The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic Read Free Page B

They were the women who managed the practical side of communion: they washed the altar linens and then ironed them, kept track of the candles, ordered the wine and the wafers. Without them, the service would not happen.
    One of them told me, with some embarrassment, that before putting the small cloths used to wipe the communion cup into the washing machine, she said a prayer that the stains would come out and the linens would get through the wash, and then that all the people in her church would get through, too.
    At my own church, Trinity in Santa Barbara, Mark Benson, who had lost his partner to AIDS, said he had asked a priest where Phil was, and the priest had answered him with “a hackneyed Christian line about where the dead go. I think he quoted some line from scripture. It meant nothing to me. I realized later that I needed the priest to enterinto poetry because that is where Phil is. He could have said, ‘Well, Phil is at the zoo now.’ Something that would clearly express the fact that Phil is gone, no longer literal, not here, not visible, but not absent, not without influence, not dead.”
    In New York, at an Episcopal church on Fifth Avenue, a woman said that when a friend’s son committed suicide, she told the sky.
    At a yoga studio, also in New York, a teacher said, “It’s a struggle to find God. Some people have a kind of heart for it, but for most of us, it’s a struggle. It’s a struggle for me.”
    Sometimes people told stories that were a little too
Bible Stories Illustrated
to be quite believable, or too New Age—sunshine and ocean waves. But if you gave people enough time, the cant wore off, and the individual experience came through, often with its own ragged edges.
    Once I had been to the museum in New York, I recognized what they were. Pieces of
derroteros
. Fragments of coastlines.
    At the same time, texts found buried in Egypt in 1945 were finally fully translated. They dated, scholars thought, back to the second century. They are called the Gnostic gospels. Someone named Thomas wrote one that is completely different from the tone of Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. Thomas is a Zen teacher: very pure, without story. Someone named Mary wrote another, and another was written by an author named Mary Magdalene. These new gospels were discussed in some of the churches I visited, but their relationship to the four Synoptic or “certified” gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) was not discussed. And to imagine that one of them might be read on a Sunday in place of one of the four—that was really notdiscussed. They lived in another world, that of academic research.
    Priests and ministers partially appreciated the stories told in small groups and partially condescended to them. Or what felt like condescension may have been more like confusion. The church, including me, didn’t seem to know exactly what to do with them. They were the church you can’t see. But they stayed with me. What I did not understand was how important they were.
    One day I woke up and saw the connection between the Gnostic gospels and the stories I was hearing on the road. The Gnostic gospels were old. The stories I was hearing were new. But they had something big in common: they were witness accounts. “I saw,” they said. “I encountered.” “I understood.” And while the Gnostic gospels were old, they were new to the church. For two thousand years, the church had relied on an approved pool of stories, the four Synoptic gospels—reliable and valuable but limited. Inside the walls of churches they were read out loud Sunday after Sunday. These new stories—the Gnostic gospels and the stories people told of their own encounters—were free range. Now what?
    There was much to be said for what I saw and what I heard when I traveled, but I was missing something I did not know I was missing until it came back to me. Part of it was a particular kind of pleasure. I didn’t taste my (always organic) carrots or leeks,