True Story
The best stories are never written down or
reported in the news. The best stories are relayed through intercourse—and if
your first thought at my use of the word “intercourse” is sexual, your mind
isn’t in the gutter but exactly where the dictionary positions human
communication.
I sleep next to the latest Merriam-Webster’s. (The
Oxford English Dictionary in two volumes is downstairs in the living room; its
micrographic type requires a magnifying glass, another useful tool I keep
beside my bed.) “Intercourse,” derived from Latin words inter and currere meaning
“to run between,” has two definitions before the sexy one.
The first is “connection or dealings between
persons or groups.” So basically everyone engages in “intercourse” with
everyone else all the time. Especially in this day and age, we’re all plugged
in to people we know as well as to those we’ll never know by way of multi-intersected
webs that stretch from, say, the nascent heartbeat of a fetus in a woman’s womb
to the planetary plasma waves which that woman had a hand in converting to
sound waves.
No body is excluded: not a person locked up in
solitary confinement (they are part of the prison and legal systems), or
someone who has chosen to lock the world out via a strict ascetic lifestyle (they
are part of a religious system, or at least the eco-system as they still take
up oxygen and produce methane gas), or a locked-in human being paralyzed and
unconscious and hooked up to a life-support system (they are definitely
connected).
The second definition is “exchange of thoughts or
feelings: communion.” Which makes me, as a minister, think of holy
communion—certainly the meal during worship which for us Christians, depending
on our tradition, either mysteriously is or memorably symbolizes the exchange
of Jesus’ body into bread and Jesus’ blood into wine. But holy communion also
happens before and after worship, in the kitchen and hallway (speaking of
“running between”) and over cups of coffee or tea—when the real stories come
out.
I remember one Sunday, a member of the
congregation came up to me before church and asked to speak to me after church,
a sure sign that they needed to talk. With a little juice left in my emotional
batteries after leading the morning service, I got my hot beverage and some
cookies in the noisy fellowship hall, and the member and I went—like Jesus—to a
deserted table.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” I replied. Both because I had been
in on an experience with a ghost in my stepdaughter’s house some years ago, and
because I wanted to reassure her that she could tell me anything.
“I think my neighbor’s chair is haunted,” she
said. She explained that her neighbor had died recently, and the neighbor’s
next-of-kin had cleared out the house and given her the big comfortable lounge
chair that the neighbor used to sit in. Only whenever she tried sitting in the
chair it felt weird—she couldn’t describe it exactly.
Then she asked me, “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. Both because I didn’t
think she was crazy, and because even if it sounded crazy I believed her.
She went on to say, “I don’t want to get rid of
the chair. It belonged to my neighbor and she was a good friend and we looked
after each another. I don’t know what to do.”
My stepdaughter hadn’t known what to do either
but, at her wit’s end, she finally had words with the ghost, or ghosts, and
told them, essentially, It’s okay if you live here but leave my stuff alone and
quit upsetting the dog. And that seemed to take care of it.
“Try talking to the ghost,“ I suggested. “Tell it
it’s okay to be here but you were wondering if you could share the chair, or
take turns using it. You’re happy for the chair to have a new home in your
house, and for the ghost to move in, but let’s get along together.”
She breathed a sigh of relief.
Sometimes the most intimate intercourse we
experience is with a spiritual companion in a crowded room, or with a spiritual
presence in a crowded chair.
