And All Those Souls…

One of the most surprising realizations of my adult life thus far is that I love going to church at night.

I cannot recommend it enough. Our families have been doing church wrong our whole lives. Making us get us in the morning, cutting short a refreshing Sunday slumber, putting us in whatever was our “Sunday best,” and sitting us down in a pew in late morning. Worse still was in summer, when by the end of the service it was past noon, your shirt was wet with sweat and the back of it was stuck to the pew back.

No, night is ideal. Especially if it’s pitch black. There is something about walking in darkness, or under dim streetlights, to an unassuming parish, going up stone steps, into a lit church nave. Just the right amount of brightness for that time — enough to be well-lit, but only just — and just the right amount of warmth. Both kinds of warmth — temperature but also atmosphere. A sense that this is a community, at least of those who feel the same way. I don’t necessarily have to be a part of this community. Flannery O’Connor said she went to mass every Sunday for years and didn’t speak to anyone. Just being present was enough for her. I can understand where she came from. And after the service concludes, this service of heat and light, we return to the darkness, and head to our homes.

There’s something strangely powerful about this. There is a feeling present that I have felt multiple times and find it hard to perfectly describe. It’s the best way to go to church. It might even be the only way.

Last week was All Soul’s Day. More people around here ought to celebrate it. It’s a day devoted entirely to the dead. To death itself. To contemplating and understanding death and the dead and what that means for those of us who are blessed with life at this particular moment in time. I find it to be a kind of inverse to Christmas. Christmas to me still does mean family, but family in conjunction with all sorts of flashy, disposable, temporary things: the gifts, the wrappings, the tree, the useless Hallmark specials. All Soul’s makes me think of family, but stripped to the very essential of family and humanity; their lives and what will come to them after.

I walked to the parish in darkness, and took in the warmth and the light. As the service concluded, I was not ready to leave and return to the darkness just yet. I needed a little more time. I stayed in the pew, towards the altar, resting, praying even. Almost everyone was filing out to the exit. I stayed, taking in the darkness from the stained glass windows (in darkness you can’t even tell they have color) and the terra cotta of the sanctuary. Incense was still in the air. Incense is warm, rising as warm air does. Eager to escape the nave and find a way outside, into the darkness.

I was, it seemed, the only person in the sanctuary. An altar boy who was putting out some candles on the other side had left through a side door. I walk up and along to a small shrine of the Virgin Mary. The church has a small rack of candles in front of the shrine, by the cushions left for those who wish to pray. I grab a long match from the side pocket of the rack, light it, and light a candle. I hadn’t considered who I was lighted it for. It was pure instinct. I lit the center-most candle.

As I shook the long match to put out the flame, I suddenly have the feeling that someone is behind me. That someone was watching me. It was intense and slightly distressing. I turned around and saw him.

Now, I’m sure you’re probably thinking that I met The Big One, right there on a Wednesday night in Washington DC. I did not. And since I mentioned a “he” then you probably eliminated the chance that I had a Marian apparition. Wasn’t the case either, clearly.

No, my experience was stranger than that. I turned around and saw a short, bearded olive-skinned man in a rough tunic holding a clay mug that smelled quite strongly of wine. He looked about forty or forty-five. He had a perfectly round head and a shiny pate at the center of his balding scalp. And he was smiling. His smile radiated warmth in a way that I never have quite felt before.

After a second he stifled a belch. I supposed he had some of his wine just before he arrived. He smiled directly at me. He then turned to the shrine. His smile seemed to only grow brighter. He put his hands over his heart. The wine mug was in his outer hand, but some of it proceeded to spill from his mug. I heard a laugh. His lips had not moved. The smile remained as if he had not let out a noise.

I was utterly, entirely baffled. There was absolutely no way he could be there. There is simply no way a short chubby man in a tunic and clay mug could have walked around Foggy Bottom and arrived in this church without anyone noticing. Without me noticing. I turned to him as he focused on the shrine. His smile radiated an intense sense of pride, of a certain kind of innate joy that one feels when they’ve truly accomplished something great. Something holy.

He turned to me. His smile relaxed, but it still seemed improbably. He spoke. He did not move his lips. This I will remember. I could somehow tell for certain, somehow, that this was his voice. How I knew that, I didn’t know. I cannot begin to explain it.

He told me, “Be not afraid. For I am Joachim.”

And surprisingly I was not afraid. There was something about this man that did put me a little to ease, in spite of how absolutely absurd this encounter has been.

I told him my name, and then was about to ask him why he was here. Just as I about to say, I turned back to the Shrine of the Virgin. I concentrated on the statue’s eyes for a split second. I turned back to face Joachim, and he was gone. There was absolutely no sign of him. No sounds, so sight. Not even a drop of his wine.

The altar boy came back into the nave and was about to to say something when I yelped in shock. The altar boy looked terrified by my face. I told him I was fine — I nearly said “be not afraid” — and asked whether he saw a short chubby bearded man in a tunic.

The boy looked at me in utter bewilderment. “Well, no,” he replied. I apologized, claiming that I was making a bad joke. I grabbed my coat, left the nave, walked down the stone steps, and returned to the darkness.

Reader, Joachim is not in the Bible. Quite the oversight, in my opinion. For this man, this short, chubby, wine-drinking supernaturally jovial man is known in Christian tradition as the father of the Virgin Mary. He and his wife were middle-aged, childless, fun-loving middle-class Jews who on one particular day were visited by an angel who told them that they would in fact have a child, and that child would be Mary.

I had an apparition of the Virgin Mary’s father. Jesus’s fun grandpa. God’s father in law, if you will. A man who lived and died at a distance of 2,000 years and 5,000 miles away from me. And I met him. He spoke to me in a Foggy Bottom church.

He did not give me prophecies. I do not know when the end times will come. I don’t know the secret of Fatima. He didn’t give me that. He didn’t even give me a sip of his wine (though had I asked, he might have). All he told me was be not afraid. To this day I cannot tell if that was the point, that the advice I needed was those three words. I am still trying to understand.

What I understood enough was that the next time I was at that church, at night, I lit another candle. For Joachim, and any other souls.