“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, published posthumously, 1947
Last month I lost two friends from my childhood parish in Albany, N.Y. One was the former pastor. As he began his tenure at St. Vincent de Paul Church in 1972, and I was readying to attend college locally, living with my folks, he invited me to launch a contemporary music group. Back then we called it a folk group, what with its Peter, Paul and Mary sonorities and its civil rights era aspirations. Since the congregation swelled every September with an influx of college students, some of whom were accomplished students of music, the group’s ambitions and its competence grew quickly.
Rev. Leo O’Brien was a man who did everything in his power within the rubrics of his position to create a radically hospitable church. He was no flame-thrower or rabble-rouser, but rather a quiet, dignified man with an easy Irish smile and a beckoning gesture to anyone who came through the door. And I mean anyone.
For nearly two decades, my partner was a practicing Muslim who came to church with me for our high holy days. At that point I had left the choir and left Albany, but I was welcomed back into the ranks of musicians when I was in town. My boyfriend skated in behind me, flipping pages of the hymnal and having a little problem with pitch that no one, especially me, brought to his attention. Father O’Brien and his second, an administrative assistant named Sister Joan Byrne, called him their favorite Muslim. When he and I broke up, they continued to ask after him until they passed away.
Father Leo O’Brien was a man who did everything in his power within the rubrics of his position to create a radically hospitable church.
Father O’Brien died about three weeks ago. The multitudes of priests assembled. The choir swelled with old voices like mine coming back to pay respect and help celebrate the life of this gravely generous man. He was 94 and had been retired from the parish for about 20 years. Yet the church was full to the last overpacked pew.
Just before the Bishop Mark O’Connell began the entrance procession for the Mass, a phone call came in on someone’s cell phone. An alto who had been singing with the choir for half a century had taken an unexpected turn for the worse and might not be able to last the week. Debbie Kirsch was 78. She’d been in pain from severe scoliosis for decades, and her grip on self-governance had become precarious. But she knew that Father O’Brien’s service was beginning that morning.
After the last echoing notes of the recessional, I rushed to visit her. She told me she had had a vision at the very hour when Leo died a week earlier. She had seen him as a boy, she said, and then as a young priest. “Absolution,” she said, cryptically, not explaining who was absolving whom.
She was well aware that all this might be a bit of hypnagogic fancy, or a visitation, a waking vision. “Inspired maybe by ‘Touched by an Angel’ starring Della Reese,” she intoned. She was losing cognitive grasp quickly so I was impressed by how clear and clinically proved her analysis was of the possible roots of her experience. Holy moment or delusion? “Well, or maybe both,” I replied to her, and she nodded: skeptical, noncommittal, noncombative.
I said goodbye to both good old friends on the same day, effectively: to Leo in his coffin, to Debbie in her bed in the ICU. I drove home to Massachusetts knowing I would not see either one in this life again. And as I’ve never seen “Touched by an Angel” starring Della Reese, I couldn’t have an experience exactly like Debbie’s. Neither hear her confession nor ask for her forgiveness. “And just to clear the air….”
But none of us have moments of clarity or of wonder that match any other moment, or anyone else’s moment either. Epiphanies are shining, insubstantial and evanescent. They fade before they can be quantified or categorized. They are custom-made for each of us by our own hearts and minds and, even if we never watched TV, by the templates of our understanding of transcendence.
Back in Massachusetts, I booked myself a lane at the local pool to swim out my grief. I sometimes pray as I swim. It often starts with childhood prayers from my earliest catechisms. They morph and torque like the visions that flag across the inside of our eyelids just before we fall asleep. I should add I am neither a student nor a tutor of prayer. In the room across the hall from the pool, step-class instructors were barking at their students to do this, do that, but I can’t even hector myself. I just abandon myself to the prayerful moment the way I tiptoe into the water that I trust will hold me up.
This particular day, as I considered what Father O’Brien, that good man, had done for me, I turned away from the stock if beloved phrases of the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. I just let myself feel what I was feeling in the water—movement, more grace than I can exhibit on solid ground: a welcome sense of isolation, a tightening of focus.
I am neither a student nor a tutor of prayer. I just abandon myself to the prayerful moment the way I tiptoe into the water that I trust will hold me up.
I’ve always been interested in examining my own apprehensions—I suppose that’s the curse and benefit of being a writer, being inside and outside one’s experience at the same time. What, I said to myself, does this feel like, this swim, as Leo O’Brien leaves my life of hours and months and becomes a legacy?
I began to sense—to imagine—that I was swimming him home. He was swimming beside me. We were accompanying each other without acknowledging each other, exactly—no smiles, no talking, no gestures. Just adjacent. I was swimming him in his journey not to the promised land but to the One True Sea. I would turn back, at a certain moment, and he would go on ahead.
This morning, having finished writing the obituary for the choir member named Debbie Kirsch, who died on Wednesday, I swam her along as well. For decades Debbie had been handicapped by wasted muscles, a bowed spine, fierce pains. She’d been confined to her wheelchair and a Barcalounger where she could manage to get some sleep. Her life had become consumed by the efforts it took to get to Mass and to cherish her friends. She couldn’t always manage the former but she never gave up on the latter.
I swam Debbie onward this morning. Amazing what a dip in a pool warmed to 82 degrees can do for one! In my mind’s eye she was strong and full of intention. She had someplace to be, and now the mobility to get going. She was confident and joyous in that part of my peripheral vision that you can’t draw into focus when you’re swimming.
“Oh daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?” wrote Walt Whitman in “Passage to India” (1871). Frankly, I don’t know where Whitman was. He’d gone on ahead, maybe? Father O’Brien was catching up to him. But Debbie and I, we were like dolphins this morning, a pod of two, making our way home.
