The Glory | Stories | Notre Dame Magazine

My husband and I took a walk not far from home on the gravel trail that runs along Perkiomen Creek. Our two children accompanied us, one dangling from my front and the other hoisted on my husband’s back. Our son wanted to see the water, so we found a break in the trees on a ridge above a slow section of the creek.

“Do you see the colors?” my husband asked him. “Blue and green and brown.”

I stood looking at the water as if for the first time, wondering how it could be both transparent and colored through. As I tried to discover all the colors, I noticed a bright, opaque white where the sun passed through leaves and branches to meet the creek’s rippling surface. A gaggle of geese collected nearby. They moved with slow earnestness and solemnity toward the light.

We followed their progression with excitement. The visual called to mind a lineage running down the stream of time, passing one by one into their heavenly reward. It was only an amusing thought until the first goose passed into the light. He arched his back and ascended with a few flaps of his mighty wings, then fell back to earth like Saul falling from his horse. My vision sharpened. The spots of white began to dance and blink like the sparks of firecrackers passing in and out of existence. The few other geese in the front pack hit the wall of light and stopped. Could they be seeing what I was seeing? The rest continued forward in their gliding procession, perhaps dimly perceiving what lay ahead, but as unaware as I of what it really was.

As all this was happening, the wind rushed through the boughs. It was one of the first fall breezes, which dissipates the summer with a feeling beyond mere sensibility. “The wind is speaking to us,” my husband said to my son. I then heard something like a voice. It was not a word I’d recognize, but more logos than sound. What if the world was always speaking to us?

A man on a bike passed behind us with a whir — a clean, almost beautiful, arch of noise ascending then descending out of range and pulling our attention down the trail after it. I looked again at the water. The geese were drifting together in some new direction. Things down there continued on, but the moment had ended for me. I felt dazed.

What had happened to us?

Can you tell me? Have you seen a goose blinded by the refracted reflection of late-summer light? Have you heard the leaves whispering with elvish voices? Have you seen a man beyond age with a serpent staff appear on a mountaintop? Have you seen his Companion dressed in clothes dazzling white with a face shining like the sun? Have you seen the glory?

I am bad at seeing the glory. Loveliness, quaintness, wonder, even beauty — these I am familiar with. But the realm of glory is one I just wasn’t made for. I feel like a tourist who has brought all the wrong gear for the climate. A few years ago, I traveled to Alaska with a friend. We scrambled to the peak of a coastal mountain and sat for some time, looking out at the sea and enormous basin of earth surrounded by snowy peaks. I was awed, certainly, but couldn’t help but feel a bit dissatisfied. What could witnessing something like that possibly mean? It was just too big for me.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning,” T.S. Eliot says in his poem The Dry Salvages. This is often the case. How many moments flutter by like unidentified birds? In the digital age, the opposite is sometimes true: a five-second clip evokes a laugh at the right moment. We got the meaning, but what was the experience? Our attentions and cognitions are undoubtedly broken. But even in my better moments, it seems that meaning and experience just can’t keep pace with one another. If the experience was a baby being born in a manger to a poor teenage mother, who could have guessed the meaning?

In fact, it seems the greater the glory and the deeper the meaning, the more veiled is the experience. A mother can’t witness her own child being born. She labors until the crying, writhing infant is passed into her arms, but the moment of its coming into the world is hidden to her. Similarly, a solemn Mass may be carried along by polyphony and chant, but the pinnacle moment, the Consecration, is shrouded in silence. These are the tools available to us. The great directors use light and shadow, music and silence, movement and stillness. With these, they can direct our attention. But they cannot show us the glory.

As parents we are like directors, using everything at our disposal to direct our children. Most mornings, my son wakes up before sunrise. My husband leads him to the window as the sun begins to emerge from the east. The silver dawn is colored through with yellow and gold as the world wakes to the light. “Do you see the glory?” he whispers, pointing out the window.

“Glory!” my son cries in response, but what can that word mean to him? He is almost nothing but a vessel for experience. He can memorize entire pages of books without a sense for the narrative. Yet I watch in wonder as he begins to make meaning. At the library, he thrusts toy car after toy car before my face.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“That’s a fire truck,” I respond,

“Fire truck is like a garbage truck,” he says proudly.

“Yes,” I smile, “that’s right.” But how can something be like something else and not just the white-hot experience of being itself? He is beginning to reflect, to unpack. He is beginning to discover meaning. As he harmonizes it with his experience, I can only hope that he will come to know what I cannot understand myself.

My son’s friend is about the same business in his own little way. As we sat outside one day, he carefully took my small gold cross between his fingers.

“This is a . . .” he said.

“This is a cross,” I replied.

“Cross is for . . .” he waited for me to finish the sentence. What could I say?

I am a child, waking up to the world of meaning. Cross is for pain, blood and death. Cross is for the beam in my eye, obscuring the meaning. Cross is for love, for Christ, for salvation.

Or maybe I am a goose on the creek of time, processing toward something dazzling, white and unknown. Every day I float and float. I wonder what the light is, and if I will ever reach it. But one day, I will. I will rise with a mighty flap and greet the Face shining like the sun in the east. I will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven. Then I will know, Cross is for the Glory.

Mary-Kate Corry’s essay was one of five honorable mentions in this magazine’s 12th annual Young Alumni Essay Contest.