There Is No Path
By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen
It is a Thursday afternoon in the summer of Covid, and I am in church with Hadley. We are in the annex just outside the sanctuary waiting to be called in so Hadley can be recorded reading Psalm 131 for this Sunday’s televised service.
We’ve been here for an hour—longer than the time we were told it would take to complete the recording—and Hadley has not yet read. There are only a certain amount of people allowed in the sanctuary at a time, the person who is recording has an issue with the equipment, not everyone is in view of the camera, but there’s nothing to be done about that because nobody can stand too close to each other. Some will be left out. Worship takes longer in unprecedented times.
Inside the sanctuary, the choir sings, “Jesus, we are here.” It’s a beautiful melody. It swells, it’s lyrical, it’s harmonic. If this was Sunday morning and I was sitting in church, this hymn would call me to worship. It would settle me so I could prepare myself for the disruptive grace of God. But since it’s Thursday, since this is all running late, since this whole thing is starting to feel artificial, I begin to think of subtext for the refrain:
Jesus, hello? Jesus? We’re here. We’re ready for church.
Or maybe using the Lord’s name in vain:
Jesus! We’re here! We’ve shown up! Do something! Or, tell us what to do!
I chuckle to myself, and look at Hadley to see if she catches the irony of what is now an eternal refrain. Maybe we’ll share a laugh, or an eye roll, but she’s on her phone and masked. It’s even more difficult to read her these days.
“Mom, do you think I can go to the pool after this?” Hadley asks me, leaning forward so she doesn’t have to speak so loudly with the mask on.
I shake my head no, and explain that after this there’s dinner, and then soccer practice.
Hadley glares at me, leans back on the chair and starts texting again. I can only imagine what she’s writing. I make a mental note to check her texts as I always threaten to do but remember two things: 1. I don’t really want to know what her texts say. 2. We don’t have to be here. We could’ve recorded this at home. We are here because I wanted to be here. I wanted to hear the creak of the pews and the organ. To smell the wax from the candles and to see the dust from the hymnals and Bibles lazily coasting on the sun’s rays as it pours in from the stained glass windows making a rainbow of light and reminding me of the promise God made to Noah.
Maybe He won’t destroy us, but will we destroy ourselves? Is this what free will is all about?
Hadley doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know how much I wanted to sit here and listen to her read. She wouldn’t understand if I told her. She would only be angry.
Out of habit or out of hope, I pull out my journal and Jeanne Murray Walker’s book of sonnets, Pilgrim, You Find the Path By Walking from my bag. Last summer, I began reading one sonnet a day and journaling about it. It took me until Advent to finish, and I loved the slow practice of sitting with words that didn’t ask to be understood, but enjoyed. Now though, I am looking for something from her poetry, but I don’t know what it is.
“What is new needs what is old,” she wrote in her introduction, explaining why she studied and then wrote sonnets. She’d grown tired of her voice, and used the boundaries and rules of the form to freshen and expand and bring new life to her writing.
I first met Jeanne Murray Walker in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was there for a 10-day writing residency as part of my MFA studies, and she was one of the mentors of the program. In those days, I was rigid with uncertainty and fear, and I was operating under the belief that I should’ve established myself as a writer before I’d become a mother, and that now, I’d never catch up. My actions, my posture, the way I spoke to others had an urgency of battle. And I was in battle with myself. All who got in the way were casualties.
This is who I was when I bumped into Walker with my cafeteria tray at lunchtime. So consumed was I with getting my lunch, getting out of the way, getting a seat and opening up my notes to try to get a handle on the material—on searching for some proof that I belonged here that I knocked into her; my tater tots jumped out of the bowl I’d placed them in.
It is not fair to give thought to Walker or anyone who has not expressed themselves when rendering my memories on paper, but I saw what seemed to be a common look from all the older women who worked closely with me as I found my words: this is not a battle. Calm down.
“She wants to mark it. But the S stays,” Walker writes in her sonnet, “Sophie Learns to Print Sophia.” In this sonnet, I imagine the poet is watching a child—perhaps her granddaughter—learn to write, and observes the incredible physical task of getting letters on the page: the twisting fingers, the tongue flexed in concentration, the pushing or pulling a pencil across the page. I read this poem and remember a picture Hadley made for me with the word, “NOM,” and little hearts around it. She meant, “MOM,” but sometimes those first attempts at naming things are shaky.
Walker is exploring more than the physical act of writing in the poem. Sophie wants to express what is on her heart, and in this instance, it is her name. She wants to see her name on paper.
I remember all the ways I played around writing my name writing a different “a,” dotting my “I” with a heart or a smiley face. But that was later, after I’d grown comfortable with how letters worked.
In the beginning, teachers insisted I use the paper and my left hand to write like a right-handed person. “Don’t tilt the paper,” they’d say. “If you rest your hand on the paper, you’ll get lead on your hand and your words will smudge.
I could not stay in a straight line if I didn’t tilt the paper, and I liked the lead, and soon the ink on my pinky finger. That, and the scars on my middle finger—bloody every September from opening up again—were proof I was trying. I was figuring something out, and I was doing it my way.
Jeanne uses W.S. Merwin’s words to open the poem: “Remember how the naked soul/comes to language and at once knows/loss and distance and believing?” I immediately think of Eve when I read these words, and then look at Hadley.
I want to know more about Eve’s relationship with the snake in that garden. What did she think knew about him? Was he the one who planted the desire to have a chance to name a few things in the world she was brought into?
I fiddle with the permanent scar on my left middle finger—so callused it never bleeds anymore. I examine the equally thick one on my pinky. I look at Hadley again. I believe I would’ve made the same choice as Eve, and it scares me to think that if it were Hadley standing there, touching the apple that is offered, that I would want her to have the choice to decide, too.
One of the pastors walks by and I lift a hand to get her attention. I feel rude doing so—as though I believe I look like I am being waited upon—but masked, I don’t know how to get her attention other than raising my voice. It is so hard to communicate with a mask on.
She sees me and stops.
“Do you know how much longer before Hadley reads?” I ask. Hadley looks up from her phone, eager to know, too.
“Well,” the pastor begins, raising both arms as if to tell me no, she does not know.
“It’s just that Hadley has soccer practice, and she needs to eat dinner,” I say, fiddling with my mask as I speak.
“What time is soccer?”
“6:30,” I tell her.
The pastor looks at her watch. “Oh! OK,” she says, and brings both of us into the sanctuary. “Jesus, we are here,” now sounds especially loud and specific.
“Hadley needs to read next,” the pastor calls and her voice echoes in the almost empty sanctuary.
“Just a few more minutes,” the pastor says, ushering us into a pew.
Hadley sits next to me and opens the paper with the scripture on it. She studies it as she did in the car, at the dining table, at her desk the last several days.
“You must guard your childhood now; you’re your/own mother here today,” Jeanne writes in “Notes to Yourself.” A mother is on the beach with her daughter. The other is remembering how own childhood beach memory with her mother—the glory and the pain of attempting to play with the ocean so vast. Now, it is the mother’s turn to let her daughter experience the world.
“Mom,” Hadley whispers, also pulling at her mask.
“What?”
“We are never gonna make it to soccer practice. There’s no way.”
She’s fired up; angry with me.
The pastor who frantically set up the pulpit—wiped it down so it is safe for Hadley to read—is now marching toward us, ready to take Hadley to the front.
“Calm down,” I whisper. “We have plenty of time.”
“Now we don’t!” she seethes.
“Yes, we do,” I want to hold her hand, tell her to enjoy this moment, to let the words she’s about to read seep into her, and change her. I want her to take this seriously—to not think about her friends and the pool and soccer. I came to church to feel the mystery of eternal things that I don’t understand but believe, and I want Hadley to have that same experience.
I remember myself at 13, and almost laugh at what it is I’m expecting of her right now.
I lean in close to her, because the pastor is a few steps away. Hadley flinches back, but I touch her knee and hold her gaze. “Practice isn’t until 7:30,” I whisper. “I lied.”
Jeanne tells the mother on the beach to put down the book she is reading, and to pick up her child, she’s had too much sun. Then, instead of guarding her childhood, Jeanne tells the mother to remember it: Remember how your mother took/you gently up, then folded up the ocean,/ tucked it safely under her arm …”
Hadley is looking at me like I’ve folded up the ocean.
“You don’t need a mask,” the pastor tells Hadley once she’s reached the pew. “It’s just you up there,” she extends an arm, not to touch Hadley, but to guide her away.
I do not feel guilty for the lie I told as I watch her walk away from me.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.