Running Sacred

It was a season of running.

One year into a new life with new jobs, a new home in the Midwest, a seasoned but young marriage, many decisions of life pending. The retreat center close to home offered as good a running trail as any, complete with paved and woodland trails. I was running more and longer, almost as if I were afraid of something behind me, within me. Whatever it was, it was so close I could not seem to get away. The more deeply I felt it, the longer and faster I ran, not unlike a horse increasingly frightened by a riderless wagon hitched behind him. I entered the grotto near the end of a looped run, dappled by sun and shade. A Marian figurine towered above, whitened but for specks of outside toil. Two faded turquoise kneelers rested at the grotto’s base. Without anymore straight-aways to run, I slowed to a cantor, then to a trot, then to a walk. Exhausted, I lowered my body onto the faded pads of a kneeler. It felt strange to me, a running Protestant reined in close to a blessed Mother.

I looked up at her, of professed blessed status unknown to me. I heard myself ask what it was like for her, What was it like to offer your own body for inconceivably sacred purpose? A question of lengthy sacred trajectory, when I thought about it. “This is my body, given for you,” I heard. How does one offer one’s own body to another? To a stranger, to a beloved, for what purpose? Something in me stopped running. I could not outrun this, nor could I continue to try. I loved my husband. I yearned for him, but my body was being drawn to Her.

We set a time on the phone to meet at her house the next morning, but her husband had the flu. “Let’s meet at the Grotto,” she said. I put the old Celtic ring on my right index finger, to remember who I was, the beloved of a gentling Irish soul. It was old and familiar but now felt new, fragile, scarcely breathing. Her car was there when I arrived. We walked through the arbor and sat on a bench, in the gaze of the Marian figure. An autumn breeze picked up, rustling the leaves, making shadows dance on the brick tiles at our feet.

“I’m not sure how to begin,” I began. “At the very least, we cannot bathe as sacred that which is not.” Her eyes softened. She smiled. “I was thinking about you the other day,” she said. “I realized something remarkable.” An impish tone entered into her voice, a gentle strength with expansive warmth. “It feels like we’re married already somehow. Is not that wonderful?” She touched my hand, gently, covering it with her own.

All of me felt it at once—a sensate warmth, a tectonic shift, an easing of weight, an expansiveness beyond anything I’d ever known. Early childhood returned. There was no Shame. None. What had been was no more. Its clammy hold had released. Its deadening weight, its opaque veil, lifted. A light holy breath rushed into every dark space I had known. Even if it were to be for just that moment, I realized I would know for the rest of my life: the old, dusty language of my parents’ youth had a feeling. Sanctification could be sensed.  Its reality blossomed within my very bones. When offered, in the touch of her hand, a guilt-ridden body can be transfigured. The fragrance of erotic love overpowers all shame.

Today I smile, celebrating over a decade of marriage to my Irish beloved, the man who taught me of such anam cara loves, holy friendships between persons in most unexpected pairings. I smile today because what our over-culture decries as an abomination—an erotic love between women—was precisely what sanctified my body, cleansed my spirit, emboldened my soul, freed my mind. A stone rejected by the builders is the chief cornerstone of my life, the unruly, sensate lifeline to my Beloved in whom I know all the loves of my life. 

I smile today because the wonderful, terrifying thing is that this was not the first, nor the last run. This charging steed of life keeps finding me, others, running sacred within all those committed to love, overwhelmingly abundant only within bounds. “This is religion!” we say, in union with one and all.