Mirrors

They will tell you about the haunted mirror right away.

They know that you know about it.  They know that it is the reason bookings for that particular room keep their otherwise struggling hotel afloat.  But still they must, as a precautionary measure, advise you that the room you will be staying in has a haunted mirror. 

You will nod your thanks, take your one small bag (for no one ever stays in this room longer than one night), and board the elevator in the lobby.  The elevator will take you up the necessary number of floors before it stops to let you out.  You will exit the elevator, look at your key card (though you don’t need to, for everyone knows the number of this room), and make your way to the door.  You will open the door.  Once inside you will set down your bag, find an angle on the bed from which you cannot see your reflection in the mirror, and begin to stare at it. 

It doesn’t look haunted at all, at least if the markers of haunting are age and decay.  The silver of its frame glitters as if newly polished.  From your angle you can tell that the glass has been cleaned lovingly by some unfortunate soul, or one who is fortunately blind.  You can see the opulence of the mirror, and you understand why everyone’s eyes would at first be drawn to it. 

But you know what will happen if you get up from the bed and stand in front of it.  Everyone knows. 

You will at first see only your familiar reflection, showing back to you whatever expression you have shown to it.  Your smile or your frown, your bright eyes or dull, your hands on hips or snug in your pockets—all of this will come back to you just as you expect. 

The change will at first be small, starting at your mouth.  You will see in your reflection a sudden grin that you did not will to be on your own face.  At first this will be a grin of mischief, as if you and your reflection are in on some spectacular joke.  Slowly, though, you will find yourself cut off from this grin.  Slowly, it will seem as if your reflection is holding from you some devilish secret that you cannot root out.  Then, as the grin begins to expand, you will see teeth that are not yours—teeth that are sharp and animal, perfect for tearing into warm meat or soft flesh.  As the grin begins to widen, the mouth will begin to move and from it will start a procession of noises.  They will be the noises of a beast, and they will rise and rise until you find yourself staring at your own face caught in a frenzy of howls, a crescendo of gnashing teeth and savage, bloodthirsty cries. 

If you wait out this show of beastly histrionics, if you do not run screaming from the room to seek the sunlight outside, sunlight that will offer you no warmth, you will find, at the end, that your reflection calms itself and comes to rest staring directly into your eyes.  But your eyes in the mirror will not be the eyes that you know, of whatever brown or blue or gray that they have worn since your birth.  They will be bottomless inky wells, pits of darkness in which there is no glint or glimmer, swallowing all the light from windows or lamps.  These ocular abysses will tell you that your most cherished thoughts—that you are decent, that you do your best, that you are capable of love—are lies that you can no longer peddle to yourself or to the world.  And you will despair.

Everyone knows about this mirror.  Everyone talks about it.

No one talks about the other mirror, the one on the opposite wall.  Few can wrest their gaze from this mirror long enough to notice that other one.

If the first mirror draws all eyes to itself through its pristine opulence, this other one escapes notice through its simplicity.  A small wooden frame surrounds a glass that is foggy, as if all the polishing of a careful hand could only lift its obscurity enough to cloud whatever is reflected by it in a faint mist. 

The face that you see in this mirror will not at first seem to be your own.  In fact, you will have difficulty making it out.  Man or woman, young or old, full of joy or full of sorrow—at first it will seem to be none of these things distinctly, or it will seem to be all of these things at once.  On this face, whether it wears a smile or a frown or a look of blank attentiveness, you will, however, see something very clearly, though you won’t at first be able to name it.  It may look like pity, or it may look like longing, but whatever it is, it is different from the grin you saw in the other mirror in one way.  It is inviting, it wants to bring you in, to enfold and envelope you in its immensity.

As you gaze at this mirror, though the clouds in the glass remain, you will find that the face reflected in it grows clearer.  It will become your face, but not your face.  It will become your face wrapped and enfolded in this other face, the faint one, which will itself become clearer and clearer.  And if you look closely, you will see that the other mirror, the silver one, is also reflected in this mirror.  But through this reflection you will not see the monster that wore your face when you stood in front of the silver mirror.  You will instead see the same face, the one that gazes at you from the simple wooden mirror, reflected back upon itself in an infinity so large as to swallow up the room.

If you gaze at this mirror, you will leave the room to walk out into the sunlight.  The sunlight will warm you, the blue sky will pierce you, and everything that you see will rush to greet you, embrace you, and call you by a name you never knew you had.

The strange thing about the second mirror, though, is this:  It will only show you these things if you have first looked into the haunted mirror.

Two Fires

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

       -T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

The Spirit comes as a fire.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus imparts the Holy Spirit to his followers with a breath, perhaps as the breath you would feel when a lover or friend whispers a gentle, intimate secret into your ear.  In the book of Acts, the spirit descends upon the apostles at Pentecost as a fire, wild and loud, bright and brilliant.  The dove of peace comes with wings aflame, terrible and awesome.

Fire is light.  As the chosen people traveled to the Promised Land, the fire moved in front of them by night to illuminate the way forward from slavery to the new life of holy community.  A campfire may call us back to friends when we have wandered off into darkness.  The flame of a candle casts out the shadows in the corners of our rooms.

Fire is heat.  It may call the desperate fisherman from his boat to be warmed on the shore.  It may relieve us from the cold in our bones when we walk through the doorway of a welcoming home.  It may dry our drenched clothes after an unforeseen walk in the rain.

Fire transforms.  It takes a meager offering and turns it into a pleasing aroma to the Lord.  In the kitchen, fire applied to the fruit of the earth awakens new flavors to be savored by the hungry tongue.  When the breath of life has left us, fire may change us into ash, ushering us back to the earth from which we came.

Fire burns.  While the breath of life is in us, it scorches and scars the skin, bringing pain and demanding a balm.  Fire strikes at our vulnerability and tenderness, producing the agony of passion and the grief of injury. 

Fire is many things.  Fire destroys a moment and ushers us into the next one.  Fire is the Spirit of the Lord Jesus.

***

Several weeks ago, in the heart of Lent, I sent myself on pilgrimage by embarking on a silent retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  I had scheduled the retreat in December, and I had no way of knowing where my life would be when the time for the journey came.  When it arrived, I was grappling with an ending and facing the darkness of where the road would take me in the days ahead.  The silence of my small room and of the monastery grounds, broken only by joining the monks in the offices of prayer, was a quiet and motionless ocean with no visible shore.  There was no future but the moment, and the moment was a persistent flame on my skin.

I decided to fill the hours of the first full day of this silence by hiking the trails in the woods of the monastery grounds.  I had a particular destination.  In the time since my previous visit to Gethsemani in 2015, I had heard of something that I didn’t have the opportunity to see those few years ago—the statues.  Hidden in the surrounding woods, I had learned, were statues depicting Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and the sleeping disciples whose weak flesh could not match their willing spirits to stay awake with their master.  After the morning offices of prayer I set out on the hiking trails, knowing what I sought but having no idea how to find it.  Maps I had consulted were not much help, and so I found myself wandering the wooded trails, looking for some markers that would tell me how to get where I was going.  When I found no such markers I opted simply to continue, to walk and to take the turns that whimsey dictated when the path forked or branched off.  The only plan now was to keep moving.

And I found them.  It was at just the point when I was thinking of turning around, rationalizing that I had two more days of unfilled time and profound silence and so should work on getting better bearings and try again.  At about this moment, though, I saw that the path was preparing to leave the woods for an open expanse between the trees.  “I’ll just walk up to the clearing,” I thought, “and see what I can see.”  The most notable thing that I saw when I entered the clearing was a sign that simply read “Statues,” with an arrow pointing me in the right direction.  The path took me in and out of woods and clearings, but from there on always offered signs to point the way until it came to the edge of a larger area of forest where I found the Gethsemane statues.

They were amazing.  But I was even more transfixed by something off to the side of the path, just before the entrance to this section of woods.  It was a statue of Jesus, standing upright, with the robes over his chest pulled back to reveal his flaming Sacred Heart.  It was the typical Valentine’s Day-style heart symbol with tongues of fire shooting out from the top.  Behind the figure of Jesus was a clear and perfect view of the meadows and rolling hills of the landscape beyond.  And, as I stood and gazed at the Savior’s face and his burning heart, I prayed the most dangerous prayer I have ever prayed in my life.

Oh, Lord, break open my heart.  Split it like tinder so that it may be ignited with the flame of your love.  May I catch fire, so that all around me might catch fire.

Had I known what I was asking for in this moment, I would not have prayed this prayer. 

***

He stands before you exposing his heart, but it is your own face on which his gaze if fixed.  In his eyes are two equally brilliant fires.  They are compassion and challenge.  Compassion for where you are, for the fire that eats at your own heart and disfigures your own face.  Challenge that you not shrink back from this fire, that you not know it for the fire of hell, but to know it in all its refining power, calling you beyond this moment and into the eternal moment of his Kingdom.  Neither fire diminishes the other, and neither is present without the other.  There is no compassion without this challenge, but there is no challenge without this compassion. 

His hands fold back his robe so that you can see his burning heart.  These hands bear the scars of nails, the scars of his own agony still visible though the radiance and peace of his love lack for nothing.  The fire of his heart burns brightly, but does not destroy.  It calls the heart to life and warms it eternally.  This heart cannot grow cold.  And this fire reaches out to your own heart, to find any tender place where it might catch.

This fire is my fire, he says.  From this fire was born all that is, and without this fire there can be nothing.  It is the fire of innumerable stars, of the suns and the moons.  It is the primordial fire of creation.  It gave birth to your world and to your life.  It is the fire of your agony and the fire of your joy, and to know either of these things you must know the other.  You must hold them both.  You must love them both.  This is not the fire of perdition.  The only perdition is to flee from this fire, to avoid catching it and to avoid spreading it.  Without this fire, there is only cold and there is only dark.  This fire is my fire.  This fire is my love.  And you must know its heat if you will know its light.

Behind him are unfamiliar hills, rolling on into the distance.  There is no path to mark the way through them, but they are brightened by rain and the brilliance of the sun.