Sacred Pyre

It is during my third panic attack that I think of the drum circles. I am a spectator, attached by a thin genetic thread, watching the mallets bounce over the taut drums. The vibrations travel through my heels into my jawline where the beat pulses into my head and slowly drowns out the ever-present dissonance. My heart changes its rhythm and falls in line, my blood moves into the dance.

I strain to remember that rhythm; I pull it back like a string, force it to move through me now. But I am powerless, as though my heart has been unstrung. While my mind races through some ancient, ancestral tundra, a bloodthirsty predator at my heels, the smaller part of my mind struggles for control, fights to sit still, breathe and relax. Grasping for control just makes everything slip more quickly through my fingers. I am running from myself.

At least I know now that I’m not dying—a monstrous fear that fueled my first panic attack. I was sure I was dying that night, half-resigned to the just punishment of scraping the bottom of an illicit batch of Seattle’s most-likely-laced dope in a desperate attempt at quiet (and God knows, in a family of addicts, I should know better). I was also half-terrified, begging God for mercy as I imagined the morbid irony for my parents when their one sober child died from an overdose. After twelve hours of that, when the stampede of wild horses in my blood slowed to a trot, I was relieved to be alive and wondered what the hell had just happened to me.

My second panic attack was an all-nighter of staccato Divine-Mercy’s under a blanket at my parents’ house on the evening of Easter. In the morning when I was still pale and paralyzed with fear, they drove me to a clinic, stupefied. A busy doctor handed me a brown paper bag. Take these. Small white pills. You’re just having a panic attack. Only just.

But the small white pills brought on a liquid melancholy. It started to feel like I was oozing through life, like an elongated object in a Dalí painting. And when I started to generate romantic visions of death, enough of me was present to know that it was time to throw out the small white pills. After that, the panic attacks were ignited by what appeared to be random coincidences: spicy salsa, an unexpected knock at the door, a whiff of marijuana from the apartment below me. And the coming-on of night.

It’s embarrassing. I’m too scared to be angry. And if I cry about it, I start to sink. So I keep my head gingerly above sanity and tread my little heart out.

A bushy-bearded, Quaker professor is the first to speak some words of relief: Just remember—you’re not going crazy. It feels like it. But you’re not going crazy. It’s not a tool I can use in this new, mind-bending struggle, but it’s a wrung in the ladder, something to hold onto when I’m drowning.

I try to thank God for suffering. I am a two-year-old Catholic at twenty-one. I recall the poetic trials from saints’ diaries, but I cannot make the words tangible in these marathons of fear. Instead, I grasp at the psalms, the ones I have recently repeated on Lenten Sundays: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Such a flair for the dramatic, I hear another part of me say. God hasn’t forsaken you; you have forsaken God. And then the string of insults begin; a shower of bullets shatter the sliver of stillness I have gained in the past five minutes. I am a mess again, like a jar of bees have been unleashed inside my head. If only I could drill a hole and release them all.

I pull again on that string of a memory—the steady beat of the drum circles, the ha-hum-ha-hum-ha-hum that could drown out the noise and tether my racing heart. But it’s too distant and disconnected. I am a chaos of percussion; I can’t stop thinking about everything and nothing all at once.

It is in this wave of madness that might just wash over me when I remember the Sacred Heart. I remember the day I walked into that dark, quiet church. It stretched its arms high over the top of me, like a canopy of branches. I ran my fingers along the wood wainscotting, smelled mildew mingled with frankincense, and walked towards the red flickering lamp like a dusty-winged moth. But it was all too foreign, too Catholic, with its statues of Mary and Men, its altar reminiscent of open, bleeding bulls, the likes of which Elijah called fire down upon.

I remember when I turned to the side and saw a statue of Jesus pushed into a corner, facing a small row of wooden pews. I sat there to rest, closed my eyes in practiced meditative prayer. But my eyes kept popping open to drink in more. And this statue of Jesus was oddly familiar. I shuffled through images in my head like a card catalogue and finally recalled where I had seen it: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. This Jesus with a heart-on-fire was the emblem of the gun-wielding Montagues. (At which, I let out an audible chuckle that echoed under the umbrella of Gothic arches above me.) His face was gentle, but his expression probing, as though there were words trapped on his resin lips. One hand extended, palm-up, and the other touched his on-fire heart.

I didn’t understand why I was drawn to this image, but I was. I returned again and again to that same place to pray, to probe, to wonder. And one day—and maybe here I prove that I really am crazy—I heard a voice that said, I am here. As a Quaker, I had been taught to listen to that still, small voice, and I had never heard it speak so distinctly before, with such gentle authority: I am here. Three times I heard it, and in between each I looked up and around as though lifting my head out of water, but I was indeed alone. I knew the voice came from within but was not a voice of my own making. I am here.

I would learn in time that Christ truly was there, potently present in the tabernacle, contained in a wispish wafer. But, at a time in my life when a dark, cold sanctuary was a preferred destination over anywhere, the voice spoke into the dissonance: I am here. For your comfort, for your strength. For your protection, for your consolation. For your light, for your warmth. For your food, for your drink. I am here for your body: to smell, to see, to hear, to touch, to taste—to tether you to this life, this flesh.

And, ultimately, that’s why I kept coming back. Before that moment, God only lived in my mind as an imagined, fragmented figure, pieced together through Bible stories and emotive experience. Suddenly, He was tangible, incarnational, something outside of myself.

But something I did not anticipate is how this incarnational God, who enters my blood stream like an antidote, lights something of a fire inside of me to smoke out the deepest, darkest corners that I ignore. I begin to understand that the whirlwind night of sacraments when I was baptized and welcomed into the Church was no one-night stand. And my heartbeat becomes the clanging symbol that reminds me I am alive now, which drums up a primal fear: everything I tried to kill and bury will rise up and breathe again.

So I start running from it: I run from the strong, rough hands that hurt me when I was helpless; I run from my own invisibility in a sea of people; I run from the overwhelming guilt that I have failed everyone. And through the vibrating bass of blood thumping through my ears, I think of Mary Magdalene’s deliverance from seven demons and wonder how many shadows are inside of me and how long will I have to live with them. How long, O Lord, how long? My heart would run away if it could find an escape. It would squeeze through my ear and bound away like a wild rabbit.

I imagine ripping it out of my chest— I would be free, the vibrations of the pounding gong present for only a few moments, but it would quickly fade as I held the thumping, wild thing in my hands. I would offer it to that tender gaze of Jesus. His resin lips would unseal and he would finally say with his own breath, I am here.

And He would take the sloppy, bloodied organ from my hands and join it to his sacred one. The flame would rise and grow from the fuel of my own heart; it would flicker blue and red, orange and gold, and in one great spasm of sparks, the flame would die down to a whisper once again. He would, with His own Creator-palm, place my heart, the wounds cauterized by love, into my chest. I would take one great gasp of air, feel the oxygen force open blood vessels that have contracted and the muscles that have contorted. I would listen for the drum of His heart and match mine to his, breathing in time.

Of course, I can only imagine this. But I do, repeatedly. During the third panic attack, the fourth, the fifth… It doesn’t fix me with one fell swoop, even though I want that so badly, like some Holy Spirit kamikaze; instead, it works a slow burn. Even after the debilitating panic attacks cease and it is only a steady trickle of fear I wrestle off to the side, I press my palm into my chest to remember. And when my heart threatens to break into a sprint, the Sacred Heart will be more than just a wrung of a ladder to reach for; it will be an anchor that tethers me to what is real.

I would, twenty years Catholic, continue to skim off resurfaced shadows, smoked out from the corners that Christ continues to penetrate. I offer them onto the sacred pyre of his heart where they are not destroyed, but reconciled, purified, and refashioned to the whole of me, as Christ’s wounds are to him. The steady beat of the Sacred Heart, like mallets bouncing off a taut drum, ha-hum-ha-hum-ha-hum, gather what is scattered. It guides the beat of my own, joins my body to its rhythm, my heels into its dance.