Uploading pictures regularly to Flickr.

Patty Griffin — Impossible Dream

Now seems as good a time as any for an earthquake.
— May 18, 2004


Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A new poem up: Mary Oliver's "Landscape."



I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here.

May 17, 2005
Lost crosses

It's getting hard to know what to say here. Maybe that is why I'm silent for weeks at a time. On the one hand, I'm out here living my life, with all its new and uncomfortable adventures. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much to share of those adventures. Part of me is genuinely afraid of Offending People — especially friends in real life who read this site regularly.

Maybe that doesn't make much sense. But it's certainly something I'm struggling with.


Went to New York last month with my sister-in-law Kathy (well, she is still my sister-in-law, though I am technically separated from her brother. It is getting a little complicated for us to introduce each other in crowds. I think we'll just settle eventually on the word "friend").

My visits to New York grow less and less touristy as time passes. I've been there a half-dozen times in the past five years, but I still have never visited the Empire State Building, or Ellis Island, or even Grand Central Station. I feel more and more like a local every time I go. There's my favorite corner of Central Park. There's my favorite food shop on Lexington Avenue. And oh, yeah, my new favorite bar. (I'm certainly not a big bar hound, but wow, that place is great.)

This time, we saw a Broadway play at the Graham Kerr Theatre (shown below—high in my seat on the second floor, just before the curtain went up). The play we saw was just nominated for eight Tony awards. Who would've known that I like Broadway plays? This one was remarkable.

Another favorite destination in New York is the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I've loved this place since I first discovered it five years ago. And my affection for the space has stayed with me over the past few years, despite my growing disconnection from traditional Christianity. There is something transcendent about being in this building, getting lost in its misty depths. It's a huge Gothic cathedral that was built in 1892. But construction continues to this day — they are always, always working on this building. Always a scaffolding somewhere.


I was particularly interested to return to the Cathedral last month. After the twists and turns my religious journey has taken in the past year, I wanted to hang out there for a while, get a sense of how it felt. Needless to say, I haven't felt terribly cozy in any Christian church for a while. I wondered if returning to this church would feel different.
So the day before we left the city, I took the train alone up to the Cathedral.


One thing I love about St. John is its great vastness. It is an imposing structure that seems to swallow you whole when you walk in. As you walk toward the nave, your eyes are drawn up, up, up, past the stained glass windows and the great granite columns, and your gaze dissolves into the smoky rafters.

In this way, the church has always felt like a good reflection of a transcendent experience. Your gaze goes soft, looking a hundred feet up into the air above you. There is a sense of depth and mystery that cannot really be articulated. You sense your own smallness, the insignificance of the few fierce little years you've spent here on earth. It puts you in your place. Somehow it's very comforting.

I walked into the church. I was carrying an old silver cross necklace in my pocket. I walked in, expecting all of that richness, that vastness. I was ready for all those beautiful old feelings to wash over me.

I walked into the church and all of that was gone. They had ripped the guts out of the thing. They were renovating everything. Everything that I loved about the church. My breath caught in my throat. The whole back half of the sanctuary was blocked off. The altar area, with its elaborately ornamented altar cloths and candles and prayer chests, was gone. The seven beautiful little chapels running around the eastern end of the Cathedral were gone (these were particularly precious places to me — I took the self-portrait at the top of this page during a wonderful visit to one of those chapels last year). They weren't just hiding under a tarp — they were gone. There was a port-a-potty and a pile of gravel where they used to be.

The altar area was now a shabby, improvised stage with plywood risers providing a little elevation for a fake altar, which may have been a folding table, for all I know. The back wall, instead of drifting smokily and mysteriously into dim, unguessable heights, consisted of a partition wall bleached white and adorned with a big wooden crucifix with two dramatic spotlights on it.

The church was gone. Everything was gone. The chapels I loved! I backed into a corner, and I wept.

It felt like I had come back looking for a desperately missed piece of myself, and it was gone. Some part of myself was hiding behind that partition wall, blocked off, temporarily unavailable.

I took the cross out of my pocket and laid it on one of the wooden chairs by the altar. I leaned against the wall and cried.


I'm not sure how to talk about the crosses here. This is where I worry about offending someone. Over the past ten or fifteen years, I have acquired a great many cross necklaces. Some I've bought for myself. Some have been given to me by friends and family. I have a whole host of them — Orthodox crosses I bought in Russia, before I joined the Orthodox church. Little hand-painted wooden crosses bought for me in Mexico. Delicate silver crosses from the jewelry store, gifts from friends.

I don't wear a cross anymore. I don't really want to wear any sort of religious symbol as personal jewelry right now. I have no problem with someone else wearing a cross, of course — I just don't want to wear one myself.

So I'm wondering, what becomes of all those crosses in my jewelry collection? Some of these crosses are just beautiful. Do they just sit there, lurking at the edges of my jewelry dish? Do I hang on to them, in the event that I return to that form of Christianity one day? Do I toss them out? The pawn shop is out of the question.

I decided to keep some of the necklaces, and release some of them. I decided to leave them, one by one, in public places where perhaps another person could find them and benefit from them. It seemed the most respectful way to let them go. So I left my first cross there by the altar.


I walked back to the information booth, wiping away tears. There was a very kind man there who wanted to answer my questions. I asked him where they had put my beautiful chapels. He said that everything was being restored. There was a major fire in 2003; the smoke damage is now being fixed.

I think he saw that I had been crying. I think he was trying to make me feel better. "It'll be good as new when they're done," he said reassuringly. "Better than new!"

Fourteen months from now, it'll all be back. "Just like before, except all cleaned up," he said.

Fourteen months from now.


I left the Cathedral and I walked across the street to the Hungarian Pastry Shop. I bought a chocolate croissant and nibbled on it as I walked across the north end of the park. I started to feel better, even though I still didn't know what to make of everything. The Cathedral was the last place that I expected to feel so completely displaced. But there it was.

I was on the way to becoming someone different. I would get there with or without the false wall in the Cathedral. It's an illusion to think of ourselves as carved in granite, as having arrived. We never really get there, do we? Kathy likes to say that life is just a series of re-introductions — introductions to new people, to your partner, to yourself. If we're living well, we're all walking around with scaffolding over us, all the time.

I walked down into the park and stopped in my favorite garden for a while. I sat on a bench and watched the tree branches moving in the air. It was a perfect April day. Everything was blooming. There were crushed flower petals already under my feet.