Good Jew
I only go to one bar mitzvah, and it isn’t my own. I wear a yarmulke for the first and last time. I spend three days learning Yiddish on Duolingo and give up. I’m pretty sure I use the word “spiel” wrong. Sometimes, when the men on the corner ask me if I’m Jewish on...
Sabbath
Our apartment in German Colony was only a ten-minute walk to the gardens that overlooked the old city. To the left stood the high limestone walls of Jerusalem, to the right Mt. Zion itself with its trees and tiers of white buildings, the blue cone roof of Dormition Abbey, beside it the white bell tower....
True North
Looking back for a low point marking the worst of my insobriety, it might be that signal moment I put out my cigarette in the holy water font of St. Paul’s Catholic Church, right in front of the priest, I might add, who was too stunned to reach in and remove the soggy stub, but...
Postcards from My Current Self: Faith Evangelical Church, Summer 1975, Billings, Montana
You walked to the front of the sanctuary to pick up your award—a Snoopy bank. The pastor thanked you for recruiting the most friends to attend Vacation Bible School, a week of stories and songs about Jesus interspersed with games of Red Rover and Duck, Duck, Goose. Which part thrilled you? Was it a) winning...
Twofold
“The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.” — Martin Buber, from I and Thou One thing my grandfather did when he was alive: he wrote commentaries on the Bible. Another thing he did was fall asleep sitting up in a chair. Sometimes these two activities would blur and blend, and,...
Capturing the Numinous: Mary Karr’s Sacred Carnality
When I want to pay attention, I make bread. The dough feels like skin against my own, drawing my focus as something to be attended and held. It demands lifting and patting; it asks to be placed on a bed of flour and coaxed it into a loose loaf, shaped and smoothed and weighed in...
Rite of Passage
My mother claims it was my brother’s bris that made her turn from Judaism. This was August 1965, at my grandparents’ place in Westport, Connecticut, where I spent each summer until I was eight. I was present that day, although I don’t remember: It is the back-and-forth where memory begins. What I have seen are...
Symbolum Apostolorum: The Apostles’ Creed
In my high school, where God was king and country and girls were not, everything teetered on the tightrope of treason. We knelt like mendicants while nuns used their wooden rules to measure the distance between the immaculate floor and the hems of our box-pleated mini-skirts. Because length and sexual proclivity were intertwined in the...
The Salmon
Before today, I’ve been my sister’s helper. Last summer, I’d helped Cindy clean the Leggett Motel cabins scattered in the redwood grove just off the highway. The buildings are run down, porches sag, and the floors inside not exactly plumb. While the cleaning solutions burned our eyes, we’d scoured the bathtubs, the showers, and the...
Heathen, Slave, Woman
There was a time I hoped my prayers would travel from the Hebrew Academy’s makeshift synagogue in a Hartford basement to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. First, though, I wanted them to move just a few feet, out of the dingy cramped section where the girls sat and into the bright, sacred space I could glimpse...
Full Gospel
1. What I see as a child on my way to church with my grandparents: dead barns, CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO faded into the gray wood. Also: Southern Indiana hills, knobs, knolls, ancient ripples where glaciers halted at the Ohio. What I see at my grandparents’ church: an Appalachian diaspora. Millions fled the mountains mid-century...
Mina
Some family members said I gave her the name because I could not pronounce grandmother. Others contended the name originated because she talked like a Mynah bird–her name was pronounced the same way. Mina taught me to play Scrabble: how to hit triple letters with a “j” or “x,” how to stretch to make a...
Genesis
I am sitting in the sanctuary, a few rows from the front, to my left my mom and dad, my little brother Timmy in Mom’s lap and sleeping, to my right my older brother Brad. Brad and I have just received these thin blue books, every kid in the service passed a brand new copy by...
Day of Reckoning
A bell splits the silence before dawn, shattering the last fragments of a restless sleep. Dah-dong, Dah-dong, Dah-dong, Dah-dong! A merciful pause—then four more clangs vibrate through a labyrinth of halls. The window is still dark. I cover my head with the pillow and lie still. A whisper of fear runs through me. The day...
Melting
I am passing the library when I see them. Fourteen men walking down a side street, all dressed alike, all stepping to the same steady rhythm. They wear black brimmed hats with black ribbons; the kind all men used to wear before Jack Kennedy made the bare head appealing. They wear black suits and white...
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