Bell, Book, and Candle: A rite of excommunication by the Roman Catholic Church during ancient times, when after a sentence was read from the "book," a "bell" was rung, and a "candle" (the Light) extinguished.

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Carillon

Rarely do I hear church bells anymore. It is, I suppose, a matter of proximity. In the part of Northern Virginia where I live, there are many churches, but either they do not ring bells, or if they do, the sound does not travel far enough to reach my ears.

In Euclid, Ohio, where I was born, and in other, older suburbs that surround Cleveland, carillons rang at six o’clock in the morning, at noon, and again at six in the evening, though I cannot recall ever noticing the precision of this schedule. Growing up in a crucible of second-wave European immigration, one couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Episcopalian parish dedicated to one saint or another. The pealing of bells was as much a part of the atmosphere as the morning chatter of sparrows, the rumble of school busses, or any other quotidian sounds that mark the passing of time in a child’s day.

Remnants of my parents’ Polish-Catholic upbringing accented our home: In my bedroom, a statue of Joseph stood on the window sill, for protection; somewhere in our front yard, a statue of Saint Anthony was buried to prevent theft or loss; pale palms from Easter mass peaked out from a crucifix that hung in the family room. Cathedral bells blended with Polish customs and carols from the Andy Williams holiday album into a giant metronome that carried my brother and me from Wagilia (Polish Christmas Eve) through Easter. We practiced Opwatki, bestowing blessings upon one another with wafers and honey, and we always left enough mushroom soup in our bowls “for the donkey” that brought Joseph and Mary into Bethlehem. On Easter Sunday, we offered a little prayer to the white, coconut-flaked Lamb of Christ cake in its grassy green basket before cutting into it for a slice.

My mother aspired, at one time in her young life, to become a nun. Something in the oblique gaze and flowing robes of Madonna statuary spoke to her. When organ pipes bellowed and plumes of spicy incense wafted down the aisles of the Polish cathedral she attended as a child, the spell must have been intoxicating.

My father grew up an all-star altar boy who accompanied the parish priest on Kolenda—the Polish custom of blessing homes with holy water and marking front doors with the initials of the Magi—C, M, and B (Casper, Melchior and Balthazar). He sang carols with other altar boys while the ritual was performed, and waited patiently in another room whenever a devoted Polish wife offered the priest a dram of whisky or a few tightly wadded bills, “for the church, for the church…”

Angelus

Much like my mother’s adoration of Mary, I developed my own crush, on angels. The ethereal Blue Angel from Disney’s Pinocchio captivated me, and I begged for a Halloween costume that would transform me into her. I sufficed with an oversized set of wings my mother cut from cardboard and fastened to me with ribbons that criss-crossed over my chest and tied in back.

The idea of guardian angels held great appeal, and I wondered if mine could see me, or if I might ever see them. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a book I devoured at a young age, I hovered over the last stanza of Jo’s poem to Beth: Hope and faith, born of my shadow, Guardian angels shall become.” I dreamt up complicated tales about humans and angels that ended in denouements of glitter, stars, and righteousness.

One time, I accidentally broke the hand-painted, porcelain wing of our Christmas creche angel by zooming it through the living room like an airplane as part of some magical narrative in my mind. Several days passed before my father caught sight of the angel, grounded in the stable beneath the Christmas tree, its broken wing bound by scotch tape. Perhaps my guardian angel was with me then, for I do not recall any sort of punishment.

Spiritus

My mother did not shield me from news or history about the darkness of the world. By 1980 I had read Anne Frank’s diary and seen the movies Holocaust and Doctor Zhivago on television. The Iranian hostage crisis dominated the national news, and at school and home my girlfriends and I were warned about strangers in cars who might harm, or do worse, to young girls. I wondered where the guardian angels had gone.

The concept of death was shadowy and therefore fascinating. During visits to the neighborhood library, I gravitated to books about ancient civilizations that hallowed death—Aztecs, Incas, Egyptians. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History curated an exhibit of shrunken heads, and the Cleveland Museum of Art housed a renowned collection of sarcophagi and mummies: all stoked my macabre interest in the hereafter.

I was fascinated by Cleopatra’s decision to kill herself with an asp, and by the witches who died horrific deaths upon the stake in Europe or at the end of ropes in Salem, Massachusetts. I sought out Christopher Lee vampire movies on television, where women in Victorian dresses inhabited a veiled space between the living and the dead. Occasionally I tried to mimic their aesthetic by wearing my white nightgown to go “haunting” in the backyard, while my mother looked out the kitchen window and shook her head. Eventually, after asking her for months, she let me read Peter Benchley’s Jaws, a far more chilling book than movie. The description of a woman’s severed arm lying in the sand entangled in seaweed and crabs changed my relationship with the ocean for a long time.

I will never completely understand what impulse drove me to see what death looked like on the day I decided to unearth our pet cat from the backyard one week after we found her stiff body lying on the curb. With a shovel and a trowel, I dug into the earth to get as close as I could to the black bag in which we had lovingly but practically wrapped our little tuxedo cat. I peeled back the bag to see the work of the worms and the maggots—for how long I cannot recall—before piling dirt back onto the burial site for good. Death was not romantic; rather, it was quite the opposite. Death was the void, null, nothing, and it certainly appeared definitive.

Somewhere alongside that realization was another forming in my young mind: that all of nature was driven by an instinct to survive and thrive; moreover, it had as much right to do so as I did. During an especially deep and frothy Cleveland winter, I lay within the imprint of a snow angel gazing up at the birds that floated through the sky into nests hidden in treetops. I wondered if birds understood beauty the same way I did: to me, the whitened landscape meant Christmas; to them it was barren, frozen ground, me and my snow angel a mere distraction in their hunt for berries to eat and tufts of straw grass to survive the cold. Breathing in the smell of damp pine, I felt my allegiance shift: I was still attracted to wings, just not the angelic kind.

Vanitas

Every seeker spends time in the dark thrashing about in chains of their own making. The mythical heroes of Joseph Campbell’s journeying must undergo a test; folklore and fables are replete with faeries and dragons whose purpose is to enchant, divert, and destroy.

For many years in my young adult life, I was bewitched by my own power to bewitch. I delighted in the hunt, and though I was hurt by more than one lover, it did not prevent me from hurting others. I spent too long in front of the mirror and too long in bed, and in moving from city to city for various jobs, I never stopped long enough to think about angels or notice birds.

Like incense in church, desire was powerful and intoxicating, if fleeting. It propelled most of my decision-making, until one day I found myself in a train terminal bookstore staring down at a thin volume titled, quite plainly, Happiness, written by the Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard. Though the book was about happiness, Ricard’s initial chapters focused on the root causes of human suffering: aversion, attachment, and impermanence. I considered how each of these illusions danced within myself like shadows on a wall, and how so much of human decision-making revolved around pleasure, not contentment, and the futile need for control. I read the book in one sitting on a plane from Washington D.C. to Paris, landing in the City of Light jet-lagged and fueled by black coffee, but feeling very awake.

Hawk

In time, I began to notice birds again, or perhaps they noticed me. The hawk in particular seemed to stand out; she perched on the backyard fence; flew unseen overhead leaving shadow in her wake; and struck at prey with the torque and speed of an expertly thrown football. The hawk captured my attention as an animal perfectly at home with its place in the world; she killed as needed but not more. And she regarded the world with shrewd golden eyes that took in beauty and ugliness with same aperture.

I bought a miniature marble hawk to keep on my window sill, where it could remind me of perspective and sight. Through the years, I added around the edges: a little sea glass for truth and clarity, a few acorns for potentiality, flowers for blossoming and fading, branches for seasons of the year. A clay Buddha, for light, sat not far from Shiva, Hindu god of dissolution; and there was Saraswati, purveyor of knowledge and arts, given to me by an Indian colleague.

While on a neighborhood walk, I found a little plastic tiger, a child’s toy, in the gravel and brought it home because it reminded me of the pain inflicted upon circus tigers and of the wild freedom that tigers ought to enjoy. I did not pray to these things so much as I prayed among them. Prayer, I thought, was really a song of the heart, and in the glow of candlelight everything sang its own song.

Spire

One spring, over a glass of chardonnay, a devout Christian girlfriend pronounced that I had no Faith. I could not find the words to tell her, indeed, that I had plenty of faith—in the world and its exceptional kindnesses and its equally exceptional cruelties. My friend was the sort who found prohibitions within Leviticus against same-sex marriage and queer people, even though the same book condemned shellfish, which she gladly ate.

I had neither the language nor the compunction to let her know I found her outlook as soulless as the vampires in old Christopher Lee movies, or that hawks, also loathed by Leviticus, may tear flesh for food, but they did not damn, shame, or exclude. I hadn’t the confidence, then, to stand for my truths. My friend and I finished the evening in peaceable co-existence, and I drove home from our outing thinking how Abrahamic faiths, including the religion of my birth, drew people up into a spire so they might look down upon everything else. I thought how far and hard the fall would be from such heights and of the ceaseless climbing only to fall again.

Rather than spires, I thought how much more reliable were cycles—highs and lows, growth and retreat, light and darkness. No wonder seasons held so much meaning in most of the world’s earliest indigenous religions. Amid the commercial lights and vast residential developments that surrounded me on my drive home, I wept for hawks and their young, and for trees and rivers and all of the wild things whose language we could not hear, and who suffered under the illusions of human beings sitting atop their spires.

Circle

No doubt my affinity for birds and branches and stones and seasons would have qualified me as exhibit A for excommunication during the Dark Ages. Today’s Catholic church has far bigger problems than my particular brand of mysticism, which seems to lie at the nexus of eastern philosophy, neopaganism, and unabashed naturalist. I have little interest in challenging or refuting the beliefs of others, insofar as they are not used as a force majeure for disenfranchisement, destruction, or violence. I’m resigned to be God’s problem to sort out, plain and simple.

Several years ago, a friend gave my husband and me a miniature creche tree ornament. The clean lines and unadorned pale wood reminded me of the simplicity of Jesus’ teachings before men bungled it with dogma and orthodoxy. It occurred to me that in seeking to understand the complexities of the world—biggies like Justice, Beauty, Abundance, Lack, Life, and Death—my inclination bent more naturally toward head than heart, and that my homemade altars, delightful though they were, neglected a critical attribute of the human condition: Compassion. Indeed, compassion for one another and the natural world on an unforeseen scale may be the only thing assuring us of another hundred years, let alone another millennium.

I am still partial to books and candlelight, and I find more solace in the company of natural things then in prayers or creeds. On dark days, I see my reflection in the faces of vainglorious gods and vindictive goddesses, and in the duality of Hawk and Plastic Tiger. I remind myself that all these representations are and will only ever be part of the story. The humble wooden creche looks perfectly at home in my haphazard altar of spiritual menagerie, where it helps me recall my childhood and the sound of church bells.