The opening ritual of every First Place meeting is the weigh-in. First Place is a national Christian weight loss program sponsored in thousands of evangelical churches and private homes around the country. Before the meeting begins, group members line up to be weighed. The scale is typically located in a semi-private space: a church’s kitchen, a hallway, a small closet. The weigh-in itself is between the group member and the group leader alone, but the line is often bristling with conversation and often with tension. When being weighed, the member steps on the scale and recites the week’s scripture memory verse, one of nine commitments participants make for the duration of the thirteen-week program. The leader writes down the member’s weight in her book—it is almost always a her—along with the member’s success at recalling the verse. The fusion between religiosity and weight loss that marks First Place is exemplified in that moment where the member is held accountable to two sacred symbols of God’s power and will: scripture and the scale.

The weigh-in is constructed in First Place, as it is in many weight loss practices, as the time of judgment, where the truth of one’s adherence to the program will be revealed. There is an expectation of reward for the faithful and punishment for the transgressor: that the scale will be just in its pronouncement. But, as many dieters know, there is a great tension in almost all weight loss pursuits between what the mind wants and what the body does. In First Place that tension is sacralized in an ongoing contest between godly ideals and bodily realities. While the program celebrates thinness as God’s normative ideal, weight loss is in fact hard to come by, especially in diet-based programs like First Place. The scale’s authority as arbiter of fidelity to the virtues of weight loss, an authority established by the program and reinforced in American culture, is always at danger of being undermined by fat’s tenacity. Thus tension around the weigh-in is high, filled with fear of judgment and condemnation for failing at a project that is seen as reflective of God’s will yet is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This tension needs to be managed if faith in the program, and, at some level, faith in God, is to be sustained, especially when the scale shows its disfavor and weight is not lost.

One way this tension is managed is through a regular, informal conversation that I observed regularly at the First Place group I attended and came to call “divining the scale.” After the weigh in was completed and participants settled in for the meeting, but before the meeting formally began, the group, often at the behest of the group leader, collectively discussed their weight loss results, interpreting them and discerning what they meant or didn’t mean about the women themselves, about their relationship to God, and about the program.

One conversation took place in the sixth of the group’s thirteen meetings. After everyone weighed in, but before the meeting formally began, Norma, a group leader in her mid-60s with short brown hair, a solid build, and sparkly eyes, asked everyone how they were doing. “Did you all have a really crappy week?” she asked. Someone in the group asked if Norma could give a tally of the weight lost. “This week it wouldn’t help,” she responded. “It was terrible. We’ve had one superstar, but I don’t want to say who so as not to jinx her.” “You don’t want to say cause she isn’t safe,” someone teased. “You know we’d kill her.” “But the rest of us,” Norma continued, “it’s pathetic. At least I’m the same, not up. But we’re up and down. Any idea what’s going on?”

In making the move to divine the scale’s message for its faithful but flawed supplicants, Norma raises questions about religion and food, eating and spiritual transgression, questions that have been of interest to Christians for a long time. And it raises a tension that stands at the heart of First Place’s project. The program believes that thinness is normative for the believer and that weight loss occurs when we are in physical, mental, spiritual and emotional harmony with God’s will. “As we put God in first place for our day and with our weight,” writes program director Carole Lewis, “then everything else falls into place.” The more one aligns with God’s will through adherence to First Place’s nine commitments, the more that alignment should be reflected on the scale.

But bodily realities and the limitations of dieting as a method of weight loss challenge this presumption and reality of weight’s persistence threatens to overrun the spiritual ideals that underpin the program and are the basis for its claim to efficacy. If people don’t lose weight after faithfully adhering to the program they may come to question its conflation of God’s bodily ideal with thinness and weight loss. Members need to be trained to read the persistence of weight not as a reflection itself of God’s will (if I’m trying and I don’t lose weight, maybe God doesn’t want me to), or the failure of dieting’s disciplines (if I keep doing this and it doesn’t work, maybe it just doesn’t work) but to attribute it to other causes.

The first response to Norma’s question came from Celeste, a small woman, also in her 60s, with dyed blond hair who converted to evangelical Christianity from Catholicism. She offered: “Satan and his dirty work.” Tessa, one of the group’s success stories, gave a more worldly explanation. “We get complacent at week six,” she said. “We started by doing everything we’re supposed to do. So this week, after not coming last week, I didn’t write anything down for CR [Commitment Report], didn’t open up the Bible study.” Norma then confessed her own complacency, saying “I’ve decided I didn’t need to do a CR because I haven’t been taking it with me.” “Mine is exercise,” offered Kathleen, a younger, larger woman with two small children at home. “All I can say is don’t think you’re a Lone Ranger.” Norma comforted, “We’re all not doing well.”

First Place’s program consists of nine spiritual and physical commitments. These commitments serve a range of purposes, but one, as we can see in this exchange, is an opportunity to defuse the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities. When beginning a thirteen-week session, First Place members commit to regular attendance at group meetings, adherence to the food plan, regular exercise, memorization of one scripture verse per week, daily bible reading, daily bible study (the two are different), daily “quiet time” in prayer, weekly encouragement of another group member (usually via email or phone), and faithful recording of adherence to these commitments, including every bit of food eaten, in what’s known as a Commitment Record or a CR. The CR is handed in to the group leader every week and she returns it at the next meeting with comments. Commitments are so numerous in part because the program aims to address the problem of weight loss physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. They also reflect an increasing tendency to see weight loss as a life altering pursuit that requires personal changes far more extensive than food restriction and increased exercise and a resultant proliferation of disciplines.

It is widely recognized and accepted that it is difficult if not impossible to meet all of these commitments at any one time, not to mention in an ongoing manner. But the virtual impossibility of ongoing, faithful adherence does not keep members from being held accountable to them, especially when weight loss is not achieved. The sheer number of commitments give First Place members a variety of ways to explain why weight loss has not occurred as hoped. Surely there is always something that members have not faithfully implemented in their lives during the previous week, especially as the thirteen-week session progresses. The proliferation of commitments provides a range of ways to assign individual responsibility for the lack of weight loss success, diverting attention from the shortcomings of dieting and from the possibility that God is the author of those failings which may themselves carry a message that participants could discern.

Frustration with the complexity of the program, and confusion over which aspects should be prioritized, was then voiced by Deborah, a medical professional with a teen-aged daughter who came to First Place in part to manage her diabetes. “But the program is about all emotions, spirituality. You should focus on exercise,” she told Kathleen, “and make that a focus. It’s hard to manage every piece of the program.” Norma used this comment to report on a conversation she heard at another church meeting that she and other First Place members attended the previous week. “I overheard, very recently, Deborah talking about the First Place group. Someone asked how are you doing. She goes, ‘Well, I’m doing really well spiritually, but not so much with losing weight.’” “I didn’t think I could do the Bible verses,” Deborah modestly replied. “She has the right idea,” Norma continued. “The bottom line is to keep the communication line open with God. Bible study forces us to be self-reflective and to get to the important stuff.”

First Place’s range of commitments reflects a central ambiguity in the program’s purpose: whether First Place is a weight loss program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of spiritual practices or whether it is a spiritual program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of weight loss practices. This a live question that is often at play in First Place interactions, including this one. Ostensibly, the program positions itself as the first: as a weight loss program that is enhanced by spirituality. First Place is effective at weight loss, they claim, because it focuses on the whole person, integrating spiritual concerns into the heart of its practice. The absence of God is depicted as the problem in secular weight loss programs and First Place presents itself as filling that crucial void.

Yet there is reason to see First Place as primarily a program of Christian discipleship that instills spiritual practices by linking them to the popular goal of weight loss. Spiritual changes are often the changes celebrated in First Place literature and its spiritual disciplines inculcate Christian practices that are deeply valued yet quotidian in the evangelical subculture. To use a food metaphor, spirituality and weight loss are applesauce and pill, combined in First Place to make the vital but bitter one more palatable. The question is whether spirituality is the applesauce that makes the pill of weight loss go down more easily, or whether the possibility of weight loss is the appealing substance that allows Christian disciplines to slip in. If weight loss is the pill, the weigh-in is the moment where it should display its efficacy. But if spiritual discipline is the pill, the lack of weight loss threatens to keep people from eating the applesauce.

Most of the time this ambiguity is not an issue. Within this self-help landscape, weight loss aims and spiritual aims are seen as so vitally interconnected, so conflated, that there is no need to distinguish between the two. Thinness is God’s desire, and godly devotion will effect weight loss. But when the judgment of the scale threatens to reveal possible tensions between First Place’s spiritual and weight loss projects, distinguishing between the two can be helpful. First Place commitments are so extensive that most people need to prioritize one or two of them at any given time. Spiritual commitments have the advantages of being the clear priority in a faith-based program that, after all, puts God first and of being more easily attainable than weight loss. It is far easier to cultivate a regular prayer practice than to ensure that one’s body will respond to dietary disciplines in the desired way.

By reporting Deborah’s conversation as a positive example, Norma makes the distinction between the physical and spiritual aims of the program in order to place the importance clearly on the spiritual. Deborah is held up as a model for recognizing the importance of spiritual improvements made in the course of the program even when weight loss does not follow. This not only gives members a more attainable goal to focus one’s sights on, but defuses the power of the scale as the ultimate revelator of faithfulness. Members have a means of claiming success even when it’s not reflected in the numbers. This strategy is not without its risks: the promise of weight loss is what provides the opportunity for inculcating spiritual disciplines. Thus Norma can’t go so far as to say that weight loss is not a priority at all. But differentiating between the physical and spiritual aims of the program, and prioritizing the latter, is useful in deflecting attention from the limitations of weight loss by devaluing it as a goal in comparison to spiritual development.

The divining the scale exchange concluded with participants making confounding observations about the vagaries of weight loss. Caroline observed “It’s weird that the week I didn’t write the food down I lost a lot of weight. It’s weird.” Tessa seconded the weirdness of weight loss, saying “[. . .] Sometimes I feel the same way. I had a weight loss during a week when I ate the worst in years.” Celeste said, “I did well and gained a pound. I knew I was going to lose a pound this week but I didn’t.” Norma tried to reassure her, replying “Sometimes there’s a delay thing. You might lose three next week.” “Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” Celeste said, “but that won’t do it.”

The pursuit of weight loss is in almost all contexts something akin to evangelical religion. Both are based on a simple philosophy based on perceived common sense and easy-to-apply salvific formulas. Both value and cultivate a perception of the transparency and accessibility of its central authority, scripture or the scale, for those who seek answers there. Both present themselves as straightforward in theory yet are complicated in practice, continually threatened by lived experience which often seems to trump its claims. When it doesn’t all make the sense that it should, sometimes it’s best to simply contemplate the mystery.

The question Christian weight loss programs often poses for scholars of both religion and of dieting culture is similar to the ambiguity in First Place’s purpose: is Christian weight loss essentially a secular venture, luring believers into its programs by adding a spiritual varnish to a worldly practice, or is it merely explicating, marking or making clear the religious concerns that are at the heart of weight loss projects both sacred and secular? This is a question that is important to me and has informed a great deal of my writing about First Place. But First Place members don’t really care. They are much more taken with tension that mounts as the weigh-in progresses and their faithfulness is about to be measured by number. By collectively divining the scale in the wake of that judgment, the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities are eased and the program maintains its plausibility for another week.

Perhaps it is in the nature of freedom that things can be different than they are. Considered in terms of will, one can celebrate this possibility of difference (or not) as a victory of individuals, democracy, and the market. But it does pose a problem for the nature of reality, and one that becomes increasingly acute insofar as the possibility of difference infuses the actual. The increasing complexity of society, expressed both economically and culturally through the trope of capitalism (e.g., the free exchange of money and information), manifests just such an infusion. For one who would understand the social, this historical event and trend does not just make for a finer-grained puzzle, although it does do this. It makes for greater difficulty of seeing the puzzle. Thus the increasing complexity of society has its objective dimension (increasing fragmentation) and its subjective dimension (graying of outlines). These two dimensions, further, are linked, distinct, and asymmetrical. They constitute one another, cannot be reduced to one another, and do not accord with one another.

In this way a logical, or more specifically, phenomenological problem comes to characterize a historical epoch and social condition: the secular. When the freedom to choose extends into lifestyle and worldview, the mechanism of freedom—its motives and operation—becomes radically opaque. Religion’s address of this problem, a component of multiple and varied traditions, enters into a realm of both higher stakes and paradoxical logic. I am reminded here of Niklas Luhmann’s theorization of religion, one born out of his contemplation of the secular: “In the realm of the observable (where else?), the difference between the observable and the non-observable must be made observable. [Religion] does not deal with the one or the other side of this distinction but with their form: with the distinction as such.”

Enter Spirituality

Seeing me alone one evening in Joshua Tree National Park, some campers invited me to join them around their campfire. When they asked me what I did, I told them that I studied religion. My neighbor’s eyes lit up. He made a broad, sweeping gesture toward the tumbleweed, cactus, red rock, and sand of the surrounding desert and said, “This is my church.”

The somewhat theatrical nature of the pronouncement betrayed a more-than-constative intention. It was a statement that recognized its oblique character, presenting that obliquity in full frame. I had the sense of being an audience. I am reminded here of Laurie Anderson’s description of her religious upbringing. She discussed her early encounters with the Bible whose “stories were completely amazing, about parting oceans and talking snakes. And people really seemed to believe these stories and would sit around and discuss them in the most matter of fact way. So in a way, I was introduced to a special local form of surrealism at an early age. And so there was always a question in my mind about what is actually true and what is just another art form.”

Of course there are many ways the sentence “This is my church” can make sense. But what if we interpret the sentence as absurd, something closer to “This is not a pipe”? What if we read the phrase “This is my church” when there is clearly no church in sight as an expression of surrealism of whatever special local form? What if our question is not about whether and how the statement is “actually true,” but instead about what kind of art form such a statement constitutes?

Not only did the man point to a church where there was no church. He also claimed a religion that was not a religion. He described himself as “spiritual” as opposed to “religious.” Again and of course, there are many ways that this distinction can make sense. But what if we take it as a paradox, a contradiction meant to stand unresolved? What then might it mean to have a church that is no church, a religion that is no religion?

Following Luhmann, “consider the rhetorical understanding of paradox as more fundamental than the logical one. It is simply a matter of communication that wants to use simultaneously what is incompatible…. For the communication of paradoxes, the operative effect is decisive: it causes communication to oscillate, because each position makes it necessary to assert the opposite, for which the same holds in turn.”

It’s a church. I belong here. This is my home. It’s my church. It belongs to me and I to it. It gives me myself.

It’s nature. It’s not me. It’s beyond me. It’s not my nature. It belongs to everyone and everyone belongs to it.

Flexibility? More efficient exploitation of the resources of logic? Having it all, or at least both ways? But why now and why in this way? Capitalism and greed have been around much longer than churchless cathedrals and barren fonts of life. The free flow of ideas, the ideological expression of capitalism, has never been bound by the dictates of reason. But this is different—a higher level of disjuncture; not a new page, but a page torn out of the narrative of progress and the increasing perfection of humanity through freedom. Is this the start of a new book? The destruction of an old one? Or do the two constitute a single expression?

For Andre Breton, surrealism was anything but an escape from reality. He saw it as a desire to “deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses.” That world was two-sided, and not essentially but as a result of historical circumstance: “Interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the pre-eminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from each other than they are…, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same.”

When a church is a church and not a church and a desert is a desert and not a desert, then a desert can be a church and not a desert and a church a desert and not a church even as a desert is a desert and a church is a church.

How does paradox—in this case, the freedom to make a desert a church—constitute the form of contemporary society? What contradiction between interior and exterior reality thereby comes to expression? How does one understand such paradoxical unity without resolving the paradox?

A different man stood in a forest in northern California. He explained that his brother considered nature to be his church. I asked him if he would say the same thing. He said, “I’d call it my temple, just to be different.” The social references here are familial and communal: brother and church/temple. The identity of the first brother and the identity of the second (it does not matter which is which) are constructed through the paradox elaborated above: the church that is not a church and the (functionally equivalent) temple that is not a temple. But the form of society here expressed arises through the unity of the difference of the two contradictions: a church that is not a church is/is-not a temple that is not a temple—just to be different. This is how brother expresses unity with brother. The identity of each is here expressed in terms of difference (“to be different”) and community (“church,” “temple”) conceived paradoxically (church that is not a church; temple that is not a temple) and serially (“his church… my temple” and the “just” that indicates a unity limited only by the principle of difference itself).

As studied in religious studies, “spiritual but not religious” is, more often than not, studied as religious. Scholars seek the contents of collective consciousness, the communities that affirm the contents of consciousness collectively, the practices that reflect the conscious content of the community, and the codes that condition the collectiveness of the collectivity. In other words, scholars study the religion that is not a religion as a religion by taking it as a form of society. In principle I follow this instinct. But when the form of society is paradoxical, then scholarship must reflect this paradox rather than resolve it. To say that spiritual but not religious means a focus on the self rather than the collectivity and interior feeling rather than statements of belief is true enough. But to say this and leave it at this and then to proceed with yet another this-is-this and that-is-that is to resolve paradox into juxtaposition, indeed, into contiguity.

There are many concrete results that can be gained by taking paradox seriously. Breton’s activity as an artist and communist and Luhmann’s corpus of social analysis are only two examples. Paradox is productive, an expression and negotiation of social forms. For those who would understand contemporary society, this means that paradox need not be treated as an analytical threat, a glitch in cognition that must be resolved in order to grasp truth. In fact, such paradox might call for paradox in response and in analysis: a matched and juxtaposed sociological surrealism. Above all one must resist the apprehension at engaging unresolved tensions in a way that leaves them unresolved. Faced with those who would regard such tensions as fatal for analysis, and who would iterate those tensions by way of criticism or dismissal of paradoxical expressions of social reality, one may recall Breton’s call to arms: “The deplorable inspectors who pursue us even after we leave school still make their rounds of our homes and our lives. They make sure that we always call a cat a cat and, since after all we accept this to a great extent, they refrain from sending us to the galleys or the poorhouse or the penitentiary. Nevertheless, let us get rid of these officials as soon as possible.”

My throat hurts. If I tried to hum with the muezzin or call with the cats, it would hurt. I get up and take eight tablets of yin chiao from a friend who does acupuncture. It will, as she puts it, push the sickness back out through the skin. It worked the last time.

Later, I go out for more provisions, past the Baptist church with minarets; it used to be a Masonic temple. At Tony’s health food store I greet Khan who, like several sons of the owner, works there six days a week. I compliment him on his Om tattoo and he is delighted that I know about Shiva. I tell him that Shiva is actually very important to me and that Shiva Natajara is on my mantel and another Shiva adorns my Christmas tree. His face clouds over. “Wait,” I quickly explain why I think Shiva would be okay being a Christmas ornament. I redirect the conversation to finding broth. But now Khan follows me around the store, entreating me to take that ornament down. He keeps moving to front shelves in my vicinity and is now frankly warning about disrespecting Shiva. I feel like a total idiot religion professor.

On the way home, I pass churches of Pentecostals, Adventists, and Daddy Grace, as well as another masjid. It is February 3, 2011, and no one is surprised that someone walking around in Brooklyn would run into so many brands of religion. What might surprise is that the run-ins pierce and balm in so many ways. The neighborhood does this to some bodies and not others, I guess. But if you have a body that feels like the skin does not hold things in or keep them out, if you are made partly of memories of cuts and sutures, it might do this to you.

Religion is a chain of memory, says the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and catholicité is a palimpsest. Bedford-Stuyvesant used to be all Catholic, and still the most and biggest churches are Catholic. Seven within ten blocks of my apartment. Now I pass one where a few women enter through the side door, the main door being locked on weekdays.

Thirty years ago, I lived far from Bed-Stuy, in a place where every town had a view of cornfields. Thirty years ago, I was going to school at St. Mary’s in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Probably standing in a line. We were always in lines. Lines for changing classes, lines for going to lunch, lines for visiting the lavatory, lines for school assemblies, lines for going to Mass, lines for waiting for the bus at the end of the day. Lines on weekends, too. Line up for your heat at the swim meet. Line up for Rice Krispie treats at the bake sale table. Line up for confession. Line up for communion. In lines, you waited. Waiting was normal and so was the transaction at the end of the line.

But some lines were different, and you anticipated unusual things while waiting. In line to get ashes on your forehead, for example. There was always an emotional chill as the priest spoke mortal words about dust, and a physical flinch to feel fine black palm ash fleck the bridge of your nose. Or, in line to kiss the cross on Good Friday. Making sure to get behind Mrs. Viozzi who is ancient and four feet tall but still kneels on both knees and grasps the cross with both hands and kisses the wood with two full lips, a juicy smack that sounds across the whole nave. In line to have your throat blessed on the feast of St. Blaise…

Crossing Marcy Avenue now, I catch native son Jay-Z’s music blasting out an apartment window three stories up.

Can I hit it in the morning without givin you half of my dough,

and even worse if I was broke would you want me? …

If I couldn’t flow futuristic, would ya

put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya…

I don’t know. Is love deeper than deep pockets? The neighborhood that used to be “Bed-Stuy/do or die” is now “Bed-Stuy/too late to buy” and churches turn into yoga studios at Washington Avenue.

Line up to go to the auditorium to see Jesus Christ Superstar. It was the monthly school movie some winter Friday in 1977. Eight years old, watching girls in sequined hotpants gyrate as the heavenly host, watching Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene drag herself after wooden beams as if she herself were lashed to them, I wanted to dance, I wanted to be lashed, I wanted to kneel and kiss that wood.

When we lined up to get our throats blessed on the feast of St. Blaise, this too was different waiting for an unusual transaction. Frankly, it was scary. At the end of two lines advancing up the auditorium center aisle stood two priests. They each held a pair of thick white candles, tied together at a right angle to make a cross, and secured at the crux with red ribbon. When it was your turn, you stepped up and the priest held the crux at your throat and said, “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God preserve you from ailments of the throat and from every other evil.” Then, making the sign of the cross, you peeled away.

Scary. First of all, the wax against your neck was scented and tacky-cold and felt like a funeral. Then, why was this saint’s day of all saints’ days so important to take time out? Was there imminent danger to all human throats, as opposed to other body parts? Shouldn’t we also have blessings for eyes and brains and hands? I asked this. No. Only the throat. It made you think of things that could crush or slice you there. It made you pay attention to movies where after a quick yank and flash, someone’s jugular was spurting. It made you retain a vocabulary word like garrot. It made you notice when you had a sore throat.

Many years later, when I wasn’t in school and wasn’t going to Mass and the millennium turned and I just wanted to get through my first year of teaching, I still noticed in particular when I had a sore throat. In fact the one I got during finals week of that fall semester soon turned into a cough. But I was busy. And homesick. No time for a doctor’s visit. I left Texas for a trip back east. I wanted to see my family in Pennsylvania and my love in North Carolina. I packed it all into a mad visit with lots of long-distance driving. When I got back to Fort Worth, I felt much better.

Except I still had a cough, and swallowing had started to feel funny. Spring teaching commenced and I coughed through the first class. Finally I visited the doctor and was sent home with antibiotics. But that night my chest exploded with pain and my throat hurled back anything I tried to swallow. The next morning I presented at the doctor’s again. A more thorough exam revealed that some unknown problem had already resulted in severe pneumonia, one collapsed lung, a swollen heart lining, and infection blooming throughout my chest cavity. I was taken by ambulance to All Saints Hospital and did not leave for over a month.

The first two weeks, nothing happened. My sister Mary flew in from Atlanta and virtually moved into my hospital room. The chair of my department, Daryl, visited every day. Tests were run but no one could find the problem. Antibiotics slowed the infection but didn’t kill it off. A brown bacterial stew that smelled like raw sewage had begun to burble up into my mouth. One day, finally, it started to drown me. Mary and a friend, Leah, frantically alerted the nurse. I lost consciousness as doctors cut notches between my ribs on both sides to insert chest tubes. When I woke up, I was in the ICU, lung fluid still draining into canisters on the floor.

My doctor would come see me and talk. His name was Noble. Noble Ezukanma, internist, point person for an array of specialists. Nigerian, Christian, married with three kids, beautiful and wise. I asked him all the questions I could think of. “This diagnostic process, we are trying things, you know, but it is really more an art than a science,” he would say. “We have to wait.” He didn’t know how things were going to turn out. He said so. He was an artist in process. It was comforting.

But it was another doctor who arrived early one morning, when I was alone, to tell me that one test had finally nailed it: prolonged coughing—or a fishbone accidentally swallowed, or vomiting, or chance?—had torn a hole in my larynx. Everything I ate or breathed was feeding the infection. They required my signature for surgery. Immediately.

What happened next, I am not sure how. I was frightened and teary plus high on morphine. Did I remember what day it was? Did Daryl somehow know? Did the hospital chaplain staff piece it together despite no checked box on the intake form? I don’t know. But within a few hours, Daryl had brought the campus priest to my bedside. Fr. Charlie carried two white candles, crossed and tied with red ribbon. It was February 3, 2001, and I got my throat blessed.

So, as you see, were it not for St. Blaise, I would not be here to tell you this story. I would not have returned to my classes that semester, would not be chewing over the meaning of spirituality for an online collection, would not be remembering waiting in lines, would not be walking home from Tony’s in Bed-Stuy with good broth for a sore throat.

But wait … this is no way to end the story. Don’t mess with people, people in the guild, my guild, my people. Don’t mess with my head. Leave out suggesting that St. Blaise was actually involved. Leave out hinting that without St. Blaise I would be dead. It was doctors who operated and sewed me whole. If St. Blaise supposedly saved my life, then why didn’t all those blessings years earlier work? If I am having a fit of wanting to thank a saint, I can do it on my own time. Would I say this stuff in the classroom? Do I really believe … ?

I do believe … in religion as a social construction with a long history, and in spirituality, too, begotten not made, one in being with religion. And in experience, and the self, and pluralism, and God, and any story any of us could possibly tell, all of them truly assumed, asserted and produced in very complex genealogies. Credo.

But sometimes I forget to care. My skin does not hold things in or keep them out. And having this kind of body—a body of memories of cuts, not all my own—goes back long before the hospital, long before I was born, long before St. Blaise himself. Still, I have faith. Tell the children that they can see through the powers that be. Tell the children that they can choose to believe this and not that. Tell them that their bodies are theirs for the making. That if something goes wrong the doctors can slice through layers and suture back out and then you are whole again.

Yet I keep bumping into religions and they don’t bounce off. Why live? Why sicken? Why call for ravishment? Why calm at the touch of red-ribboned candles? I have nothing against stitches. The rows run across my neck and over my heart. There are little crosses that closed chest tube holes and a big stripe under each shoulder blade. They saved my life. But some bodies are pounds of flesh with oozing edges and no fix for that. Meanwhile, I teach, I write, I walk around and see what happens. “This process, you know, we are trying things, but it is more art than science,” the good doctor said. “We have to wait.”