Read Online Holding Silvan by Monica Wesolowska - Free Book Online Page A

thought, the candle reached me and something beautiful happened. I felt Kirsten’s soul and my soul joining and rising up towards God together.
    Thinking to preserve this heady sense of souls in union, I
wrote to the Bishop of Oakland and asked to be confirmed early into the Church. I was fifteen and didn’t want to have to wait until his next visit to our parish two years later. I’d felt God’s presence, I told him in my letter. But the Bishop was busy. He wasn’t impressed with my plea. And two years later, as I lay on the rug in a little room off the sacristy during confirmation class listening to an old priest drone on about the Holy Spirit, it occurred to me that this beautiful thing – this Jiminy-Cricket-like conscience that would sit on my shoulder as a stand-in for God, part of his mysterious trinity, to help me choose right from wrong – was something only a priest could confer through the sacrament of confirmation, and I didn’t like that fact. “That’s right,” the priest said when I asked him to confirm this. Dignified and silly, the priest rocked back and forth on his heels, hands resting on the round belly beneath his cassock, and he seemed too ordinary an intermediary between me and the transcendent love I yearned for.
    Father B, on the other hand, is a priest I like. Father B is smart, reasonable, kind. He is no longer a priest at our parish – I’m no longer a member of any parish – but he has a long history with our family. He came up to the house when Mark died, he conducted the “laying on of the hands” when my father was first ill, he blessed our wedding rings. Even David likes Father B. My mother thinks that if Father B had conducted my confirmation class, I’d still be a member of the church. I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that removing life support is an uncomfortable act, and I sense Father B will be able to speak about it to my mother in a way that is supportive. Mostly, I want him to talk to her about heaven. After all, my mother has turned in torment to Father B with questions about Mark’s soul. People who commit suicide are guilty, the church believes, of a sin as grave as murder, punishable by hell; our modern understanding of mental illness has only just begun to soften that condemnation. And yet Father B has told my mother that Mark is in heaven. If Father B has said this about Mark, surely he must believe that an unbaptised baby will go there as well. Despite Saint Augustine’s
condemnation of such babies to limbo, the church must generally be softening in favor of a heaven more comforting to grieving parents. But Father B surprises me. When I tell him I am calling on behalf of my mother, he says, “Do I sense that a part of you is worried about Silvan’s soul, too?”
    Â 
    â€œIS THERE?” DAVID asks me now. I am back at the hospital and we are standing over Silvan’s little bed together. Our hands run over his body as if our constant touch is as necessary to keep him here as his blood’s circulation, or his breath. I have just told David about my conversation with Father B. “Is a part of you worried about his soul?”
    â€œOh, no,” I say, “If there’s a heaven, all souls go.” I don’t know if I believe in heaven anymore, let alone souls; and as I say it, I realize I have not even prayed for Silvan yet. What happened to my need for prayer? When I was young, I used to pray for everything. When Mark was ill, I prayed. When my father was ill, I prayed. But after that? After all those prayers went unanswered? I am here with Silvan, standing over his bed, simply trying to accept that he too will die, and that life will go on without him.
    â€œSo what did you tell Father B?”
    â€œI told him I’m worried about my mother.”
    David nods. “And what did Father B say?”
    â€œHe said he can tell my mother what he tells