Chapter 12 To Render this Moment Appropriate

You can hide ‘neath your covers,
And study your pain.
Make crosses from your lovers,
Throw roses in the rain.
Waste your summer praying in vain,
For a savior to rise from these streets.

Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road

The sun stretches across a crisp sky on this new day, and I’m far from God, wrestling this notion of faith and raising the stakes on grace. I'm caught in this seemingly eternal cycle of fist shaking and then surrender while I hide from some perceived arrival of wrath.

Thankfully, the Boss knows some pain too, some angst, maybe on my behalf, because he’s luring me away from something, perhaps to something, or, at least, he’s doing it for some girl named Mary. I guess, really, he’s just a voice coming through these speakers, a recorded memory of him from way back then -- as in, when Carter was taking liver pills.

But with or without the real Bruce, I hide ‘neath these covers, as if it's possible to find something better under here. I wander through these shadows for a time, tempted to a second home of the most painful sort. If this thing we follow after is too good to be true, then, well, maybe it isn't; true, that is.

And it is here, in this other place, lost as usual, where I speak ever so softly, as I have many times before, in the chapters that fall backward. It is here where I do indeed make crosses from my lovers, those unseen temptresses who beckon and sequester me.

In here, I’m afraid to raise my voice. I will not cry uncle, for I’m afraid of tears, too, as if perhaps I’ll awaken something too emasculating, and that just won’t do. It’s not like I want to study my pain, or even bear this shame in a dark corner of my own creation. I just want to gently go about my recovery from this.

So, it comes out, scratchy, like a hoarse muttering for him; for only him with ears to hear.

Will You look for me? Will you stretch across this distance and find me? Will You pick me up because I’ve stumbled, again? Will You fill this dark and desperate place with some type of light?

And so, that’s what I whisper today, just another day inside the shadowed bowels of the Rialto, with enough construction debris at my feet to render this moment appropriate for my mood, this lurking spiritual ennui and muck and mire.

Then, looking up at the place where a screen once was, where sparkling images filled Saturday afternoons; where memories were born, night after night; where one fateful season, more skin was revealed than a humble Greek immigrant ever imagined possible -- right there, is a light, which seems to have no source, streaming in as if it is welcome, completely at home and perfectly fitting for this moment.

I start searching for what this could be -- this illumination -- so, I put my hand in front of a work light, for I’m sure it’s just some reflection. Or maybe there’s a hole in the wall, out into daylight; a new one that we’ve not yet discovered.

But that's not it, so I start to climb toward the balcony. Maybe something is coming in from a side window, working its way through the stairwell, bouncing this way and that off of a piece of scrap metal or broken glass.

Still nothing, so I’m upstairs now and I put my hand in front of the projection room and see the shadow outline of my hand all the way across the theater. Sure enough, light is streaming in from a front window, across the entire second floor, into the small space that holds those old fire-breathing projectors, past them and through a rough hewn hole, beaming like a laser right up to the front screen where flickering bits of celluloid once created magic, of various sorts.

Light is piercing from one end of the building to the other, effortlessly, straight as an arrow.

This finds no electrical source, no bending reflection; it just is, across this upper room of my inability to stay good, down into darkened closets, these portals of sin, straight on through the rough hewn holes of this heart.

Maybe it is all just so true that what we think is good can't ever contain it.

Could it be that a Savior would rise from these streets? I think so; really I do, but what am I waiting for -- because he already has. Nothing else can explain this turn of events, this twisting of fortune, as I stand ankle deep in pieces of history that have been waiting for new life; yes, even despite this shadow I create to divert a stream of continuous Light, who moves straight on through the middle of me, across the whole span of me really, and endeavors to overcome it all, come what may.

So then, maybe through these whispers, I’m not praying in vain, so I’ll get a little louder, more confident, in fact, if I know I’m alone, in a conventional sort of way.

Unfold and unravel me! Search me deep within. Sweep away the cobwebs and shadows of bitterness, indecision, judgment, lust and pride.

Turn me upside down. Find me unholy, unworthy, unabashed and take every square inch and reconfigure me. Reshape and retool me.

I walk downstairs, out into the day where the sun has indeed stretched across the sky. I'm found again, pierced by truth as if it is welcome, completely at home and perfectly fitting for this moment.