Mass of the Transfiguration at St. Margaret of Scotland, Seattle

I. Seattle

The weathered old man in a hooded sweatshirt, stained heather gray, his thin hair as gray though tinged with gold—he looked as if he came from the sea. He sat facing away from me, facing the altar, in the scrollwork pews. On the wooden seat in front of me I could see the boredom of children that had skated on its glassy face—scrawling fingernails or pencil points—while their mother knelt, while the priest prayed,“May you make of us an eternal offering.”

The absurd hands of Christ, fingers extended, opened wide with nails driven through the center. Absurd, emaciated, pale, bloodless, this Christ hanging from the rafters of this Polish church—this Polish church named for Margaret of Scotland. Graffiti marks the bus-stop and the sidewalk just beyond its gates, its stone stairs, its grotto. Gulls mix their sound with the intermittent wail of sirens.

Let us pray.

O God, who in the glorious Transfiguration of your Only Begotten Son confirmed the mysteries of faith by the witness of the Fathers…

The man from the sea looked like Mr. Gower from It’s a Wonderful Life. Not the man softened with gratitude bellowing “Auld Lang Syne,” but the druggist in the throes of sorrow—drunk and darkened with the loss of his son. The man crumbling before a tower of pills and peroxide and poison. The man too far sunk to cling to anyone or anything. The capsules are filled, but they fall to the floor. He looked like that Gower, at least he did to me, from behind. My imagination filled in gaps with the muted gray of old movies. That is, until he turned to give the sign of peace and he looked nothing at all like Mr. Gower. The sea, too, had drained from his face. He put his glasses on just to gesture peace right past me to someone he must have known, someone he must have needed a bit of help seeing. I kind of wish he remained as I had imagined him, a man that walked straight out of the waves, a salt-bitten pylon or some weeping pier—a perch to the gulls, hovering smoke to these hills, sending their call out to the tossing salt sea.

In this church perched atop a steep hill, a stilled undulation in concrete, scrawled over with graffiti and spotted with the shit of the crying smoke gulls; this church that stitches together Scotland and Poland; this church of the dying Son, of the risen Son, of the only Begotten Son; the old Polish Priest is calling us brothers, sisters, friends: intoning, telling us softly, almost inaudibly, never to fear.

The thought of my wife and my children, of the wild cragged path that brought me here, brings me to my knees, beckons me to find center in the hung heart, from the rafters, to find center in the wound of the driven nail. I am on the edge of tears.

…then from the cloud came a voice that said,

“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

His beloved, the Lord, before whom the mountains melt like wax into the sea. The sea that tosses, sea like memory that dredges up a man like mud from its silted deep, like my heather-covered Gower in gray who lost a son, who drowns in the salt tears of his sorrow and his loneliness and his pain. What if God was like Gower, crumbling over irrecoverable loss? What if he too drowned in his tears? Became a pylon, a pier weeping wax tears melting before the thought of His only begotten: tortured, murdered, abandoned, never to return? What if death could have eclipsed the life that was the light of men? But no, the Lord shines forth ever more brilliantly alive and in glory. Before His countenance, we melt like mountains; we slide, cragged and crimson, into the wine-dark sea. We the lost sons and daughters, who once fed on swill to tame our starved, wrecked freedom, will emerge with Him white as wool bowing in endless return, an open palm to the ring.

O God, who in the glorious Transfiguration of your Only Begotten Son…wonderfully prefigured our full adoption to sonship…

At the foot of His Cross, His throne, his Most Precious Blood pours forth as fire, gushes forth in waves of wax and of sea. This fire is never spent. The Lord is King and His throne is the Cross and His nailed hands, his absurdly extended, clawed fingers open to us the only way home. The mountains are melting like wax into the sea.

And on this mountain,

“This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.”

This voice is never spent, rings on still in the ringing bell as Christ enters this sanctuary, becomes present upon the altar. It rises in the “morning star” over the melting mountains and the tossing salt sea, urges the raging, the bitter, the bent to death among crumbling towers and loss and memory and sorrow to “Rise and do not be afraid.”

II. St. Margaret of Scotland

St. Margaret prayed over every thread she wove into their vestments. The cloth was gold or dark red, purple or cream, or the color of things underfoot, the color of grass, of dry dirt, or of sand. She threaded thin hairs of the sky at dawn or of the evening into the fabric interlaced with the salt of her tears. The ocean, too, would live in the fabric. She prayed often and alone in a cave by a stream standing vigil through the night, threading her sorrow into the fabric dark, letting her tears fall for the sake of her children. Her soft palms to the cool mossed stone, the warmth of her prayer soaked through the walls, into the porous night. The gulls are still crying. The Mass is ended, and we are sent in peace. We must go among the white-winged weaving endless patterns with their cries—invisible string that tangles the pliant heart, leaves it dangling. Until Kingdom come, or the mountains melt into the sea. Their presence, like the steepness of the hills, the scrawled impatient vulgarity of the bus stop, the boredom of sameness, it all remains after Mass, after the Transfiguration. It will not end until Kingdom come. They may cry forever.

It will not always sound so much like weeping. It doesn’t to the child of the sea.

I am struck by the thought of Scotland and its “Pearl,” the saint who found herself washed ashore there. I am struck by the thought of Margaret weeping tears of nacre, of sadness as well as of joy, always recognizing her true home with the longing of exile.

Here in this church, I clutch at what the salt sea has opened its mouth to give me. Its stony heart hardens to a pearl in the soft flesh of my palm. I press it with my fingers. It is not too precious for me. I would trade it to get back to the place that I came from, the place that carries me, that I carry with me, but it is not mine to give away. It was given to me to clutch in my weakness, like the rosary beads I gave my son when I thought he would need stitches across his eyebrow. I clutch it in my own stained gray frailty, in my stretched imagination pinched like a sheet between clothes on a line or held taut between the backs of chairs. It’s only a matter of time until I return to my children, their sea of pillow softness huddled up in my fortress ineptitude. The sun is neither rising nor setting, but in this transfiguration, all is caught ascending.

Cover me in the mantle of St. Margaret’s tears, the tears of the sea, wept to bury the encroaching threat. Enfold this fear in her embroidery, crush the star’s brilliance into spun gold, into the iridescent strands of threaded care. Weave us through the sky before morning, hold us all together. St. Margaret, cover us in your mantle, seal us with closed lips, your most precious and kept. Cover us with something precious, lest our suffering be trampled to dust, having lost its savor. Cover your children, like your mother before you covered you. May the mantle of ardor for our true heavenly home, that covered you, cover us all.

Let your devotion cover over us, harden into a hidden, beaded heart over time, formed as we are “in this our exile.” Cover us, for we cannot clutch or hold or possess, under these roofs which we raise to keep out the gray days of the hard falling rain. Yet, you hold us, O Lord. You hold us as precious gems in your mercy. Cleanse us, cover us in the woven thread of your mother’s tears, make of us, O Lord, what you will. Make of us an eternal offering to You.

Our hearts are beggars, having been born into exile, shipwrecked. Spat out onto this parched land Be our refuge, turn our suffering into the gemmed dew of morning. Let the unworthy palm of this earthly kingdom yield to the touch of remembrance. Let it be open to the treasured bread we bear in our bodies, that is beyond our own keeping—the pearl of so great a price, worth all the hills of Scotland, of all the waves of the tossing salt sea.

Mary, you were Margaret’s refuge. She gave her body to enfold and form the flesh, blood, and bone of kings and queens, to enfold all of Scotland. She walked along that country’s glens and burns, along the stone walls, embroidered the night breathing the warmth of its hearth fires in another exile, bringing to life the poured blood of Her Savior: in the scarlet threaded bodies of her sons and daughters, in the bread broken for the life of beggars, in the tread of devotion that seeped through the cracks of her stone prayer—a light that is the life of men, the brilliance of which the stars could but approximate. The stars are stale crumbs to the leavened loaves of her supplication, droplets to the parched earth of her thirst for mercy, specks of salt to the soot sea of her indiscernible pleadings, her inexhaustible hope. Feed us with these stars. Whisper of home to us, in your cave song.

When I think of Margaret of Scotland in this church where the Polish priest prays, I wish I could see her face. Not a stone likeness, or glass, or paint, just the flesh and skin curve of her features, of her cheekbones where the tears carved their path down to her thread, to the stone cave floor, to the loam of the glen, to the burn, to the sea. Her body has returned to the earth, interred, awaiting the resurrection. Only her bones are left, though no one knows where, having been lost to the cruel theft of the ages. I wish I could clutch her cheekbone to my chest, cover it with tears, mingle mine with hers. How she must have wept rejoicing in her hope, even as she clutched her Black Rood to her chest at the death of her son, and of Malcolm. How she must have wept, widowed in a tower, her royal train flung along the floor. Maybe she fell close to the cold stone begging for a clean heart, weeping tears that can never truly be swept away, emptying the sea she carried within her.

If I close my eyes for a moment, I hear her singing of exile and of home. I hear in her—daughter, bride, mother, queen, sister in Christ—a beggar, as we all are, trying to scrounge every morsel of His presence. She will not keep it to herself. She will break it and feed it to me. We will eat. We will swallow the stars, become a watered garden, a spring gushing thick through the cracks in the fingers of all that we fight to clutch and to keep.

Until our tears turn once more to the joy they are meant for, and they carry us home.

III. Home

The voices of children are transparent. Ours are clouded, green, tumbled by age and words like glass by the sea. Our voices find their way back to shore, no longer sharp in their brokenness, no longer clear as they were when we were children. Our tears fall silently, catch fire, and are purged. They will fructify the good earth if we let Him carry them away; the flickering night burns and blooms like blown glass at his breath. We will find our way home, enfolded in the night’s dark mantle.

In the dark as in the forest alone, laying beneath birch trees which shed their skin like paper beside a running stream, voices do not seem to matter. Neither do words, beyond the forest’s edge where the blackberries grow. These paper trees lean toward life, as they lean toward death. This stream rushes. The thorn of the bramble grows along with the berry which conceals its sweetness within its darkness. The green moss clings and the young shoots rise. The roots dig deep beneath the surface, composed in the most meaningful silence. Only He could speak anything worthwhile here.

It is a Monday morning, after Mass, and walking past the gravestones that line the valley of my small forgotten coal town, I think of Seattle. I think of its hills and gulls, of Gower and St. Margaret. I listen for her prayer as I press my ear to a stone, as I press my ear to the trunk of a tree, I pray for those drunk with loss and sorrow. I watch boulders gather silt as the water without words runs clear and true. I think of my wife and our children with glass voices. I think of the life we lead, the life we lean toward, that we clutch too recklessly. There are no words to hide behind here; we are all see-through.

What has passed our lips as food, O Lord, may we possess in purity of heart…

A vision of my youngest daughter: she is sitting on the floor, a fleck of sun upon the nape of her neck, her chestnut hair pulled loosely back, her smile aimed at the dog she has come to love. The uneven exchange of every instant, of something lost and of something gained, is brought to life for me in this moment. I try my best to hold it, but I cannot clutch such a thing. I am swept up in it, covered. I can’t imagine carrying this to my death. I pray it will live on well past the time when my body turns to bone. I pray that as my life goes on beyond the grave, that I will keep this vision with me, that such an exchange will live endlessly as I behold my Maker, as He beholds this gift of vision he bestowed upon me beneath the birch trees, beside this stream, where the berries grow so dark and so sweet; as He held me, dumbfounded with joy as with sorrow, in the rooms of our living where our precious children once played so tenderly without the urgency of words, with voices so clear.

“…that what has been given to us in time, may be our healing for eternity.”

In that same room where my daughter played earlier that day, beside the ticking clock, there is a window which opens out to the hills. It is framed in cruciform lines, painted white but now yellowed like teeth. There’s a crucifix on the wall and bread in the oven. The gilded inside edges of this cheap imitation of the one hung in San Damiano claims my attention as it glows in the slanted light. It is lit up as if from within. The calm gaze of the hanging Lord seems to address me as He did Francis, “Go and rebuild my church.” He says it to us all between the ticking clock and the growing grass on the hills.

We give names to the things that grow as if to claim them: the flower and the vulture, the scent of the earth at the first fall of rain. Petrichor, like love, like petrifaction, like stone turned into the air. All transfigured for our keeping into words. We make our home with them. His voice is calling.

Before going to sleep, I sit awake in the darkness with these words beyond utterance, where names too seem to lose meaning. We’ve been given the dark. It is ours in our wombed beginning; its song stays with us, is sung deep into winter, as we yearn for hearth and light.

We, the lost and weary, move through these valleys feeling our way along with those we’ve been entrusted to love. There will be loss on the way. There will be suffering. Our wallpaper memory will peel and yellow, fade slowly into snapshots. We pray there will be morning and there will be milk. We pray for others, in their loss, like constellations etched in our sky, thrown like satellites, like shadows cast in the long halls of remembrance, on the sea-blue mantle of our mother’s care. All will take the shape of the cross if we carry them within us, never alone, in the cave-mouth dark, through the bramble forest, under the swept moon, covered in His Precious Blood, yoked. He carries us unto rest. We will make our way back, in our return through these valleys, giving way to the horizon where heaven kisses the earth, where the star’s ladder touches our tread. Tired we come—bound as we were to trudge the plain and field of our wonder over rock and the packed path of earth. Our alabaster jars are no longer filled to overflowing. We have dropped our precious ointment along the way.

But your voice, Lord, carries our wept song home. Give ear, all the earth, to the voice that is sweet and calm and fierce in its calmness. The Word carrying us through the night on its winged breath of stillness and sweetness, carries us wearied and lost and far from home, with opened unworthy palms, mouths wide in supplication, like children clinging through the dark night for bread and for fire. Let our song for home no longer sound so much like weeping; let it become like glass, with light breaking through it, transparent beyond words, transfigured.