Photo of a windswept-me at Stonehenge, circa 2000
I spent much of my first year at university not going to class but crisscrossing England in search of magic. By train I went to St. Ives on the recommendation of a nun who told me there was a cliffside chapel inside of which one could hear the whispering of saints, soft as starlight and twice as clear. Begging a ride from a friend driving up to see his grandmother in Nottingham I sought out the stone well said to date back to pre-Roman times where wishes could be bought for a lock of hair and a song. By bus I went to Salisbury to see Stonehenge because according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin said it had curative properties and I was desperately in need of a remedy.
It was the year 2000 and we were all teetering on the edge of a new world. The Cool Britannia of Oasis and Blur was giving way to the girl power bubblegum of the Spice Girls, while Tony Blair made finnicky noises from Downing Street about the third way, and my friends and I played Golden Eye on the Nintendo 64 when we weren’t at the pub downing whiskey. It was the end of history and everyone was drunk.
Soon after that first year of university started, I began to have panic attacks. They were apocalyptic in their intensity, each one the end of my world. I had struggled with OCD since I was eleven, though I didn’t know that is what it was and had no one to confide in about the hellscape that was my mind. When the panic attacks began, they broke me.
I was in and out of the hospital, sometimes only staying alive because of the kind voices at the other end of the Samaritans crisis helpline. At one point I begged a doctor in the emergency room to please admit me, to put me somewhere that could make the cataclysm in my mind stop, but he said that since I wasn’t a threat to myself or others that there wasn’t any room for me.
I wasn’t surprised; it seemed there had never been room for me anywhere.
At the top of Richmond Hill - my photo.
Sometime that year, I was sitting on a bench at the top of Richmond Hill, smoking cigarette after cigarette, gazing down at the steel grey ribbon of the Thames, when something made me blink.
I looked up and saw the low, soggy clouds had parted just enough to give me a glimpse onto sunny blue sky. It was gone almost instantly but the shock of it roared on inside of me. It had been cold and grey for so long that it seemed I had forgotten a sky even could be blue.
I blinked and blinked again and that is when I saw the old man.
“Make a wish,” he said.
He was standing by the wrought-iron balustrade, wearing a rumpled jacket the same waterlogged green as the leaves in the bushes behind him.
“I’m sorry?”
“The sun just hit you in the eye. Make a wish. That’s how it works.”
His cheeks were red and his beard was grey and his voice was rough around the edges. I didn’t know why he was talking to me, but I did know wishes weren’t real. And I should know. I’d made plenty of them throughout my eighteen years of life, wishing to be loved, to feel safe, to be known, and none of them had ever come true.
But the sky had been blue. And I had seen it.
I silently made a wish.
The man gave me a nod. Then, as he turned to go, he said I could tell the tale to anyone, but I had to tell it slant, because “the thing about truth is that people will only see it if they want to.”
London - my photo
A week later I was sitting on the sticky, cigarette-butt strewn floor of a rave in Brixton. It was called The Fridge and people were always getting hauled out by paramedics for having suspected drug overdoses on the dance floor, their bodies on the stretchers writhing as if still moving in time to the music.
Sandstorm by Darude was playing because it was always playing that year and my friends rushed off to dance, glow sticks flashing in their hands. I stayed behind, slumped against the wall, telling myself I was having fun. That this was what life was all about, parties and friends and wild weekends and drinking and being young and reckless. I told myself it didn’t matter that my panic attacks were getting worse, that my mind was filled with shrapnel from the moment I woke up to the moment I tried to sleep.
It didn’t matter because nothing mattered.
At eighteen I believed in nothing. Well, actually, I believed very much in the cleverness of believing in nothing, having absorbed the idea that intelligence consisted mainly in standing at an ironic distance from every claim to truth. The fact that my heart had always longed for something more was of no importance. There was no ultimate purpose to existence, no objective right or wrong beyond personal preference, no transcendent meaning waiting to be discovered no matter how much one might long for it. What’s more, I was lucky to have been raised this way, unburdened by archaic moral frameworks that had shackled previous generations, free to do exactly as I liked, knowing none of it mattered.
Yet there I was, sitting on the floor of a rave in London, trying not to cry.
London - my photo
After my friends and I found our way home from the rave in the sodden dawn, I slipped out of our flat. On the street, I began to walk, letting myself dissolve into the flood of people beginning their day. It had been a week since I made my wish overlooking the Thames and nothing had changed. I felt stupid for having wished, for having dared even for a moment to hope.
I walked for so long I didn’t know where I was, all I knew was that I found myself standing in front of a small stone church. There was a busy street behind me, morning traffic splashing through grimy puddles, men and women in coats and serious faces going off to do important things. And there I was, glitter from the night before still smeared across my eyelids, staring at a church. Leafy vines of some sort crawled across its stone face and I remember thinking it was odd that the plant should still be so green when everything else was so cold and drear.
And then, for no reason at all, I found myself going inside.
In the still air of the cramped entryway I could smell the whole of the night before clinging to me, the cigarette smoke, the booze, the sweat, the perfume. I told myself I should leave, that I didn’t belong there, but I didn’t.
I stepped forward.
There seemed to be no one else there and I wondered if I was doing something wrong by going in, but the beauty of the place quieted my worry. The interior of the small church was little more than worn stone walls and a beamed roof. The weak morning light settled unevenly across the floor and the dark wooden pews. I felt embarrassed, ashamed, both for being there and for being so moved to be there.
I walked slowly along the back edge of the room until I came upon a small notice fixed discreetly to the wall explaining that an anchoress, name unknown, had once lived on the site. Not within the exact walls, for the church had apparently been rebuilt more than once over the centuries, but she had lived there, on the same patch of London. A medieval woman who surrendered herself entirely to God by allowing herself to be enclosed within a small cell built against the church, to remain there the rest of her life. She would pray, contemplate, counsel, and participate in the Mass through a narrow opening in the wall, her world reduced to a few square feet of stone.
The thought of it dazzled me. It was like catching sight of that flash of blue sky at the top of Richmond Hill.
I found my way into one of the pews and sat down. I imagined this long ago woman, one person among the many medieval contemplatives who chose the anchorite path all across Europe, surrendering everything to God. I wondered what her cell had looked like. I saw winter mornings cold as this one, when the chill would have settled so deeply into the stone walls that she could feel it in her bones before she even opened her eyes. Her fingers stiff as they coaxed a reluctant flame into life, the familiar grain of a wooden stool polished beneath hands that had rested upon it every day for years, rain tracing paths across the narrow window while the church bells marked out the passing of another day.
All to be close to God.
To be close to someone I said I did not believe in.
Though I remained sitting in the pew, I nevertheless felt like I was falling. For months, for years, all my life, I had felt unmoored from the world, spinning untethered and alone, far away from everyone and everything.
But now, for the first time, I felt like I was falling toward something.
It would be many, many years before I would ever consciously consider believing in anything. Journeys from unbelief to belief rarely announce themselves as they are being lived and grace doesn’t always arrive with the dramatic clarity we imagine; it gathers until the soul discovers, much later, that it has been walking towards home all along.
But if I had to choose one of those half-hidden thresholds where something imperceptible shifted within me, I would have to return to that cold, grey morning in London, to that old church, and to the life of a medieval anchoress. It was there, long before I understood what was happening, that my calloused soul was cracked open so something holy could flood in.
Strangely, when I look back now at that week, I find I can’t remember the words of the wish I made at the top of Richmond Hill. I can only recall the deep longing that tore through me like a shooting star across the night sky.
But I do know my wish was answered.
And I know God had been answering it long before I was able to recognize His reply.