Basket Balls and Holy Bells: Emilie's Re-Poem-Port

Installment 1: A Re-poem-Port inspired by the Sisters of St. Benedict of Ferdinand, Indiana

Imagine sitting in a huge vaulted marble room, bells, harp and organ slipping around the columns and over the pews like the black and grey seams passing through the white marble. The faith and the marble come from Italy. The hand cut wood pews, with their swirling vegetation come from Germany. An Amen and silence, except for the sound of 15 rubber basketballs reverberating through the crypt, shaking down the silk knee-highs of a little old nun at the noon day prayer. “We would be praying and you’d hear all these balls bouncing.” A high school for girls was located in the crypt below the church. The basketball court was inserted in 4 sections between the stone ground in 8’ sections of 2” shiny wooded floorboards. The black game circles were worn through by the rubber tennis shoes. The girls are gone.

I particularly loved the way the crypt recorded time. The walls were thick at the bottom of the basilica to bare the weight of this religion. Huge cave windows of smooth plaster were cut into the walls, portals into the day and the changing light. The daylight revealed a stratum of memory, first the crypt was a storage space for holy relics, then a basketball court and theater, then a chapel, while the church was being restored, then an art gallery…soon I think a burial ground.

Kate and I frequent gas stations these days. Gas stations are good place to wake up, drink coffee, watch the birds play games on the telephone wires, get directions to places we’ve never been. I love the bright colors, particular the two shades of green used for the BP logo. Gas stations produce allot of disposable energy like candy wrappers, gasoline and Styrofoam cups. We’ve been to stations in Virginia, Kentucky, Indian, Illinois and Missouri. Are these florescent oasis’s non-places? They don’t record memories like the crypt in the church of St. Benedict. They will be bulldozed and flattened, bulldozed and flattened—leaving behind a soda can, trash or artifact? I wonder if people become streamlined like gas stations, hotels, highways, sub-divisions.

We sat in the church during the noon day prayer. All I could hear was the fountain between the almost whispered choruses of nuns chanting the psalms. The sound of a fountain, cool and contained added to the mellow drone. I saw hundreds of rows of pearly white and gold teeth opening and closing. Do not let the enemy in. The wind is blowing, shut all your doors!—open your heart to God…

I was imagining the way the church looked before it was restored in 2005. The Nave peaked in a spine of parachuting canvas and lopsided boards blooming into an upside down forest of horse hair. We would be sitting beneath the great underbelly of a wooly mammoth. I remembered…

…a walk with Will through Gaudi’s still unfinished la Sagrada Familia. The columns like thick milk thistle holding up the sky, creating a space of buoyancy somewhere between gravity and weightlessness. We played hide and seek in this massive fossil, but never found each other because we were always looking up. Later that night, we stumbled down a paved stone alley into a church that held the sound of the wind like a conque shell. Thousands of porticoes, some with wrought iron gates, were flickering little movies. Paintings of weeping women and dying men were glowing above mounds of smoldering red candles. I reached my hand into the smoke, dropping a coin, and lighting a wick for Papa. My grandfather was shipwrecked, on a raft for 48 days. Each day, he lay in the sun and salt eating chocolate, until it ran out. He ate condensed milk, until it ran out. He ate his own daydreams and then he was found. I am looking for milk thistle; it is supposed to remedy the gallbladder.

Kate and I are on our bicycles. We need to make it to Kansas City by Saturday at 2pm for the unveiling of a clay head that looks like my papa--Nathan Stark. Busts have gone out of fashion. It will be strange to look into this new face, especially because my grandfather was always a good four feet taller than me. Yes, it will be strange to look directly into his eyes, a head on top of a pedestal.

The hill was steep. The rain was unrelenting. Agnes Maria Dauby, Assistant director of Vocation Ministries led us through arcades, halls and courtyards to the Monastery’s Swap shop a small room filled with neat rows of pastel shirts, underwear, bras and slacks. Everything was soft and dry. We were quickly transformed and spent the next hour chatting over hot chocolate and glazed cinnamon cake.

“I don’t see how people can make it through life without God.” She was wearing a flower button down blouse. “My parents installed the faith in us.” Agnes Maria’s father worked at an army ammunition plant, driving a forklift. Her mom worked at a plastic factory where they made canisters for bubbles. I’m Imagining a whole factory filled with rotating gears, boiling plastic, and billions of bubbles. She grew up in a house, whose walls were covered in holy pictures. My grandmother on my Dad’s side had a hologram of Jesus’ face outside the bathroom. You’d look at your own face in the mirror, and then open the door and see Jesus. Depending on your point of view sometimes he had a halo and sometimes he had a crown of thorns and blood drops.

A nun in a sparkly gold top gave us a tour of the church. I can’t remember her name. I am trying to remember all the names of the people we have met on this journey. The one that sticks with me right now is AriAnA. She is nine and an expert lemonade entrepreneur. We didn’t actually meet. Her father told us about how he loved her name. “It has three A’s! When you right it out, the A’s become the mountain peaks. You can draw clouds swirling around the peaks.” Kate drew the clouds. We left the drawing on the kitchen counter in a town we might never see again.