The Variations

by John Donatich

Genres: Christian Fiction; Religious & Inspirational

Synopsis

A compelling sympathy of the faiths that fill the gap between who we set out to be and who we ultimately become

A powerful debut novel about a priest who has lost his church, his mentor, and, most upsetting, his ability to pray. How can Father Dominic protect or guide his parish when everything he loves falls away? How can he counsel Dolores, a troubled teenager prone to emotional panic and spiritual monomania? Or James, a promising African American pianist, struggling to realize his artistic ambitions by bringing his own voice to a piece that has been played by the world's most brilliant pianists, Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Into this malaise comes Andrea, a sophisticated New York editor attracted at first by Dom's blog and then by the man himself. Dom's journey from the cloth into the secular world will offer carnal knowledge, but also something deeper, a more resistant knowledge as life fails to offer happiness or redemption. In prose both searching and muscular, John Donatich's The Variations has located the right metaphor for our spiritual crisis in this story of one man's spiritual disillusion and ache for self-knowledge.

Release date: February 28, 2012

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Print pages: 288

Sample

ONE


It was when driving the parish car that Dominic felt most secular. He was just a guy in a Mercury Sable, driving to and from work, doing errands; he could be anyone else on wheels, someone hard to track. Even though the old Sable was nearly twelve years old, it clocked only 47,253 miles on its odometer and was more likely to die of old age than experience.
He had taken the last two stop signs on a roll. Since he was driving with a suspended license, Father Dominic opened the gate and pulled into the church parking lot with a bad conscience, into the vast emptiness of a weekday morning.
Pulling the keys out of the ignition quieted the dinging in the dashboard. The alarm had rung his anxiety to attention as he sat in the car surveying the church property. The gutters leaked, and the asbestos-lined basement flooded after every rain. The boiler surely would not last the winter. The locks didn't secure, and it was only after they had reported the theft of a gold-plated chalice to the Falcones, the local organized "family," that the break-ins ceased. Mice or something bigger worried the walls of the rectory. Empty bottles of beer and cheap whiskey littered the corners of the lot; Dominic turned out early every Sunday morning to clear them before Mass. How he hated the clink of glass against glass in the garbage bag, hollow and carnal like a laugh track.
Now in its fifth decade of urban renewal, New Haven was just a bunch of little neighborhoods struggling to assert their integrity. Dom liked the tired maturity of the city's faith—the kind that knew better than to reach a conclusion, that believes despite the contrary evidence, despite the improbability of redemption. His church was needed here.
Dominic packed up his portable "death kit"—that little pouch of blessed oils, holy water, a stole and his battered little green book, Pastoral Care of the Sick—that he had used in administering Extreme Unction, the last rites, to Father Carl. He leaned over to jam the kit into his glove compartment when in the rearview mirror he saw a flash of movement, a white T-shirt behind a tree. He froze as the girl ran to the next tree—barely a girl, really, a sliver of agitation. Dolores.
Dom had known her since she was a kid in the parochial school—when there still was a school. It was Father Carl who had had the primary relationship with her. They had scheduled spiritual counseling every Thursday night at 6:30 right after the evening Mass, but it was always a gamble whether the girl would show or not.
"One of God's special cases, given us to know Him better," Father Carl had winked, which, again, had confused the younger priest. Dolores was an insistent but erratic presence; she would come to the church every day for a period but then disappear for months only to wind up calling Father Carl at the rectory in a panic in the middle of the night. Then the pattern would repeat. Dom tried to be patient with the girl, but he worried about the toll she took on the ailing older priest. She showed up rarely when expected and often when inconvenient. If her timing was unpredictable, she was even harder to place physically. During his weekly visits to Dolores's housebound mother he barely saw any sign of the daughter in the apartment. Dominic even wondered whether she lived half the time out on the street. The truant officer, social worker and welfare agent had filed their final reports and were done with her. The high school and the state had virtually given up on her. She had turned to the Church in the end.
Father Carl had really been her last lifeline, and when he got sick Dom began to see more of her. She ran errands for the elder priest, made round-trips to the post office and drugstore, brought him books from the library and, then, audiotapes when he grew too weak to read. He began to show up at morning Mass in polished shoes. She was desperate to be of use to him, although Dom had always found her to be in the way.
"She must be wearing you out; you need your rest," Dom warned Father Carl.
"What I need is a life I can still help," he replied.
Dominic felt Dolores competing for the priest's affection. A few months ago, in what would turn out to be Father Carl's final public sermon, she had scooped Dom by arriving at the church early, shoving him aside in order to seize control of the wheelchair. She would be the one who wheeled Father Carl down the aisle to the altar, glowering at the congregants in the pews, daring them to look directly at their frail pastor with anything but reverence. But now that the old priest had died, would she be turning to him for counsel? The thought exhausted him.
Wincing at the grunting door (he half expected it to fall off completely any day now), Dominic made hard work of gathering himself out of the car. Glancing at the bumper, he confirmed that he had swiped the mailbox backing into that tight spot. He bent down pretending to examine the scratch while getting a peripheral glimpse of the tree she hid behind. She was so skinny a birch could manage it. He stood up, put his hands on his hips, stared directly at where he thought she would be and walked toward the line of trees at the edge of the lot.
"Hello?" he cried out.
There was no answer. Dom heard the steady roar of the Interstate beyond the concrete barrier at the edge of the shallow woods. His next call was lost in the rumble of a passing truck.
"Is that you, Dolores?" he asked and stepped over the curb onto the soft pile of pine needles. The damp of the earth seeped through the hole in his left shoe he hadn't gotten around to mending.
"What, no coat? Aren't you cold? Come into the rectory and warm up."
"You can hear me, but you can't see me."
"Why is that? Are you invisible?"
"Might as well be."
"Come in; it's cold out. Or I can drive you home."
"Oh no, none of that."
"None of what?"
"Whatever. Sooo, how is he?"
Dom sighed. Would this girl be the first he told? "He's with God now."
Dolores stepped out from behind the tree. He barely recognized her. Long stringy hair, not so much unwashed as unclean. Untreated acne on her forehead. Teenage skinny, probably too skinny. Her very posture was angular and aggressive, vaguely contentious. She was the age at which physiology was temperament. Or was it something more? She seemed somehow hurt.
Dominic cleared his throat. "I'm very sorry. I know how you loved him."
"How do you know that?"
"Well, because I know how he loved you."
He watched the bones of her face fold into an ache; then she turned and ran across the parking lot. He called after her.
As he watched her race down the street, he felt that familiar discomfort he hated in himself: the capacity for pity. He had been prone to it his whole life but had grown to mistrust it utterly; it was feminine and sentimental. It turned on him like heartburn. He had hidden within it, and he had mistaken it for kindness.
* * *
Climbing the narrow stairs off the kitchen, Dominic balanced a hot cup of tea on his briefcase; he had forfeited his usual dash of brandy. The hot water steamed in the cool hallway. Much of the rectory had been shut down to save on heating; now it would be kept just warm enough for him.
Upstairs in the library, Dom logged on to his blog. With naive goodwill, he had recently written an essay arguing for the preservation of Our Lady of Fatima Church, which the archdiocese had recently named among the several dozen churches likely to close. There had been a sudden if modest outcry within the parish. The friends of the church were supportive, holding midnight candlelight vigils and prayer sessions. A petition was drawn and signed by the very people who never bothered coming to Mass.
Parishioners came to him with visions. A widow claimed she could suddenly see a teardrop form in the corner of the eye of the marble statue of the Virgin, only it's a blemish in the stone that Dom knows has always been there. He did not disabuse the woman, though, and stayed off the record while she talked to the newspapers. None followed up on her claim in print, thank God. He was glad they didn't take her seriously; the world was right to be suspicious about these sightings: Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, Queens, and hundreds of others. He mistrusted any literalizing of the mysteries.
It was on the Internet, though, that Dom got his first real idea of how people outside the parish felt about the church and its future. There would be nothing of the Bing Crosby sort of priest for Dom, drawing strength from the supportive folk of the parish. Daily doses of anonymous venom spat through the Web and landed on his blog. Over the last dozen months or so, he had posted his sermons, editorials, daily meditations, personal essays to a small but growing and appreciative audience. His blog had even been linked to several national sites; he had become a kind of go-to guy for reporters watching contemporary Catholicism. His Facebook account collected hundreds of friends, while his social life added none. Most of his readers were either orthodox Catholics looking for blessings or those curious few who came to find out what the fuss was—those agnostics who didn't necessarily believe in the Deity but held on to "their own personal idea of God." As if the purpose of being a god was to be conjured up in the imaginations of those who needed Him.
But it wasn't until the rumors about the closings went public that he got the full blast of those who did not come with sympathy.
Comment #1022 by jimmyfox on November 25 at 7:14 p.m.
Nobody wants you. Just shut it down. Why would you ask us to hold out against all that gives us a little pleasure in this crappy world? No sex, no drugs. Puh-leeeeze!
Comment #1023 by indiparent on November 25 at 7:39 p.m.
I agree. Go to hell! You churches are just recruitment centers for innocent children to be sodomized by the priests anyway. What are you but safe havens for pedophiles. Read a newspaper, people. Get out of town and be in a hurry, Our Lady of Flatulence. God riddance (pun intended).
Comment #1024 by holyjizz on November 26 at 12:12 a.m.
Me again, Father. Let me ask you about that little girl who got shot in Columbine, the one the book got written about, She Said Yes. That's what the newspapers reported the girl said when asked if she believed in Jesus—with a gun to her head. Turns out the whole thing was a sham. It's more like She Shit Herself. That's the humanity of the situation. Am I right, Father?
Let's talk turkey, Padre. When it comes to religion, we're supposed to respect and honor your right to preach superstition and ancient taboos that we wouldn't allow anyone else to get away with. So—we've gotten rid of slavery, cannibalism, the fucking stoning of whores—you name it, the list goes on and on. But in the case of religion, we have to simply annihilate the entire rational evolution of our minds and bow our heads at the effort?
Face it, Father. The fight's over. The world is better off for moving on. The New Atheism: Bring it on.
Dominic typed in a response:
I recognize a definite zealotry to your atheism. Your attack on religion is not only ideological, it's downright evangelical! It's almost as if your ambition doesn't just want to destroy religion; you want to replace it.
Your certitude astonishes me. I've heard all of it before: that our vision of God is a defense system against the fear of the unknown, a fantasy of anthropomorphic grandiosity, a cognitive response to some ancient offending or frightening mental stimuli. I've heard this all before from social psychology, social-exchange theory, evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive science, members of whom inform us that human instinct and intuition are evidence of adaptive behavior, learned fitness, market motives, encoded survival techniques. To give no credence to the wild and unknowable side of consciousness—how small that must feel.
Faith is that willful belief in what is not possible, or, as Wallace Stevens put it:—the nicer knowledge of belief
That what it believes in is not true.
Your legitimate gripe is actually with the Church, which really in the end is nothing more than the social management of the wildness of spirit institutionalized within religion. More than that, it's also the acceptable mechanism for people to safely explore that wildness. They won't like that I write this, but they should realize it's their greatest asset.
Why would anyone not want a greater, more ambitious idea of the human soul—one that can believe in something beyond what it can conceive of? Why wouldn't you cultivate the kind of soul that is able to willfully experience beyond the rational mind and material world, even if illusory? Isn't that in itself a kind of joy?
Rather than post, Dominic highlighted and then deleted the response. He knew that he would never win or lose that argument; it would just devolve into name-calling. He would be just another priest arguing with another atheist: "But you're guilty of the same thing you accuse me of; you are trapped within the structural dynamics of your own prejudices." They would get into that "I know that you know that I know that you know" game, like a bad high. Better to resist the easy grooves of careless thinking online: all these people who just wanted to come lift a leg and pee in his yard. Instead, he simply wrote and sent through the line:
I quote: "To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter."—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Funny point in our history, isn't it, for a priest to be attacked like a heretic.
* * *
"Whatever you say, say nothing."
Father Carl's last words haunted him. It was as if the old priest had passed invisibly inside the younger, but instead of being burdened Dom felt curiously lighter, happier and excited even—as if they were road buddies off together on some caper.
Whatever you say, say nothing. In the sacrament of Extreme Unction, Dominic had touched with the consecrated oil the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the lips of the old priest but then lingered, rubbing the oil into the hands. How soft, still, cool and so white: between flesh and marble, man and monument. Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou has committed by walking, Dominic said, touching the feet of Father Carl. A douse of holy water, a dose of morphine. Father Carl was nothing but a man and barely that. What was it that Dominic listened for in the sound of the breath held in that grim line of the lips, life or death? And then nothing. Withheld. He had counted slowly and at the twenty-third beat, he listened to the rattle in the man's chest. How many deaths had he witnessed? At what point had they become—no, never routine—but the opposite of something happening?
Whatever you say, say nothing.
The phrase would stick. Even with his cheeks sunken, his bulk weightless on the bed, humming to stay just a little alive, that motherless child, that childless man made the effort to be priestly, significant in his last words, as if they might become famous last words. But who remembers a dead priest?
Holding the hand a bit longer, Dominic had listened for the warmth to cool; he smelled the rank from under the sheets as the old man's bowels loosened. He turned his head away. Is this how a soul at death, at the pearly gates themselves, must look back and first see itself? Soiled and still. How big and true little words pretended to be. Dead. God.
Dom laid the hands across the chest. Old tools in a junk shop. He closed the priest's lids over his eyes. Why did people in the movies always die with their eyes closed? Dom said a final prayer, struggling to let the words settle into meaning; he leaned into their rhythm and fought the hunch that it might just be his own last sincere prayer. He kissed the waxy forehead. He thumbed the jaw to shut the gape of the mouth. Agape. Say nothing. Little Lamb. Lamb of God. Who made thee?
There was much to do. Arrange for the transport of the body from the hospital to the funeral home. But, in fact, many of the details—the choice of coffin, the parish cemetery lot, even the list of eulogists—had been prearranged by Father Carl, who was proud of the fact that he had exacted an "ecumenical discount" from the undertaker. After all the referrals he had given? Father Carl's two brothers were on call, and Dom knew that the answering machine blinking red in the vestibule signaled a neglected call from the elder checking up on things. None of it should wait, really. Nevertheless, he wanted to drift quietly for a while in the depressurized air of the emptying rectory. Weightless and suggestible as a ghost, he wondered the places he might go, the things he might see, might hear. From his earliest awareness, Dominic knew he was given to a mystifying tendency, prone to imagining things around him deeper and more beautiful than perhaps they really were—or had a right to be.
Roaming the halls, he passed Father Henry's room, sealed shut since the priest died fourteen months ago. The door to Father Carl's suite was open, as he had left it. Dominic stood in the doorway as his loneliness warmed its way into the room; his solitude was thermostatic, portable. Sitting on the twin bed made up tight as a military cot, Dominic handled the rosary beads Father Carl had left on his bed table, and resisted the temptation to see human wear in the bevel of the beads.
There was very little the old priest left behind. Not a clue to a single secret. Even if the parish had wanted to honor him as an elder or the chief of a small tribe, there was no personal treasure to bury him with. Where were the things he loved and held on to—the list of which might serve as a kind of biography?
When Father Carl had asked why he wanted to be a priest, Dominic joked, "Why, to have what you have: the girls, the money, the cars, the houses." Looking around, Dom realized he had learned to crave as little as Father Carl. The bureau drawers contained only graying and neatly folded underwear, socks in a limp roll, his personal Bible fraying with Post-it notes, his liturgical calendar, his notes for sermons in copy books, his library copies of Trollope and Nouwen. A beach pebble—the one unpractical item, ostentatious in its useless sentiment. A photograph of Father Carl with his twin brother, at least thirty years old by the look of the Pontiac and their sideburns. In the bathroom, his shaving mug, brush and razor. Under the bed his pair of slippers, his pair of sneakers. He was simple, like a bird, maybe, who loved his few colorful threads but left them behind within the nest. He hoarded nothing.
The absence of belongings, in fact, testified to how little Father Carl regarded his mortal life. The old priest had believed so fervently in the afterlife (almost till the end) that Dominic's own faith had been excited by it. In the old man, extravagance of soul was in equal parts to the modesty of the body.
"Of course you can argue that it is improbable—heaven, the afterlife, the Great Merger with Being, whatever you want to call it—but you can't argue with me that it is impossible because I can believe it. To me if it's conceivable, it's possible."
That was what the old man had argued. If irrational or illogical, there was also a beautiful justice to his faith: what ought to be true has to be true. "There's no dishonor in it, you know," he had argued to Dominic, "in believing in something merely because you cannot disprove it."
Dom opened the little white paper bag and took out the sandwich the orderly had given him as he left the hospital. The tuna fish glued the two stale slices of bread together like a gray paste. He wasn't hungry but ate the whole thing anyway, tasting it like medicine. Father Carl had loved tuna and ordered it in a club sandwich with a whiskey sour—"the real stuff, not the mix"—at the Graduate Club every Friday lunch.
Dominic looked in the old man's closet. Sweats on a hanger. Three clerical suits. One double-breasted pinstripe, which Dominic took out. He pulled off his sweater and tried on the jacket; the satin lining was cool against his bare back as he buttoned the front. The sleeves hung below his wrists, and as he turned to the mirror and lifted his arms in a mock benediction to his congregation, he braced himself against the unexpected smell of Father Carl that crept up. The old priest had been like a father to Dominic; how difficult it is for a son to love up to a father.
"Call no one your father on Earth," exhorted the Bible; Dominic's childhood had nicely accommodated that.
Dominic took the suit off and looked at himself in the mirror. "You're too sexy to be a priest," one of his bloggers had commented not so long ago. "Even if you were meant to be one," she wrote, "my God, what a waste!"
The mirror didn't exactly corroborate. Fifty loomed just a few years away like a drop-deadline. His workouts had gone by the wayside, and his belly rolled over his underpants. The hair on his chest was graying faster than the hair on his head and grew like a jungle, creeping over his shoulder. Wasn't there supposed to be the equivalent of a tree line to one's torso? Walking closer to the mirror, he saw that he seemed to have the face he deserved: his lips dipped sourly at the corners over the empty space left by the molars that had been removed a decade ago. Worry marks creased his brow. Still, he believed he could whip himself into shape, pass for handsome again, make it on the outside should things come to that. Should the parish close for a fact. Should he be set loose from the Church. Should he become answerable to the charge of being "sexy."
Those hostile comments on his blog—he should find them instructive, be proud of them even. He was too old to have no enemies.
As he hung Father Carl's suit back in the closet, Dominic hummed a song that the dead priest had used to whistle frequently, "Do Nothing till You Hear from Me." He smiled and understood what he was looking for: Father Carl would "write" his own eulogy by limiting or censoring what might be said. He owed the dead man that much at least: whatever he said, he would say nothing.
* * *
"Kneel when you pray," Father Carl had instructed him.
"Kneel even if you aren't able to pray."
Dominic dreaded his evening prayers. The Liturgy of the Hours, November 26, was the Day of the Moon.
Let us pray.
Most merciful God, we humbly pray thee: that, like as when thy blessed Abbot Sylvester was devoutly meditating over an open tomb on the vanity of this life, thou didst vouchsafe to call him thence unto the desert, and to adorn him with a life of wondrous merit; so thou wouldst enable us after his example, to despise all earthly things and hereafter to rejoice in his eternal fellowship.
Dominic sat before the still-black window, tracing the filigree of the treetops against the starless but bright night sky, a bemooned sky. He waited for the comforts that reliably came with prayer: for the uphill pull of the eyelids to set at half-mast, for the lips to part and the tongue to go soft, for the tingle at the bridge of the nose, for the lightness at the top of his head. He listened for what he loved about the language of prayer: how it reminded him sometimes of the grit of gravel being stepped on, sometimes of rain running in a gutter, but always of the pinch of recrimination. He tried to pray as young seminarians do, clueless yet stimulated, groups of men sent off like toddlers into a playground. He meditated upon the lesson of Abbot Sylvester, who had looked into an open grave and saw there the disfigured body of a handsome kinsman who had lived nearby, saying, "I am what he was and what he is I shall be."
Sweat broke across his forehead; fatigue pressed at the back of his eyes. The pain in his knees insisted that his body was just matter: what Simone Weil called simple, disobedient matter. He was unable to pray. This wasn't just the usual quieting of doubt, like calling a room to order. This was different.
He worked hard at it, but it was like learning to draw by tracing. Better a copy than a fake. Faith should be authentic, not original.
His prayers reached for the moment when the words lost meaning and began, simply, to act. But not this evening. The failure startled him, like a child who looks up to discover that the legs he clings to do not belong to his father.
"Pray every day, Dominic," Father Carl had said. "It's like money in the bank."
But his body disobeyed. He was starving; his stomach rumbled, and his head ached. Sluggish, constipated, swollen with false starts. Not subservient to his will, but selfish. He craved; he was hungrier than he had ever been. How unlikely this physical rebellion, as if the rocks on the beach were to rise up and colonize elsewhere. He felt the corrosion of conviction deep in his bowels. He dropped to his knees and invoked the antique panic of Psalm 70.
Be pleased, O God, to deliver me!
O Lord, make haste to help me!
His knees, experienced as a yoga master's, ached under his weight and gave in. He fell to his side, hugged his legs to his chest and let the pressure radiate between the shoulder blades on his back. He turned over onto his belly. He closed his eyes to block the rush of images coming at him. He laid his head in his hands, pressed the warm curve of his fingers against his face. The weight of his head in his hands moved him, as if he were another gazing upon this picture of anguish. He had lain in this pose the day of his ordination—prostrate: a young man so eager to be saved and to save. That day seemed so long ago; the image itself an anachronism.
Dom rubbed his eyes until they ached, and the very blindness made its own images. He watched the nervous movie unfold: psychedelic constellations, arid deserts of cracked skin and creeks of blood; even this self-abuse had the colors of cosmic illusions.
Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold. Psalm 69
His prayers had been stripped of belief, authoritative and petrified like a dead language. They were impotent even as he ground his hips against the hardwood planks of the floor, unforgiving of the unwelcome bulge in his pajama pants. "A common affliction," he told himself with consolation and condescension. He was like an adolescent again. Now in his middle ages, he couldn't even bear himself in pants. His flesh rushed and engorged while his spirit withered and shrunk. The mind was willing, but the flesh was materialist, insistent. Prayer, in fact, had become an irritant like his morning erection: objectless, unfocused, unloved, unloving.
"Listen, Dominic, the big challenge is not to keep believing but to believe again and again, to start all over," Father Carl had exhorted. "Day by day. Day after day. From scratch. Every day."
He tried to pray as he had been able to as a young man, tireless and ardent, with that once-in-a-lifetime sense of attainment young men have. It had come to him so naturally and so blessed. He even used to think he had a gift for it. Now he felt plain foolish. His entire inner life—so credulous, so accredited, so historically buttressed by centuries of theology—now seemed merely ridiculous. What could he do, given the failure of his praying, but simply talk.
Failed Prayer Number One
In prayer I am never alone, both the dreamer and the dreamed.
Even our nightmares deliberate. He who could save us is almost always too late, almost never on time.
You and I, though, we're right on schedule: Here I am, prostrate before You, in this ancient pose this late in the story. You recede as the day emerges, impressing upon me You're going missing.
I'll go out for You again tomorrow.
"Pray like you still believe," Father Carl had said. "Let it sneak up on you."
Failed Prayer Number Two
Lord, open my lips. And my mouth will proclaim your praise.
I will listen for you all night long.
I am beside myself listening for You.
Here, in the aftermath of You.
I am comfortable with Your absence so long as I know You are there.
He worried that using the second person in his prayers was presuming too much—as if he was admitting his own person by implying a listener.
He slept for a while without dreams. When he woke several hours later, stiff and wary, trying to remember why he felt afraid, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, rose to his knees and continued where he had left off.
Failed Prayer Number Three
All is still—"Dead quiet," Father Carl used to call this kind of outside, as if telling the future.
I awoke hoping that I had changed in some essential way; that I would know exactly what to do; that I would recognize Your guidance though it had not been given.
All summer long, trying to ward off this crisis, Dominic had read outside the Liturgy for his morning prayers, looking for inspiration from Chinese poets of the eighth century; Californians from the last—but he found the simplicity of their spirit overly burdened. Their openness crowded him. He had stood in the predawn and tried to feel virtuous before the beauty of a single leaf that fell at his feet. He tried to free himself of promise and be in the moment. His breathing would grow heavy at the proud pressure of being "present," the bias that so much depended on one's attention. In any event, his prayers had stopped asking for anything long ago. He wanted to return to his own enraged universe before which he lay watchful, helpless and expectant.
Failed Prayer Number Four
With prayer, practice does not make perfect.
Tragic as I feel, this must look pretty funny: me, here on my knees, smelling the failure of will on my hands.
My spirit is suspicious of epiphany: all that blissful filling.
I have never felt so much f