THE ROUGH VOICE of the aging priest is muffled as he bends forward to touch his head to the marble altar. Face down is better than face out, he thinks, where his failure is on full display.
The near-empty church extends into shadow. A handful of worshippers avoid close contact. They grip the wooden pews with desperation, the half-drowned scrambling for a gunwale. “The hulk of the shipwreck behind them,” as the poet says. Their children won’t come to church, the hypocrisy too much to bear. He knows the saints in high niches are no match for the idols in their children’s pockets, provide no relief from their hollowed-out fatigue. He glances up. I am the captain of this ship, he thinks, and we are going down. The bread sits lifeless in the paten. The wine a flatline. Instead of Christ at the Last Supper, the priest recalls Odysseus clinging to the fig tree while the sea greedily sucks down his ship and men. Is that what you get for rustling the gods’ cattle, he wonders.
He clears his throat. Listens to the deep-chested coughs squeezing the breath out of his people. Almost in tune, he begins to sing: “Create in me a clean heart, oh God; let me be like you in all my ways. Give me your strength, teach me your song, shelter me in the shadow of your wings.” He looks out, expecting to see the same shipwrecked bodies. “Like sea-crows they were borne on the waves about the black ship,” Homer wrote, “and the god took from them their returning.” Instead, he meets gazes filled with kindred affection. His chest feels warm. The quiet in the church seems less like emptiness. In staggered response, the survivors carry the next lines of the tune: “For we are your righteousness. If we die to ourselves and live through your death, then we shall be born again to be blessed in your love.” A baby squeals from the back row beyond his sight, much louder than the sound system has ever worked.
He reaches for paten and chalice. Their cold metal not meeting the moment. A better priest, he thinks, would have his mind on the apostle Paul during Mass, not Odysseus. Paul had not been the captain of his ship; he’d been a prisoner under guard. Lifting up the bread and wine, he remembers scraps from the story in Acts. Just before dawn, knowing their ship would soon be dashed upon the rocks, Paul urged his captors to eat. “For the last 14 days,” Paul said, “you have been in constant suspense and have gone without food—you haven’t eaten anything. Now I urge you to take some food. You need it to survive.”
The priest takes some bread and gives thanks to God in front of them all. He breaks it into pieces and begins to eat. Then he opens his arms, inviting these lovely few to also eat. “They were all encouraged and ate some food themselves,” says the storyteller in Acts. Odysseus, the priest recalls, clung to that fig tree “like a bat.” Its branches too high to climb and its roots too dangerously close to the sea’s teeth. “I clung there steadfastly,” Odysseus said, “until the sea should vomit forth mast and keel again, and to my joy they came at length.”
Here is my heart, O God. Let me be like you in all my ways.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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