God, Mary, and Mother Earth
Katie Lynn
Katie Lynn
When I was in second grade, I saw God perched on top of the basketball hoop. His hair untamed, tousled by wind the way mine was. His lanky legs, one pulled up into his chest the other hanging. He sat how I would if I didn’t feel like a passenger in my body. I could feel sweat traipsing down my forehead and balling up on my upper lip, the Texas heat was suffocating. I tried to clear my mind. To drown out the squeak of skin being burned red against metal as kids threw themselves down the slide.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I whispered, shifting from foot to foot. “But I really want to win today, it’s the last day that Ms. Philips is going to pull a prize from the box. I promise I’ll read my Bible for thirty minutes every day if you let me win.” I prayed this same prayer every week.
Later, my teacher yanked the brass bell down through the air, the strike calling us back into the classroom. I shoved the roly-poly that I had claimed as my familiar deep into my pocket. Its tentative steps onto my palm and the way it burrowed between my fingers had won me over. I sat down at my seat. The cold, dry air raced down my spine. Ms. Philips had already pulled out the treasure box. It was a cardboard box that she had sloppily tried to make look like a pirate's chest. It sat behind her, waiting its turn as she cleared her throat to draw all of our eyes to her.
“Okay guys, today I’m going to pull three names as a little goodbye present to y’all,” I couldn’t stop kicking my legs. I looked around to see what everybody else was thinking, some were just as excited as me, but other’s eyes kept wandering back to the clock that creeped closer to 3:30.
“Jacob, Henry, and,” her eyes darted to our waiting faces, while she paused, “can I get a drum roll, please?” We all banged on our desks, “Isabelle! Each of y'all come up and get one prize.” My stomach sank to the floor. I closed my hands tight trying not to cry, my nails digging little crescent moons into my fleshy palms. I wondered if I had done something wrong. I was the only person who had never won. I stuck my hand into my pocket and let the roly-poly step back onto my fingers, the tickling of the tiny pads of its feet and brush of its antenna on my hand, calming me. Did God hate me? I didn’t want to think that, so I decided he must not exist at all. Nine years later, I sat in my World Religions class. The violent fluorescent lights kept me awake. My teacher read Jesus’ sermon on the mount to the class, soft and deliberate, forcing us to lean forward to hear him. The way he read it was different to the way preachers did. They would wrestle it into whatever shape they needed it in for their sermon. He read it in its entirety the way I did as a child. When I was a kid, I thought God was my friend. That he was the wind, the stars, and the grass I ran through barefoot. When I stopped believing I realized how deadening the silence was when I’m alone, but trying to reach back into the connection was trying to reach out and grab a rope I could just barely graze with my fingertips. My parents raised me in the Baptist church. Where they reserved talk of Mary to the birth of Christ, but in class it was different. My teacher asked us to think of Mary as the prophet that had delivered God’s word onto the earth. He projected Michelangelo’s Pieta on the whiteboard. Mary’s smooth, eternally youthful face stared down at the limp body of her son cradled in her arms. She looked down in resigned sadness; she always knew it would end this way. Then he projected paintings depicting her with tears streaming down her face and swords piercing her heart, Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. The blown up image glowed softly in the dark classroom. Our teacher asked us to empathize with Mary. Not as an exalted religious figure, but as a mother who knew that her baby would have to endure an unimaginable amount of pain.
As a child, whenever I blew out a candle I would send a prayer up with the smoke. I’d see God grasping the smoke tight between his fingers, pulling it up to his ear and listening to my whispers. After I stopped believing in him I’d see the smoke soaking back up into the earth. Where she would listen to it her hair, the moss and her eyes, one the moon the other the sun. With no warning, I’ve started seeing Mary. Sometimes her cheeks look rosy and her smiles come easy, other times she cries silent tears her eyes cast up toward heaven. Perhaps she’s trying to see her son in the slits of sky between the granulated cirrocumulus clouds.
While I wrote my final for the class, out of the corner of my eye I could see God sitting on my bed among unfolded laundry and a plush panda leftover from my childhood. I knew if I turned to look at him he would disappear. His nose was bleeding thick, gold blood. Instead of pinching the soft cartilage the way my dad taught me to, he let it collect on his clean, white, linen shirt. I’m worried God is doing coke. Why else would the fabric of the universe be wearing thin, collapsing in on itself, nothing new born out of stardust while the old shrivels up and dies. Or maybe it has nothing to do with God, maybe it's us that’s snuffing out the light of a dying earth.
The prompt of the essay asks me, what I believe and why. I try to tell it I’m not sure, but I’m still stuck staring at a blank page. I think of Mary sacrificing her son, the earth, her roots running deep underneath my feet, even God watching me from the basketball hoop. Even though I can’t rage like a forest fire, curling up into the trees, leaving behind foundations for new growth. I can at least blink on like the flame from a Bic lighter, keeping fingers warm. A pinprick of light in a dark concert hall, joined by hundreds of others swaying to music. I believe that I’m supposed to leave the earth a little better. To pick up abandoned apple cores on the trails behind my house. To hold someone tight to warm their bones. To make sure my little brother makes different mistakes than I did.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I whispered, shifting from foot to foot. “But I really want to win today, it’s the last day that Ms. Philips is going to pull a prize from the box. I promise I’ll read my Bible for thirty minutes every day if you let me win.” I prayed this same prayer every week.
Later, my teacher yanked the brass bell down through the air, the strike calling us back into the classroom. I shoved the roly-poly that I had claimed as my familiar deep into my pocket. Its tentative steps onto my palm and the way it burrowed between my fingers had won me over. I sat down at my seat. The cold, dry air raced down my spine. Ms. Philips had already pulled out the treasure box. It was a cardboard box that she had sloppily tried to make look like a pirate's chest. It sat behind her, waiting its turn as she cleared her throat to draw all of our eyes to her.
“Okay guys, today I’m going to pull three names as a little goodbye present to y’all,” I couldn’t stop kicking my legs. I looked around to see what everybody else was thinking, some were just as excited as me, but other’s eyes kept wandering back to the clock that creeped closer to 3:30.
“Jacob, Henry, and,” her eyes darted to our waiting faces, while she paused, “can I get a drum roll, please?” We all banged on our desks, “Isabelle! Each of y'all come up and get one prize.” My stomach sank to the floor. I closed my hands tight trying not to cry, my nails digging little crescent moons into my fleshy palms. I wondered if I had done something wrong. I was the only person who had never won. I stuck my hand into my pocket and let the roly-poly step back onto my fingers, the tickling of the tiny pads of its feet and brush of its antenna on my hand, calming me. Did God hate me? I didn’t want to think that, so I decided he must not exist at all. Nine years later, I sat in my World Religions class. The violent fluorescent lights kept me awake. My teacher read Jesus’ sermon on the mount to the class, soft and deliberate, forcing us to lean forward to hear him. The way he read it was different to the way preachers did. They would wrestle it into whatever shape they needed it in for their sermon. He read it in its entirety the way I did as a child. When I was a kid, I thought God was my friend. That he was the wind, the stars, and the grass I ran through barefoot. When I stopped believing I realized how deadening the silence was when I’m alone, but trying to reach back into the connection was trying to reach out and grab a rope I could just barely graze with my fingertips. My parents raised me in the Baptist church. Where they reserved talk of Mary to the birth of Christ, but in class it was different. My teacher asked us to think of Mary as the prophet that had delivered God’s word onto the earth. He projected Michelangelo’s Pieta on the whiteboard. Mary’s smooth, eternally youthful face stared down at the limp body of her son cradled in her arms. She looked down in resigned sadness; she always knew it would end this way. Then he projected paintings depicting her with tears streaming down her face and swords piercing her heart, Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. The blown up image glowed softly in the dark classroom. Our teacher asked us to empathize with Mary. Not as an exalted religious figure, but as a mother who knew that her baby would have to endure an unimaginable amount of pain.
As a child, whenever I blew out a candle I would send a prayer up with the smoke. I’d see God grasping the smoke tight between his fingers, pulling it up to his ear and listening to my whispers. After I stopped believing in him I’d see the smoke soaking back up into the earth. Where she would listen to it her hair, the moss and her eyes, one the moon the other the sun. With no warning, I’ve started seeing Mary. Sometimes her cheeks look rosy and her smiles come easy, other times she cries silent tears her eyes cast up toward heaven. Perhaps she’s trying to see her son in the slits of sky between the granulated cirrocumulus clouds.
While I wrote my final for the class, out of the corner of my eye I could see God sitting on my bed among unfolded laundry and a plush panda leftover from my childhood. I knew if I turned to look at him he would disappear. His nose was bleeding thick, gold blood. Instead of pinching the soft cartilage the way my dad taught me to, he let it collect on his clean, white, linen shirt. I’m worried God is doing coke. Why else would the fabric of the universe be wearing thin, collapsing in on itself, nothing new born out of stardust while the old shrivels up and dies. Or maybe it has nothing to do with God, maybe it's us that’s snuffing out the light of a dying earth.
The prompt of the essay asks me, what I believe and why. I try to tell it I’m not sure, but I’m still stuck staring at a blank page. I think of Mary sacrificing her son, the earth, her roots running deep underneath my feet, even God watching me from the basketball hoop. Even though I can’t rage like a forest fire, curling up into the trees, leaving behind foundations for new growth. I can at least blink on like the flame from a Bic lighter, keeping fingers warm. A pinprick of light in a dark concert hall, joined by hundreds of others swaying to music. I believe that I’m supposed to leave the earth a little better. To pick up abandoned apple cores on the trails behind my house. To hold someone tight to warm their bones. To make sure my little brother makes different mistakes than I did.
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Katie Lynn is a senior at the John Cooper High School and hopes to major in creative writing or history after she leaves. Katie Lynn spends most of her time writing, working on Inkblots, her school’s literature magazine, or making hyper-specific Spotify playlists.
Katie Lynn is a senior at the John Cooper High School and hopes to major in creative writing or history after she leaves. Katie Lynn spends most of her time writing, working on Inkblots, her school’s literature magazine, or making hyper-specific Spotify playlists.