meditation on spiritual exchange, 2024
A small child in a great cathedral, I watched lines of old, old, older file through a narrow aisle to venerate my holy mother. Smoke isn’t thick enough to fill the dome but its memory lingers, lingers like the parting of ways.
I was raised Greek Orthodox (there was no god there) and knew those cathedrals well.
There is a hush in the body’s bend—a silence that prayer, with all its muttered rehearsals, can never reach. Prayer is a rope, a steady cord weaving between flesh and the divine, but prostration is a sacrifice, a chosen smallness. It is to place one's face against stone, knowing it will neither return the kiss nor yield to comfort.
There, on the cold ground, I found a truth nestled beneath the rigid formality of words: that devotion becomes worship when all flesh is made low, at the mercy of dust.
I now practice Buddhism with deep gratitude to an ex-partner and all-around exceptional human being who introduced me to the Kwan Um School of Zen at age twenty. My sangha is at the Athens Zen Centre; we sit in a cool, moonlit room that overlooks the Parthenon. The abbot has my mother’s name and eyes much kinder.
To prostrate is to surrender without the comfort of structure, to drop below language and allow the bones to bear the weight of unseen forces. In this gesture, something forgotten stirs—a wordless reverence, a bow that can only tremble in place of words. It is through this posture that worship becomes like breathing, private, and austere, held as if in a soft hand by something immense and invisible.
It is antithetical to architecture, and asks you, what are you without scaffolds?
The summer we split, god took me into an era that became eternal August.
June was Jumu’ah services on Fridays in the grass. Saturdays, Shabbat prayer across the field. Every day was for praise, and sometimes at night my good friend would help me to lay my hands on the ashes of the sacred fire that had burned there, and tell me to pray.
I watched a woman whose name I did not know fold at her own altar, with a secret god held tightly in her chest. She sank lower, carried by the weight of her hope and grief alike. I imagined she, too, felt the presence of that god moving over her frame like a cloth. She rose; there was a paleness to her eyes as if they had glimpsed something beyond, something undivided by altar or incense, something almost like a lover’s glance — brief, forbidden.
It took me a long journey through each of these spaces and more to begin to wonder, where is god in all of this? I would, in no particular order, sit and pray and listen and pray and speak and pray and walk and pray... never even looking for god. I was not interested in looking for god. I did not desire anything more than what I already had, even though I was unfulfilled and broken.
I went to rooms full of people who were very sick. They asked me the questions I had been asking myself for months. I was a person who was very sick, too.
After twenty-three years, I am a testament to god — the likes of whom I only found because I stayed with them there, low and silent.
Prayer can be strung across oceans, it’s two tin cans and a taut and desperate string.
Prostration spills us out of ourselves and onto the altar like the wax of a lit candle.
Prostration takes us to that aching moment before sleep, where every movement echoes inside the bones, bearing the weight of surrender, offering the very structure of one’s body.
As a woman given the name of the mother of god I return, even now, to this supplication — a bow not to plead but to disappear into the warmth of a shadow, to ache against an absence that I’ve never been certain of before.
I moved my linens to the floor and every night I sleep there (it’s true!) to feel the ground like I did all summer.
I still do not know if I believe in god: I am only learning to speak this strange language in confessionals and gentle movements.
What if god resents me for leaving him too?