Out of Place
Emotionally, however, it’s more fraught. As the accordions play, as the other believers walk up the aisle to receive the gifts, I sit alone in my pew. It’s hard not to feel like I am the only girl who didn’t get an invitation to the party.
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I had planned to stay for the Polish sausage lunch after the service, but the clot of people refuses to budge down the vein of the staircase. In fifteen minutes, the line moves a foot. It doesn’t seem to bother the people around me. They catch up on grandkids, surgeries, summer vacations. You should stay, I tell myself. I bet that Polish sausage will be amazing. But I still have that long drive ahead of me, and I cannot shake the feeling that this place—while home to those around me—is not my place. I feel alone even as my body is at the heart of all these people.
I blame the drive.
It reminds me of something I experienced twenty years ago as I sat beside my new husband in a tiny Dodge Horizon. We were honeymooning in Montana, but to get there we had to crawl across the mind-numbing expanse of North Dakota. To break up our return trip, we stopped in the Badlands at Medora. As we drove into the park, we felt like the flesh of the earth had gotten up and wandered away, leaving behind bony hills and lonely deep gullies. We parked and climbed a hill. A finger of light reached out of the otherwise dark sky, spotlighting a piece of land that had been seared red by lightning strikes. It was as if my husband and I had stumbled upon the geographical residence of loneliness. He said, “It’s beautiful,” and it was, but I had to put my hand to my heart to staunch the ache, a feeling that is far more familiar to me than the awe I seek, relentlessly.
The same thing happened on the drive this morning. The beautiful broad land could have been an opportunity to take in the big picture or an invitation to be absolutely open to whatever stretches out in front of me, but instead that flat road did the same thing to me that Medora had—it carried me straight into a loneliness that had me curling in on myself while the sky did nothing but watch.
What is wrong with me? My husband could stand in Medora and appreciate its beauty. The people at the Polka Mass could clap and kneel and shake hands with their neighbors. But I end up pierced, as if by something sharp and jagged that leaves me struggling for breath, struggling to hold my head up, struggling.
A lunch of good Polish sausage and conversation might chase all the seared and lonely gullies away, but because I do what I often do—sit on the edge of things, stay on the outside—I end up feeling what I often feel: out . . . of . . . place.
“Excuse me. Excuse me.” I reach the doors and walk down the steps. I will eat lunch in my car and consult my list to find the next new thing where I can hope to experience the divine.
It will not occur to me until much later that, had I opened my arms wide, I would have touched two angels as I passed between them.