barrenness and trans/substantiation

lent diary #1

Day 1 No Airpods (Christ in the Desert, Kramskoi, 1872)

when was the last time you visited a place you knew last as a child?

I whiffed communion.

I join the line steadily making its way to the altar, white and gold. I have a leather jacket on. I should’ve left it in the pew. I didn’t expect to be here today - I was going to the beach, and was drawn by something to go inside. Now it’s communion. He holds the bread out to me. The body of Christ.

“What do I do?”

He blinks. “Oh, are you just here for the blessing?”

“Oh, no, I’m, uh, here for. That.”

He leans in. “Are you Catholic?”

“Yeah, it’s just been a while.”

He seems irked, or maybe I’m anxious. “Okay, so you take it in your hand.”

I do.

“Then in your mouth.”

My face burns a little. I scurry back to my pew. I overthought it, not knowing if there was a proper way to reply, to do this sacrament I haven’t done since I was a kid at St. Catherine’s in Temecula. I felt bad for holding up the line, for causing a short circuit in the Friar’s brain. He was just a Guest Friar, though, so I don’t think my reputation at St. Monica Catholic Church is tanked. Friar Kevin. Also, forgiveness is kind of the whole deal there, so.

Jesus was in a desert. I’m in Los Angeles. I’m not Jesus. I’m Elaina.

I’m not a boy in Temecula anymore. I’m a woman in Santa Monica, wondering what I should give up for Lent. Wondering if I should be in here at all.

I don’t have to say my name at any point, nor am I visibly trans or dykey, whatever those mean. I just get to listen, listen as Friar Kevin traces the journey of Jesus in the wilderness, besting temptations by remembering God’s declaration that he was his Beloved Son, no matter what. He didn’t need to earn a thing, nor prove himself. He was fully human; that’s how he was tempted. He was also fully divine; that’s how he didn’t give in. Fully both.

We’re only one of those things. Maybe. We hold contradictions, too. Like the Eucharist, like Jesus, we can be both material and symbolic. My body is a symbol of change, of possibility, of contradictions. I am also a very material, fleshy human whose heart is always breaking over some girl, whose stomach often twists in knots of anxiety and indigestion, and whose brain often races with fear about the possible loss of very material medicine that has very material effects on my very material body.

Oh, Jesus, my tits.

It’s very likely that a body like mine is not welcome in this place. Yet I still believe the Church does hold things for me. A space to reflect, at least. Ways of living a better life, maybe. As someone who has chronically felt undesirable, who feels like they must earn love, who craves validation and praise, it’s comforting to hear that maybe we can just live. Live in the love that’s already there.

So what have I given up?

Music. Well, more specifically, listening to music while out in the world. If I’m at home, or studying in the library, Spotify’s my oyster. The bus also doesn’t count (it’s baby’s first lent, I need a few assists).

But if I’m just walking to class or the store or just around? I open my ears and stay fully open to the world. I just listen.

The world is not a barren desert that I need music to bear existing in. I don’t need to try and escape. I don’t need to listen to Silver Jews to pretend I’m in Seattle, my home away from home. I don’t need to blast SOPHIE to transport myself to the world of the play I’m writing, the one that exists somewhere between Greece and cyberspace. I don’t need to play Bob Dylan on loop to play romantic scenarios over and over in my head. I can listen to the birds, to the distant white noise of L.A. traffic, to the wind. To scraps of conversations, to set-ups to strangers’ jokes whose punchlines are rushed away by passing cars.

If I really need music, I sing to myself. I realized that I don’t have that many songs memorized, even the ones I listen to on constant loop. I’ve never needed to have them off the top of my head. But I’m getting better. I’m learning a song at a time on guitar, really practicing until I can play through without missing a word or a chord. I’ve got "It Ain't Me, Babe" down pat. So there’s that.

I still can’t slow my brain all the way down. I still need to fill the relative quiet sometimes, and talk to myself under my breath if I’m not singing. Writing scenes, working through problems, replaying old conversations, fantasizing. Whatever God is in the air is drowned out by my own incessant monologue. I’m trying to talk less, listen more. Give my voice more clarity, more confidence, when it does appear. Trust me, I’m not trying to silence it completely.

---

If only it were absolutely quiet here at times.
If averageness and happenstance grew silent
and the neighbor's laugh,
the noise my high-strung senses make
would not prevent my staying awake-

I could in one millennial thought
conceive you in your farthest reach
and could possess you (like a fleeting smile)
and dole you out as gifts with gratitude
to all of life

(Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours)

---

So here’s to at least a few more weeks of hearing more punchlines, feeling more love, singing with my own voice, and listening in a gentler way. I hope this doesn’t come off as proselytizing, or self-help B.S., or masturbatory. It’s just words on a screen. Words that might’ve come from my lips, spoken out loud to myself, floating out into the silence, vanishing.

This world is not silent. This world is not barren.

e.l.m.