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The grief made sense. I was giving up on half my life. My hopes for the future. I’d have to mourn that loss.
I’d always thought I’d have a wife. A partner. Surelysomeoneshould have come along by now so that when I went to Father Vasili, I’d be asking to be ordained a married member of clergy.
Celibacy was my future now. I could almost grasp that. But there was something so muchworse.
Loneliness.
Long decades of watching, as an outsider, as the kids of my congregation grew into teenagers, then college students. Then hopefully, if they hadn’t grown weary of religious tradition by then, I’d officiate their weddings. I’d spend my years counseling newlyweds with wisdom I could only glean from books, crowning young couples in love, then crowning their children thirty years later.
God could have shown me a woman atany timeduring this last decade I’d spent preparing to do His work. Any woman at all.
No. That wasn’t exactly true. Or fair.
None of the collar chasers at seminary had turned my head. At least, not for longer than a chaste date at the local diner.
There wasonewoman I wanted.
A certain doe-eyed, red-lipped, elfin-faced anthropologist popped into my head every time I’d prayed for a partner during the last couple years.
I had to stop picturing her now, no matter what it did to me whenever I heard her deep, husky laugh when our conversations lasted too late into the night, both of us punch drunk from too much work and too little sleep. I wouldn’t picture her sheet of silky black hair that kissed her shoulders in that black sundress with the tiny straps she’d worn the other night when we’d prayed together. I definitely wouldn’t picture that odd smile she cracked whenever she saw me in my seminarian’s robe, or her sitting in the middle pew of the church when she attended with Soula, head bent over the Liturgical guidebook with the cutest look of determination on her face as she tried to decipher the Greek pages.
I rolled onto my back and wiped my hand down my face, scrubbing my short beard. Anything to snap Decca’s face out of my mind. But it was futile. I couldn’t help it if I’d been attracted to a woman I shouldn’t want. Attraction was just attraction. Except the imageI’d just told myself Iwouldn’tpicture seemed permanently etched into my brain.
Now I’d have to do whatever it took to scratch it off.
She wasn’t mine.
She’d never be mine. She’d never want me or the duties that accompanied my job. The church would never see her as a presvytera—the wife of a priest.
Thunder roared outside the thin attic walls. My eyes shot to the small window. Silver flashed against the distorted glow from the streetlamp. The rain raged harder, crashing against the door three floors below. Sounding more like ten-foot waves against the hull of a fishing vessel.
I covered my eyes with my arm, the pressure relieving some of the tension.
God, please. You calmed the tempest on the Sea of Galilee. Calm the tempest in my heart.
I’m not Jesus. I can’t sleep through this.
Of all the Orthodox iconography I’d seen and texts I’d studied, it was Rembrandt’s painting I envisioned in that moment. The darkness and despair he poured out on the canvas with oils and pigments matched what was in my heart.
What utter desperation the Apostles must have felt during that storm.
We are perishing,they cried out.
Out on the open water. No hope of saving themselves. Walls of water crashing over the gunwales, cracking the hull like an eggshell. Threatening to pitch them overboard to drown in a frenzied, sucking sea.
But God didn’t just quell the storm. He rebuked the sea and the winds. To the disciples, he asked,Why are you fearful?
As if imminent death wasn’t reason enough.
Why am I fearful?
How shallow is my own faith, that I haven’t placed my trust fully in Him?
That was a dumb question. I already knew the answer. It was because He had already provided for me once, in my last hour. Two end-of-life favors were too much to ask.
I closed my eyes. Just for a minute. It was late. I’d been determined to pray through the night, but when the church fathers instructed us to pray without ceasing, they didn’t mean it literally.
I almost didn’t hear the knock.
