Horses

For twenty-three years, I attended the same church every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning. My family would sit together in a pew near the back or towards the middle, the front rows unofficially reserved for the most enthusiastic congregants. My mother was the exception in our family, and the reason we attended so faithfully. She stood, arms lifted above her head, tears flowing, and joined her prayers in the language of the Angels with the chaotic symphony of others. Their voices together produced a roiling boil of indecipherable noise just underneath the percussive, eardrum-denting music of a ten-piece band, also improvising their part. Dancers moved in front, waving flags and long sticks as if they might be more effective in gaining God's attention. On a good day, all the men in the church might be passed one of the body-length round dowels that stood erect to the side of the stage. They would then gather in a circle and bang them flat end down on the plastic floor, their chants forming a war cry against the ever-present and mysteriously powerful Enemy. A heavy metal sword stood upright near the dowels that might be taken up by one of the men and swung to and fro, symbolizing and reminding us of the violence intended by this ritual.

It was up to us, the worshippers, to create an environment hospitable enough for the Spirit to spare a visit. As such, this might continue for one, two, three or more hours at a time. We were encouraged to reflect on the state of our hearts and to understand whether we truly wanted the presence of God in the room with us, or if we'd rather be at home, living lives of passive enjoyment, taking pleasure in the World and its offerings instead of suffering for the cause. We had to cleanse our spirits if we wanted the breakthrough. This was Spiritual Warfare, and the commitment of our army would decide the battle. We usually prayed on behalf of the state of Israel, in anticipation of the End Times, the return of the Temple Mount to the Jewish people, the return of Christ and his thousand year reign, and the great conversion that would precede it. In this event, members of all other faiths would be faced with the choice to accept the truth of Christianity or spend eternity in Hell.

I wanted to achieve Soldier status, to become a servant in the Army of the Lord, mostly because the bitter taste of the social periphery had worn me down. I wanted to be part of the core, accepted and trusted by the circle of pastors and deacons. I was also afraid of going to Hell. 

I knew I had to perform a series of pseudo-rituals that would prove my faith: speaking in tongues, moving and shaking in the front of the church, confessing my sins, and so on. Like any good social striver, I tried to push past my reservations, but was informed by the pastor that “Intellectual pride stood in the way of my relationship with God”. Not the act of thinking, but the desire to understand and to know the truth was evidence that I lacked faith.

This was where I first saw Her. She stood on the church stage, armed with a guitar and belting out the repetitive chorus of “Our God is an Awesome God” so loudly she hardly needed a microphone. It was clear that she did not lack faith. She launched herself, physically and emotionally, towards life with a reckless, immediate, even alarming energy. She did not need to understand why she felt or expected what she did. She only had to follow the Word as it was passed down to her and somehow know deep in her bones what to do. She understood this so deeply that anyone’s suggestion to the contrary would earn a spate of harsh insults.

She stood in front of the church one Sunday and gave her testimony. She had been dirt poor, the youngest of her alcoholic father’s 8 children and the victim of the kind of sibling bullying that can only be inflicted by those much bigger and older. She’d been slapped and punched and thrown into the snow and locked outside. Her dad had, many times, left the farm to gamble and drink his paycheque, leaving the children to fend for themselves. This place had given her refuge, one of the church families afforded her a room while she worked through a diploma program. She could support herself now, and she was grateful. God had told her she would one day reach the status of an Olympic equestrian athlete. It did not need to make sense, because God had secretly confirmed all suspicions regarding her destiny. He would clear the way if she trusted and served well enough, which she attempted through sheer force of will and work ethic, the only resources available to her.

Tears flowed among the congregants, including my mother, who approved of my interest in her because of her faith. I was happy.

I was nineteen years old and a student when we met. I excelled in university, and breezed through my first year, and this left me with too much time to follow her around, drawn as I was by her energy and lack of inhibition. I would drive her to work to wait all day and pick her up in order to spend the evening ice-skating or by the lake or at church together. I took up riding as an excuse to see her more, an activity that dispelled any romantic notions I had of the relationship between humans and horses by forcing me to pick myself up, muddy and bruised, from a series of gravel roads as my mount galloped off and she chased after. I wanted the physicality of riding to form me into an action-oriented person, get me out of my head and into my body, and make me a real man. I also wanted her attention. I thought riding might prove me to her, sensing her uneasiness with my age and desire to depend on someone. I wanted to make her fall in love with me, and to be worthy of that.

We would ride together, and as I learned she shouted over the wind to me “You have to be focused on going forward! The horse can sense your fear. You’re making it uncomfortable! It’ll try to get you off its back.” This defined her approach to life, straightforward, fearless and embodied. I tried to sit up, face forward, twist my spine in the direction I wanted my companion to travel, and stop thinking, stop fretting. Perhaps rightly, she grew frustrated at my slow progress after having, again, fallen off. “Why are you even doing this if you’re so uncomfortable?” she asked. 

She and I were wed at twenty-four and twenty-one years old, respectively. We had bickered, rather than talked, for months, but the fighting intensified in the few days before the ceremony. We understood, and acknowledged previously, that we did not and could not know each other, having met only eighteen months earlier and, in that short time, constructing a wall of fundamental differences and frustrations between us. When I drove, she would urge me to “speed up!” or “pass them!” if we came behind a larger vehicle. I once allowed a horse to slip out of its gate, my back turned, and spent hours chasing it in the cold. When she arrived home I told her what happened and she hit me in the arm. “You are so stupid,” she said. For my part, I quietly resented her until I was no longer quiet. She had wanted to move across the country in pursuit of her dream, knowing no one and nothing about the destination. “You are crazy,” I replied. 

We sat on the floor of my apartment one night before the wedding. I sensed that she was unsure of me, and I spoke the words “I don’t know how to talk to you anymore”. We attended counselling and scored the lowest possible score on a relationship compatibility test. Another evening after a fight, I asked why she had chosen me. She responded “It seemed like a good idea”. 

In our circles, though, the purpose of a marriage was not to fortify a love. It was to bind two fundamentally broken sinners together and shave down their rough edges until they learned to love each other and fit together. So we stuck with the program, refrains of “marriage is hard, but it is so worth it” ringing in our ears as we peeled off, exhausted, from the wedding.

Even by the standard of that shaky beginning, things went downhill fast. The economy collapsed that year and I could only find work under the table as a labourer. She developed a condition that severely hampered her ability to work and pushed her further towards an equestrian career. In short, we were poor, short of prospects, and frustrated with ourselves and each other.

I received a call from her one day at work and she was barely comprehensible. She cried and sputtered into the phone as I tried to make out what had happened. She’d been bucked off a horse she was training, her helmet cracking the ground. She then remounted, only for the animal to rear up and over and come down on her, pinning her leg and whipping her body on the gravel like a leather belt. I held the phone to my mouth as I drove home and asked her what day it was. She thought about it hard and stuttered “maybe… T-T-Tuesday”. “Good job,” I reassured her. We repeated this exercise for thirty minutes until I arrived.

We could not pay for an ambulance, and not knowing what else to do I loaded her into the car and took her to the hospital, and then into a wheelchair in the emergency room. The nurses sheared her boot off and then demanded to remove the helmet, which, in her state, she protested on the basis that her brain might fall out. We settled in and waited for many hours for treatment. Her knee was very badly twisted and melon-sized, nearly all the ligaments and tendons sprained or torn in the fall, along with injuries and lacerations to her head and upper body.

The church hosted a guest-speaker the following Sunday, known for his articulate visions of Heaven and faith healing capabilities. Her pain persisted, but in spite of it and at her request we travelled into town for the service. She yelped like a stepped-on dog when she exited the truck, leaned on the crutches held out for her, and we made the slow trek into the church.

The Spirit found a suitable place to rest there that day. Congregants danced, wept and cried out with the music while the guest-speaker passed on visions of Heaven as it passed before his eyes. The guest-speaker glimpsed his deceased wife and she did not know him, fully committed as she was to her role as a heavenly servant patrolling the streets of gold. I turned to Her and asked about the pain but she was irritated by the question, her eyes-closed and speech-humming in her dialect of Tongues. She hobbled to the front of the room, took the microphone, and explained what she saw. An infinite wall of tiny drawers extended before her like a pharmacy shelf, and inside were located every imaginable soft tissue, the nuts and bolts of the body. 

She said she had reached out and asked God to guide her towards parts that would fit her. She chose a specific new ALC ligament and snapped it into her knee in the vision, and it fit perfectly, and then continued this practice with her other broken parts. She said that when she returned from Heaven she could walk again, and she walked confidently across the front of the room, smiling brightly. She walked like that until we left, and I felt great shame in admitting what I saw. She yelped again in the truck and again on exiting, and stepped gingerly around the house when we returned, adjusting her gait to hide any drag from her leg and gritting her teeth without a sound when the pain set in.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” I asked, because I did not believe she had been healed. If I admitted this directly I knew I would be shunned. Instead, I kept quiet and let others rave about the miracle for many months. I was afraid of her, having witnessed her ability to repress pain and a brutal commitment to seek the community’s praise above her own wellbeing. I was ashamed in two ways, first because I didn’t believe and couldn’t bring myself to even lie, and second because I did not speak about what I knew. In my naivete I had thought this life would make me direct, assertive, and honest, and allow me to win her love. Instead I remained silent.

We lasted three more years. Much of that time repeated the pattern above, only worse with every iteration. A chasm of resentment grew between us where there had been love, despite our differences. I could not bring myself to tell her that I didn’t believe: in God, in the miracles, in the dreams that we had each given so much for. We attended church two more times before the end and she danced while I stood and felt nothing. 

At the lowest point, we lived in a camper van parked on a gravel pad behind a nearby farmer’s house. I cleaned stalls for work while she rode newly broke, half-wild horses for the racetrack. We ate too little and worked too much. I asked her if she thought our life together would ever feel different than it had been. “I think it’ll feel the same, just with more going on, bigger and better” was her response. 

My heart longed for the trick, to believe so strongly and easily in the future, a destination with no path towards it. Though I wanted to change, I knew I could not even bring myself to try again, and that I should have known better than to think I ever could.

I was in another city for work when she called and let me know it was over. I quit my job and flew home. On the way I purchased a rose-gold necklace, knowing her favourite metal. On arrival I presented it to her, a peace offering and a reminder of our mutually lost wedding rings. I meant this as a romantic gesture but it presented more like the way a dog might return to its owner after a chiding, head held low and a gift stick in its teeth. I told her I wanted to be with her, that I was sorry for the way anger had sprouted in my heart. “I don’t believe in this anymore,” she replied, eyes glassy. 

There was someone else. She was in love in a way that she had never been. He loved horses, grew up around them, and talked to her the way she wanted. “Did you cheat on me?” I asked. “Well, we kissed.”

My mind went numb. Ringing swelled up in my ears and I moved and spoke slowly. I looked around and the house felt at once strange and familiar. I knew it was no longer my home and I could not cry. I hugged her and told her that I understood but if she wanted to try again, I still loved her and that is what I would do. She turned to me and spoke “if it wasn’t so perfect with him, of course I would stay,” gesturing between us, “this is, of course, deeper.”

I needed to stay at my former home before my flight the next day. It was the last night we would ever spend together. “Should we… you know, have one for the road?” she asked. Eyes on the ceiling, I responded “No, thank you.”