Afterwards, When there are clothes to be ironed

Of course the most common side effect of ecstasy, the one subject to ceaseless blather in mediocre sermons and articles on faith, is the coming back to oneself - the same frumpy lumpy self that made it so difficult before the ecstasy to believe in the light of the human soul. Or God. Or love. Or anything. Long before we had to tolerate kitschy exhortations about mountain top experiences and let-downs, the early Christians sat around sighing with their pagan brethren the Platonists about the sorry state of the world- this world bound by a bag of bones (one father colorfully called the body "a sack of excrement") that somehow managed to play host to a divine eternal light. The major risk of creativity or prophecy or mystical religious experiences or maybe even, as some friends and I have pondered over the years, really great sex, is this coming back to oneself changed and unchanged. Perhaps the challenge is especially poignant when the instrument of one’s ecstasy is the body as with singing or running really fast. No ecstatic experience and no means of attainment is guaranteed a repeat performance. But there is also the treachery of our frail bodies to contend with or to confound us. Like pain this sweetness too shall pass.

My ecstatic experiences usually signal their end the same way. I lie in bed and hear this ancient chant: "Juneau! peninsula! agriculture! surround!" It's the voice of not-my third grade teacher. She was the teacher next door to us, who led us through the vocabulary unit on Alaska one afternoon. I remember those words because she started us on the chant and let us keep reading alone. All I know of that woman was her glowing light-filled red-brown skin and this one thing she taught me. I pine for such a teacher, whose gift was so great I remember everything she ever wanted me to know. What if she could have told me of the soul?

After the Alaska chant comes the steady stream of voices under my face, the running titter of the large and aging Catholic family of my childhood. A thought will surface, now and again - My Aunt Lulu describing the most thrilling experience in the world, standing on the seawall as the surge from Carla blew in, her pining for that wind in her face again, those waves trying to tug the world from under her as she stood firm on the wall. Or Nana singing the Airforce theme song. Or Uncle Irving, our family's only Jew, sitting in his house shoes for the holy days (no leather shoes allowed), listening to a Hebrew radio broadcast while trying to shoo us goyim kids away so he could do his part in making the world right again. If he had money in his pocket, he would always give it to you if it were your birthday. I think of him when I read about the crowds pestering Jesus in the Gospel of John, wanting him to multiply the bread again, forgetting the example of the generosity, forgetting everything but their own want. Uncle Irving gave until he saw our greed, then he'd "humph" and look right through us, then away. His wife, my great Aunt Max, thought it was funny to give us kids actual bundles of switches for Christmas one year, with a piece of coal and an empty box of lemon sours glued on. I will never forget smelling the empty box and the disgust at realizing that the coal did not in fact taste like chocolate as my cousin suggested.

Then where am I? The same, but not. Sanctified and squirrelly, but at least not taken up like Francis, at least not pierced in body as well as soul. At least not too holy to wish I could have persuaded my aunt to give me that candy after all.