numinous ovenbird I only have one recording of my Baba’s voice. In an interview with my mother’s mother over 20 years ago, she tells me about her relationship with God, with the Virgin Mary, with Jesus. My own voice is animated, my questions abrupt. Baba’s voice is soft, dreamy, she is enraptured in a way I can’t understand. She tells a story about her life in which God is the central character. She talks about replacing a family photo above her mantel with a reproduction of The Last Supper. This offended at least one of her children, but she says, “I only have a family because God gave me one, so he gets the best wall in the house.” There was no doubt in her at all. The Last Supper remained in its honoured spot above the fireplace her entire life. The part of the interview that grabs my attention most, two decades later, is a transformative moment from Baba’s youth. She says, “When I was 16, I saw a movie called The Song of Bernadette. Afterwards I came home in tears, crying because I knew I wasn’t praying enough. I wasn’t close enough to Mary or close enough to Jesus. I didn’t know enough about them. I wanted to be like that little girl, Bernadette, who was so holy, and spoke to Mary. I wanted to be as pure and holy as she was but I didn’t know how. I cried and cried. And I began to pray to Mary.” You can hear the awe in Baba’s voice as she tells this story and you can sense the yearning to be chosen, her desire to be bestowed with the gift of miraculous visions, to stand in the presence of the Virgin Mary and be overcome with mercy. She wanted her body to be sanctified, pure, a vessel for divine morality. I remember the glimmer in her eyes as she dreamed this vision of herself, kneeling on the rocks before a grotto in some distant past. I didn’t think much of her words then. I was just gathering information for an essay and I saw her as a relic, with views that could bear some modern day revisions, if not outright eradication. But listening now, I understand something of her fervour. It’s a feeling I know, after so many more years on this earth–this aching desire to enter into a sacrament of living, to kneel upon the earth and feel the glow of something holy encapsulating my beating heart. I have no God to beg for blessings, no heavenly hosts to petition for mercy, but I have, within me, a soul that seeks the numinous and sometimes finds it in the most unlikely places: in the searching sporophytes of an ancient moss, in the sound of rain hitting leaves like a million mallets playing the vibraphone of the world, in another body hugged so close to mine that I lose track of all my edges, become, if only for one sacred moment, sainted by the day’s grace. 250517 what's it to you? who go blather from