The Woman With the Alabaster Box

She can't even see him really.  She knows he's there.  Others talk about feelings they get, things they see, signs and wonders and all she has is an insatiable longing to be near him.  She suffers from a hunger that cannot be satiated. She has tried to do things to get close to him but so many have told her that she's not worthy to come or healed enough to serve or that she is not obedient enough to the religion to participate.  The people who whisper and gossip and get turned on by the dirty little stories of other people's sins don't want her to be near him. She only knows she needs to be near him.  She had two celestial visions but she is too tainted and crazy to be believed.  She needs him and that's all she knows.

Since childhood she has come to the understanding that she cannot feel love.  Love doesn't exist in a feeling way to her like it does to others.  She knows that people love her but she cannot feel their love.  She can only feel sadness when someone who said they love her leaves.  She can't experience love as a feeling.  She discovered that early on sex was the closest she can come to feeling anything so she used her sexuality as a way of feeling "love". When she is hungry she uses sex to fill that emptiness. 

She had been told as an adult that's not what love is but it's all she knew growing up.   They say it's not allowed in her faith but they don't understand.  Without sexual expression there is no love for her.  She has to have the only feelings she can experience or life is a dark void.  She has been told he is there so she stays even though she doesn't belong like the others.  She came from across town and she wants to find him because she needs him.  She doesn't care about impressing anyone.  She is looked down on as being odd.  She doesn't come to be seen by others, she comes because she needs him.  She hides in the shadows of the balcony when she can so they don't see her.  She feels exposed when they do see her.  She needs to know she is loved so she can continue to live.  She needs his love.  She needs him.  She has done horrible things in the name of needing a man's love.  The sunlight goes behind a cloud and all is dark.  Her  mind rolls back like a large scroll unfolding its dark pall over her thoughts. 

The hotel room is barely clean...the ceiling is a drop ceiling stained from the leak that may not have even been fixed.  It smells of dirty secrets and a window air conditioner is blowing out musty cold air.  He is a business man, a CEO of a very prestigious company.  He doesn't use his real name but neither does she.  They pretend to be interested in each other's brief introductions.  The internet pic was accurate.  He's well built, very polished, extremely handsome, and the epitome of success.  He's married, has three teenaged children, wears a large gold band, and lost his mistress when he moved across country.  He takes off his wedding ring and sets it on the nightstand.  This is how he divides his two lives.  He is not the cheating husband when his ring is off.  He has a black Lexus in front of the hotel room door.  He is totally comfortable with what he is doing.  These are actions that say that these experiences are part of a world he keeps behind a black lace curtain.  It's a lovely facade that is covered up from his family.  He says it's part of his way of "having fun" and he pretends to be having fun every week or two.  In reality he looks demanding and his eyes are dark.  He is very handsome but his blue eyes are cold like steel.  He has nothing in them but the drive to be in control and to dominate.  Whenever a man has dark eyes that means he wants power and to be in charge.  He is not about love.  He knows what he wants and she can tell he wants to dispense with chatter and get down to business.  With nothing left to say he asks her if she wants him to say I love you.  She says no.  She then focuses on the ceiling and disappears.  The little girl comes to keep her company and all is black.

He is almost finished getting dressed, thanks her, and says he will call her.  She knows he won't and he knows that she knows.  It's all a lie so that he can quickly leave.  He finishes putting his tie back on and he kisses her cheek and tells her the room is paid for if she wants to stay.  He finishes tying his polished brown shoes, grabs his cell phone and keys, and then opens the door.  The sunlight hurts her eyes and as he waves he leaves the hotel room door open and barks angrily into the phone, "Of course I won't miss his recital for crying out loud!  I just got held up.  I'm on my way."

She gets up, shuts the door, feeling empty and disappointed again.  She showers and then catches sight of her face in the bathroom mirror.  Lines are starting to appear where there use to be rosy cheeks.   Why does it always come to this?  How did life go so wrong?  She then sees that her eyes are as empty as his.  This isn't what she wanted.  She wished she could say this was the only time she did something like this but it isn't.  There have been other times all ending the same way.  One preached at her and told her she was a bad person.  He told her she needed to accept Jesus.  One or two paid for fancy rooms, a large jacuzzi, and the best food, but they never call her back.  Countless blurring of experiences all ending in deep loneliness and despair.  She has the sad eyes of a broken woman.   

She wants to feel love but somehow that desire has been twisted into an obsession about sex.  Sex and all those feelings are the only love she thinks she will ever experience so she settles.   She sinks deeper into her misguided search for the knight who will be looking for fun but mistakenly fall for her and rescue her from her dying self.   

She goes to the nightstand where she tossed her clothes and sees that he left her a crisp 50.00 bill in the ashtray.  Her breath catches in her chest and she shakes her head.  She doesn't even have the esteem to feel angry she just shrugs her shoulders, puts herself together, and goes to her car leaving the 50 dollars behind in the dark room.  She starts the car and then begins to cry. As she makes a few work calls she begins to sob deeply and the phone slips from her hand to the floor of the car.  She cries deep racking sobs that come from somewhere within.  A lost little girl with straight dark hair is looking at her from inside her broken heart wondering if she will ever be hugged and wanted.  The little girl turns and slowly walks away carrying her Raggedy Ann doll.  She is lost forever in abandonment and depression.  The gray curtain falls and there in the car is the little girl, mascara pouring down her face, feeling nothing, hating herself for believing and daring to believe the smart man would see what she really longs to have and would save the little girl.  It's all lost now and she puts the whole scene and her brokenness into her alabaster box.  The little girl keeps it safe for now.  She then puts the car in gear and drives away quickly wanting to get rid of the memory of what she did.  She sees her actions as the confirmation of how evil she has become trying to be good.  How can you be so evil when you only want to be good and help the lost little girl?   She puts the memory of the little girl away with the alabaster box and goes to lunch and back to work.

She tried to come back to the faith and volunteer for things to be part of the community but people have heard whispers of this and that and her depression and mania alternate in a whirlwind that convinces people she's not very close to God.  After all, people who are close to God know how to act in worship and around others and they aren't  mentally ill.  They don't blow up or challenge authority or even dare say they disagree with a critical teaching.  To her it all looks like Stepford and she hasn't learned that being yourself is not always OK.  They don't say they feel emptiness and darkness like she does.  She dares to say that she feels nothing, no matter what she does.  It's like her soul must be dead and her body hasn't gotten the message.  She walks around seeking feelings to confirm she's still alive.  They avoid her because she's crazy.  Only crazy people feel like she feels.  She knows this and agrees.

The faith community must feel things.  They are all married because everyone must be married unless you are a priest or nun.  The fact she's been twice divorced is a sign she is not close to God and crazy.  She wonders if they hold onto their husbands because she might be shopping for a new man and she's a bad woman.  They live in their shelters that are very expensive.  They shut out public schools and "those people".  They go to sports games and ballet recitals and take really long vacations posting everything on social media.  They have all day to polish their nails or garden and complain about how vexing it is to have such a schedule.  They all laugh about how their husbands leave socks on the floor.  How annoying but "what can you do?"  Their sweetness smells like spoiled sugar to her and she finds it salty in the wounds of her life.  They talk about how sad they are that the SUV broke down and they all have to pack into the Volvo to go to mid-week children's events at the parish.  They talk of how proud they are of their children and there doesn't seem to be any tolerance for those who couldn't begin to have that upper middle class existence and who see her as a sinful woman.  They never seem to run out of money.  They never have to choose between groceries and the  light bill.  They never seem to wonder what they will do now that they are low on gas.  They never wonder if their husbands cheat on them with evil women who have little girls crying inside of them who need affection.  They sit in church all polished for their performance.  Some seem genuinely happy and some want everyone to think they are happy.  When she talks about having a bad past they say they too weren't always good and they say, "I was pretty bad too.  I didn't even go to church for a while" and she realizes their definition of bad and hers are a thousand miles apart, like the chasm that separates her from ever being close to them.  Two arms stretched out on the cross, as far as east is from the west. 

She walks up to the front of the church as they sing Agnus Dei and she feels eyes on her.  Yes it was true a year ago this would not have been allowed.  She is so stained.  They told her she needs to heal before she can do some things and she doesn't understand this.  The leader must have saw her stains because he disapproved of her pouring out the contents of her alabaster box for the broken God.  But that leader left and all those who polished his armor are lost.  He had sneered at her and rolled his dark eyes at her when she talked to him.  Actually she had seen that look many times.  He wished she would disappear.  All her life it has been the same.  "Make me look good or go away".   His message was very clear.  She can't make his armor shine so she needs to go away.  He had beautiful shiny armor too.  She would try to help him keep it shiny but anytime she reached out to him she put fingerprints and stains on his armor.  He would become impatient.   She really wanted to help him and be part of the group but the more she tried the harder she would fall.  She kept clouding up his armor and finally she crawled away sobbing because she couldn't help him be shiny and the pretty people needed him to be shiny.  She was then forgotten by him as if she never existed at all and she put that rejection in her alabaster box.  Her fear of not existing was a phobia of hers.  Her worst fate on earth would be to become invisible.  She thinks of another woman in the same predicament during the time of the Bible.  It was about 2 thousand years ago.  She pushed her way into the polished people who looked down at her and fell at his feet.  She probably couldn't see him either through her tears. She used her hair to wash his feet.  Her tears poured over the feet of God.  She had to force her way through all of those who rolled their eyes and sneered.  The woman wants to be close to him so she will find a way.  She must be near him.  She needs and wants him. 

As she stands at the front of the church with the others she has to close her eyes so she can't feel the congregation looking at her.  They wouldn't understand.  It's not the people there, it's all the eyes of all the people that know what she's really like, why she has insatiable cravings for men and their attention.  It's her eyes condemning herself over and over. She has this dark hatred for herself.  It's the eyes of the little girl crying and accusing her of neglecting her and ignoring her.  The little girl with the rag doll and the alabaster box.  Every week she prays that someone will show her she's worth loving.  Those in line with her to serve all pray the prayer.  She keeps her eyes clamped shut and says nothing.  She knows she's unworthy in ways they could never comprehend.  She is unworthy to even exist.  Being a sinner seems like a good thing when you think that you should be annihilated.   If she could ever see she was merely a sinner who needed redemption and someone who deserved mercy she would consider that making progress.  

She has never said a single thing in Mass for many months.  She is not part of their family.  She is on the outside.  She reads the responses silently but does not speak them out loud.  She does not sing.  She only watches as the crowd mills around him and she longs to be with him.  They want their armor to shine.  She just wants his love.

With her heart breaking she receives him, because he is all that makes her alive.   He alone can quench the hunger that makes her sinful.  She apologizes to him every time she receives him.  She tells him that she is sorry.  She feels bad that she even receives him but she really has nothing to offer in exchange for his brokenness.  The little girl with the wounded heart steps forward at that moment and opens the alabaster box and pours it out on him.  She anoints him with her precious memories.  She then offers her doll hoping that he will accept it.  It's all she has in that moment.  In those moments in front of everyone she longs to look out at the families and say she is sorry.  For what ...she has no idea.  She holds his blood in her hands and she stands there smiling and offering him to the lovely people who seem to know him and love him better.  She looks in the chalice and sees the wine, now blood.  A tear drops into the chalice.  She blinks them away.  She wipes the edge of the chalice and sees his blood on the linen and her mind rolls back.

She sees her son and he is covered in blood,  Everywhere there are tubes and wires.  This is the first time she has been allowed to see him since he had the accident.  Everything is swirling and distorted.  Beeping noises are everywhere.  Everything feels like it's underwater and she can't hear people when they speak.  Blood is in droplets all over the floor.  There's a panicked scream in the background of her mind and it's really high pitched and makes her insides turn to water.  It is her screaming NO! NO! NO! NO! 

A cold rushes through her as her oldest son lays in front of her.  He is walled off from smiling at her behind a curtain of death where she cannot go and a machine is breathing for him.  Then she sees his head.  It's split open like a broken melon.  She can see his brain, the wire running into it to see if he will remember all the wonderful things that they shared together.  Chunks of his brain are hanging out of his nostrils.  She has failed as a mother.  She has failed to protect him and to help him grow up.  He is 16.  She holds her broken son sobbing and wailing at the ceiling.  She begs God to kill her and leave him alone.  What has he done that merits his being broken?  She wails, screams, and no sounds come out--they are all in her broken heart.  He fades away and all is swirling around her.  The little girl puts her rag doll in the bed beside him, "Mom I don't want to die".  And she dies along with him ...and the little girl sees her heart dying and curls up drawing her black patent leather shoes to  her chest and begins to rock herself. 

"The body of Christ broken for you."  Mary is with her son and she cradles him in her arms.  His blood pouring onto her clothes, and she's crying at the sky and it is all darkness.  Her son is dead and she remembers his first steps, his voice when he called for her.  She remembers being his mommy.  My baby!  My baby!  His blood, his precious blood!  Why does he have to be broken?

It is finished.  "I'm sorry, he's brain dead."  Her heart slowly dies as she watches his heart slowly stop beating and finally stop.  The swirling, the earthquake within her  heart, the brokenness.   The veil has been rent in two within her heart.  She sees her little blonde baby, "I love you mommy."  The 7 year old with his painted picture of a tulip.  The teenager with hands shaking one evening, "Mom I had a dream I died.  I don't want to die Mom."  His hugs and his smile and his laughter.  Her soul has screamed in grief and it will never cease screaming but no one can hear it.  No one hears the screaming.  The little girl sits inside of her and gathers all that screaming, all those tears, and all that grief and puts it inside the alabaster box and then covers her ears. 

It is finished.  The cup is almost empty and she finishes the last of his blood.  She places the chalice on the altar, bows, and sits.  She cannot kneel and it hurts her heart they may think she is disrespectful.

The woman breaks through the crowd, she dares to come to Jesus.  She is tainted from  her sin and she is crying tears only he can see.  They dropped into the chalice, salty tears of pain, and they mixed with his blood.  She tries to visualize him and she throws herself at his feet and he says that her tears touched him.  They didn't just touch his feet.  They touched his heart.  He forgives her.  He tells the crowd that her humility and her self hatred have driven her to him and that he appreciates her gift.  Maybe he saw the little girl trying to give him the Raggedy Ann.  The gift of her empty soul was seen and embraced.  The little girl is all alone and he sees her with her alabaster box.  Her only treasures are the secrets poured out from the box.  He calls them on their blindness and tells her that she is forgiven and that her many sins are gone.  He reaches into that place the veil is rent in two and he embraces the heart that is broken.  He saw the little girl.  

 Suffer the children to come unto me for such is the kingdom of God.  

He sees and he understands.  Her sins are many.  He said this to her not to them.  He was not trying to humiliate her.  She always hid so many of her sins so he says this to let her know that even though there are many, he sees and yet he loves.  He loves her anyway.  He loves her.  Why can't she feel love?  She knows he loves the little girl and now maybe someone can tell the little girl that it was wonderful she was born.  Did their eyes meet?  She longs to see his eyes.  Male eyes that are not dead.  Male eyes that do not seek to dominate or control but to love.  She sees reflections of those eyes every now and then.  A priest who talks to her has them.  They meet and eat dinner so she can ask him about the eyes of God and how can she have them too.  She tries to ask him where he got them but the little girl knows he is safe and she won't stop talking.  She knows he is not like the other men and she tells him all her stories and he patiently listens as she shows him everything in her alabaster box.  She is happy that he is safe.  She tries to ask about how he got the eyes of God so filled with love and peace because she wants them too.  But the moments slip into hours and she can't stop sharing the depths of her heart and he is gone and she is left with the image of God's eyes.  She puts that image in her alabaster box.  It is her memory and she holds it close to her heart.  The one man who does not seek anything from her.  The one who gives and pours out his heart in infinite patience.  He takes the God who died and he pours out God's love for her through his eyes.  She knows he does this and she loves him for it. She loves him and the God in his eyes. 

She has been thinking about being with someone all day and Mass is taking too long.  She had set up a time.  She longs to be holy like the pretty people but she cannot seem to get the idea out of her head that time is slipping away and soon she will not have enough looks left to draw any man's interest and she will have nothing.  She needs to feel that feeling again.  She doesn't want to go because she wants to live a better life but she is torn in half and her mind is churning with thoughts of men with dark eyes and time where she can experience the only type of love she understands.  She hasn't done this in 2 years but she feels weak.  She asks God to please help her.

She is tapped on the shoulder and a friend gives her a bracelet.  It is turquoise and has images of the mother of God on it.  Dozens of images in a little white box.  She said that someone wanted her to have it and that she would email her later with the story.  It is all images of the mother.  The one who was broken and wailed to heaven for the broken son.  All images of her. The mother of God conveying her longing to be close to the woman who sees her gnawing for sexual release and understands she has it mixed up with love. The woman who was pure tells her that she experienced perfection in love and that she never had need for sexual experiences.  Love is about perfect union with God. The woman longs for that union being one with her soul, with the little girl, and the belief that she matters.  

It's over and she leaves having seen a glimpse of him, having tears mingle with his blood, and having been told by him she was forgiven.  Flashes of her past push her out of the parish quickly but she has seen him and for now that will be enough.  Her empty alabaster box rattles inside of her as she leaves.  She has nothing more to offer him.  She is spent and fought her panic and anxiety so that she could stay and experience being with him.  She discards the critical eyes and prepares to go home to be alone.  She dreads surviving another week but now she knows.  It's not the pretty people who condemn her at all.  It is she who has condemned herself because she is mixed up, not pretty, divorced twice, and not one of them.  She is not part of this family.  She longs for things she shouldn't and cannot share that with them. 

As she leaves the parking lot she sees a pretty mom wiping her son's little pink hands with a baby wipe.  She wants him clean and puts him in the back of her shiny car.  She places the plastic pack of wraps in a floral tote and gets into the car.  The wipe falls from the edge of the tote and floats to the ground.  The little boy is sweet.  He looks about 4 or 5 years old.  The woman watching the scene realizes she never wiped her son's hands with wipes.  She was a bad mother.  The wipe blows across the parking lot and impulsively she stops the car, opens the door, and retrieves it.  It smells of baby powder and there is no obvious dirt on it but a small twig is attached to it.  

She feels the woody twig.  The wood takes her to the pounding of the nails into the cross and the blood of God running out all over it.  The mother is there who wants to wipe her son's wounds away and her wailing heart breaks as she cries to the sky.  The blood on the purificator, and the hospital sheets was there.  The silent screaming was there.  The blood and the tears, and the cross, and her heart.  The blood of the little girl screaming after being assaulted by her father and the blood on the sheets and her nightgown.  "This is what men do to you when they love you."  Then she sees the image of the cross and Jesus saying to the bloodied little girl crumpled at his feet that he loves her and that all that happened to her was wrong.  It was not love.  His blood pours down the cross and the little girl cries and wondered if she killed him.  She wants to take him down and feel his arms around her.  He looks down from the cross and says, "I do this to show you how much I love you" and it all confuses the little girl.  Blood and love go together for her.  

The wipe smells so pretty, just like the woman in the car.  If she wiped her son's hands with pretty wipes would he still be alive?  She imagines the smell of the powder with Mary washing little Jesus and saying how he needs to get cleaned up for bed.  She remembers the day when she danced with  her son with chocolate all over his face and he kissed her and said, "There!  Now you have a Hershey kiss." She is startled by the sound of a horn honking behind her.  She puts all the memories in the alabaster box and the little girl takes it and walks away with her rag doll as it's time to go home alone.  Her offerings of expensive spikenard are all of these priceless memories both agony and joy that she shares with the only one who will ever really understand.  She pours them over the broken God who bleeds and in that holy moment she, the sinner, dares to share her bleeding with him.  

She realizes her car is blocking the exit and she quickly drives away with the smell of the wipe and wine that is his blood filling the car.  As the car turns the corner she hears the rattle of the bracelet with all the pictures of the mother on her wrist.  The anonymous gift that would keep her from thinking of her hunger and meeting a man today.  No dark eyes today.  The crying mother wants to be close to her.  The little girl puts that victory in her alabaster box to pour out on him next week and they head for home.