We Grabbed the Priest at the Altar and Then Light Flooded the Entire Church

We Grabbed the Priest at the Altar and Then Light Flooded the Entire Church

I had my hands on that priest’s robe and I was pulling him backward over the altar when every light in that church exploded at once and not one of us could move a single step.

What happens to a man who grabs a priest at the altar and gets stopped by something no one in the room can explain.

My name is Sami Hadid and I am 29 years old born in Chicago, Illinois.

the son of a Syrian father who came to America in 1991 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a Lebanese mother who came two years later to marry him and never once regretted the distance from everything familiar because she said the man was worth the miles.

I want to tell you about the night I put my hands on a Catholic priest and tried to drag him off the altar of St.

Stannisl Church on the northwest side of Chicago and what happened in the 3 seconds that followed that changed the entire direction of my life.

I want to tell you about the light and what it felt like to be inside it and what came after it and what it cost me to tell this story publicly and why I am telling it anyway.

But first, I need to tell you about Chicago and my father and the mosque and the slow, steady construction of a young man who believed that grabbing a priest of an altar was a righteous act and not a violent one.

Because that belief did not fall from the sky.

I built it brick by brick with help I did not know I was receiving.

Chicago’s northwest side, the Albany Park and Irving Park neighborhoods is one of the most culturally layered parts of the city.

Within six blocks, you can you can walk past a Kurdish restaurant, a Mexican bakery, a Korean grocery, a Polish Catholic church, and a mosque with a parking lot full of cars on Friday afternoon.

The mosque my family attended was on Kedzi Avenue, a converted warehouse with a green dome added to the roof that was visible from the Kimble Brown line stop.

The community was a Syrian and Lebanese and Iraqi and Palestinian first and second generation.

The whole range from families who had been in Chicago for 30 years to families who had arrived last year.

All of them held together by the Friday prayer and the shared Arabic and the particular bond of people who carry the same history in different amounts.

My father Wid Hadid was the kind of engineer who thought in systems.

Everything was a system to him.

Everything could be understood if you found the right level of analysis and applied the right framework.

He was a fair, a harsh, measured man who applied the same analytical rigor to his faith that he applied to his work.

He believed in Islam because he had examined it and found it coherent.

He did not believe in it because someone had told him to or because the alternative was socially costly.

He believed because he had looked and concluded and that’s a specific quality of his faith is groundedness in examination was both the thing I respected most about him and the thing that made my own failure to find the same groundedness more painful.

I had examined and not concluded.

I had looked and not found.

And the space between my father’s settled faith and my own restless absence of it was a gap I spent most of my 20s trying to paper over with activity and noise.

By the time I was 23, I had dropped out of the University of Illinois Chicago after 2 years of political science and found my way into the orbit of a community organizing group in Albany Park that was doing what I would have told you at the time was important work.

Some of it was the group had real roots in the community and did real things.

We organized against housing discrimination.

We pushed back on zoning decisions that were squeezing out Arab and Muslimowned businesses.

We advocated for families at immigration hearings.

The legitimate work was real and it mattered.

And I am not going to pretend it did not matter because the person I have become since that night in the church understands that doing good work for bad reasons is still good work even if the bad reasons need to be examined.

But beside the legitimate work was the other work.

the targeting of Christian outreach activity in Muslim neighborhoods, the disruption of church events, the harassment of a street evangelists, the creation of content designed to make Christian practice look ridiculous, and Muslim resistance to it look heroic.

This was the work that fed the numbers, the social media following, the donations from sympathetic people across the country who watched our videos and felt that someone was finally doing something.

And the numbers were the thing I was most honest about wanting, more honest than I was willing to be at the time.

The numbers were the feeling of mattering.

The numbers were the answer to the question that the empty prayer rug asked me every morning.

The question was, “Is anyone listening?” And the numbers said, “Yes, 30,000 people are listening.

” And I could live on that for another day.

The man who organized the action targeting sent was a man named Riyad.

He was 32 Jordanian American second generation.

Basa a former pre-law student who had dropped out of depol and become the most skilled and most dangerous organizer I had ever worked with.

Riyad had the gift of narrative.

He could take any situation, any church event, any Christian outreach activity and frame it inside a story that made our response feel not just justified but necessary.

Not just strategic but sacred.

He was a genius at that and it is worth saying clearly that this specific gift, the gift of making harmful things feel sacred is one of the most dangerous things a human being can possess and one of the easiest things to follow when you are young and angry and hungry for a story that makes your pain mean something.

Riyad had identified St.

Stanislaus as a target, not because of anything the church had done specifically, but because it had recently partnered with a Syrian Christian Refugee resettlement organization that was bringing families from Syria to Chicago and helping them settle in Albany Park.

The framing Riad used was that a Catholic church was using Syrian Christian refugees as a wedge to enter a Muslim neighborhood.

The framing was not entirely untrue and was almost entirely misleading and I absorbed it without examining it because examining it would have required slowing down and I had learned that slowing down was dangerous.

The action was planned for a Sunday evening mass in November, not the morning mass, the evening one which was smaller, maybe 80 people, an older and quieter congregation.

Riyad said a smaller crowd meant more impact per disruption.

He said the goal was to get footage of us confronting the priest at the altar during the most sacred part of the mass and that if we could physically remove him from the altar even briefly, even for 30 seconds, the footage would generate coverage that would make our point better than any video we had made before.

I want to be honest about what I understood the plan to be.

I understood that we were going to go into that church and physically drag a priest off his altar during the mass.

I understood that this was a different line than we had crossed before.

We had disrupted events.

We had surrounded tables and shouted and filmed and made noise.

We had not put hands on a person of faith in their own sacred space during the most sacred act of their liturgy.

I understood the difference and I went anyway because I had built a self that could not afford to be the person who slowed the movement down.

Six of us went in through the side door of St.

Stannis Laos at 7:15 on a Sunday evening in November.

Chicago November is a serious cold, the kind that comes off Lake Michigan with nothing gentle in it.

a cold that has traveled 200 miles across open water and arrived at the city with full force.

We went in from the cold into the warmth of the side vestibule and the smell hit me first.

Old candle wax and incense and the particular smell of a building that has been prayed in for a 100red years that layered accumulated smell of devotion and the stone and wood and breath.

The mass was already in progress.

We moved through the vestibule and into the back of the nave.

The church was darker than I expected.

What were high ceilings with modest light fixtures and candles on the altar and the stained glass windows black with the November night outside them.

80 people in the pews.

An older congregation.

The kind of small Sunday evening crowd that is there because they want to be there and not because the Sunday morning as a social obligation.

The priest was at the altar.

He was maybe 70 years old.

A small man with white hair and a slight tube.

Wearing white vestments.

He had his back to the congregation.

Facing the altar, his arms raised in the orange posture.

The prayer position with both hands extended upward and outward.

The posture of total openness of offering.

Riyad looked at me from three feet away.

He jerked his head toward the front of the church.

He said quietly, “Now we moved up the center aisle.

I want to tell you what I felt walking up that aisle toward the altar.

I want to tell you because it matters.

I felt nothing clean.

I had felt something clean at the beginning years ago when the movement was new and the cause felt pure and the anger had a clarity to it that I mistook for righteousness.

But by 29, by that November night in St.

Stanislaus.

The clean feeling was gone and what was underneath it was just noise and momentum and the particular terror of a person who has been moving fast for too long and is afraid that if he stops he will have to find out what he has been running from.

I walked up the center aisle of St.

Stanislau’s church in Chicago at 7:20 on a Sunday evening in November and I reached the altar rail and I went through the gap in the rail and I put my hands on the wide vestments of a 70-year-old priest who had his arms raised toward God and I pulled and then the light came.

It did not come from the fixtures.

That is the first thing I need to say about it.

I have thought about the light every day for the two years since it happened.

And I have looked at every explanation that does not require me to say what I believe it was.

And none of them hold.

The light did not come from the ceiling fixtures, which were the same modest strength they had been when we came in.

It did not come from the candles on the altar, which were still the same small flames they had been.

It did not come from any source I could identify.

It came from everywhere at once.

One moment I had my hands on the priest’s vestments and the next moment the entire interior of St.

annis church was filled with a white light of a quality and intensity that was completely unlike any artificial light I had ever stood inside.

Not painful, not blinding, but total.

It filled the space from floor to ceiling and wall to wall without casting shadows because it had no single source and needed no single source.

It was the light of a room that has been filled with something that gives off light as a natural condition of its existence.

I let go of the priest.

My hand opened and I stepped back.

I did not choose to step back.

My body stepped back before I made a decision about stepping back.

I was standing at the altar rail in the gap I had come through and my hands were open at my sides and I was looking at the priest.

He had not moved.

His arms were still raised, still in the orange position, still extended upward and outward.

He was still facing the altar.

The light was on him and he was in the light and he was continuing what he had been doing as if nothing had interrupted it.

Because for him, as far as I could tell, nothing had.

He had not flinched when I grabbed him.

He had not turned.

He had not pulled away.

He had continued his prayer with his arms raised toward the altar, and the light had come.

and I had stepped back and he was still there, still in the same posture as if my hands on his vestments had been no more significant than I went through the room.

I turned to look at Riyad.

He was standing in the center aisle 3 ft behind me, completely still, his face had an expression I had never seen on his face before.

Riyad’s face was always controlled, always operating, always projecting exactly what he wanted it to project.

The expression on his face in that moment was not controlled.

It was the face of a man who has encountered something that his categories cannot process.

Standing completely still because the processing has stopped and the body is waiting for the processing to restart before it does anything.

The other four men in our group were behind the riad.

They were also still not frozen in fear.

still in the way a person goes still when something very large and very real has just entered the room and the appropriate response is to stop and acknowledge it.

The congregation had not moved.

80 people in wooden pews on a Sunday evening in November in Chicago.

They sat in the white light with the kind of stillness that has depth in it.

Not the stillness of shock, the stillness of people who are entirely present to something that is happening in their midst and know it and are choosing to be present to it and not away from it.

I do not know how long the light lasted.

My estimate is between 20 and 40 seconds, but I cannot verify it.

Time in that church in that light did not behave the way time normally behaves.

It did not stretch or slow exactly.

It was more that the normal meter of time, the second by- second forward movement paused while something else used the space and then it was gone as suddenly as it had come.

The church returned to its normal light.

The modest fixtures, the altar candles, the shadows came back.

The stone walls went back to their ordinary gray brown.

The stained glass windows were black again with the November night outside.

The priest lowered his arms, turned to face the congregation, and continued the mass exactly where he had left off.

I was standing at the altar rail with my hands at my sides.

And the full reality of what I had just done and what had just happened, pressing down on me simultaneously.

I had put my hands on a 70-year-old man at prayer and tried to drag him off his altar.

And something had stopped me.

Not someone, something.

Something that filled an entire church with light that had no source and stopped six men in their tracks and then departed and left the priests still standing and still praying as if the entire universe was organized around his
opraiveness and not around anything we had brought into the room.

Riyad touched my arm from behind.

He said quietly, “Let’s go.

” His voice was different.

The authority was still in it, but there was something underneath the authority.

something unsteady like a table that has had a leg slightly loosened and is still holding weight but is not entirely reliable anymore.

I walked back down the center aisle.

I did not look at the congregation.

I could not.

I went through the vestibule and out the side door into the Chicago November cold and the cold hit my face and I stood on the sidewalk outside Stanislau’s church and breathed.

The others came out behind me.

Nobody spoke.

We stood on the sidewalk in the cold and nobody spoke for a full minute.

This had never happened after any action we had done before.

There was always a debrief, always an immediate assessment of what footage we had gotten and what the narrative was and how to frame it for the online audience.

The debrief was the action after the action, the translation of what had happened into content.

Nobody was translating.

Nobody was reaching for their phone.

Nobody was looking at Riyad for direction.

We stood on the sidewalk outside a Catholic church in Chicago in November and nobody spoke and the cold worked on us and the light was still happening inside every one of us even though it was gone from the building.

Riyad said, “Finally, let’s walk.

” We walked, not together exactly, more parallel.

Six men walking north on the same block in the same direction without quite being a group anymore.

After about two blocks, Riyad stopped and said he was taking a car home.

He said we would talk tomorrow.

He looked at me when he said tomorrow and his eyes had the same unsteady quality his voice had had.

I nodded.

He called the car and got in and left.

I walked home 40 minutes on foot from St.

Stannislaus to my apartment in Albany Park.

I needed the walk.

I needed the 40 minutes of Chicago November to work on me.

the cold and the wind and and the street lights and the familiar streets.

I needed something ordinary to move through because the inside of my head was the least ordinary it had ever been.

I thought about the light the entire walk home.

I ran every explanation I had.

Electrical surge in the building’s wiring.

Group psychological response to stress.

Shared visual hallucination.

I ran all of them and none of them survived contact with the specific quality of what I had been inside.

The light was not a malfunction and it was not a projection of our collective state and it was not the result of anything wrong with the wiring or the fixtures or the candles.

It was something that filled the room because something needed to fill the room and then it was done.

I got to my apartment.

I sat down on the floor of my living room with my back against the couch, which is where I went when I needed to think and could not afford the distance of a chair.

I sat on the floor of my apartment in Albany Park and I said out loud to the room, “What was that?” The room said nothing back.

But the question did not feel like it went nowhere.

There was a Bible in my apartment.

I had taken it from a hotel room 2 years before, not to read, more as a trophy of a particular action we had done.

I knew where it was.

It was on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the corner, spine out, a small dark green Gideon New Testament.

I got up and took it off the shelf and held it in my hands for a moment.

Then I sat back down on the floor and I opened it.

I opened it to a random page and the random page was the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John.

I started reading from the top of the chapter.

I read about Jesus in the temple court speaking to the religious leaders of his day, the people who held the institutional power of the faith and I read the words he said to them.

He said, “I am the light of the world.

” Basu, whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

I sat on the floor of my apartment in Albany Park with a hotel Bible in my hands and those words sat in me the way heavy things sit with full weight, not moving, not performing, just present.

I am the light of the world.

I thought about what I had been inside 40 minutes ago.

The white light with no source.

The light that filled from wall to wall and floor to ceiling and had no shadow because it needed none.

the light that has stopped six men who had come to do harm.

I am the light of the world.

I sat with it until 1:00 in the morning.

Then I lay on the floor without moving the Bible and I stared at the ceiling and I said the question that had been forming since the moment I stepped back from the altar with my hands out open.

I said, “Are you the light?” I said it to the ceiling and the darkness and whatever was or was not listening.

I said if you are the light then everything I have been doing has been the opposite of you and I need to know because I cannot go back to what I was before tonight and I do not yet know how to go forward.

The apartment was quiet.

The city was outside the windows and underneath the quiet very small and very certain something said you already know.

I did not go back to Riyad the next day.

He called me twice and I did not answer.

He texted and I read the texts and did not respond.

Not out of hostility.

Out of the specific need for silence that comes over a person when something large has just happened and every conversation is a risk of having it managed away by someone with more investment in the previous framework than in the new thing
growing in the wreckage of it.

I went back to St.

Stannislaus on Wednesday afternoon, not on Sunday when the church would be full and the mass would be happening and the memory of what I had done would be visible in the faces of the people who had been there.

It on a Wednesday afternoon when the church would be empty and I could sit in it without being anyone to anyone and just be present with the question.

The side door was unlocked.

I went in through the vestibule and into the nave.

The church was empty and quiet.

The candles on the altar were lit.

Small flames in the ordinary afternoon light coming through the stained glass windows.

The priest’s chair behind the altar was empty.

The sanctuary lamp burned its red steadiness beside the tabernacle.

The stone floor was cold under my shoes.

The smell was the same old candle and incense and accumulated prayer.

I sat in the last pew, the same pew I realized that I had walked past going up the center aisle on Sunday evening.

I sat in it and I looked at the altar and the tabernacle and the sanctuary lamp and the place where the priest had been standing when I put my hands on him and the light had come from the back of the church.

The altar was 30 m away.

From where I had been standing, when the light came, it was about 6 in.

From 30 m, it was a wooden structure with candles and a gold box and a red lamp.

From 6 in, it was something else.

From 6 in, it was the place where a 70-year-old man had stood with his arms raised toward the ceiling in the posture of complete openness, and the light had come, and the man had not moved, and I had stepped back.

I sat in the last pew for 20 minutes before the priest came in.

He came from the sacristi at the side of the altar through a small door still wearing his everyday clothes, dark trousers and a black shirt with a clerical collar.

He was carrying something papers of some kind and he was moving with the unhurried pace of a person doing a routine task in a space they have moved through for many years.

He saw me in the last pew.

He stopped.

He looked at me for a moment with the clear attentiveness of an old man whose vision is still sharp.

Then he walked down the center aisle toward me and he sat in the pew directly in front of mine, turned sideways so he was facing me across the pew back.

He put the papers on the seat beside him.

He looked at me without speaking for a moment.

Then he said, “You came back.

” I said, “You knew I was there on Sunday.

” He said, “Yes.

” I said, “You kept praying.

” He said yes.

I said why? He said because what I was doing was more important than what you were doing.

He said it without any edge in it.

No condescension.

Just the plain report of a man who had a clear hierarchy of priorities and had acted according to it.

I said the light.

He nodded.

I said what was it? He said I cannot tell you what it was in a way that will satisfy the part of your mind that wants a rational explanation.

He said, “What I can tell you is that it has happened in this room before.

Not often.

Three times in my 31 years at this church.

How each time something has happened in this sanctuary that needed to be answered and the answer came in that form.

” He paused.

He said, “You are not the first person who has come back afterward.

” He told me his name.

Father Andre Kowalsski, Polish American, third generation, ordained at 30, pastor of St.

Stannislaus for 31 years.

He was 71.

He had been a priest longer than I had been alive.

And in that time, he had seen the neighborhood changed three times around his church and had changed with it and had stayed.

He said this neighborhood has been Polish and then it became Mexican and now it is everything.

He said the church is still here.

The door is still open.

Some things do not change with the neighborhood.

I said, “I put my hands on you.

” He said, “Yes.

” I said, “I was trying to pull you off the altar.

” He said, “I know.

” I said, “I am sorry.

” He looked at me for a moment.

He said, “I accept that.

” Then he said, “What are you looking for?” The question was the same question I had been asked in every church and by every person of faith who had seen me for what I actually was underneath what I was performing.

What are you looking for? I had answered it differently each time, always with some version of the performance.

This time I said the true thing.

I said, “I have been empty for 6 years and I have been filling the emptiness with noise and I do not know how to stop.

” I said, “The light in this room on Sunday was the most real thing I have experienced in my adult life.

And I do not know what to do with that because everything I have spent six years building is the opposite of what made that light come.

Father Andre sat with what I said.

He sat with it the way old men who have been in the room with many forms of human pain sit with it quietly without rushing giving it the respect of real attention.

Then he said, “Can I tell you something about why the light came?” I said, “Yes.

” He said, “I believe the light came because you were at the altar.

” He said not in spite of your reason for being there.

Because of it, he said the altar is the place of encounter.

It has always been the place of encounter.

In every tradition that has ever had an altar, it is the place where the human and the divine are closest.

And you came to the altar on Sunday night with six years of emptiness and six years of noise and six years of the opposite of what fills a person.

and you put your hands on the altar through me and the encounter happened.

He said, “I do not think that was an accident.

I think you were brought to the altar.

Not the way you expected to arrive, but you arrived.

I sat with that for a long time.

” The sanctuary lamp burned its red steadiness beside the tabernacle.

The afternoon light shifted slightly through the stained glass.

I said, “What do I do with it?” He said the same thing anyone does with an encounter at the altar.

You come back, you come back and you sit in the room and you let it work on you.

He said, “You do not have to believe everything or understand everything or resolve everything.

You just have to keep coming back to the place where the real thing is.

” He gave me a copy of the Gospel of John, a small paperback edition from a stack he kept in the sacry for exactly these moments.

He said, “Read this slowly.

Every time you feel like you are reading a debate, stop and start over.

Read it like you are watching a person move through the world.

Watch where he goes and who he chooses and what he does when he gets there.

” He said, “The light in this room on Sunday is in those pages.

It was in the world before this room existed.

It will be in the world after this room is gone.

” And it came for you specifically on Sunday evening.

and I believe it will not stop coming until you let it in completely.

I walked home from St.

Stanislaus in the Chicago Wednesday afternoon.

The sky a flat November gray, the cold still serious of the lake.

I had the small gospel of John in my jacket pocket and the weight of the conversation with Father Andre in my chest and the specific texture of a man who has just been told the truest thing about himself by someone who barely knows him.

I read John that evening and the evenings after it.

I read slowly the way Father Andre said.

I read the wedding at Canaa where Jesus turned water into wine and I thought about transformation, the transformation of one thing into a fundamentally different thing.

And I thought about what was happening to me, what had been happening since a Sunday evening.

And I thought this is what transformation feels like from the inside.

uncomfortable, slow, complete.

I read about the man born blind in chapter nine.

The disciples asked Jesus whose sin caused the blindness, the man’s sin or his parents’ sin.

Jesus said neither.

He was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

And then Jesus healed him.

And the religious authorities could not accept the healing because accepting the healing required accepting the healer and accepting the healer required restructuring everything they had built their identity around.

I read that and I put the book down on my kitchen table and I sat in the particular recognition of seeing yourself described from the outside the people who could not accept the healing because accepting the healing required restructuring everything.

That was me.

That had been me for six years.

And the blind man who simply reported what had happened to him to everyone who asked I was born blind.

And now I see that was the man I was becoming whether I had agreed to it or not.

I called my mother on a Thursday evening 4 days after the Sunday at St.

Stannis Laos.

She was the person I had always been most honest with.

My Lebanese mother who had come to America to marry my father and never regretted the miles.

I told her what had happened.

All of it.

The action and the light and father Andre and the gospel of John and the question I was living inside.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “Sammy, your grandmother on my side in Lebanon.

Her mother was a Christian before she converted to marry your greatgrandfather.

” She said, “There has always been this question in our blood on both sides of it.

” She said, “I am not afraid of where you are going.

I am watching to see what you become.

I said, I do not know yet what I am becoming.

She said, I know, she said, but you have stopped being what you were, and that alone is worth everything.

I went to Riyad on a Friday morning, 10 days after the Sunday at Santistanis Laauos.

I drove to the organization’s office above the Halal Market on Kedi Avenue, and I sat across from him in the back room where we had planned more actions than I could count.

and I told him I was leaving.

He looked at me across the desk and I watched him run through the responses.

Anger, then the attempt to reframe my departure as a temporary crisis of faith that would resolve.

Then the calculation of what my departure cost the organization in terms of visibility and reach.

I watched him go through all of it in real time on his face and I waited.

He said, “What happened to you in that church?” I said something I cannot explain and cannot dismiss.

He said the light.

I said yes.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said something I did not expect.

He said I felt it too.

He said it quietly looking at the desk.

I felt it.

I did not know what to do with it.

So I left.

I have not been able to not think about it for 10 days.

I said what are you going to do with it? He said I do not know.

I said, “I know someone you should talk to.

” I gave him father Andre’s name and the address of St.

Stannislaus.

He looked at the piece of paper I slid across the desk.

He did not pick it up, but he did not push it away.

I walked out of that office, and I did not go back.

I began attending mass at St.

Hanislaus the following Sunday, not at the evening mass, the morning one.

I sat in the back and I watched and I listened and I let the liturggy move over me without trying to process or argue or categorize it.

I met with father and Jay weekly.

He was patient and precise and he never once gave me the feeling that my arrival in his church had been anything other than what he had been praying for for years.

Not specifically me, but the person who would arrive the way I arrived through the back of the battle through the wrong door.

are covered in the evidence of what they had been before the light got in.

We working through the theology slowly, not because I was resistant, because I was honest.

Every question I had was real.

And Father Andre gave every question the full respect of a real answer.

And when the answer was genuinely incomplete, he said so.

And we sat in the incompleteness together and did not paper over it.

Faith, he told me, was not the absence of uncertainty.

It was the decision to follow what you knew to be true in the presence of what you did not yet understand.

What I knew to be true was the light.

What I knew to be true was Father Andre with his arms raised toward the altar and not moving when I grabbed him and the light coming and me stepping back with my hands open.

What I knew to be true was the Gospel of John read slowly at my kitchen table over two weeks in November and the specific gravity of words that land in the body before the mind can intercept them.

What I knew to be true was the blind man’s testimony.

I was blind and now I see.

Simple, flat reported true.

I went on my knees on the floor of my Albany Park apartment on a Monday night in December.

Chicago December is the serious cold made permanent.

The radiator was working and the apartment was warm and outside the wind moved through the streets with full authority.

I knelt on the floor and I said the truest thing I had said in 29 years.

I said, “I believe you are the light.

I believe you filled that church on Sunday evening not because I deserved it, but because you wanted to reach me and the altar was where I was.

and you will go anywhere to reach the person who needs reaching.

I believe the arms raised toward the ceiling are the right posture and I have been in the wrong posture my entire adult life and I am changing it now.

I am raising my hands empty.

nothing in them except what I am giving you, which is the six years and the noise and the actions and the priest’s vestments in my fist and the thing underneath all of it, which is just a man who could not find his way to the altar any other way than the way he came.

I said, “I am here.

I am yours.

Do
with me what you did with the blind man.

Start from the blindness and build forward.

I have nothing to bring to this except the emptiness that has always been shaped like you.

” The warmth came.

It always comes for the people who say this prayer honestly.

It came from my chest outward and it filled the apartment the way the light had filled the church without shadows, without source from everywhere at once.

And it was not the same as the light in the church.

It was quieter and more personal and entirely mine.

But it was the same substance, the same presence, the same certainty of being known and chosen and wanted.

Not despite the six years, but through them, because the six years were the road that led to the altar, and the altar was where the light was waiting.

I was confirmed at the Easter Vigil at Santest Stanislaus.

The following spring, Father Andre administered the sacrament.

He placed his hand on my head and I felt the weight of his old hand and the weight of 31 years of staying in a neighborhood that kept changing and holding the door open for everyone who came through it, including a 29-year-old Syrian Lebanese man from Albany Park who had come through the door the first time with his hands reaching for the wrong thing.

My father and I have spoken about what happened many time over the past 2 years.

He is a man who holds his faith through examination and conclusion.

And the conversion of his son to a different faith is not something he has found easy.

And I will not tell you he has found it easy because he has not.

But he is a fair man and a measured man.

And what he said to me in our most recent conversation was this.

Sammy, the god you have found, he posed the way my father poses when he is being more careful than usual with words.

He said, “There is a presence in you now that was not there before.

I do not fully understand it, but I can see it and I am not afraid of it.

” I said, “That is enough, Baba.

That is everything.

” Riyad picked up the piece of paper I left on his desk.

He went to St.

Stanislaus 6 weeks after I did.

He and Father Andre have met four times that I know of.

I do not know where Riyad is in the process.

I only know he went back and going back is always the beginning of the right direction.

Two of the other four men who were in the church that Sunday have been in contact with me since I posted the testimony online.

One of them is asking questions.

One of them has already found his own father and in a different city and is sitting in the back pew of his own church and letting the liturgy move over him without trying to argue it away.

Both of them when we have spoken have used the same word to describe what happened on Sunday evening.

They say the light was real.

I say yes.

I know to every person reading this who has been building noise over an emptiness and calling the noise conviction.

I want to say the emptiness is not a malfunction.

The emptiness is the shape of what is missing.

And what is missing has a name and is looking for you with the same determination it uses to fill a church in Chicago on a cold November Sunday and stop six men who had come to do harm.

He did not stop us with an argument.

He did not stop us with a counterforce.

He stopped us with light pure sourceless total.

The light of a presence that fills a room because the room belongs to it and has always belonged to it.

And everything that enters the room enters his space.

You are in his space right now.

Whatever room you are reading this in.

Whatever noise you have been using to cover the question, the light is already in the room.

It has been in the room the whole time.

You just have not been still enough to see it yet.

Be still.

Look at the altar.

Raise your hands empty.

Say, “I am here.

I am yours.

” He will fill the room.

He filled mine.

He has been filling rooms for 2,000 years.

And he has not run out of light yet.