Divine spine

The conversation was heading in an awkward direction, as conversations about religion and politics often do. 

My mouth was ready to cast off a sentence, which might have amounted to “I’d rather see a church burn than spill a single drop of this-here coffee,” when I managed to reel it back inside. 

A brief chortle, however, propelled me toward ephemeral damnation.

“Do you go to church?”

“No,” I had to admit. “And because I am a lapsed Catholic, I feel the need to verify just how much thought I’ve put into disbelieving.”

He waved me away, not wanting to waste his time with any of my religious meanderings. 

It’s just that he KNEW and I didn’t.

And from here until the end of the session, he would bestow upon me the healing miracles that God bestows … if you are saved.

As he tells me his story … a short one that starts with sitting on a bench in church, praying for nothing in particular, and receiving the shock of feeling a dodgy vertebrae in his lower back shift a whole quarter inch to the right, falling back into place like a puzzle piece, smoothing out the pain he had hardly acknowledged.

The way he described it, was as if the whole congregation felt the godly adjustment. 

He paused long enough for me to pay respects to the power of prayer.

It was in earnest that I replied: I’m so glad for you.

No one could have been more surprised than I was that the spirit had, in fact, moved me.

Even amidst the suspension of disbelief, I couldn’t suspend the feeling that however someone finds true peace, it’s personal.

Not my place to throw a wrench in the works.

Which is where another “holy lecture” found me a few years ago as I stood with a sign in a sea of protesters unmoored by a Supreme Court decision that had overturned the civil right of women’s body autonomy bestowed by Roe Vs. Wade. 

This voice at the lectern, a woman, had called upon her Christian faith and waited a minute as the gathered crowd exhaled a collective groan.

“Now I know what you are thinking. You’ve heard a lot of people of the faith tell you they believe in the right to life, but they do not. If they believed people should have the right to life they’d make sure people also had the right to live it.” 

She preached about how the righteous would be against the taking of lives through judicial and extrajudicial means. They would be against guns, and wars, and hatred. They would be interested in feeding the poor, and housing the homeless. If they wanted healthy, happy babies they would make policies to ensure those babies’ parents were cared for, too. There would be real benefits, not just bootstraps. It takes backbones, too.

I noticed then how the crowd had hushed. And I felt a calm come over me.

I felt my spine tingle.

Like a puzzle piece slipping effortlessly into place.