Page 37 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
I felt the wild animal wariness again. I didn’t want to spook her with my open relief, my naked joy at seeing even this small stirring of life.
“Okay,” I said evenly. “I’ll get dressed.”
Midnight Mass.
It started as a tradition in the Holy Land, where believers would gather in Bethlehem during the night and then, torches in hand, walk towards Jerusalem, making it to the city at dawn. A ritual that could fuse narrative into real life, where followers of Christ could stand in the same place He was born before making a pilgrimage to the Holy City.
It’s changed over the millennia, morphed and warped into something different, but at its heart, it’s the same. A re-enactment. A retelling. A redoing.
A liturgical creation of a new reality where Christ walks among us. At least, that’s what Scholar Tyler would say about it.
In the few days since Poppy had left the house under her own steam, she’d gradually come more and more back to life. Singing along with Christmas carols. Yanking the book out of my hands when she felt like I was doing the voices badly. Even playfully pinching my butt in the kitchen.
Our own liturgy was slowly unfolding between the two of us. Glimpses of happiness and easiness and the divine. And like a Mass, I knew it couldn’t be rushed, couldn’t be pushed along. It had to unfold at its own pace, take its own time. So I held space for my lamb. And at the same time, I learned to hold space for my own grief and my own guilt. The idea that I’d earned our miscarriage as punishment haunted me, tormented me.
I read the annotations in my bible explaining that David and Bathsheba’s son probably died of natural causes, the act simply being ascribed to God’s will as so many deaths were in those days. And I read David’s own words in the Psalms:
As far as the east is from the west,
So far does he remove our transgressions from us.
But nothing helped.
I told you I was addicted to guilt. And like any addict, I needed to hit rock bottom. Which wasn’t, as I thought, our miscarriage. It was the few minutes after midnight Mass, when I looked over and saw Poppy staring at the Nativity scene in front of us, the life-sized mannequins of the wise men and the Holy Family.
The life-sized baby Christ in the manger.
And then the Poppy-shaped shell she’d built around herself cracked, the raw emotion of the last month punching through her cocoon of numb self-control, and she started crying. No, not just crying.
Weeping.
The church was mostly empty now, which was good, because Poppy wept loudly, her hands over her face and her body hunched over so that her face was above her knees.
It cut at me to see my lamb like this, cut at me and also filled me with relief because I’d known this had to happen, I’d known that she needed to truly mourn. I wrapped an arm around her. “I’m here,” I whispered quietly. “I’m here.”
She said something into her hands, something so choked and teary that I couldn’t make it out, and so I leaned closer and she said it again. “It’s all my fault.”
Four little words. Four dangerous, gangrenous, little words. Four words that—if you let them take root—would rot you away from the inside, would eat your soul and set decay festering in your heart.
I—Tyler Bell, former priest—should know.
“No, no, no,” I begged her. “Don’t say that. Tell me you don’t believe that.”
She raised her face to mine, her eyes wet and her cheeks splotchy. “It is my fault, Tyler. I didn’t know if I wanted the baby! I said all of those terrible things about the baby changing my life, and what if God took the baby away because I didn’t love it right away? Or what if God was saving the baby from me being a horrible mother?”
Jesus Christ, I thought, and the thought was half instinctive swearing and also half prayer. Is this what my own thoughts sounded like? Is this how dark and lost I was as well? When it came from my beautiful lamb, I could see how poisonous the guilt and shame were. How pointless.
And suddenly I took a step forward on my path, advanced along my spiral several paces. Quitting my addiction to guilt wouldn’t be easy. It would probably be an emotional project for the next few years…maybe for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t help Poppy leave her guilt behind if I didn’t do the same with my own.
So I took a deep breath, held my crying wife close, and…let it go. Loosened my hold and dropped it to the ground. No more guilt for me. And no more for her.
“This isn’t punishment, Poppy,” I told her, with every ounce of certainty and love I could muster. “It’s a tragedy and it’s hard and it’s sad, but God doesn’t send pain to punish us or test us. Pain happens. Death happens. How we grieve and cope—that’s up to us. Of course you were nervous about having a baby. Of course you were ambivalent. We would never punish a bride for feeling ambivalent before her wedding, or a man for feeling uncertain on the first day of a new job, so you can’t punish yourself for how you felt about a child.”
“But it took me so long to be happy about the pregnancy.”
“Being unhappy or doubtful isn’t a sin.”
No more than leaving the priesthood. The thought came from somewhere outside of me, a beam of light illuminating the darkest corners of my soul. And for the first time in a year, I felt it. The shimmering, air-crackling feeling of God nearby. I only wished I could take that feeling and wrap it around Poppy like a blanket.
