Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
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From the Archives
Features • Spring 2012
I thought I would have something on her, this nun. I thought that being out in the world, spending my time not with my eyes closed, wearing pants, watching television, would give me something that she didn’t have. But now she’s coming slowly down the hall and I’m smiling already, far too soon, giving myself away.
And now breathe out all negative thoughts in the aspect of thick black smoke, out into the sky, where they will disappear, never to return again. Droljang lives in the nuns’ residence, while I stay in the Female Dorm. She has been living at Kilnwick Percy Hall for a couple of years, come from Scotland. It has stayed in her accent. She has a shaven head— “I need to cut my hair again,” she says, rubbing her head with her palm — and trainers with the heels worn down from where she has slipped them off so many times. She now runs the Bed and Breakfast in the renovated outbuildings. The facilities are clean and well-organized. Every room is named for a tree: Birch, Elm, Gingko. In the laundry room, Droljang stands in the steam, folding occasionally red and yellow robes for the other nuns and the white sheets for the guests. “Deary me,” she says, and gently waves a fly from the ironing board.
Five minutes until dinner and the little pestle in its bowl will chime up and down the hall. The smell of rosemary and olives.
Kilnwick Percy Hall was built on a hill in the hamlet of Kilnwick Percy in approximately 1845. Four colossal Georgian columns form the frontispiece. The grounds are wide with woods and a large lake long dried and a chapel, in the Norman style, dedicated to Saint Helen. A mile away is the little town of Pocklington, greengrocers, video rental, pharmacy, and then the hills, purple with mud and bracken. East Riding, the Wolds of Yorkshire.
This particular week in summer, there are four working visitors at Kilnwick Percy Hall: Nick, Mark, Bill and me. There is also a monk from Thailand. He has come with a translator but doesn’t talk much himself. He walks around; he picks up the pamphlets outside the meditation room and looks at the pictures. In the evening, when the residents have their puja, he listens and moves his lips to the foreign sounds.
We are Droljang’s charges.
“What kind of thing do you like to do?” she asks us. “Bit of gardening? Or cooking?” We work for our room, board and free spiritual lessons. Nick, a young student of geography, says he’ll do anything. He’d like to be outdoors. Mark, quiet and tough, has been dropped off by his girlfriend and is waiting for her to turn the car round on the gravel outside. Bill has been here before. He knows the score. The hall was used by the military in the Second World War, he tells us. As a training headquarters, then for several decades as a family home, and then the Buddhists moved in. On the first floor are the meditation room, a gift shop, a dining room, and offices. The upstairs is bedrooms.
I say I don’t mind cleaning. I fancy cleaning the podium where the nun teaches, and all the little offerings that sit on the shelves around the room. I want to polish the belly of the Buddha in the glass cabinet behind her.
They set me up making beds in the Bed and Breakfast with Droljang. In the laundry room, she shows me how to arrange the bedside trays. Ten sachets of milk, two butter biscuits to rest on top of the coffee filters, one of each color of fruit tea. And how to fold the towels so the labels don’t show. The Bed and Breakfast is four-star.
The New Kadampa Tradition has become a brand; the original World Peace Hotel has been franchised across the world. And the World Peace Cafe, where Bill sits drinking a cup of tea. Mark, Nick and I stand around him, drinking ours, and he tells us that everything has calmed down here since five years ago when he last visited. Back then, there was a scandal with one of the monks, who in strange moods would take his robes off and go wandering through the grounds, up to the chapel and round the lake.
Bill laughs hard. It was a dilemma for the other monks and nuns to know what to do with their brother. In the end, he was removed. Probably placed in a less popular retreat. They wrestled with their consciences, Bill says, because confrontation is so frowned upon.
But attachment is a delusion, they say. The teacher compares delusions to dark growing clouds.
And Bill says he owns a scrap yard in Tottenham. He calls himself a lay-Buddhist. Each day, he wakes up early and enjoys his own ritual. He makes a cup of tea and takes it outside to look at the hills, then he reads from the beginners’ guide to the New Tradition that he has bought himself. He spends all day working in the new kitchen they’re making in Gingko, one of the rooms in the Bed and Breakfast. Since he’s a visitor, they let him have the radio on while he works. The music drifts into the grounds.
I take Kelsang Lekma’s load out of the washing machine, underwear like my mother’s. I pull
at the red and yellow parts, the holy things, untangling, then I lay them carefully over the ironing board. I start to iron the different pieces; the nuns’ robes are made of three pieces, one like a tabard, two that drape to make two skirts. More carefully than I have ever ironed, I iron Lekma’s clothes.
And now breathe out all negative thoughts, in the aspect of thick black smoke, and watch them float away, out of sight, and when you breathe in again, you’re breathing in all the positive thoughts, in the aspect of bright, white light.
She is an experienced teacher. She tells us, sitting on the platform with her robes around her big hips:
“We all want to be happy.”
Sitting hen-wise and kind, above us in the meditation room, “We all want to be happy.”
I think of Bill. And me.
When I finish the ironing, I fold Kelsang Lekma’s clothes and leave the pile on the washing machine for her to find, and go to Elm to put the finishing touches to the room. There are guests arriving soon for the weekend retreat.
In the female and male dorms for the volunteers, the windows are twice as tall as you and there are white shutters from the carpet to the ceiling. One pigeon beds in the cold end of the pillar outside the window, bleating its old song into the stone. Others get into the hall. Kelsang Lekma shoos them out, only because of the cat she keeps upstairs. At night, I lay in my little bed, hearing first the men in the Male Dorm next door talking about something, then the pigeons, the gravel in the wind, the hills. It’s not yet ten o’clock.
When Lekma describes desirous attachment, she says it’s like chocolate. She pretends she is one of us. “Sometimes, you just can’t help it,” she says. She compares indulging in desirous attachment to eating too much of your favourite chocolate; it’s so good at first, and then you start to feel guilty.
I look around the room, but everyone has their eyes closed.
The volunteers walk around the dried-up lake, crunching in the grins of old mussels stuck in earth.
At breakfast, on Sunday, waiting for noon when I will leave for my bus, I sit in the dining room with Bill. The doors are open onto the grass outside where the visiting monk from Thailand is taking his tea.Bill is playing with the little tassel that marks the end and the beginning of his pink prayer beads.
“What do you do? With them?” I ask.
“It’s a mala, isn’t it? It’s like a rosary.”
He describes that counting is a relaxing thing; he tries to say his mantra 108 times, which is traditional. He takes the mala from round his neck and puts it on the table between us. He says: “You keep this one. I’ve got another.” When I refuse, he says: “It’d be wicked to refuse’m.” So I take them. I play with them as Bill finishes his tea, counting, no mantra yet, other than the sound of him drinking or the sound of the sheep.
Features • Fall / Winter 2023
I was born on the outskirts of Johannesburg, twenty years ago. The first nineteen of those years were my journey inward. I consider them unbroken years, if only because that lets me say I know a thing or two about the city. That twentieth year and the months after it have been punctured by the feeling that I know nothing about the place at all. But nineteen years is something, some time long enough for me to call the city mine.
Poetry • Winter 2009
**1 / Meeting Burt**
Burt Lancaster and I don’t
have much to die for: love
of the game and the gold
and the girl not as much
makes simple to say she’s not
beautiful, perpetually
never quite undressed,
dusty and sweaty under
that scarf, her dress, her
face, wide plain, blessed
expanse glistening daily
above breasts long fought
for, Burt and I, too old
now to care about love.
**2 / Losing Burt**
The tropes gather faster when Burt appears,
he’s lost craps and a woman, broke and rebuffed,
smirking and grumbling that humans make love
face to face, a remark worthy of some score-
settling cowboy in spurs, not you, Burt, your
single regard for time and rock blown rough
in one moment’s furnace of sticks, sweaty, buffed,
refusing objection your fusework near blears
human loss so unsavory
I’m lost, Burt,
can’t tell your face features through the sure
group’s tactics and horses, making calm
ill-advised, more fitting to flail and blurt
guilt in tumid air that soaks these shores
without oceans,
Your hand is creased without a palm.
**3 / Replacing Burt (On Seeing a Different Western)**
Burt and I have had a falling out
I say loud, hoping after a reaction,
eyeing with verve and meaning my now
and new loved outlaw, lanky Gary. Faction
different this time, clean-shaven and freshly
married, on the run not from the long
law but the lawless. Blonde-sweet Miss Kelly
headstrong and stupid—seems he’s on the wrong
side of her Quaker complaints. He stays to greet
a death mimed by cruel schoolboys. A crime
for their sake. Boys scatter. Streets empty. Smutty heat,
smutty Gary beneath the Marshall sign,
moral and certain, leather and tallow.
Poetry • Spring Summer 2022
They hold chalices above their mouths
and the eggnog
never tickles their lips. It’s
stuck at the pommel.
The false-teeth manufacturer millionaire
nods. Aren’t those transitions between our
two coasts strange? One’s
bailiwick in this
case, is the dank snow falling
at the philtrum. Backward in a lovely
smoky hovel.
The girl smeared chocolate mesquite
at piano. And we all poured ourselves
into bed.
Features • Spring 2016
We go clockwise around the circle of folding chairs. Most of us are shy. We say our names and, per our leader’s prompt, something we like about Quakers. A shiny-headed man with a gold-tipped cane is one of the last to speak.** **
He sits close to me in the circle, wearing a dark blue suit and loafers and clutching two books to his lap. One is a Bible. He does not wear a wedding ring. He shifts positions constantly, putting varied amounts of weight on the cane as he tries to sit up straighter. He struggles to get his sentences out, lips moving frantically around sounds he cannot make. His dark eyes bug with the strain. When the words emerge they are painstakingly placed, each one a piece of fragile glassware set on a high shelf.
“I….am….in love….with….God.”
The sentence takes a good fifteen seconds to emerge. By the time it does, the Quakers and I are transfixed; we’re staring at him, and everyone is smiling. Mehmet Rona’s face splits into a grin. Exhausted and pleased, he snuggles back into his chair. Silence.
I think: My God, this man is a prophet.
Mehmet Rona has presence. In another life he might have been a politician or a door-to-door salesman; people are drawn to him like moths to light. At our break for tea, he moves around the circle to take hands, kissing fingers. He offers a ride to a woman when he learns she doesn’t have one. I tell the group I’m interested in conducting interviews with Cambridge Quakers, and am met with suspicious looks. Mehmet speaks up. “I’m…..in,” he proclaims, shakily raising a fist to the air. Everyone laughs. I flush to my scalp and beam at my bald knight in shining armor.
Mehmet the prophet speaks boldly. This particular session of New Lights (an evening teaching group affiliated with the local Friends Meeting) is predominated by ‘non-deists.’ Mehmet, quite obviously, finds their opinions blasphemous. He squints his licorice eyes in frustration when someone conflates God with natural beauty, or identifies Him as the creative impulse they feel before penning poetry. Mehmet adores the Friends Meeting. He exalts its prison fellowship and commitment to the poor. As a vegetarian pacifist, he’s at home here. Nevertheless, his God is bigger than a landscape or a good idea. I know he wishes he could speak more. When he does, everybody listens.
“The Quakers are hungry for Christ,” Mehmet tells me later, in private. “And they deny it.”
***
The Society of Friends first coalesced in 17th-century England around a group of Puritan dissenters: the most famous of these, George Fox. Shepherd and shoemaker turned theologian and preacher, drawings of Fox portray a hook-nosed gentleman dressed like the beloved oatmeal mascot. (Contrary to popular belief, Quaker Oats claims their beaming front man is neither Fox nor his contemporary, William Penn; he’s a fictional Friend named Larry.)
Depressed and dissatisfied by clerical advice and the political pandering of the English Civil War, Fox eventually accessed what he identified as true authority. In solitary prayer, he heard a voice: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” No bishop’s robe or hefty tithe could improve or subsume Fox’s own intimate access to God. There was undiluted wisdom straight from the fount, and it was there for everyone. Fox and his followers envisioned their sect as “primitive Christianity revived.”
But at the Cambridge Meeting, most of the Quakers are not Christians.
Quaker worship means sitting in silence for exactly one hour. In Cambridge, that entails filling a bare, tallow-colored room with a predominantly white congregation, shoed in Birkenstocks and draped in scarves, mostly elderly. Some gaze at trees out the window. Some stare at their hands. All mediate, or talk to a higher power(s). Many are Buddhists. Some are atheists. Some are Jewish, some are lapsed Catholics. No text is read. No songs are sung. “Quaker” in Cambridge is a far cry from Fox’s unfettered but rigorous Protestantism.
The hour of worship isn’t always *entirely* silent. An individual can speak if he or she is ‘quaking’—overcome with the impulse to ‘give a message’ to the Meeting. Anyone can do this. As one member tells me, the Quakers are not so much a society of laypeople as they are a society of clergymen—each ministering to their own conception of God.
At the close of the hour, before homemade breads and tea, there are announcements: for climate change walks and camp-outs at nuclear power plants, for Israel-Palestine video screenings and singing in the streets. At Meeting, earthly actions collapse into religious worth. They are the sum of faith. The Quakers do good, even though at times they feel more like a left-wing service club than a unified religious community.
In the midst of it all, there is Mehmet, a bald sore thumb, proclaiming the Gospel whenever he can get words out. Why does he stay—why doesn’t he find a Baptist congregation to join, or a Catholic priest to hear his sins? It’s because in theory, what the Quakers have going on appeals to him—this unmediated means of communing with God.
***
Talking is hard labor for Mehmet. I watch flashes of delayed electricity working in the muscles of his forehead, popping his veins in frustrated embarrassment. Tongue, teeth, and lips collide and tangle. I silently cheer when they manage to cooperate, spitting out a word or fragment. Mehmet has primary progressive apraxia of speech. Often, the condition is caused by a left-hemisphere stroke—I’m not sure if this is what happened to him.
The eating itself is calming to Mehmet; the waitress knows him by name and meatless order. Mehmet comes to the Plough and Stars almost every day for lunch. It’s close to his apartment, accessible even with heavy dependence on a cane. We’ve got our hats and coats in a bundle together on the chair, and Mehmet is leaning forward to speak. Without his disease, he would be a lecturing professor, holding all the cards of wisdom and prestige. He dresses like an academic, clad in a dark suit jacket and sweater. But the power dynamics are wonky. I am the one that can articulate quickly, pulling words from recesses with ease.
It is poignant that the man who for decades practiced silence as spiritual discipline is now confined to it. He takes it lightly—“God wants me to shut up,” he chuckles—but still, it’s sad. Mehmet made his living as a renowned physicist; now, equations and proofs pool in the contours of his brain. Mehmet is funny; when he makes me laugh, his face goes radiant.
Mehmet loves words, and actively seeks God in collections of them. “The…Bible is prose….written…in poetry,” he opines. In 1989, hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, he read both Homeric epics, plowed through the King James Bible in its entirety, and taught himself Ancient Greek.
***
I’ve been attending Quaker Meetings for months. They aren’t easy. The noisiness of my own body is an impediment—the grumbles and pops of a stomach, the creaks of a tense jaw, the scratch of denim as I cross and re-cross my legs. I am so noisy.
In Morning Meeting, attendance 150 on average, ‘settling’ takes about fifteen minutes. That’s how long children are required to stew before being released to Day School. Tiny cries produce parental shushes. Little boots bump the benches. I like having the kids around. They give me cover to get comfortable.
It’s 10:35, and the room has filled. Nestled in my pew, I dispose of the ideas that come to mind most readily. Those ones are never about God. I fret over academic assignments I need to complete, wishing I had a pen and pad to make lists. God keeps the lilies and the sparrows, but what about me, bearing the petty burdens of grocery bills and cover letters and homesickness? I don’t know what it will be like to not have a bedroom at home next year. I don’t know how I will get up in the morning without hearing my roommates bustling around, turning on the shower water. But these worries lack gravitas; they aren’t noble. Can You speak to my condition, Lord? Even if You could, why would you want to?
This isn’t what I went to spend my hour on.
I picture a broom, knocking down cobwebs from the eaves of my brain—a pair of hands taking out the trash. I know the dust will be stirred up when the Meeting is over. For now, I move it into the corners.
Next, I must try not to fall asleep. Once, in Morning Meeting, I gave up. I slumped against the tallow-colored wall, closed my eyes, and shamelessly dozed. Every morning is a battle with leaden eyelids. I worry a little about how my mouth might hang open, how my breathing might grow labored. Perhaps I even snore a little.
I hear the spoken messages: a confession, a snippet of policy talk. I join the singing when it arrives (the same guy sings “Give Peace a Chance” almost every week.)
Finally, I approach something like prayer. It is shocking how tiresome conversation with God is these days. I must knead myself into it.
The Quaker meetings put the impetus on me. If I want to have an experience of worship, I must focus. There is no guidance from a speaker, no set of songs or parcel of text, just the cloudy space of my own thoughts. For some, like Mehmet, this is where the God of Israel lives—speaking into grey slimy tissues, washing them clean.
***
Turkey, the 1950s.Six-year-old Mehmet lived with his parents (culturally Muslim atheists) and his older, adopted brother (Armenian by birth, converted to Islam while living in Turkey).
The Armenian brother, disgusted with his father’s cankerous doubt, demanded that a lamb be sacrificed. His sin brought shame on the household; atonement was necessary. A lamb was ordered.
“I….played…with…the…lamb,” muses Mehmet. The sentence comes out surprisingly fluid, not much space between the words. I envision small, brown Mehmet in dust or grass, running wool through his fingers and kissing a pink nose. They’re running together, two young created things. I can see this in Mehmet’s eyes: unadulterated joy, decades old, all the fresher for being stored so long.
The next day, a man with a mustache arrived at the house and took the lamb from Mehmet. I imagine it came away from his scrawny arms with a bleat, a panicked scuffle of hooves that struck his collarbone.
“I…made…eye…contact….with…the lamb…at the moment…of slaughter,” stutters Mehmet. By this point I’m glued to him, elbows forward on the table, water glass and pen alike forgotten. Recollected blood runs in Mehmet’s irises: life leaking crimson for the sake of his father, whom he loved. But was it really necessary to kill the innocent?
“It…was…that…moment…I…found…my…religion,” whispers Mehmet. The blood in his eyes turns to tears. I flush. Mehmet pauses. He rasps a little around his breath. His tears collect, almost to the point of spill.
“You…write…” says the old man, “…I…collect…myself.”
Mehmet has lived a life of visions. In 1973, he was living in Ankara with his wife Josephine, teaching physics at a university. One night, he sat straight up in bed, waking his bride. She noticed fuzzy light, a halo maybe, tangled in his hair.
Mehmet dreamt he was strolling into his living room. In the dream, he peered at a print of *Mona Lisa* hanging on the wall. *La Joconde*, Mehmet insists, became the Virgin Mary. Hand outstretched, she tugged Mehmet into the canvas. Suddenly, he was in Biblical times, the illustrations in my purple book blown to size. Mehmet doesn’t provide details of what he saw after that. It’s enough to know that he saw something.
Mehmet’s official conversion was anticlimactic. In 1981, during the baptism of his godson, a priest asked the Turkish professor if he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Mehmet, of course, said yes—he had for decades, even if this ceremony was his first time articulating the choice. “That’s so beautiful, so subtle,” I murmur. “After all that time.” Mehmet approves: “I’m…glad…you…see…the…beauty…in it.”
And how did Mehmet become a Quaker? The whole thing is a big joke. He made friends with a man named Michael Shannahan, an Irish guy with seven children. After a few months of shared meals, Mehmet asked Michael to introduce him to his parish priest. Stereotypes were foiled; Michael was a Quaker. From then on, Mehmet was a Meeting-goer.
Mehmet has lived a life of tragedies. Michael Shannahan went through a horrible divorce with a wife “addicted to being pregnant,” and drank a lot. For months, Mehmet spent all his free time sitting with his friend. Mehmet’s motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down for a year and a half. His own marriage with Josephine crumbled. This mysterious illness rendered him mute in all settings except the most controlled and intentional. And yet he is all praise, all love.
Mehmet has arrested me. He grasps my hand when proving a point. He makes me order dessert, and won’t let me pay for my meal. Eying my notebook, he tells me he has a “similar fetish” for luscious journals and smooth pens. He praises my home city. He tells his waitress friend what to do with his untouched half of pizza. “Oh, Gary?” she says. “Of course.” It’s Mehmet’s ritual to apportion his meals to the needy. For all his etherealness, Mehmet is a man of the people, offering rides and food and compliments with abandon. “My…whole…life,” he tells me, “people…have said…I have a…transparency…for God. I…leak…my faith.”
It’s true: Mehmet has a rare life of allegories, a symbolic pattern you can’t ignore. The Lamb of God, the faith of a small boy. The silver tip of a knife pulverizing innocence, all the sadness of the world spilled from sheep veins.
Mehmet himself is a symbol for holy silence. In the still of Meeting, he comes to know a Lord he has always encountered through noticing and listening and the love of others—not through traditional avenues. “My…relationship…with Christ…is very intense,” he says. Natural. Felt. “Meetings…help me…to organize that.” His relationship with people is intense too. “You…have to love…other…human beings,” he insists—a simple sentence made overwhelming by palsied hands and desperate eyes. He wants me to understand—there are so many ways to know this God. One’s own mind can be a cathedral; one’s own life can be the liturgy.
***
When I was a child, God and I met in silence. Like many American families, mine didn’t attend church. Yet even without a pastor’s spoken word for it, I always knew God existed. I liked Him. Whenever our cat got lost in the fields behind our house, I wrote God suppliant letters in fat felt marker. I plunked His spirituals in my piano lessons, singing along as I practiced.
I never learned about God. I had no sermons to listen to, no Sunday school lessons to complete, no verses to memorize for candies. I hadn’t heard any of the gossip: that some people didn’t believe in Him, or denounced His definition of justice, or found his Son’s claims—the one Way, Truth, Life, etc.—restrictive. My relationship with the Creator was all intuition and innocence. After bedtime, door closed, I thought over spelling tests and worried about friends at school. I felt listened to. God was my friend.
When my father sang to me in the bathtub, or directed magic shows with me, or helped me with math homework, God was there. When my mother gave up her teaching job to raise me, shuttling me to the library and the zoo and the dentist, God was there. My parents indefatigably modeled sacrifice and adoration, and we never stepped foot in a sanctuary.
As a little girl, I remember feeling guilty about not going to church. I wanted my family of four busy on Sunday mornings. I wanted us to acquire teachings and talk about them together, or pray before dinner like my friends’ families. I wanted us to follow the rules. Now as an adult, I choose a church with a sermon and songs and communion and structure—because there’s something good about that too: having spoken norms and covenant community and a pastor I trust to keep me on my toes. Church matters.
But “the church” is fluid, and Mehmet understands this, the Quakers understand this: how God can operate covertly, in an unstructured Sunday service where there is nothing but calm, in the six other days of a week. And while I’m personally convicted that God must be at the center of the Meeting in order for it to operate as a religious community—a God that looks like Christ—I find the fluidity somewhat refreshing, indicative of how invasive He can be.
God is vast. This has always been an idea that both terrifies me—how can I believe in something I can never see the boundaries of?—and comforts me—that’s what faith is all about. And don’t you want faith in something your limited mind can’t fully comprehend, can never completely espouse in a sermon or hymnal?
When I rise to leave the table, Mehmet embraces me. He kisses me on the cheek twice, warm and soft, loneliness incarnate in the way he holds me close. He tells me he’d like to keep getting lunch, please. I feel unconditionally loved in the grit of the city. I feel touched by God.
2026