Immaculate

by Anna McGahan

‘There are some people in the church community who see marriage as the outward manifestation of your faith, you know? So if you’re getting married, you’re kind of climbing the ladder to heaven. If you’re married with kids, you’re even closer. If you’re single, God must be working on your character. If you’re infertile, you’re having trust issues. If you have marriage problems … well, someone’s living in sin, because the covenant is your salvation. Even if staying feels like self-betrayal or abuse, it’s the most important thing. Leave your spouse and you might as well have left God. And once you’ve exited the institution of marriage – which is the bedrock of the church’s survival, because if you can’t control people with sex you can’t control them at all – once you’ve left the system, you just don’t fit into its trajectories anymore. You’ve done the forbidden thing, the unforgivable sin. You’ve eaten the apple. You know too much.’

Nothing about this is good. And if God is present and lucid, I feel terribly disappointed that someone I trusted could possibly sit there, watch that happen to me and my kid, and do nothing.’

I feel very close to the darkness, and the way the theatre descends into it, like falling asleep before the dream begins. I usher them into their seats, as they so naively allow their bodies to be put under the influence of story. The similarities to church baffle and compel me, but the differences are stark. I would usher them into church, too, and they would sit under the bright lights and hug their neighbour and stand to sing together. They’d participate in a soaring coming-together of purpose with the performance, before settling in to be fed. Always that same word – fed. Fed the ideas they should be believing, loosely justified by the Word: just the equivalent of blogs and texts from ancient homies who wanted to start a podcast.

The only survivable perspective in parenting is magical thinking. I love you, so nothing bad can ever happen. I love you, and therefore you are eternal.

And what do I do, with that small will? The one that chose none of this chaos, but right now chooses sleep? Do I lay her down, the sleeping child, finally breathing so steadily against my breast? Or do I rip her from peace, throw holy water on the burning body? Maybe gain another hour on the loudly ticking clock of her tiny life? The meds sit heavy on the kitchen bench. Poison that might mean life. Brutality that might mean kindness. I wake her, and she screams.

Dr Simon looks at us: aggrieved, human. ‘I know you would like to believe the arc of the universe’s story bends towards justice. My work tends to offer a different narrative. That narrative is chaos.’

I understand implicitly the battle between the God we want and the God we get, right in that moment.

I feel sorry for the brokenhearted pastor sitting next to me, the one I used to nip the ears of when we made love, the one who would feel guilty about lying in the sun listening to Bob Dylan, not realising that that too was worship. The one who hurt me in the name of God time and time again, addicted to orthodoxy and numbed by self-righteousness.

But isn’t that the point of everything that has happened between us? We command nothing. We control nothing. We receive and receive and receive, and some of it is beautiful and some of it is absolutely fucked. I know I am in shock, and I know the feelings will decide they want to speak at four in the morning or some such hour, but for now I feel nothing but a practical acceptance. Life is fucked. Life is entirely fucked and there is nothing we can do about it. No amount of missions or outreaches or fundraisers or social media campaigns will change it. Our child is dying. We’ve already lost.

‘Love is not the same as transparency. Honesty and secrets are just tools we use to communicate. Love goes beyond that. There are a lot of reasons I cannot be transparent. I live to love my partner. And I work in order to stay alive.’ ‘Financially?’ ‘Financially, sure. But spiritually, too.’

Dad had pushed back when I converted. Mum had pushed back when I married young. But the church had given me purpose, and friends, and a family, and a job. It had taken care of those questions of belonging. It had been an outlet for every bit of energetic zeal and wonder that I could have been directing at sex or drugs or dance floors or international travel or fine arts degrees. My rebellion into Christianity made me into a perfectly obedient daughter, and I think for that they just accepted the benefits of my good behaviour and tried to ignore the weird shit. It was innocuous, for a time.

But there’s this place you get to, when you’ve gone lower than low. When you have nothing and nobody, or when the pain is too much to actually cope with. There’s a secret place that opens up and lets you in. A place of real beauty and real rest. Only people who have really been hurt, really been broken, get to see beauty like that. It’s the paradox of all the pain. It grants me access to the kindest thing, the brightest thing. And I don’t think I would trade that for any bed.’

Tragedy must be met with the defiant cultivation of life. I have chosen to cultivate life.

It reminds me of when I first met God, so young and fresh and vulnerable at the age of twenty-one. It was always about wonder and relationship, then. I met Jesus, fell in love, decided to commit. But after a few years I felt catfished. As if the person who gave me that wonder never existed at all, and was just a mask for a bunch of desperate men, setting a trap to appease their desire for control. I made so many decisions attempting to get that wonder back, as if it were being withheld from me until I fulfilled the true picture of a Christian woman. I married Lucas. I quit my arts degree and swapped to theology. I made only Christian friends. I fasted, I studied, I served, I gave away. I changed my political views to fit with the religious rhetoric. I had a child. But the wonder never returned. Not in the same way. Not until now.

‘And then there is the kind of healing that happens when you feel pain, but God doesn’t take the pain or the sickness or the injury away. Instead, He just stays with you while you’re in it, and He feels it with you. And He doesn’t make it stop, but He doesn’t leave your side. You endure it together, and there is a comfort in that.’

I realise that this is the curse of motherhood, after all: to watch your child in pain is the most powerful of tortures. The irrepressible urge to hurt in their place is the most potent of loves.

It is not justice. The men win because the men don’t know how to lose, and we are afraid of what will happen if they do.

My initial embrace of spirituality could easily be put down to my desire for an owned change in trajectory: the belief that if I could become a more palatable human being, perhaps I could cultivate a simpler, more blessed life. I didn’t do any research, didn’t lay the religions out side by side and evaluate their efficacy as ideologies or walks of life. It coincided with my friend wanting to visit the little church on the corner, where they played acoustic guitar and all had tattoos. She wanted to laugh at it. And we did laugh at the pews and the liturgy and the priest and the song lyrics. But I felt the music through my body the same way I do when I dance. I felt the prickle of electricity, the otherworldly presence, the whisper of a full moon through the window of a sleeping house.

He was so direct, so unexpectedly sharp in a room full of softness. I was attracted to Lucas’s sharpness, then. It reminded me I was alive. I did not know it would press deeper into my skin with every passing day, until I woke up sliced in two.

I don’t know which are worse: the fairy tales that tell the brutal truth, or the ones that give you false hope of happy endings.

Every villain looks like a hero in the right light.

It is a secret pleasure to be sad with someone who is also sad. It is a lovely betrayal of that sadness to be happy with them, too.

I am not sure I could ever forgive Lucas for loving the Bible more than me and Neve. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? If he had loved God more than Scripture, perhaps it would have all flowed on. Maybe I could have tasted his tenderness and sacrifice, accessed his vulnerability and strength. Maybe I could have loved him, and he could have loved me. But instead we dutifully loved the same old collection of poems and stories and diary entries and receipts, bound together and called ‘biblical law’, and assumed that this shared love meant marriage. The Bible gave me the boundaries I wanted, and it gave him the purpose he lacked, as if somehow the scrunched-up notes of floundering humans might translate to the infallible blueprint of life. It showed us the truth about a handful of lives, no doubt about it – but that truth is ugly. That truth states that life is absurdly difficult and death is inevitable – even for God. That we will look for God everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, except exactly where we are. And wherever we hurt most, is the place that God will be. If God were to exist, of course.

Eventually he speaks. ‘You will sleep again, you know.’ I do not believe him. I stare at the road. ‘And one of these days, you will wake up and think: Wow, what a gorgeous morning.’ ‘I won’t.’ I refuse to. ‘You will. Because it will be warm, and you will have slept so well, and the sun will sparkle on the dew, and a butcherbird will be singing. It won’t overpower her loss. It will just be a beautiful morning in the midst of her loss. And it will hold you gently.’