I was raised to believe in God. For a long time I did, and then I didn’t, and then I did again. Now? I think the question of God is irrelevant. I am more interested in theories like serendipity and synchronicity.

When I was in elementary school, we took a field trip to the zoo. There were big black bears growling in a cage. These bears frightened some of the children. The frightened children moved their backs against the brick wall opposite the cage, back away from what their instincts told them was a threat. Other children, embolden by the separation of bars, hurled insults and pennies at the animals. I stood still and expressionless, trying desperately to fight the urge to snatch the keys from the belt of our tour guide and unlock the cage door. It was not so much a desire to free the animals as it was an insatiable curiosity to see how a crowd would behave if confronted with a snarling beast and no bars to protect them. At that very moment, as I struggled with my own impulse, our pimply-faced tour guide leaned over to admit to our teacher that a mistake had recently been made. The person in charge of cleaning the bear cage had accidentally left the door unlocked overnight. The zookeepers thought it quite a blessing that the bears, left to their own devices for over 12 hours, had never wandered outside of their own imprisonment. I heard the tour guide tell all of this to our teacher and suddenly I was all four feet of pigtails and pasty Irish skin trying to hide my tears. I stood in front of that bear cage, this awkward little girl, and I cried. When my teacher saw my distress, she leaned down to ask what was wrong. I could not find the words to explain it.

For the past two weeks, I have been thinking about that trip to the zoo. I was even thinking about it the day that I went to my local library and checked out The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Synchronicity? Dillard introduced me to Casper Hauser. Up until last week, Hauser was as unfamiliar to me as the walls of the dark cage he was raised in. All those years being raised with nothing but shadow, his own unfettered mind, a cot, and a wooden horse. At 17, Hauser was abruptly released into the streets of Germany by his unknown captors. He purportedly carried nothing but a piece of paper inscribed with his name. Here is the part that amazes me. Even after being imprisoned for over 17 years, Hauser did not show any anger towards his captors. Only once did he show any negative emotion regarding what happened to him. His only negative response occurred after he witnessed his very first smattering of stars. His chest heaved with the knowledge of depravation. He was quoted as saying, “My captors should be jailed for a few days for withholding the sky.” I may be lazy about my belief in God, but I am certain about my faith in Annie Dillard’s version of Casper Hauser.

Did you ever see the movie Serendipity with Jon Cusak? Okay. I know it appears that I am changing gears here, but stay with me.  I think everything may be connected. I think, but I am not sure. Anyway, the movie is a big pile of crap. The movie confuses serendipity with fate, just so it can trot out the big soulmate cliche and entertain a bunch of teenage girls and housewives who need to believe that it is there destiny to be loved like movie stars. This is not serendipity. Serendipity is when you discover something necessary while on a quest for something else. The point is that you have to be searching for something in order for serendipity to happen. I am not sure if finding Casper Hauser in the same week I tried to process my feelings about that trip to the zoo is serendipity or synchronicity. Hell. Maybe it is God. If so, I imagine he is laughing.

The evening of that day my elementary school class went to the zoo, I stretched myself out on my small bed. I stared at the ceiling. I practiced the art of revision. I was a writer even then. I was only little and lacking all the necessary tools, but gifted with a reckless imagination. I envisioned my field trip much differently than the way it had been. I pictured it the way I would have liked it to be. In my re-telling, I do get my small hands around the zoo-keeper’s keys. I unlock the heavy cage door before anyone can stop me. The biggest of the black bears lumbers out, growling, he moves towards us. Children and adults scream and scatter. In the center of all this confusion, I stand firm. I throw my head back like God. I laugh too. I laugh like a crooked finger pointing directly at the stars.

I know some of you clicked on over because I told you that this post was about you. It is okay. Have you ever stood in front of a mirror searching your own reflection for such a long time that you become all distorted, like a cubist painting, a mere abstraction, a metaphor instead of an actually person? Yeah. Me too.

I have this image of my grandfather, he sits at the head of the dining room table, cold mug of beer in a right-handed fist, wearing a Fruit of the Loom tank top, the ones that suburban white boys stuff into too baggy pants, and decorate with gold chains, a wife-beater, but he never was. I watch the medal flash against the hair on his chest, and I reach for it instinctively.

“That’s Saint Christopher.” He tells me. And in his voice, I hear a reverence usually reserved for the shape of my grandmother’s legs, his role as provider of the family, and me, the six year old who crawls underneath his feet after a Sunday morning sleepover, dog-legged on all fours, eating my bacon scraps.

“Without this,” he takes the medal into his hands and rubs it until St. Christopher’s back, heavy from where he has carried God across the river, shines, “without this, I would not have survived.”

My little girl heart knows he is referring to the war, and has a brief flash of my grandfather wearing a shiny-hard-helmet that makes a punctuation mark out of his ears, standing atop of a tank. There was a picture all yellowing in its grain atop the dresser in his bedroom, and there are trench foot toes that snake out from under the blanket where we snuggle together in the den, and he lets me hold the remote, and pick the channel, while my grandmother serves us french fries on television trays. But, what does a little girl heart understand about war? Instead, she covets the way gold gets caught up in the soft black fur of her grandfather’s chest, the way it carries with it magic.

When I am confirmed at the age of thirteen, a woman in the eyes of the church that will not agree to my owning my own body, I wear a too tight dress to contain the way my body is rebelling against my little girl desire to remain naïve. I carry the wine up the altar and two red marks of shame bloom on my cheeks from all the eyes that follow my hips I have not learned to control yet. I still believe in reverence then. When the priest lays the Eucharist on my lips, I believe in the transmutation of Jesus’ body into mine. I feel clean and new, like a kitten lapping its own skin to shine. I sit on the wooden pews under stained glass, and permit myself the wonder, while delighting in the way my own St. Christopher’s medal lays gentle against my breast, on a too long chain that was given to me by my grandfather. God is simple then.

At the age of 18, I will wake up from a long dark night that is like a tunnel I emerge from, and there is snow on the ground that is blinding. There is a tear in the too-tight dress I wore to accentuate the power that was my hips moving across a room, like the tail end of some comet. I want their eyes to follow me scattered across a sky. I feel the swing of medal against my freckled breastbone, and I thankful for the necklace that is still there, and I worry about the underwear that are not, and the dull pain that is a crucifixion between my legs, and I bleed like Jesus then, the whore of Babylon, stoned. God is this terrible grasping. I am bereft of the magic that St. Christopher summoned to bring my grandfather home from war. I am God’s unworthy.

I am all angry bones and raised fits that shake themselves out at dark clouds that give only raindrops as their answers. I can not wear gold around my neck when everything underneath it has been tarnished. I do not believe in magic. I give up my faith in God. I break the heart of my Grandfather, and I am not sorry. I am not sorry I say, over, and over, and over, still not ready to forgive myself.

When my darling Butterfly is born and she carries the black shock of my Grandfathers hair, he is not there to see the way I cradle her in my arms, and sing her lullabies. Instead, I bundle her two layers warm and I carry her to the place where stone rests against sky. I cry against the stiff cold roses that I lay at his feet, and I am thankful. I do not ask for his forgiveness.  I know by the way he sends the blue bird that is the color of my daughter’s eyes, to rest on the tree above us, that the only forgiveness that was needed came a long time before, when I looked at my body in the mirror, and I re-taught myself to love every curve, and I revel when I walk down a street at those hips that shimmy and they shake, and they pushed my daughter out into this world. This is the world that she now exists in, so tiny and small, so full of our belonging.

I press my baby against my chest that is no longer gold, because I do not believe in the necklace a man wore to ward off the demons of war, or a woman wore and was not saved, from the way her legs splayed open in a snow drift, under a railroad track in the cold, but I have not given up on the magic. I have not given up on God.

Instead… I am holding it in my arms. I carry it in myself.