The Astonishing
By Marianne Jay Erhardt
For Saint Christina Mirabilis (b. 1150, Belgium)
Your only children were the children of God, and you gave them—your sisters, your neighbors—what they wanted. Proof. It should have been plenty, waking up at your own funeral, your body floating to the church rafters, the fires that lit you up for hours, until you grew bored of the horror and walked out of the flames, smoldering. What more could the doubting Thomases demand? An off-kilter sun in the Fatima sky? A crucifixion toasted into a ripple-style potato chip? The truth is, once God shows his cards, we are quick to dismiss miracle as madness, even malice. Twice, you were imprisoned when your holiness seemed too good to be true, too good to be good.
Eighth grade Confirmation. I found you in one of our household Dictionaries of Saints. I wasn’t sure about my faith, lit only by fear, but I was a sucker for sacraments. With Holy Orders off the table on account of my sex, and Baptism, Communion and Penance under my belt, I was halfway to saved. Counting was something to count on: Ten Commandments, Fourteen Stations of the Cross, the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary—Glorious, Joyful, and Sorrowful, Lenten candles and Advent calendars, the tallying and exchange rate of venial sins in confession, my debt paid off in the pews, on my knees. Usually, ten Hail Marys and one Apostle’s Creed.
Catholic math aside, what charmed me about you, Christina, was the way you kept to the limbs of trees, far away from your believers. They say that you couldn’t stand the smell—of people, of sin—that you climbed high every chance you got. Were you holding still up there, waiting for the people to make their way, or did you leap and swing, cut a new path, a medieval parkour course, a prayer in motion? The dictionary held no illustrations, but I imagined you in timeless rags, purples and grays. Something layered but easy to move in, something worn by a modern dancer modern dancing. So this was a way to snag a place in Heaven. Put on a show but run to the wings before the applause. Never collect your carnations. Stand in the freezing river for days, sure. They’ll see you. Surrender to the wheel of the watermill, go round and round. They will hear the crush of bone but before they can touch you, you’ll split. You’ll head to the thatched roof, the blackjack pines. Anywhere above, away.
So I chose Christina as my Confirmation name. You were proof that this whole salvation thing was a bit suspect. While my classmates chose patron saints that had legible virtue—Lucy, martyred virgin; Francis, lover of poverty and birds—I enjoyed telling people that I had chosen to name myself after the patron saint of lunatics.
It was a lofty move, a soapbox in its own right. But I was practicing being above it all. Earlier that spring, I’d been ousted by my group of girlfriends for some mysterious middle school collection of transgressions. My truest friend had been Karen, brilliant and bold. She had divorced parents and this proximity to sin gave her certain authority. The previous year, she had volunteered the two of us to spruce up the classroom bulletin board. We covered it with pictures snipped from her mother’s magazines, horrifying images of the genocide in Rwanda, not exactly what our teacher had in mind when he took down the previous month’s life-explaining cell diagram—nucleus, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum.
Karen had a compassionate soul. She was also thirteen. So when our peripheral friends—the mean, skinny one; the heavy-lidded Irish step-dancer; the seemingly queer hockey player who said all of us were gay, her favorite insult—soured on me, Karen followed suit. The only real discord I can recall is a moment when Karen confessed that they were planning to try marijuana. I’m sure I gasped. I had, after all, won the D.A.R.E. essay contest in 6th grade. I could not believe that my actual friends would dare to smoke up, to get high.
They grew away from me and finally, one lunchtime, held in the classroom, one of them asked, Doesn’t it suck when someone you hate keeps sitting with you at lunch? And Karen said, quietly but clearly, Yeah. It does.
It was easy to depart. My heart played dead, my sandwich seemed to repack itself into the aluminum foil I had just unfolded. I rose from the chair without snagging my long hair on a loose nail, and I floated across the room, to my desk, alone. A boy I liked—one I had called on the phone in the summer, one who had surely seen through but not questioned my highly rehearsed claim that such a phone call was no big deal because I was calling every single person in our grade—stood near me.
Why are you sitting alone? he asked.
I studied the foil and admitted, I can’t talk right now because I’m trying really hard not to cry.
Okay, he said cheerfully, and then he kept quiet but also kept eating his chips near me and not in a disgusting hungry boy way, but like a real person with an appropriate appetite, and I felt enormous gratitude to him for years after.
Even so, on the day of my confirmation I could count my close friends on one hand, if that hand belonged to Saint Eurosia, whose hands were cut off before her beheading. Which is to say, I had no friends. I had my family. And I had you, Christina the Astonishing, cultivating your loneliness in a treetop. Taking your name felt like taking a dare, like casting a spell on myself. And if it took, good. And if it didn’t, well, maybe also good.
Here’s the truth: I was no good in trees. At twelve, I’m not sure if I had ever climbed one. Is it possible for a landscape to fail you? Is it possible that my house in the woods was circled by the wrong trees? Leggy birches or dense, sharp evergreens, none suitable for climbing? No, there were the two crabapples, at least. I could have gone up if I had tried to go up. One summer afternoon, I stood between them. Wary of yellow jackets but inspired by the Magnificent Seven U.S. Gymnastics Olympic team, I set out to master a handstand. I had no aspirations to be a gymnast. But the way I saw it, these girls, who were my age, excelled at childhood: flipping, flying, defying gravity. Keri Strug on the vault; Shannon Miller on the beam, the Dominiques’ floor routines on the bouncy blue, the ponytails, the crowd-pleasing Devil Went Down to Georgia.
I, on the other hand, floundered at youth. And so I practiced, flanked by the crabapples, their fruit already rotting. It didn’t occur to me to use them for balance. Instead, I pushed my hands into the grass, hurled my legs into the sky with too much force, and landed flat on my back. I did this about a hundred times before I gave up. I don’t remember feeling sore, just an acceptance that I was built for falling down, alone. It was my kind of sacrament, the kind that feels holy but can be worn out, forgotten, annulled. And, over time, it was.
And still, I sense that girl’s longing when I show my boys how to float into a handstand in the summer yard. Show them to let their heels kiss the body of the dogwood for balance, that the tree won’t dodge or disappoint. She’s there; she tosses her halo up into the magnolia for Nolan and Silas to chase. Or there’s a bird or a squirrel or some other sacred soul at work. And I am bound to follow them up. They go farther than I go, but I go.
The spell of your name, Christina, it hovers into my high school years. And one late night, I am in the woods with new friends. We sit on the earth; we are circled by trees. And we hold and believe one another’s exaggerated stories, about the blessings and curses we know of the world. And no one wants to flee. We have cigarettes. We have lights to make them burn.
Marianne Jay Erhardt is the author of Lucky Bodies (TTU Press, March 2025), winner of the Iron Horse Prize. Her writing appears in Orion, The Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Electric Literature, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has held residencies at Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She teaches writing at Wake Forest University.
Lovely piece, Marianne.