Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Discursion: Faith (2)

I see the woman, sitting silent, alone, waiting for the bus that may or may not decide to pick her up today.

I think: same woman, same bus stop, same book in her hands. Where is she going? What is she doing? What is she reading?

The woman is a nun, as her quaint costume makes abundantly clear. She sits alone, silent, a human statue: perfect posture now habitual from years of training, browbeating, and, ultimately, ardent emulation. Her attention to the small book she holds is entire, unyielding.

And it takes several seconds for the understanding to occur: this is a cliché. Of course. But like any cliché worth its stench, there is a twist, a discernible fork in the future, a possibility.

Either: this woman-this quiet, meekly loyal, unreservedly religious woman-is, of course, reading the bible. For the thousandth time, the millionth? In her unremarkable way fortifying one of the increasingly intractable truths: the possibility still exists that custom and tradition count for something, are still worth attaining. And this woman, this archetype, beautifies what should not change, an innocence somehow not contaminated by our co-opted culture.

Or: it brings into sharp relief the pitiful, ceaseless certainty that our capacity for wonderment, our curiosity and confusion, are not strong enough to escape superstitions and easy answers: that anyone could find comfort, or meaning, in a ritualized routine, reading the same spurious words endlessly, unfolding their anti-mysteries into eternity.