On Kneeling

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

I’ve started kneeling. Scarcely, I’ll admit, and only when I’m alone in the Catholic Student Center’s chapel, but I’ve started. It’s a slow process. I scoot to the edge of my seat, dig my fingertips into the upholstery of the chair in front of me, and let the chair back hold my weight while I lower myself to the ground. My forearms shake when I lower myself. The tendons overlaying my knuckles press against the inside of my skin. They form creamy white stripes, lines that made me mistake tendons for bones as a child. I do not know why I tremble when I kneel. I am not particularly heavy, not weak-jointed. But my jutting veins and flexed wrists tell of strain.

Here’s a story in one sentence: curious essayist-of-faith creeps into her local Catholic Student Center one Wednesday to scope out its viability as a public writing space, finds herself consumed by the way devotion and tradition swim within the building’s walls. Or here’s that same story put another way: I watch a Lenten prayer service from behind sanctuary glass, my head bobbing with the bodies that move up and down to pray, to bless, to taste the Body, to enter the pew, and I want to join them for reasons that remain hidden to me. Or one more way to spin it: Christ crucified, suspended from the sanctuary ceiling with steel cables, beckons an onlooker to drop her quasi-gnosticism and worship in body and spirit. So many stories, so many vantages, all foretelling the same story of my strained hands and bent knees.

In the Protestant circles I come from, people do not kneel. We sit. We stand. We sit again. The first time I saw a kneeler in a Catholic sanctuary, I thought it was a footrest. But then I watched a woman lift a white lace veil over her hair and flip the kneeler down from the chair back and set herself upon its cushion. She showed me a devotion I thought extinct or hidden, a devotion that for all its bodily visibility was still somehow private. I have no way of knowing what the woman prayed. I just know she did so with meekness, and that it felt like an invitation, which is why I now associate kneeling with Catholic heritage. “Catholic” the way the Apostle’s Creed means it, the universal church, the billions of believers spanning centuries and traditions who have dropped to their knees in worship, reverence, humility, something else, something fleeting and holy that can only be found down here. Let me learn by paradox, the Puritan poet writes, that the way down is the way up. So I go down.

It feels awkward, which is something I’ve yet to hear anybody say. Probably because we long for romantic accounts of our devotional kneeling, accounts where the Holy Spirit rushes through us, lowers us with mystic winds. But might I report this? The carpet of the Catholic Student Center is thin, like the skin on the back of my hands, and the rows of chairs are so close together that I fear I’ll bump my nose against the chair back on my way down. And when I kneel, I can only see the Christ statue at the front of the sanctuary from the hips up.

But still I kneel, sometimes with clasped hands, sometimes holding fast to the chair in front of me, because I suspect kneeling is a type of prayer that transcends words. When I cannot find the syllables to explain my confusion or awe or need, I can lower my body onto the carpet and let my drooping shoulders speak for me. When I fear my pride will drive me straight to the heavenly throne with a riotous list of complaints, I can stoop down as a corrective. Sure, I feel awkward in this position, but maybe that’s part of the discipline. Maybe the skin on my knees, white like strained knuckles, pressed hard into the carpet, is meant to feel numb, meant to make me feel my need. It reminds me that worship does not always feel suave. I wonder if that’s the point. We’re meant to feel strange and wobbly on our knees. We’re meant to reach out for a tether, something upon which to lean. And there in our flailing we find the Christ, the God-man, The One who condescended to meet us in our lowly humanity, The One who comes down even further to meet us in even lower places. Like here upon this kneeler, in humble posture. Of course we’d find Him down here.