Ten years later, I still remember clear as day the sense of startlement that went through me in a small Catholic church in Seldovia, Alaska, when I suddenly found myself standing before a bas relief carving of the fourth station of the cross—Jesus bidding farewell to his mother—and suddenly realized with every fiber of my being that it was not his mother he was bidding farewell to, but his beloved. What told me this I can’t tell, or whether the sculptor even intended it. But something in the body language between them, the quality of the yearning one could still feel arcing through the
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