I Half-Believed

conversations with Abraham beneath the Perseids

“It’s a really nice night out there, you should go out,” my husband said as he shut down the house for the night, jerking the outdoor party lights from the outlet, rounding up ice cream bowls, checking the locks on the doors once more.

I almost didn’t.

I’m such a homebody I have to talk myself into going onto the porch sometimes. But I heard the Perseids were doing their thing, felt the same way I felt for the solar eclipse. That some ancient celestial thing was passing by, and that if I could just coax myself to step into its rhythms and out of mine, my toes might leave the ground for a moment. I might become something different, more real.

So I put feet to peeling stain, felt the way it stuck to my instep, but tried to attend to the sky above, above, at the brilliant dots that came into focus as my eyes realized where they were, no longer inside the artificial glow but out in the wild, where you have to work for your light.

And can you believe it? I nearly bent over backwards, like when I tried to show the kids how to do the limbo, surprised that my body could move like that without any kind of warm-up. I gave quiet acknowledgement to my spine, promised to be good to it so that for all of my days I could do this: look upward so enthusiastically that I would nearly turn myself inside-out.

What came to my mind in this inverted state was Abraham. Yes, father Abraham. The ancient one. The one that for all of my days has seemed to live in the Old Testament, a dusty man in a dusty tale that I’ve sort of half-believed, like the way you half-believe that you’ll sleep again when you have a newborn or you half-believe that Russia exists, because you’ve never been and you cannot really fathom that other people live there, just as you live here, concerned about running out of milk or if there’s any clean underwear in the dryer.

But I’ve been looking at the maps. I’ve traced my finger from Ur to Haran, from Haran to Shechem. I see where the mountains rise and the Nile runs through Egypt and how wide and vast is the Syrian Desert. And suddenly the collections of letters that form names of places I cannot pronounce, let alone comprehend, become something. Something my eyes don’t glaze over. Something I can touch and feel and recognize and—a teensy tiny bit—understand.

So when I flipped over backwards and saw those stars and felt my feet on wood—in that moment it was as though Abraham and I were on the same level of existence. This mighty giant of the faith that I’ve half-believed in: I half-believed that I could be standing next to him, could be talking an easy back-and-forth about what God said yesterday, and cattle and the color of the sky and the way that our feet feel when they are bare, outside. As long as my eyes were up at those stars, I felt that time didn’t exist in the traditional sense. It felt just as possible here that I could go for a walk into the dark wild wood behind our home and meet Abraham on the way, wandering in the wilderness, too. Wondering where God was going to tell him to go next. Just like me. We were…together in that.

My back revolted after a while. I went upright again. I said goodnight to the stars, to Abraham, to God. I remembered that eternity and the ancient past are all just a step onto my deck away. I told myself I would venture out more often. For the first time in a long time, I felt my toes leave the ground.