NOTE: The meditation project happened over a year, but this writing project jumps back and forth in the timeline as random journal entries intersect with my current daily life. A memorable dinner at a Spanish tapas restaurant brought me back to before the beginning when I was wrestling with what it even meant to me to “be spiritual”. -TR
I was twenty-one, sitting on the floor of Ilene’s apartment in Gracia, the hipster neighborhood of Barcelona, and I had never felt so lonely. Forty-two of us on the same study abroad program, supposedly having the same experience, and I felt like the only one having mine. Language barrier, culture shock, isolation as the only out gay of my group and my financial aid hadn’t come through. I studied the drab gray-green walls, peeling in places, a few stray nails poking out. A single lamp with a bare bulb. A card table buried under books, laundry, mail, dishes. Ilene lounging on the futon, leafing through a magazine. Somewhere outside, or maybe above me, or below — a strange heaving sound, over and over, that could have been lovemaking…or pigeons. Either way, it only made the loneliness worse.
I reached for the top book on the pile and handed it to Ilene.
She flipped through the book — a collection of Oscar Wilde stories — and started reading aloud: The Selfish Giant. I didn’t know the story. I didn’t see it coming. Somewhere in the last page, big fat tears started rolling down my cheeks as the realization arrived that the small, wounded child in the garden was Jesus, and by the time the giant was covered in blossoms under the tree, something in me just gave way.
I cried and cried. I crawled into my friend’s arms and cried my eyes out as she awkwardly patted me on the back. I cried for the giant. I cried for the child. I cried for myself and I cried for humanity. I couldn’t have told you, in the moment, whether it was the beauty of the story or the loneliness underneath it finally finding a way out. And somewhere in the middle of that crying, uninvited, another voice surfaced — my stepmom’s, from some aside years earlier: if any one of my kids was gay you’d be kicked out of this house. I wasn’t consciously afraid of that, I was just in this moment of overwhelm and there it was, riding along on whatever door the story had opened.
I don’t know how long I cried. Long enough that I was, in my own words, basically all cried out. My friend broke the silence: “So, did no one read to you as a child?”
At that time, organized religion and I weren’t getting along. Patriarchy, misogyny, smiting the gays and all that. I had just come out within the past year and was deep into my queer education, so pretty much anything religion was on thin ice. Having said all that, I also believed that Jesus was actually a real person. I saw the Bible as a book of stories…let’s say historical fiction, written and rewritten by men to their own agenda. I couldn’t take it seriously.
But, stories can carry truth without being true. And there is something about the big picture of religion that resonates: divine forces, human purpose, morality and ethics. Which brings me back to the stories that gave me all of that first — the Chronicles of Narnia.
I loved those damn books! I’d started the series in sixth grade, one book a year, and it never went in a straight line. Sixth grade: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Seventh grade: reread book one, then Prince Caspian, started Voyage of the Dawn Treader but got stuck...not sure why…it wasn’t all the Pevensie kids, Eustace was a jerk, I don’t know. Eighth grade: I reread book one, book two and breezed through book three, started The Silver Chair but the plot lost me. (What’s a Puddleglum?) So the next year I’d pick up where I left off, rereading what I already knew before pushing one book further into what I didn’t.
I couldn’t have told you what I personally believed at seventeen, but by the time I got to The Magician’s Nephew (the creation of Narnia itself), many of these Christian-based ideas were in me, long before I ever sat on Ilene’s floor in Gracia.
I’d known for years I had a spiritual streak, but avoided that path because in my mind the final destination was something I’d already ruled out. So what changed in December 2020 — why did a wine rep with an aversion to organized religion suddenly start meditating every single day? I don’t think anything changed, exactly. I think I finally got curious. (Aaaand… my dad died, aaaand there was that foreboding existentialism of Covid hanging over everything.)
December was day one of paying attention to what I’d already been given. Narnia, The Selfish Giant, and forty years of half-formed beliefs were now pushing me towards a new path. I wanted to know where they would take me.
I really connected with this, Tracey—especially the idea that you had avoided the spiritual path because you thought you already knew where it would lead, and then finally got curious.
My own relationship with spirituality began from a very different place than I ever expected, after many years of thinking of myself as an atheist or agnostic. Looking back, curiosity was probably the beginning for me too: being willing to pay attention to experiences I couldn’t easily explain instead of immediately dismissing them.
I’m looking forward to reading more about where your experiment takes you.