Supplicant

 I want to make a pot of spaghetti but am pre-empted by a lack of spaghetti sauce.  I really don’t want to go anywhere, really not wanting to wade into the fluorescent lighting, the garish assaultive advertising and brave the lineups to get what I want.  I don’t want to get what I want, but I have to.  I get in the car clumsily and lumber out of the driveway, begrudging set on my mission. On the way past the Catholic Church down the street, I spy a young man, a teenage boy, kneeling on the sidewalk, thin and bent like a bough under a torrent. It's such a hot and humid day and he kneels there in a full pale yellow suit, maybe his Sunday best. Such a lost looking thing. In the rearview mirror, I can see he is not gardening, not stooping for a dime. Hands clasped, head bowed, he is praying. Poor lost thing.

At the Walmart, it’s a foray through the categories, a mathematical foraging through subdivisions of supply and demand.  I find the spaghetti sauce I want in the pasta department, there the rice and couscous is also kept.  The 1-8 item lineup is bovine and as fate would have it, the clerk can’t get the price of a turnip and needs to call for a price check.  There are full cart checkouts that are finished before I pay for my single can. On the way home, the boy is still kneeling in the same place and position, still supplicating under the sun. What could have driven him to kneel out there in the full sunlight on tiled stone?  Is there a point where we fall so far that we can only look up from our knees?

    I think of my mother in her last days. While sick with emphysema, she kept her crucifix under her pillow, out of sight but always close to her thoughts. When we are scared and have lost control, we turn to a great controller, I suppose. When we refuse to abandon hope, yet can’t find solution, we need to turn to magic.  Faced with the impossible, we turn to something we deem to be invincible.  Our faith is only as limitless as our imaginations.  Hope springs eternal.

    The poor boy. He kneels there on the hot concrete. Why hasn’t anyone taken him in? Why hasn’t a priest come out to give him some sanctuary, or at least an audience? It’s quite possible there are no priests there. Maybe the boy doesn’t want to go in. Maybe the recipient of his prayers is not someone inside.  He kneels there alone and unassisted. Why have the gods turned away?  Why do they hide?  Can’t they see this young man’s sincerity? Is he not ardent enough? Should he be quaking? Should he be whirling?  Should he be cutting a lamb’s throat? Should he be cutting out a virgin’s heart? Should he be hurling himself off the top of a mountain?  Should he be speaking in tongues?  Which tongue?  Aramaic? Latin? Yiddish? Sanskrit? There are so many questions in the mystery of God. Whenever there is no answer, that answer is always God.  And God, evidently, never answers...