Dr. Curtis

Your religious deconstruction would’ve been a crash landing without Ben Curtis, the old-as-god Yoda professor who sits front row, middle seat when heaven collapses for you.

You’re twenty-one and show to an office hour where you expect to elaborate on course readings and assignments, to speak to peer collaboration and how you might engage more in class.

He sits back, eyes closed. A silence you resist, but will befriend with time and practice. “What are you carrying?” he asks.

What tumbles out is news to you, too-that what filled you once doesn’t fill you now. It’s stale and you’re afraid. Who will you be on the other side? You say this nervously, eyes moving around the office, searching for something, anything, to fix to. A small line drawing of a cross, three figures at the base, an inscription: ‘It was the women who stayed.’

He gives you the poem ‘The Way It Is,’ by William Stafford. Not for you to understand, but to grow into.

Ten years later he’s sick in bed, in and out of the hospital. He writes in a text, “This illness is teaching me how little I know about the spiritual life.”

You give the poem back to him: ‘There is a thread you follow/It goes among things that change,/but it doesn’t change...’

“A special one,” he says.

You’re both growing into it.