she was flying low over a river in the nighttime, just a foot or two above the surface of the black water. The river gave the impression of being slow and cold and sluggish, though she did not reach down to touch it. She was in a long nightgown that fanned out behind her as she flew; the gown flowed like seaweed glimpsed roiling under waves. Flying like this was surprisingly effortless. As she flew, she stared into the depths of the water and could only see blackness, no light penetrating the surface. She turned her head to see the trees lining the river, each one dressed in distinctive autumn finery, golds and peaches, reds and purples and oranges. And the city skyline behind. She recognized the backdrop and so now could place her dreamy night flight in Boston, along the Charles River.
Turning her face back down towards the black water and gliding faster, gliding lower, so that her nose almost dipped into the water, she was close enough now that she could feel the water’s cold chill rising up toward her. She glided under a bridge by steering her upper body just so to make it under the arch, and then she saw the first shape under the water. She slowed down her glide as she realized that there were many shapes under the water, white, jellyfish-like shapes just under the surface of the water. The river was filled with them; they were stacked on top of each other, endless ghostly white shapes floating with the slow drift of the water toward the harbor. She slowed her glide more. She didn’t know how she did this, it just happened as she put her awareness to it. She slowed more so as to look more carefully at the shapes. Now she was hovering motionless just above the black surface, looking down at the ghostly jellies. She could see human faces gradually emerging from the mass of shapes, human ghostly shapes floating under the water looking up at her. As soon as she made them out, they seemed to notice her in return, some raising ghostly arms up to point, and opening ghastly mouths in silent screams.
The water ghosts started moving up toward her, jostling each other, pushing in upon each other to move closer to Sara, suddenly very aware of just how near she was to this wakening mass of wraiths. Sara gasped and tried to start gliding again but now she did not go anywhere, she could not move, she could not even move up away from the surface of the river. She had forgotten how to fly. She was frozen, inches above the water ghosts, their hunger for her living flesh palpable in the cold night air. Her nightgown had fluttered down into the water by her feet in her stillness, it no longer was supported in its loose flowing flight, and she could feel tugs on its cloth like fish pulling at the end of a fishing line, pulling her with increasing strength down towards the cold water. The cloth of her nightgown wicked water up from the river. Her frozen body started to tilt in response to the tugging, her toes now breaking the surface of the water. She opened her mouth and began to scream. She was slapping at the ghostly shapes now. She was crying and screaming and flailing when she woke from the dream.
She was back in the living room, again staring into the fire. The morphine the doctors had prescribed for her made her dreams and waking blend in a way that reminded her of childhood, when it was sometimes hard for her to tell if she was awake and alert or asleep and dreaming. She took a moment to separate from the dream, to feel her weight pushing down into the warm fabric of the chair. And after only the briefest moment in the present, her mind was pulled back toward a recurrent childhood dream of being called by God. The priest at her church, Father Joe, enthusiastically endorsed this dream and gave her books to read about Joan of Arc. “Joan of Arc also was called to serve, and she did so brilliantly and saved her people,” he would tell the young Sara when the two would discuss the dreams and Sara's calling.
“But Joan of Arc was killed, and she was very young!” Sara responded. She, herself, was very young, only about eight or nine.
“Yes, well, many of the saints were martyred. We never know why we are called, but, if we are faithful, we follow God when he calls,” Father replied.
Young Sara would go looking for Father Joe after her Sunday school lessons each week to talk about her dreams of being visited by an angelic messenger and to discuss the idea that she could devote her adult life to service of God per the messenger's command. Father Joe listened wholeheartedly and fed the young girl stories of nuns and convents that fit neatly with her ideas of the nun's life, based completely around her annual viewing of
The Sound of Music on TV.
Father Joe became much less enthusiastic when Sara told him that the angel of God who visited her in dreams now was asking her to bear the son of God. The angel specifically said that this should happen before Sara turned 18 years old. She had just completed her first communion, still dressed in her resplendent white “Bride of Jesus” wedding dress, when she first told Father about this dream. They were at a celebration following the first communion mass in the parish hall across the parking lot from the church. The room was full of other brides of Jesus, second grade girls bedecked in wedding gowns and veils, their male counterparts dressed richly in black suits. Proud parents and grandparents and extended families rounded out the crowd. Little boys in black suits ate donuts covered in powdered sugar and got reprimanded for messing up their nice clothes. The sugar on their dark suit coats looked like snowflakes.
“Father, I had another dream about my calling,” Sara began earnestly, as she got in between Father Joe and the large communal plate of donuts at the reception.
“Yes, Sara? And what happened in this one?” he responded with a smile.
“The angel descended from heaven on wings of golden fire. His face was serious and stern, and I was frightened.” Sara said.
“Stern? You always use such big words for such a little girl, Sara. What happened next?” Father Joe sat in a nearby chair so that his bold brown eyes could more easily meet Sara’s green ones. With the priest seated, the two were nearly face to face.
“It was dark outside. I was running in the woods, and I was scared. I was running from something. I could feel its hot, wet breath on my back. The low tree branches pulled at my dress and at my hair and whipped my face. And then I came to a clearing. The sky was dark, no stars, and I was so tired. I could not catch my breath. I fell to my knees there, and I knew I would die. I knew the thing that I was running from would get me, so I turned my face up to the sky to pray for help. And I saw a falling star there.”
“I wished on that star as it fell, but instead of falling to the side like falling stars usually do, this star seemed to be coming straight for me and getting bigger and bigger. And as I sat there praying and wishing, I could tell that the thing that was chasing me was afraid. I could feel its fear, and I could feel it retreating into the cover of the woods. I was safe as long as the star was there. But as the star kept falling toward me, I started to see that it wasn’t a star at all but an angel, beautiful and terrible. His face was smooth like a statue but with that stern, serious look, like I was in trouble. And his wings blazed with fire. He was all white except for that fire, white robes, white skin, white hair, and white eyes.”
“And did the angel speak?” Father Joe asked. In his eagerness to hear her story, he seemed to have forgotten the donut clutched in his hand, suspended halfway between the donut plate and his mouth. Powdered sugar snowed down onto his black pants. He noticed then, and, raising the donut to his lips, took a bite.
“Oh, yes. When the angel’s feet nearly touched the ground, he stopped, and he hovered. He looked at me with those white eyes and that stern face. He said, ‘Sara!’ and his voice boomed louder than anything I have ever heard, but he was not yelling. His voice filled my ears and my head and my whole body, and it hurt. ‘Sara! You must not be afraid. I come from heaven with The Word of God. You are to bring forth the next Messiah, the next Savior. This must be done before the day of your birth in your eighteenth year.’” Sara paused in her telling, and looked at Father Joe. He looked surprised. “Father, do you think that means before I turn eighteen or before I turn nineteen?” Sara asked, earnestly.
Father Joe finished chewing the bite of donut that was in his mouth, holding up one finger to indicate that he needed a moment to do so before responding. Then he said, “Have you told your parents about this dream?”
“Yes, Father,” Sara answered, “But they still think it's just a dream. That they all are just dreams. They say callings don’t really happen to people, not callings from God. They say that they are made up like all the other stories in the Bible.”
Adult Sara chuckled at this remembering. Her parents were always at odds with the church, and they were always chagrined that, as a child, Sara believed everything the church and the priests told her as if it were the gospel truth. Her dreams and visions, her callings, completely flummoxed her new age parents, who really only went to church to keep their own, more traditionally faithful parents, happy.
Her reverie broken, she noticed the sound of Mike whistling in the kitchen and banging around, the sounds of him hunting for something to eat. He was home from his most recent business trip. Since she was eating less these days, and since the kids were gone, their meals together had become very informal. She would sometimes sip some soup while he ate whatever he had made for himself or picked up on his way home from the office. It was good to have him here. It helped ground her in the real world, even through the haze of the meds. He whistled his way into the living room holding a small plate with a sandwich on it, and he took up a place on the couch near the fire.
“It’s cold out there today, that wet chill that comes this time of year and runs right through you,” he said, pulling a nearby blanket onto his lap with his free hand, then setting his plate on his lap. "You should be glad you didn't have to go out in it." He added, and Sara noticed the briefest ghost of guilt pass over his face, like he wished he had not pointed out her invalid state.
She chose to ignore it. “What did you make?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing special,” Mike replied, looking down at his creation. "Just some hummus and cucumber and tomato slices on that bread you like. I mean, that you used to like?” He shifted uncomfortably.
“I still like it. I just can’t eat it.” Sara said, maybe a little sharply. She pulled her wrap tighter around her frame. She was shrinking from not being able to eat, and she found that she could sink more completely into her old wrap that she had knitted back when the kids were in elementary school. She had had it that long. It had been used for playing pretend way back when. Which one of the boys used it as the ocean of his pirate ship? Its blue undulations of chunky purl rows and knit rows made fantastic waves for an ocean. And one of the other boys – maybe the same boy? – slept with this wrap when she got sick the first time, when she was in the hospital. Family memories knitted in with the rows of wool.
“How was work today? Sometimes I feel like you are my only connection to the outside world anymore,” Sara said.
“Oh, same old, same old,” Mike replied. “Trying to save the world. What did you do today? Did you start reading that book I left you?”
Before this last trip, Mike had given her a copy of
The Bluest Eye. She had read it shortly after they started dating, and she spoke so passionately about it then that he thought it would be good for her to reread, to revisit, and to maybe find some of that old passion now.
“I cracked it open, read a few pages, fell asleep. It’s hard right now. The drugs are making me so tired, it’s hard to finish a thought. And I read the same paragraph about fifty times to try and get my mind to focus. They say its cancer brain. Sometimes it seems like the cancer is eating my brain, even though it isn’t in there yet. I swear I can’t finish a sentence sometimes. And I lose my thoughts from one moment to the next.”
"You still have those vivid, storybook dreams, though, don’t you?” Mike asked, and he looked away from his sandwich to look at Sara’s face, to look into her eyes. She loved the way his hazel eyes never looked the same from one moment to the next, reflecting light, and picking up the colors behind and around them in almost a magical way. In this moment, they were gold at the core moving out through an emerald green mantle and a dark brown crust. His eyes today were like a model of the earth she made in middle school earth science class.
“Yes,” she answered. “I think I will always have those. I’m having them more now. I think it’s the pain medication.”
“Anymore dreams of God? Or angels? Have they shown up again?” he queried.
Mike knew about her dreams of being called. They had stopped when she was still a teen, leaving Sara feeling abandoned. She had felt guilty that she had not produced a child for God, and there was still a part of her that wondered if the dreams had deserted her, if her faith and her God had deserted her, because she had not lived up to that calling. But even though the dreams had left her, and she was no longer visited by the angel with the fiery wings, she remembered the dreams, and she longed for them with a burning in her belly. She had told Mike about the dreams one night early on in their college years, during one of those long walks with lots of hand-holding and secret-sharing. He enthusiastically listened and asked many questions. He claimed to be an atheist, and he loved to think about how other people develop faith. The idea that she had truly believed that she had been called to this purpose as a child blew him away.
“No more God or angels, no.” Sara sighed.
“You miss them, don’t you?” Mike asked.
“I do. I do miss them. And I feel like I need them now. I would like for them to come back. Remember when Mom was dying? Her hospital room filled with the angels and saints and the spirits of people who had gone before. At least she could see them there. I want that to happen for me, but I’m afraid it won’t. I’m terrified I’m going to die alone.”
“You won’t die alone. We will all be there, me and the kids. And besides, you’re going to beat this thing again. I just know it. You did it last time. You'll do it again.” He took a big bite of sandwich, indicating that he was finished with this thought. Mike didn’t like to discuss her dying. He never had. He usually changed the subject in some way or another.
“I’m not sure I want to beat it,” Sara said. “I’m tired. The kids are grown and gone. We all have to go sometime, right?” She looked over at him pleadingly, needing an answer that she knew he would not give her. Needing permission to let go.
He finished chewing and said, “Nope. It’s not your time,” with a finality that made her sigh and rest her head back against the chair, closing her eyes. This line of conversation was over for now. They had lived together long enough that she could tell that any further queries in this direction would be fodder for argument, and she did not have the stomach for it right now.
With eyes closed, her thoughts turned to the fiery angel from her dreams. Father Joe had a discussion with her parents after her heartfelt talk with him at her first communion regarding her dreams of being called, but he did not mention the dream about the new messiah. Sara's mother had very clearly told the priest that he would no longer encourage her in this direction. All talk of being called to service of the Lord would cease. They threatened to leave the church if the priest did not actively discourage Sara from her belief in these dreams.
And with young Sara, her parents explained to her over and over that the stories in the Bible and stories about such people as Joan of Arc were not real. That they were propaganda for perpetuating the religion on illiterate peasants so that the priests and bishops and popes could make more money. Sara cried and hated her parents. She didn’t believe them. It was even worse than when she had learned that Santa Claus was not real. But when she tried to talk to Father Joe about it, he turned her away with a gentle but firm redirect.
“Your parents do not want us to talk about callings anymore, or about your dreams, Sara,” Father Joe told her. She had not been able to see the priest on her own since her parents had gone to have their talk with him. This was the first time she had been able to catch up with him to ask him a question. “And, further, they were very clear that they do not believe that little girls are called to service by God.”
“But what do you believe, Father?” Sara had asked him.
“Sara, I believe you can have a calling. And if the Lord wants you to be in his service, your parents will not be able to stop it. What do you believe, Sara?” At this point, another congregant squeezed past Sara and dragged Father Joe off to talk about some adult concern. Adults always thought their concerns to be more imperative than those of children.
When Sara told her parents of her dream of the fiery angel and of her calling to bring forth the new Messiah, they were shocked. And her mother looked scared.
“See? I told you we shouldn’t make her go to church just to please our parents,” her father had said. “She’s just so damned impressionable and sensitive, too damned sensitive.”
Her mother shook her head and said, “Sara, honey, you don’t actually believe the things they say in church, do you?”
“Well, yes.” Sara stated simply and honestly.
“Oh, honey. Those are just stories. Please promise me that you won’t try to get yourself pregnant just because a dream told you that you should. Oh, Jesus.” She said, rolling her eyes. “I can’t even believe I have to say that to you,” she added.
“The dreams are very believable.” Sara retorted. “It’s hard to tell if I’m awake or asleep. That’s how real they are. They are as real as this talk we are having right now, Mom.”
“Well, they aren’t real. It’s just the combination of that incredible imagination of yours and the stories that the church has had centuries to tailor to get just that kind of response out of its followers,” her father said with the fatherly finality that meant that the discussion was over for now.
Sara rested her mind on the face of the angel, which, even after all these years, decades, she could still see as clearly as the day she first saw it. Whose face was it? Its sternness had a quality of her father’s face, but it was not his face. Its marble smoothness resembled the face of Jesus, crucified, from the statue hanging above the altar at the church she went to as a child, but it was not his face. That Jesus’ face was covered in blood and anguish, gory and horrible. The fiery angel’s face was beautiful and smooth and unblemished even through its sternness. She focused on the face and all other thoughts burned away, even the sounds of the room died down, diffused to nothingness. Just the angel. Would he come back to her in her time of need? Could she call on him now? In her mind’s eye, just the angel’s face, his eyes closed to her, the stern expression she remembered from her childhood replaced by a deep and profound sorrow. The smooth alabaster unfurrowed but expressive all the same. The strong jawline and prominent brow, aquiline nose. She imagined touching his face with a tentative hand, feeling the coolness of his cheek, but as her dream hand rose up, she felt a shock of pain running up from her palm into her heart, and a feeling of utter shame blooming in her chest. He was not for her in this earthly way, not for her flesh.
How could she wake him? Her eyes lingered on his perfect face as she felt her body relaxing again towards sleep. His hair fell in waves, framing his face, and he was utterly, completely still. Her heart ached to ease his pain, to comfort him in his sorrow.
And then she was running in the woods in the dark again, being chased again, the hot breath of the animal hunter on her back, terror prickling the surface of the skin at her neck. Running, stumbling over tree roots, a million unseen brambles pulling at her skin, her hair, her clothes, running blindly over the mossy, soft, soundless ground. She was hunted but also hunting. She had to find her way back to the field where she first met the angel. She knew this. But she was weak and tired, older now. She did not know if she could make it. And somewhere she heard a baby crying, one of her babies. The hunter behind her heard it, too, and stopped chasing her. She had to find the baby before the hunter did. She cried out and woke herself from her dream. She was sweating. She blinked and looked around at the room and saw Mike, almost finished with his sandwich, looking back at her.
“Hmm. Must have been dreaming,” she said, by way of explanation.
“You looked anguished. I thought about waking you, but," he gestured at his sandwich by way of explanation. "What were you dreaming about?” Mike asked.
“Running. One of the children was in danger. Typical,” she replied. She didn’t want to tell Mike that she had been looking for the angel. It seemed like a secret she should keep tight this time, which she found curious.
