Light from the Chapel
Tee Ngugi
Tee Ngugi
That July morning, mist and light showers descended on the grey ascetic walls of Our Lady of Mercy Girls High School. Noni and the other girls felt the gloomy weather in their breasts. The nuns, their arms crossing at the chest, walked with hunched shoulders, their usual austere manner now more forbidding. Even Father Onesmus’ kindly dark face, Noni thought during Mass, was weary of the world. But when he began to pray—his face turned upwards, eyes shut and his arms outstretched out in front of him in a blessing gesture—pleading with the Lord to strengthen the faith of all those despairing of their weakness and saddened by their sinfulness, his voice trembled in desperate earnestness. His face, old and gloomy and agonized, was a hideous mask, but his faith transformed it into the face of a martyr. Noni was repelled by the mask, the hideous loathsome mask, and yet she was desperately drawn to it. She wanted to crush it against her bosom, to smother life out of it, and at the same time draw from its spiritual well.
“We pray this in Jesus’ name,” said Father Onesmus, and when Noni joined in the chorus of “Amen”, it was as if her voice came from outside of her body. She swirled in space and, oh, the peace—she could float here forever. Then, slowly, she settled back into herself. She became aware of a warmness pulsating in her loins. She clasped her hands tightly together on her lap and stifled a moan, looking askance at those beside her on the pew. At the end of Mass, she hurried out of the chapel into the drizzle, hoping the cold streams of water would douse the fire aflame inside her and cleanse her of her filthiness.
In bed that evening, Noni quietly rebuked the devil: “Get thee behind me, Satan, get thee behind me, Satan.” She knew there must be a chink in her armor of faith which had allowed evil to dwell within her. The verse warning of the wages of sin made her shudder: Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to death.
She sobbed into her pillow. All was lost. The only thing to do now was to await the thousand fires of hell. Then, out of the thick fog of despair, a voice spoke to her.
If we confess our sins, He will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness.
She murmured a confessional prayer. Joyful and exhausted, she curled into herself, certain that she would wake up in the morning with God’s glory restored to her. But when she began to doze, Father Onesmus’ repulsive and seductive mask emerged from the shadows of her brain. She sat up in bed, flustered, her heart pounding in her chest, the storm of despair gathering again in her soul. She slipped a sweater over her pajamas and stepped out of the dormitory.
The daytime drizzle had persisted into the night, but Noni did not feel its icy bite as she ran towards a small light coming out of the lone building of the chapel. She stretched out her arms and surrendered herself to the shower. Purify me, she prayed silently, oh waters from heaven, before I come into the shadow of God’s house. Only one thing was in her mind—the chapel. If only she could reach it and be cleansed of sin and its torments. The chapel, her sanctuary of mercy. She was sobbing in gratitude, saying her Hail Marys, because she already felt freed from her sins.
She stood in the light coming out of the vestry window. The Holy Spirit was within her now, and there was no fear of evil in her. Then she sat for a long while on a tree stump below the window, soaking in the peace within and around her. Eventually, she stood up and went back to the dormitory, free of sin, bathed clean by the blood of the lamb.
Many years later, as a 30-year-old writer, Noni searched her upbringing for clues that could explain such an outpouring of emotion and sensation. But she was brought up in the abode of Christ, as her father, a staunch Roman Catholic, described their home to visitors. He believed that the divine manifested itself in Christian discipline and modesty, and he discouraged any sensuality or flamboyance in speech or dress in his household. He warned Noni and her younger sister to be wary of daydreaming, boredom and restlessness, gateways, he pronounced with a grave expression on his face, to the deadly sins of sloth and lust. This was a favourite theme at family prayer time when her father assumed the attitude of a benevolent paterfamilias, and with his palms held up, led the family in prayers. “Lord,” he would begin in fervent entreaty, his eyes shut tightly, and his face turned upwards, “forgive us for our lazy thoughts, our moments of weakness, and our wayward dreams.”
Now in her flat, seated at her writing table, Noni became intrigued by the idea of a connection between the spiritual and sexual. Could it be, she thought, that under certain psychological conditions, a spiritual experience could trigger physical sexual feelings just as tantric sex increased spiritual awareness? An owl hooted from nearby, and when the distant drone of traffic subsided, Noni could hear the frogs croaking in the dam. She stood at the window, peering at the city night sky. She was tall and slim with large hazel eyes, articulated cheekbones, and wore her hair in an afro. In the light and shadow cast by the reading lamp, she was Angela Davis in silhouette.
She felt a sudden urge to go into the night and listen to its solitude. Instead, she resumed her seat at the table and thought again: Spiritual ecstasy as coital energy? Was that what had unleashed a torrent of desire and revulsion within her that day in high school and caused her to seek redemption at the chapel?
On the Saturday following her nighttime duel with the devil and her victory at the chapel, Noni was alone in the laundry room, doing her washing. What peace to have mastery over evil, she thought. She sang quietly: “The blood of Jesus washes over me and I am no longer afraid...”
She felt her old self again. Her big mischievous eyes shone, and joy bubbled inside her, ready to burst forth like a fountain of water.
As a young girl, she had wanted to be an air hostess, but her father had insisted she think of a less flirtatious profession, as he called all occupations he disliked. So she had settled on becoming a doctor. Now, she separated the green jerseys in case they bled from the white blouses and grey skirts. Surely, she recited softly from Psalms, "His salvation is nigh them that fear him…"
Her thoughts became flighty. She remembered her first love letter from a boy in a nearby school. The first time I saw you, the letter had read, I was assailed by waves of ebullience. She and her friends looked up ebullience in the dictionary and, scandalized by the boldness of the letter, giggled and screeched. For months afterwards, to their great merriment, they mimicked in slow dramatic diction: “I was assailed by waves of ebullience.” Poor boy, she now thought, perhaps he carries his heartbreak in a pouch and, when he is alone, takes out the pouch and gently nurses the hurt, the way elderly poor people count coins fished out of the recesses of their persons.
Noni stood back from the washbasin, hands akimbo, and thought: Maybe I will become a writer and write about people who walk in the shadows of life carrying their hurt in pouches. Yes, a writer... She scrubbed the clothes with a new energy, wrung them, and flung them dramatically into the rinse basin. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
She wondered why people of faith were forlorn when they should be free and joyful. She went outside to hang the clothes on the line. The rays of the early morning sun warmed her shoulders and her heart. The prospect of the righteous is joy, but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing. Oh, how elated she felt. I am assailed, she said inside her head, chuckling to herself, by waves of ebullience.
The night before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Noni slipped from her bed and stole to the chapel to give praise for months of triumph over the devil. The darkness swallowed her but the small light coming from the vestry window in the distance beckoned to her. Tonight, she didn’t run and her spirit was untroubled. She sat again on the tree stump under the light from the vestry, and once more, peacefulness, falling like light showers from the building’s solitude, washed over her. The night was silent and, beyond the circle of light from the vestry window, deep. The thoughts in her mind were gentle and pleasant. It must have been a night such as this, she thought, which had inspired the song Silent Night. She sang softly a line from the song: “Sleep in heavenly peace.” The melody blended with the darkness. Tonight and for many nights to follow, she thought, I will sleep in heavenly peace just like the infant Christ in the song.
Noni got up to leave. Then it occurred to her: the light—why was the light on this late? Why was it on the last time she was here? On an impulse she stepped onto the tree stump and, leaning against the wall, peered through the untinted circular part of the window. Father Onesmus sat at his desk, one hand buried underneath his robes. His face, eyes closed, and mouth slightly open, was turned upwards. The hideous mask...the face of a martyr! Only this time, agony and ecstasy morphed in and out of each other.
Then a muffled moan escaped from the priest’s throat as he trembled in release and damnation. Noni drew back from the window and walked back to the dormitory dazed by the revelation and sank into a dark fathomless slumber.
“I saw you that night, Father,” Noni said without rancor. She was standing in the vestry in front of the desk behind which sat Father Onesmus. She was surprised at how calm she was. The loss of her innocence at the vestry window a fortnight ago had thrown her into a moral crisis. Her philosophy of being had been located in faith and notions of sexual purity. When she was besieged by sinful impulses, groping in the darkness of despair, she knew she could get succour from her faith. But what she had witnessed through the vestry window had shifted the sands of her faith. If those entrusted by the Lord to shepherd the flock were themselves sinners, then where was hope?
For a long while after the incident at the vestry, she had wandered in a spiritual wilderness, fearful that should evil visit her again, her shaken faith would not rescue her. Who could she seek to restore her faith? The nuns would condemn her for heresy. Her friends would shrink away from her in horror. Her parents would die of shame. It was then she decided to confront Father Onesmus. He was the cause of her spiritual trauma and key to its resolution. She would go to him and confess everything—how his tortured face had caused her to sin, and her being witness to his damnation.
The priest looked down at his desk. His attitude expressed no surprise at Noni’s night appearance in the vestry office or her accusatory confessions.
“Who are we, Noni?” he asked. His voice was a whisper, but clear.
Noni stared at him, unafraid. Outside, the silence was interspersed with the sound of crickets and the distant barking of dogs.
After a little while, Father Onesmus answered his own question.
“Sinners. And yet, and yet, Noni, we believe in His truth so utterly.”
What Noni now saw was not the sinful fraud she had come to confront and condemn. He had fallen into the abyss of sin, but still he clung to his faith. She felt a rekindling of her own weakened faith. We must rise from our fall by our faith. Even at the gates of hell, we must call out for His mercy and, surely, just as He had cleansed our sins with his blood on the cross, so too would He redeem us. God has not forsaken us.
“Let us pray, Noni,” Father Onesmus said, interrupting her thoughts. He prayed in utter belief in their redemption. And his voice was sorrowful and haunted and joyous. When she echoed his “Amen” at the end, she sailed around the dark brown table and sat against its edge facing the priest. Then she bent over the martyr’s mask and clasped it to her breast. She had to smother the repulsive and seductive mask. She must kill the source of her sinfulness. Helpless and in despair, the priest searched with his mouth and found her pomegranate breast. He drew the full breast slowly into his mouth and, just as slowly, slid out again to the tip, as if the action were a ritual of penitence. Oh, the mysterious space between ecstasy and the agony of sinning, between pleasure and guilt. Noni drew the mask more tightly to her bosom. Die. You must die. But the more she pressed against the mask, the more she felt she was the one dying. In the spasms of a new revelation, she drew the martyr’s mask even closer to herself. The mask was her lifeline back to the land of the living.
“It was a transcendental moment,” Noni wrote many years later. “There is a mysterious space where pure sexual and spiritual experiences connect...” Noni paused in her writing, thinking back to that strange phase in her life.
For the remainder of her time in high school, she would never again experience spiritually induced erotic states. Her faith had become tempered by a new awareness. Later in college, Marxist and feminist scholarship would provide her with other ways of understanding her reality. For now, leaps of faith were no longer possible. But she also knew that for those who jumped over the precipice with their faith as the only lifeline, strange revelations, if not miracles, were possible.
One day, driving home from a visit with her publisher, Noni was involved in an accident. When she regained consciousness, she saw her mother and sister sitting at the foot of the hospital bed.
“You cracked your skull, but you will be fine,” her father, standing at the side of the bed, said.
Then the room went dark. When she came to again, only Father Onesmus stood next to her bed.
“God is with you,” he said with a rueful smile.
She was seeing him for the first time since leaving high school. Now he was very old and grey and frail. But his eyes were as kind and sad as she had known them.
After their encounter in the vestry, she had never visited him again. She and he had carried on as if nothing had happened, and there was no awkwardness when their paths crossed.
“I came as soon as I heard the news,” said the priest.
She tried to sit up but her body ached.
“No, don’t,” he said, “just be still.”
“These neglected roads will be the death of us all,” Noni said.
The priest was sad.
“God’s mercy will protect us,” he said.
Noni wanted to say, no, no, only a revolution will, but she stopped herself. Maybe they were saying the same thing. Maybe God’s mercy will come through a revolution. The will of the people was the will of God.
She felt peaceful in his presence. She told him about the theory she was writing about.
“What do we know, Noni...? What can we know...? Life is God’s mystery.”
They smiled at each other; Noni happily, he sadly but stoically.
Then he prayed for her recovery. He walked with difficulty towards the door, stooped at the shoulders. Noni now felt grief because she saw that soon he would sleep in heavenly peace. Eternally.
But she knew he was not afraid of the valley of darkness because he believed utterly that a light, like the light from the chapel, would beckon to him and he would emerge from the dark.
“We pray this in Jesus’ name,” said Father Onesmus, and when Noni joined in the chorus of “Amen”, it was as if her voice came from outside of her body. She swirled in space and, oh, the peace—she could float here forever. Then, slowly, she settled back into herself. She became aware of a warmness pulsating in her loins. She clasped her hands tightly together on her lap and stifled a moan, looking askance at those beside her on the pew. At the end of Mass, she hurried out of the chapel into the drizzle, hoping the cold streams of water would douse the fire aflame inside her and cleanse her of her filthiness.
In bed that evening, Noni quietly rebuked the devil: “Get thee behind me, Satan, get thee behind me, Satan.” She knew there must be a chink in her armor of faith which had allowed evil to dwell within her. The verse warning of the wages of sin made her shudder: Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to death.
She sobbed into her pillow. All was lost. The only thing to do now was to await the thousand fires of hell. Then, out of the thick fog of despair, a voice spoke to her.
If we confess our sins, He will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness.
She murmured a confessional prayer. Joyful and exhausted, she curled into herself, certain that she would wake up in the morning with God’s glory restored to her. But when she began to doze, Father Onesmus’ repulsive and seductive mask emerged from the shadows of her brain. She sat up in bed, flustered, her heart pounding in her chest, the storm of despair gathering again in her soul. She slipped a sweater over her pajamas and stepped out of the dormitory.
The daytime drizzle had persisted into the night, but Noni did not feel its icy bite as she ran towards a small light coming out of the lone building of the chapel. She stretched out her arms and surrendered herself to the shower. Purify me, she prayed silently, oh waters from heaven, before I come into the shadow of God’s house. Only one thing was in her mind—the chapel. If only she could reach it and be cleansed of sin and its torments. The chapel, her sanctuary of mercy. She was sobbing in gratitude, saying her Hail Marys, because she already felt freed from her sins.
She stood in the light coming out of the vestry window. The Holy Spirit was within her now, and there was no fear of evil in her. Then she sat for a long while on a tree stump below the window, soaking in the peace within and around her. Eventually, she stood up and went back to the dormitory, free of sin, bathed clean by the blood of the lamb.
Many years later, as a 30-year-old writer, Noni searched her upbringing for clues that could explain such an outpouring of emotion and sensation. But she was brought up in the abode of Christ, as her father, a staunch Roman Catholic, described their home to visitors. He believed that the divine manifested itself in Christian discipline and modesty, and he discouraged any sensuality or flamboyance in speech or dress in his household. He warned Noni and her younger sister to be wary of daydreaming, boredom and restlessness, gateways, he pronounced with a grave expression on his face, to the deadly sins of sloth and lust. This was a favourite theme at family prayer time when her father assumed the attitude of a benevolent paterfamilias, and with his palms held up, led the family in prayers. “Lord,” he would begin in fervent entreaty, his eyes shut tightly, and his face turned upwards, “forgive us for our lazy thoughts, our moments of weakness, and our wayward dreams.”
Now in her flat, seated at her writing table, Noni became intrigued by the idea of a connection between the spiritual and sexual. Could it be, she thought, that under certain psychological conditions, a spiritual experience could trigger physical sexual feelings just as tantric sex increased spiritual awareness? An owl hooted from nearby, and when the distant drone of traffic subsided, Noni could hear the frogs croaking in the dam. She stood at the window, peering at the city night sky. She was tall and slim with large hazel eyes, articulated cheekbones, and wore her hair in an afro. In the light and shadow cast by the reading lamp, she was Angela Davis in silhouette.
She felt a sudden urge to go into the night and listen to its solitude. Instead, she resumed her seat at the table and thought again: Spiritual ecstasy as coital energy? Was that what had unleashed a torrent of desire and revulsion within her that day in high school and caused her to seek redemption at the chapel?
On the Saturday following her nighttime duel with the devil and her victory at the chapel, Noni was alone in the laundry room, doing her washing. What peace to have mastery over evil, she thought. She sang quietly: “The blood of Jesus washes over me and I am no longer afraid...”
She felt her old self again. Her big mischievous eyes shone, and joy bubbled inside her, ready to burst forth like a fountain of water.
As a young girl, she had wanted to be an air hostess, but her father had insisted she think of a less flirtatious profession, as he called all occupations he disliked. So she had settled on becoming a doctor. Now, she separated the green jerseys in case they bled from the white blouses and grey skirts. Surely, she recited softly from Psalms, "His salvation is nigh them that fear him…"
Her thoughts became flighty. She remembered her first love letter from a boy in a nearby school. The first time I saw you, the letter had read, I was assailed by waves of ebullience. She and her friends looked up ebullience in the dictionary and, scandalized by the boldness of the letter, giggled and screeched. For months afterwards, to their great merriment, they mimicked in slow dramatic diction: “I was assailed by waves of ebullience.” Poor boy, she now thought, perhaps he carries his heartbreak in a pouch and, when he is alone, takes out the pouch and gently nurses the hurt, the way elderly poor people count coins fished out of the recesses of their persons.
Noni stood back from the washbasin, hands akimbo, and thought: Maybe I will become a writer and write about people who walk in the shadows of life carrying their hurt in pouches. Yes, a writer... She scrubbed the clothes with a new energy, wrung them, and flung them dramatically into the rinse basin. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
She wondered why people of faith were forlorn when they should be free and joyful. She went outside to hang the clothes on the line. The rays of the early morning sun warmed her shoulders and her heart. The prospect of the righteous is joy, but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing. Oh, how elated she felt. I am assailed, she said inside her head, chuckling to herself, by waves of ebullience.
The night before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Noni slipped from her bed and stole to the chapel to give praise for months of triumph over the devil. The darkness swallowed her but the small light coming from the vestry window in the distance beckoned to her. Tonight, she didn’t run and her spirit was untroubled. She sat again on the tree stump under the light from the vestry, and once more, peacefulness, falling like light showers from the building’s solitude, washed over her. The night was silent and, beyond the circle of light from the vestry window, deep. The thoughts in her mind were gentle and pleasant. It must have been a night such as this, she thought, which had inspired the song Silent Night. She sang softly a line from the song: “Sleep in heavenly peace.” The melody blended with the darkness. Tonight and for many nights to follow, she thought, I will sleep in heavenly peace just like the infant Christ in the song.
Noni got up to leave. Then it occurred to her: the light—why was the light on this late? Why was it on the last time she was here? On an impulse she stepped onto the tree stump and, leaning against the wall, peered through the untinted circular part of the window. Father Onesmus sat at his desk, one hand buried underneath his robes. His face, eyes closed, and mouth slightly open, was turned upwards. The hideous mask...the face of a martyr! Only this time, agony and ecstasy morphed in and out of each other.
Then a muffled moan escaped from the priest’s throat as he trembled in release and damnation. Noni drew back from the window and walked back to the dormitory dazed by the revelation and sank into a dark fathomless slumber.
“I saw you that night, Father,” Noni said without rancor. She was standing in the vestry in front of the desk behind which sat Father Onesmus. She was surprised at how calm she was. The loss of her innocence at the vestry window a fortnight ago had thrown her into a moral crisis. Her philosophy of being had been located in faith and notions of sexual purity. When she was besieged by sinful impulses, groping in the darkness of despair, she knew she could get succour from her faith. But what she had witnessed through the vestry window had shifted the sands of her faith. If those entrusted by the Lord to shepherd the flock were themselves sinners, then where was hope?
For a long while after the incident at the vestry, she had wandered in a spiritual wilderness, fearful that should evil visit her again, her shaken faith would not rescue her. Who could she seek to restore her faith? The nuns would condemn her for heresy. Her friends would shrink away from her in horror. Her parents would die of shame. It was then she decided to confront Father Onesmus. He was the cause of her spiritual trauma and key to its resolution. She would go to him and confess everything—how his tortured face had caused her to sin, and her being witness to his damnation.
The priest looked down at his desk. His attitude expressed no surprise at Noni’s night appearance in the vestry office or her accusatory confessions.
“Who are we, Noni?” he asked. His voice was a whisper, but clear.
Noni stared at him, unafraid. Outside, the silence was interspersed with the sound of crickets and the distant barking of dogs.
After a little while, Father Onesmus answered his own question.
“Sinners. And yet, and yet, Noni, we believe in His truth so utterly.”
What Noni now saw was not the sinful fraud she had come to confront and condemn. He had fallen into the abyss of sin, but still he clung to his faith. She felt a rekindling of her own weakened faith. We must rise from our fall by our faith. Even at the gates of hell, we must call out for His mercy and, surely, just as He had cleansed our sins with his blood on the cross, so too would He redeem us. God has not forsaken us.
“Let us pray, Noni,” Father Onesmus said, interrupting her thoughts. He prayed in utter belief in their redemption. And his voice was sorrowful and haunted and joyous. When she echoed his “Amen” at the end, she sailed around the dark brown table and sat against its edge facing the priest. Then she bent over the martyr’s mask and clasped it to her breast. She had to smother the repulsive and seductive mask. She must kill the source of her sinfulness. Helpless and in despair, the priest searched with his mouth and found her pomegranate breast. He drew the full breast slowly into his mouth and, just as slowly, slid out again to the tip, as if the action were a ritual of penitence. Oh, the mysterious space between ecstasy and the agony of sinning, between pleasure and guilt. Noni drew the mask more tightly to her bosom. Die. You must die. But the more she pressed against the mask, the more she felt she was the one dying. In the spasms of a new revelation, she drew the martyr’s mask even closer to herself. The mask was her lifeline back to the land of the living.
“It was a transcendental moment,” Noni wrote many years later. “There is a mysterious space where pure sexual and spiritual experiences connect...” Noni paused in her writing, thinking back to that strange phase in her life.
For the remainder of her time in high school, she would never again experience spiritually induced erotic states. Her faith had become tempered by a new awareness. Later in college, Marxist and feminist scholarship would provide her with other ways of understanding her reality. For now, leaps of faith were no longer possible. But she also knew that for those who jumped over the precipice with their faith as the only lifeline, strange revelations, if not miracles, were possible.
One day, driving home from a visit with her publisher, Noni was involved in an accident. When she regained consciousness, she saw her mother and sister sitting at the foot of the hospital bed.
“You cracked your skull, but you will be fine,” her father, standing at the side of the bed, said.
Then the room went dark. When she came to again, only Father Onesmus stood next to her bed.
“God is with you,” he said with a rueful smile.
She was seeing him for the first time since leaving high school. Now he was very old and grey and frail. But his eyes were as kind and sad as she had known them.
After their encounter in the vestry, she had never visited him again. She and he had carried on as if nothing had happened, and there was no awkwardness when their paths crossed.
“I came as soon as I heard the news,” said the priest.
She tried to sit up but her body ached.
“No, don’t,” he said, “just be still.”
“These neglected roads will be the death of us all,” Noni said.
The priest was sad.
“God’s mercy will protect us,” he said.
Noni wanted to say, no, no, only a revolution will, but she stopped herself. Maybe they were saying the same thing. Maybe God’s mercy will come through a revolution. The will of the people was the will of God.
She felt peaceful in his presence. She told him about the theory she was writing about.
“What do we know, Noni...? What can we know...? Life is God’s mystery.”
They smiled at each other; Noni happily, he sadly but stoically.
Then he prayed for her recovery. He walked with difficulty towards the door, stooped at the shoulders. Noni now felt grief because she saw that soon he would sleep in heavenly peace. Eternally.
But she knew he was not afraid of the valley of darkness because he believed utterly that a light, like the light from the chapel, would beckon to him and he would emerge from the dark.
Tee Ngugi is a columnist, writer and singer-songwriter. His short fiction, essays and commentaries have appeared in several publications, including New Orleans Review, St. Petersburg Review, Kwani, Brittle Paper, Timbuktu, New Black Magazine, Jahazi, and The East African, among others. His collection of short stories, Seasons of Love and Despair, was published in 2015 by East African Educational Publishers. A second collection of short stories is forthcoming. A graduate of Yale, Tee has worked in the academic and NGO sectors in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Kenya. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya.