Consummatum Est

In the last few years before her death, my mother talked to herself. Or rather, she talked to someone.

Throughout my life, during her years on this earth, the kitchen was Mother’s place of abiding. She spent most of her waking hours within its warm, productive walls. In those last years before she passed from this life, whenever I was home with her, if I came into the kitchen quietly, I would often find her talking quietly as she worked. It seemed that she was talking to herself, but perhaps she was having a dialogue with God, or with an angel, or with a long-dead loved one. I do not who was on the other end of these quiet conversations, but I do know that I never had an uneasy reaction to what I heard. There was no hint of mental illness or irrational muttering. Her words were soft, measured, deliberate, the tempo and phrasing akin to the sort of conversations we have late at night when others may be dozing in the next room or over there on the sofa. When I would interrupt her at one of these times, she would instantly go silent, but she never seemed embarrassed or nonplussed. She seemed simply to have ended or put on hold a genuine, natural exchange.

Again, I do not know whether she was sounding the depths of her own breast, or if she was pouring out her heart to someone, or if she was seeking supernatural help. What I do know is that I am my mother’s son, and I often catch myself doing things that remind me of her. I sometimes become aware while watching a movie that my mouth is slightly open and my head inclined just a bit, just as Mother’s would be when she watched television. Occasionally I fall asleep in my chair with my chin down on my chest, and I come awake with a start, looking around with quick, guilty glances to see if my wife has caught me napping.

Good Friday was today a cold day, early morning snow pellets being driven across the green grass by a terrible wind. After a week of summer-like temperatures, the day felt especially raw. When I ventured outside to cut some brush, my dog Jinx squinted into the wind as he tried to interest me in postponing the work for a bit of playtime. I spent some time cutting the brush and stacking it in the wheelbarrow, only to watch Jinx pull branches from the wheelbarrow and prance through the yard with them in his mouth, head held high. The whipping wind dashed my laughter against the trees and the sound was lost to the day.

The trees. I moved among them, weaving my way in and out as I worked, stopping every now and then to stare up at them, the whipping high branches, just starting to wear the green, not yet casting a shade. As always when I look up from next to their thick trunks, I thought of them as columns in my cathedral, supporting the ceiling of blue heaven, the high expanse through which fly the angels and memories. And as I moved among them, I found myself talking to myself.

Unlike the fragmentary conversations I heard in Mother’s kitchen, there was no question about whom I was talking to. I was not praying to God, not beseeching the saints, not summoning the angels. I was truly talking to myself. Asking myself the questions that become more important to me with every trek of the sun across the sky. The whys and hows about myself, about my inabilities to do this, or to eschew that, or to believe that certain thing, or to accept this belief. And even more frequently, the questions are What am I to believe? How am I to know? Men have shown themselves to be false and feckless, completely unbelieving the teachings they have lorded over the heads of meek believers for centuries. Does this seem a harsh statement? There is a harsher element than my voice, harsher than the cutting wind of the morning of Good Friday. The harsher element is the body of clean, quiet waters that flow at a place called Lourdes. The place of healing has been sealed by men who do not believe the waters have the powers. What am I to believe? How am I to know?

And those of us who ask honest questions are looked at with narrow eyes. To ask, to weigh, to delay decision…these are the marks of troublemakers, of the contentious. Which of us who ever honestly asked the elemental questions truly desired the reputation of a troublemaker? Few, I suspect. This label is coveted by those who don’t care enough to try to believe in anything. Such people merely want attention, like neglected urchins.

But those of us who talk to ourselves get tossed into the same cell with the deliberately contentious. We mutter and whisper, living in our homes and moving through small clouds of incense, our troubled faces lit by candles, our fingers restlessly moving across the beads and the corpus, reading our books and our scripture deep into the tiring hours of the night, worrying with our doubts, tormented by our doubts, and looking up to our ceilings to check and see if just this one time, someone will show us that we are heard, that our petitions matter, that our whispers have not been dashed against the trees by the frigid currents of wind.

I cannot speak for all those who talk to themselves, but I can say that I follow — as best I am able — the Son of the Living God, the One Who declared His work to be accomplished.  I cling to what I have, what I have been given, but I want more. I want clearer answers. I want strength to supplement my weakness, my pathetic weakness. Does this make me an enemy? Does it make me troublesome?

Night has come down on Good Friday, and the small creatures have already followed their timeless patterns and tucked themselves away until Holy Saturday. For me, I will sit and think some more. While my wife sleeps, I will likely move on quiet feet to the back bedroom, light a candle and some incense, and sit before the crucifix above me and the statue of the Virgin to my side. My lips will move and I will speak. My lips will move and I will pour out my words.

~ S.K. Orr