Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson

T.S.?
    I’m a UW graduate, I’ll have you know. I studied with Ted Roethke ages ago. Would you believe I was once a girl beat poet hanging around the Blue Moon Tavern and skinny-dipping in Portage Bay? Of course you wouldn’t. Who could believe that? But I’ve published my poetry here and there in small journals and periodicals over the course of eons. Never a published collection, though—I’m a firefly, so to speak. But you’re our brand new lovely young priest so I must tell you that it was Kierkegaard who caught my interest centuries ago and turned me toward the Lord. My master’s thesis was a perambulation on his
Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
I was thirty-seven years old then. My husband was a struggling, tender playwright who taught theater at Lincoln High School. Now I’m an old widow in a logging town, that’s the way life goes. I do not genuflect to time or circumstance but move forward in the name of Jesus and have at times been enamored of the Quietism with which you are familiar from seminary, particularly the Quietism of François de Fénelon which you touched on so briefly in your sermon three Sundays ago. On another topic, I reread my V. L. Parrington last summer. And three volumes of the Great Books series. Lately I’ve been making a little study of Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley.
    In large print?
    With a magnifying glass. Built into a kind of helmet. I found it on-line two years ago. It’s something like a watchmaker’s visor.
    I’ve never seen that, said the priest. So Aquinas and Berkeley lately, you say. Then you must know the answer to the age-old question: How many angels is it, approximately, that can dance on the head of a pin?
    Twelve, I suppose. I don’t know for certain. If only Saint Thomas had thought of us here, out in these woods asking humorous deep questions, he might have finished his
Summa Theologica
and we would have that information.
    Are we ready to catch up to the others, my dear?
    A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey—let’s go.
    They made the crest arm in arm, waded through the Oregon grape and salal—following the lead of the old black dog, who seemed to have fixed on the scent of the others—and entered the dank-smelling forest. The priest felt happy to have found somebody who was reading Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley as opposed to
Fishing and Hunting News
or
Cosmopolitan
magazine. In ten minutes they found their fellow pilgrims, now milling like a restive theater audience, and the widow whispered, Set me down now, it’s dry right here, and you go among the others.
    All right, said the priest. Bless you.
    They were in a forest mostly of firs, most of which wore moss on their branches—moss draping the vine maples and deadfalls and hanging over everything smotheringly like a botanical parasite. The priest recognized feather moss because he had taken a handbook to the forest on two successive gray afternoons and thought he recognized nearby as well something called old-man’s beard. It confounded him that his memory for flora was so poor, an insufficient and paltry instrument; he would learn a plant’s name and then, within days, it was as though he hadn’t learned it. He did recall reading or hearing somewhere that moss grew only on the north sides of trees, a theory of nature flagrantly at odds with the reality of these throttled firs which were slightly sinister, slightly macabre, as though dipped in some green virus.
    The visionary knelt in a bed of moss with her hood pulled tightly around her face and her rosary clutched in her hands. Most of the pilgrims knelt now too, and one in an elegantly wavering voice read solemnly from the book of Acts And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions,