Witness the wonders of Allan Chumak, the white-haired media phenom of the late-Soviet age, who promised to heal from a distance using only his hands, and the television broadcast. The large amber-shaded glasses. The unbroken gaze. Here he is, sitting inside the television box, which is now inside youtube inside your computer, inside your very own home.

To watch Chumak—and I mean really watch him, without interruption or preconception and until the end—is to enter into his world. You have to believe, lest you be left outside—a belief whose compensation is a pleasant sensation, the twilight feeling of sleepy-awakeness, a combination of TV-initiated alpha-waves and gentle hypnosis.

Chumak began appearing on Soviet state television during the late-1980s—the time of “Gorby,” perestroika, socialism with a human face. He was allotted a small, though by no means nondescript, corner of the morning program 120 minutes, at 7:15 am, when people all across the Soviet Union would tune in for some distance healing. Describing the source of his powers, Chumak would describe a magical moment when, at the age of 42, a torrent of energy pummeled his body like a waterfall and the world was revealed to him as a “fantastic diversity of energo-informational interaction.” Since that time, Chumak has been able to focus this “energy” through his hands for the purpose of healing.

Watch it again.

There is a certain reliable regularity at work in his programs. First there is the greeting and a brief explanation of the malady du jour—in this case allergy and respiratory disorders. Then there is a discussion of etiology—always for Chumak a disruption of “the harmony of every process in the organism.” Then the proposed resolution, a recalibration through his reiki-like hand movements. The cure takes place right then and there. A sympathetic current of sorts, perhaps aided, back then, by the static electricity gathering on the convex curve of the screen. There is an excess of force, too, though, and viewers are invited, with a mysterious half-smile, to place jars of water or cream (“whatever you like”) next to the television to be “charged” (zariazhennyi; also loaded) (:30). Finally, the recommended pose: “You ought to be free and comfortable…. Place your hands on your lap, arms down, and close your eyes. Only pay attention to those feelings that appear during the session.”

This posture of blindness and relaxation is the posture of faithful submission. It is an embodiment of vulnerability and trust, of innocence and expectation—a posture from which it would be extremely difficult to mount a defense were someone to punch you in the gut.

So much of what we might imagine about time and place—the late Empire moment—has been conjured from out of the smoke and mirrors of capitalist triumph. At the risk of falling prey to a post-Cold War imaginary, twenty-five years hence I imagine all those Soviet bodies in their apartments, stilled before the television. Perhaps it is no coincidence that so many found themselves in this position while living in the twilight of empire. It was the 1980s, after all, and the smell of the end of history was there like a dying animal. Or so it has become: imaginings must be taken, like a shot of bad tequila, with many grains of salt. Others, of course, experienced it very differently—as a chaotic and hopeful time in the Soviet Union. A time of exciting revelation that followed decades of so-called “stagnation” under Brezhnev. Gorbachev had introduced reforms to both the media environment, known as glasnost (literally transparency; openness), and to Soviet institutions (perestroika). People were again able to read more widely; opinions critical of Soviet life became more widely circulated. These new openings brought what anthropologists have documented, retrospectively, as sudden “break of consciousness” (perelom soznaniia) and “strong shock” (sil’neishii shok). Many new cultural forms emerged at this time, but among the most curious was the rise in mass-mediated “extrasensory” healers sent out live via the state broadcasting channel to the entire Soviet Union. Chumak is not alone. There is also Kashpirovsky’s televised hypnotism.

Watch it again.

Chumak was inside your home long before you clicked the link above. Consider, for instance, a resonance with a viral strain of American spirituality wrought of the fascination with national collectivity, media technologies, and gods. There is a dream here, utterly familiar. A voice that can only imagine itself in terms of everything or nothing, with little in between. Think, for example, of Whitman penning the following lines in 1855, five years prior to the Civil War:

I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

These and other alignments of spiritual uptick and political-economy suggest that Chumak speaks to a history redolent with spirit, technology, and empire, a history shared by Cold War adversaries, a history of mutual collapse.

I cannot help but watch Chumak. His wordlessness. The opening and closing of his jaw. The motion of his head, moving side-to-side, nodding, but bent on being still. He is intentional about not making sound, and so there are sounds of silence—lip smacking, throat clearing, the just-detectable sound of breathing. A knocking in the studio and a door closes—the lifting of the veil for a moment, reminding us the there are others there in studio, behind camera—a whole crew, perhaps, involved in this production.

The viewer is not a viewer. In asking us to close our eyes, Chumak has asked us to shuffle the sensorium. He has turned the clock back on modernity’s forward march of the gaze. TV is here meant to be experienced through the ears, on the skin, by the nose, and finally in the viscera. As I close my eyes now, I can recollect hearing my own 1980s television—its sound that is no sound: that high-pitched squeal of household appliances that only reach the ear from another room. I can feel the dancing dust on the screen under my fingers and the hair standing up on my arm. I cringe with anticipation at the crackling that gathers under the finger until the electrical shock! And I can smell it—that distinctive combination of household particle and arcing electricity. Don’t stand so close to the television!—not just an admonishment to protect the eyes, but also, perhaps, a warning born of suspicion of the industrial everyday. The TV was to deadly electrification as the microwave was to nuclear warhead.

Watch it again.

A typology of Chumak’s hand movements:

1. Fine-tuning: Tweaking the miniscule mechanics. Smaller movements are required.

2. Stroking: While holding one hand still, the other moves outward, as if petting a cat.

3. Gathering up and drawing out: An invisible sphere is constituted with both hands. Once constituted, one hand periodically pulls some threads out of it.

4. Tending to the sphere: The hands pack and repack the sphere.

5. The sign of the cross: Reminiscent of the Christian rite, the right hand draws a plus sign (usually several times vertical followed by several times horizontal).

6. Straightening up: Again, smoothing that which has been conjured.

7. Equalization and balance: The hands move as the hands of a scale, seeking equilibrium.

8. Silence: The hands punctuate action with inaction. Resting in midair, the hands await further instruction.

There has always been an interesting convergence between faith, media and power. Yet here it is not just very much like, but in fact asserted, the mundane gesture, captured by electricity and projected through a TV tube can carry with it an unseen “energy”—an energy with a power to cure from afar, bypassing the gaze. A metaphysics of morning television. An energy that is not an effort. An energy that doesn’t make a sound. An energy that comes as much, if not more so, from within as without. In this way, Chumak becomes the channel for your soul—your soul channel.

Watch it once more. When I turn the youtube transmission up, I hear two tracks now—the hiss of television, and what could be the bleeping of digital information.

Can I still place a jar of cream next to my computer monitor to charge it up? Was the TV the necessary medium for distance healing? Or does it have to do with the experience of late Empire and the failure of our language to articulate the decline? Or maybe it was some combination of naïve fascination with the television, only just making its way into the households of the world as an everyday object? We can’t know, and the ingredients of spiritual experience of this type seem scattered like electrons in search of a screen.

On youtube, a certain “achalkov” keys in his own riposte to Chumak’s session: “Awesome! After this session my mobile telephone was charged!”

I lied to a dying man, although I meant every word. It’s a strange thing, to say you intend to do something that you don’t really intend to do, yet feeling as though the words themselves are embraced in such uncompromised truth that they actually exceed their indexical meaning. If there is spirituality in promises, prayers, and praise, can there also be spirituality in the excellence of the lie?

I had known Phil for barely over a year, while doing ethnographic research with evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee. We became close friends, despite a four-decade generation gap and even wider cultural differences. I was a New York academic with an agenda; a secular Jew sojourning in the lives of church folk. Phil was a committed Christian, with a lifelong dedication to his church and a passion for ministries of evangelization. He was an endearingly calm, quick-witted Tennessean, and an ebullient father and grandfather. When I met him, he was already fighting for his life.

The lymphoma that eventually killed him was gaining ground, and Phil was undergoing a series of chemo treatments at a local hospital. He had a steady, seemingly endless stream of visitors; family, friends, coworkers. On the afternoon I visited he was uncharacteristically alone, but characteristically upbeat and talkative. As I approached his bed he sat up and smiled, barely showing a hint of fatigue or concern. “This sucks,” I said, gesturing at the wires, tubes, and monitors that surrounded him but clearly referring to something more. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Yeah, it does kinda suck,” he said, still smiling, “Thank you! You’re the first person to come out and say it since I’ve been here.”

We talked for several minutes, perhaps an hour, mostly about news and gossip in the community. We talked about my research, which Phil supported by helping me make contacts among local pastors and churchgoers and putting a little friendly pressure on those who never invited me to their Bible study groups. I used to joke with Phil that he was like “my personal mob boss” in the church. On more than one occasion he turned the table, calling me his “personal rabbi.” It was novelty that drew us to friendship in the first place; it was a shared sense of humor that kept us there.

As I prepared to leave Phil’s bedside that afternoon my heart was heavy and my hands turned cold. I knew what I was about to say. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, but I could see it coming and chose not to stand in its way. In my relations with people who were part of my research, I never wanted to feel like I misled or deceived anyone. But this instant just felt different. It called for something novel.

“I’ll pray for you.”

I said it.

Phil stared back stunned. In those fleeting seconds I imagine he was both shocked and pleased: There was hope for me yet. He was never the kind of guy to be smug or self-congratulatory about such a thought. There was undoubtedly a part of Phil that reveled in my words, but he was far too mature in character, and in his faith, to have settled on a triumphal reading of our exchange, as though my spiritual indifference was finally conquered and that was that.

And what of my character? I lied. I told someone that I would do something for him that I could not do. I didn’t plan to set aside time to petition God on Phil’s behalf, or “lift him up” as evangelicals say, at least not in any way consistent in form or content with the prayer practices of the faithful. Perhaps I should have simply said, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts, Phil”? Why even invite the pretense of religiosity? Was I so eager to make Phil happy? Did I think my words, my simple unexpected words, could actually save him?

The fact is, by telling Phil that I would pray for him I spoke something of an indirect truth. My sincerity rested not in the content of the statement but rather the sentiment that inspired it. It was a sentiment that called out to be expressed in prefabricated words, conveyed in what for me were new wineskins (to put it biblically). I wanted to enter a new level of social exchange, to give him an inalienable gift, however disquieting and self-alienating it may have felt. I wanted him to know that I cared about him that much.

In this sense I was perhaps more like Phil and his churchgoing friends than I had ever been before. Prayer is an act of private supplication and public worship, but that is not all it is. Prayer is an artifact of value, something given and received. It can circulate among friends and strangers like currency, sometimes in the form of an act, often in the form of a promise. “I’ll pray for you.” The words invoke piety, but they also signify sociality. They cannot be empty words. They have the power to create bonds, to forge narratives of belonging, to convey or reciprocate emotions. I suspect I’m not the first person to say those words without meaning them in a literal sense. There are many self-aware evangelicals, for example, who could probably admit to neglecting promised prayers at one point or another in their lives, either by failing to make time or forgetting altogether. But that’s not my main point. That’s not really the point at all.

I am often asked if I was ever moved spiritually during my fieldwork, whether I experienced a “God moment” akin to that famously described by Susan Harding, when she suddenly found herself interpellated by the conversionist discourse of her fundamentalist-Baptist interlocutors. Of course, such questions usually rely on assumptions as various as they are loaded, with regard to what exactly constitutes a “spiritual” experience. Nonetheless, on most occasions I feel obliged to respond in the negative. While I certainly experienced profound revelatory episodes, uncanny coincidences, and flashes of emotion with visceral intensity that I could have internalized in a spiritual idiom, I rarely felt inclined or compelled to do so. This response may be well received by certain scholars who would applaud me for holding my ground, for not allowing myself to “cross a line” from an intellectual position posited to be secular to the faith of my subjects. But that would be a misguided conclusion, misguided in that it presumes that the line between belief and disbelief (or better yet, between those who pray and mean it and those who don’t pray at all) is the only line there is to be crossed.

The reality is that there are many lines that can be crossed when an avowedly non-spiritual person interacts with “people of faith,” and not all of them have to do with spirituality as conventionally understood. Lines of sociality—that is, the terms of when and how we perform our relational affinities with other people—make up an intrinsic part of what it means to be evangelical. For all their individualist rhetoric, evangelicals are often intensely social people, who celebrate and affirm their interpersonal bonds with routine diligence. Negotiating those lines offers a different point of entry into the realm of evangelical spirituality, a moral disposition that, among other things, relies on the richly paradoxical claim of privileging “relationships over religion.”

So while I may not have flirted with conviction in theological terms, I explored a space of indeterminacy that in my experience was no less implicating. When I “lied” to Phil about praying for him I did not separate myself from his religious world, as one might critically accuse me of doing, so much as adopt a communicative cue derived from a mode of religious sociality in which stated affections, expectations, and courtesies—indeed, words themselves—provide the channels through which “authentic” spirituality is made to appear real and tangible.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve done little more than try to resolve an ethical lapse with an intellectual conceit, a half-truth at best. Or maybe, as opposed to centuries of Christian teachings insistent on transparency and objective sincerity in religious language (as Webb Keane has described), there are parallel, unspoken values attached to the art of well-intentioned words. Maybe Phil really knew what I really meant, and if he were still alive would understand why the memory of that afternoon both exhilarates and haunts me. Maybe I’m praying for him right now.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (1877)

Though writing a generation later, the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins invokes a Romantic enthusiasm for the natural world, finding there not only artistic and intellectual stimulation but also a resource informing theological contemplation. Hopkins’s art stands out in this respect, for though there are remarkable exceptions, it is generally the case that Christian thinking is anthropocentric in orientation. Perhaps fascination with post-mortem destinations (heaven, hell, purgatory) in much Christian discourse minimizes perceived value in the material world. Alternatively, maybe it is the tendency to stress the unique status of humans as made in the image of God (see Genesis 1:26), and the fallen state of the post-Edenic universe that is to blame. Whatever the reason, many Christian thinkers seem reluctant to recognize anything of spiritual import in the ecological wonders that surround us. To my mind, this is a missed theological opportunity. Hopkins’s willingness to see the divine purpose in each thing—What I do is me: for that I came—and his awareness that all creation is “charged with the grandeur of God,” as he says elsewhere, inspires a worldview that refuses to put self, and humanity as a whole, at the centre of all things.

Hopkins’s complex poetry gestures toward a spirituality, a communion of individuals with the world around, including animals. And I suspect I am not alone in saying experience resonates with this insight. Such was the case for me a few years back when we lost our spirited greyhound named Tiger after a short illness. It was a heartbreaking diagnosis. Osteosarcoma is a bone cancer that leaves few viable treatment options, apart from pain management. The brief time between diagnosis and our final goodbyes was not easy. There were frequent trips to the animal hospital, and the financial costs of palliative care, including an expensive routine of medications. Far worse was the emotional toll as we waited the inevitable but gradual progress of the disease. We wondered constantly when the quality of life ends for an animal, and whether the decision to delay euthanizing was for our own benefit or hers.

Companion animals inspire much behaviour well described as spiritual in the broadest sense of the word. These creatures have a remarkable capacity to disrupt self-centeredness and inspire affection and appreciation for something completely “other.” Though with Hopkins I contemplate and define spirituality in light of both Christian theology and the wonders and mysteries of the natural world, there is inevitable dissonance that results from each attempt to link the two, particularly when animals are involved. The church’s history boasts many teachers finding religious meaning in encounters with other sentient beings, and yet many more reflect the deeply entrenched view that the natural world does not matter. As early as the writings of St. Paul in the mid-first century, we find language appearing to minimize the significance of animals: “it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake” (1 Corinthians 9:9-10). At least on the surface, Paul appears to undermine the force of a Torah regulation clearly intended to protect labouring animals in favour of an anthropocentric remark. No doubt influenced by Paul’s thinking, the church has a sorry history of neglecting the importance of animals in the religious life, not to mention its tendency to overlook moral responsibilities toward them. Despite Paul’s interpretation of Deuteronomy 25:4, biblical literature provides plenty of evidence to suggest that animals are more than ornaments in the world God made. This is not the context to develop a biblical theology of nonhuman creation but suffice it to say that just as the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), so too animals reveal something of their maker. This God declares them “very good” along with everything else he made (Genesis 1:31). One striking account of the religious consequence of animals in the context of biblical literature is a scene in the Book of Job.

“Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south?” (Job 39:26). This is but one of a litany of questions God puts to Job once he responds to this man’s complaints from the whirlwind. Job lost everything and understandably, he voices despair, sorrow, and anger over his sorry plight. Yet God does not explain the man’s losses and torments but instead directs Job to observe the world around him, including a wide array of nonhuman species (Job 38-41). Lions, mountain goats, wild asses, eagles, deer, oxen, ostriches, horses, and the mysterious but mighty Behemoth and Leviathan appear among the wonders of the natural world God describes, and the effect on Job is striking and perhaps predictable. “I am of small account,” he says to God, “what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further” (40:4-5). The experience transforms Job. His worldview no longer centres on his own predicament. He gains perspective, acknowledging his minuteness (which is not to say insignificance) in relation to God and the world around him. This ancient Jewish text offers another obvious yet profound lesson. Our interactions with the divine occur within a richly diverse and majestic world populated with seemingly endless species, and these nonhuman animals are every bit as dependent on God for life and wellbeing as human beings (see e.g., Psalms 78:23-25; 145:15; 104:21; 147:9).

Caring for and grieving the loss of my dog turned my thoughts away from myself and toward God, the ultimate “Other.” My relatively short time with Tiger in life awakened compassion and celebration of God’s good world, and my journey with her through the valley of the shadow of death evoked a longing to find meaning and solace in loss. Much to my surprise, this animal-human relationship reminded me I am not at the centre of a God-ordered universe. For the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, all living things reveal the creator God, with each kingfisher and dragonfly—and let us add each companion animal—offering a glimpse of the divine.

This card—hand-lettered and never-sent—is the earliest document of my family tree: an invitation to a party held a decade before I was born. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen that’s old enough to bear the name our immigrant parents gave us, Watersmeet. It should not seem so old, but it does; this card from 1978 has the weight of a great-grandmother’s lost pearls, and though it hasn’t even yellowed with age, my mind conjures the dusty scent of memory when I hold it between my fingers.

I asked my father about Watersmeet. “I don’t know, son,” he said. “That was all before my time.” He joined the coven in 1983, only five years later; how could things have been forgotten so quickly? But in those five years, we’d lost Carrie and Deryk, those British wanderers who had brought us word of Wicca from the old country, who had left, gone away to Oklahoma and Iraq, to building plans and brain tumors, to fates none of my family seem to know. In just five years, the family had fractured, from one coven between the Mississippi, Missouri, and Meramec—St. Louis, where the waters meet—to covens across the Midwest, in Kansas City, in Des Moines, in Springfield. By the time my parents joined, they called it Sabbatsmeet, the name I’ve known our family by since before I knew what religion meant.

I found the card in a collection of invitations my friend Sarah kept, invitations that told the history of Sabbatsmeet in six-week intervals. Eight festivals a year, each one of them heralded by a letter with a time, a place and a picture. They’re about the only letters I get anymore. Sometimes they feel anachronistic—Why do we keep a mailing list anymore? Hasn’t everyone had email for a decade?—but we send them anyway, to people who already know about it from the Facebook group, to people in Alabama and California who haven’t made it to a sabbat in decades. I looked through this folder, at these pages of Commodore 64 typefaces and hand-drawn directions, hoping that somewhere in there I’d find my own history—whatever that is, whatever that means.

Look at this tree.

I understand the rightmost branch, the St. Louis covens: Pleiades—that’s the coven I was born into—and next to it, Watershade, our sister. (In the decade and a half since this was drawn, there has been another branch, HollyOak, already come and gone.) They grew out of Arcady, which came from Watersmeet. This much I knew, if only from osmosis. But what about the rest? Silver Ankh? Crystal Mountain? Elysium? Why have I never heard of these?

Sarah fills in some of their stories. “Avillion, I think that was Rhiannon’s group,” she says. “And Elysium’s still around. Lane and Cheryl.” The left-most branches are all the Kansas City covens, whom we lost touch with after a hard divorce. It takes a phone call to Don, once the priest of Arcady Coven before he left Missouri for Florida, to learn much of anything about the others. He told me stories of Deryk and Carrie, he with his bushy mustache and his dry wit, her with her bright red hair and poor coordination: “She was our ‘Aunt Clara,’” he says—the clumsy aunt on Bewitched. A week before a Mabon festival, Don and his wife Alene had stopped by Carrie and Deryk’s to find them packing their suitcases. “We have to move to Kansas City for Deryk’s work,” they told him. “Now you’re the priest and priestess.” The next Beltane—the first of May, when we dance with ribbons in hand and twine ourselves around the Maypole—he’d said they should stop calling themselves Watersmeet, since their meetings weren’t about one coven anymore, and how some new girl from Duluth had said they should call it Sabbatsmeet instead…

I smiled when I heard that story. Elaine, Sarah’s mother, is as close to me as any aunt; once, she’d just been some girl from Duluth. She would have been younger then than I am now. Somehow that seems impossible—not that she could have ever been that young, but that she could have been a part of Sabbatsmeet at that age, could have named it. It feels like it should have always belonged to people older and wiser than me. But it didn’t. They were just kids at the time.

In my head, I know that. I still can’t believe it.

A coven is not a church; there are no buildings, no pastors with divinity degrees, no Women’s Group postings on the bulletin board; only my parents’ living room on a Friday night, the coffee table filled with athames (wiccan ceremonial knives) and chalices and candles. Ultimately, there is nothing material to hold the enterprise together—nothing but the will of its members. That’s all fine: when it works, it’s full of intimacy and love, a good place to grow up in.

But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes people disappear—they move away, or they get divorced, or a friendship ends violently—and they take their memories with them. A few things get saved—some records of the early days, some lists of names unspoken for decades—but it seems like so much more has been lost, stolen away by changes of address and wounds that never had a reason to heal.

I’ve learned things I never even knew to ask about by leafing through this folder—a history that I didn’t know existed. Mostly it makes me wonder how much more there is to find, how many more people I owe some of myself to. I want to know my people, my parents, what their lives were like before I was born. Working-class Missourians like my parents were probably not the people Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders would have expected to reach. But somehow their religion did, passing from England, with love from Deryk and Carrie, through Watersmeet, through Sabbatsmeet, through Pleiades, through my parents, to me. It just seems so improbable—but it happened. How?

I heard that Tom, the one who sent the Samhain invitation with the grinning bat, went into the hospital last week. Liver failure. It doesn’t seem right that a man who would remind his friends to bring their “teddy bears & other favorite cuddlies” should be vulnerable to that. But people are fragile, and too easy to lose. Sometimes the invitations outlast the parties.

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.”