True Story

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.