Trini

Trini

After class, I drop into conversation, and this dear woman who gathers up much more than our names, tells me I have found my truth. She is a mother, and older, so I listen. She hears my confession with such marvel and attention that I am not moved to tears at all, but to something more certain. Faith, then. Or trust.

I have told her only that I know something in me broke--opened, it must have--and my practice shifted. The path behind me having been wiped clean, for months I took tentative steps in a new direction. Even when it did not feel good, it felt right. She told me some people go to their graves never learning their truth. This one, she said to me, you trust. "Every creature has a religion," St. Thomas Aquinas wrote. "Every foot is a shrine where a secret candle burns." Many mornings, I left behind in my home so much that was holy in pursuit of what I believed was even more so.

For a long while, this pursuit fed inward fires; that secret candle burning ever brighter. Until one day, I woke up to find I was at another's altar. And while it remained entirely sacred, I understood that I had become a container of its grace. There was no going back. There was only going out and on. "The result of prayer is life," says St. Francis. Many years had I bent my body in practice as in prayer. It was time now to get on with the living.

For everywhere I rest my eyes, I am a witness to grace in bloom.