What If
“Because of the connectedness between people, miracles happen.”
by Steve Charles
In theory, we’re all one of a kind. I know. But some are more one-of-a-kind than others.
My friend, Mary Angela, was one of those.
I knew her for almost 20 years, but it was at the most unexpected place and time—a Bible study—that she left me in awe.
The priest had asked a question: “Why are women drawn to the spiritual?”
“Oppression,” one woman said. “Deprived of power, one must find another form.”
Nods around the table.
“Amen,” one of the men said.
Then Mary Angela—whose husband Robert, with whom she had adopted four children, had died three weeks earlier—spoke softly in her northern Alabama accent.
“Because a woman has felt a life flutter inside her and die, and no one believes her.”
I wondered at that statement for two years before I finally convinced Mary Angela to sit down and talk with me. It wasn’t really an interview—there was no story or article for the magazine I edited. I just wanted to ask about those words and learn more about the person who spoke them.
“I said what?!” she said after I explained why I’d wanted to talk to her. I read the statement again, every word, just as I had scribbled it down on my hand two years earlier when she’d first spoken them
She listened, thought about it. Her answer was as enigmatic as that initial statement itself.
“I have no idea what experience in my own life I might have been referring to,” she said.
Then she told me about the day she and Robert found out they couldn’t have biological children. She described walking into the Episcopal Church near the Air Force base where Robert was stationed and asking the rector to put her on the prayer list because “we cannot have any ‘homemade children.’” She told me how the priest eventually gave her the telephone number and name of a chaplain who knew of people wishing to place a child for adoption, how that led to them finding their first child.
“How can I not believe that God moves in mysterious ways?” She said. “He doesn’t beat me over the head with a miraculous recovery from cancer or a flaming sword in the sky, but because of the connectedness between people, miracles happen.”
“Although I do not think that’s what I meant at that Bible study,” she said. “Maybe it was coming from a different place, and I didn’t say it right.
“But I think men more easily carry the illusion of progress and success. That believe they can control life. For women the realization comes earlier—that life is going to happen to us in ways we could not have imagined.
“So many women I have known were required at a young age to deal with things that they could never have anticipated. They make an accommodation, and the comfort is to believe that what you see is not what you get—that the meaning of what you are experiencing may, upon reflection, be something quite different from what you think the meaning of this experience is, especially when you’re sitting in the middle of a mess.
“And as your life gathers experience, you realize that’s not only comfort, but wisdom.”
We talked for more than an hour that afternoon in the sun room in Mary Angela and Robert’s home, the room he’d been most proud of. Ours was more of a conversation than an interview.
When Mary Angela died late last year I found that transcript on my computer and began reading, impressed with her patience as I read: She had listened to me not only asking questions, but sharing my own life. In more detail than most people would ever abide. I was surprised at the ways the life of this woman a generation older than me, and from Alabama, paralleled my own.
She had a wicked sense of humor, too. One day as I helped her into my brand new sunset orange Toyota Matrix to take her to a church event, she looked at me and said, “I hope they paid you good money to take this color off their lot.”
And the transcript is peppered with parentheses with the word “laughs” between them.
I didn’t get to find out exactly what Mary Angela had meant when she said, “Because a woman has felt life flutter inside her and die, and no one believes her.” Maybe she left me to figure out that one on my own. But I got the conversation and time with a friend that I needed.
“I do believe that whether I’m naughty or nice, my creator has a very affectionate regard for me,” she said. “Even when I don’t get done what I’d planned and nothing is going the way I’d hoped, there is a presence of the Divine and my days are better. I sometimes like reading the Psalms at nighttime, especially when I wish that a day hadn’t happened the way it did. When I read the Psalms, I know I’m not alone.”
“And when our days here are done?” I asked.
“The safest statement is, ‘We don’t know,’” she said. “But mystery is a thread that has run through my life—“Why should this have been? Who knows what may happen tomorrow?”
“‘What if’ is a good beginning to a statement of creation, and a good way to think of the presence of the divine. So why not a good way to think of what’s next?”
I can still hear her voice, that sweet northern Alabama accent, how she told me that “south of Birmingham the accent is hideous.” That laughter. The day I walked her out to her car after a friend’s funeral and she said, “We sang practically every hymn and prayed every prayer in the Book of Common Prayer—the Protestants must have been baffled.”
And I can see her smile and look up at me after our conversation at the house (she was less than five feet tall even before osteoporosis took off a few more inches). She thanked me for coming by and “listening to an old woman.” And I thanked her, too, though I didn’t then realize the gift she’d given me.
Sure, Mary Angela was wise, but—even better—the child inside her was very much alive.