Start of Something New

The plane landed in a foreign land. Seven hours later, we are lying quietly in the clean, quaint room of a cheap hotel in a town with a name I have almost forgotten. The Puerto Rican nightlife is picking up around the little city and our hotel, a converted monastery, stands adjacent to a chapel with tall walls that echo techno music and accents that I do not quite comprehend. My daughter's breathing is deep and her mouth is open, almost smiling as she sleeps. Her tiny chest rises and falls, she is unaware of the noises and excitement that envelope our small world that night. My husband beside me is also lost in the world of dreams. When he sleeps, he looks so much like our daughter that it strikes me as odd. By day, he is tough and strong and she has a baby face and wide eyes; at night, they are angels with just a few years between them.

I lay pondering the room, looking at the stained glass window high up in the ceiling of our room. The deep red, blue and green panels outline a cross. The room where my family now sleeps once housed monks before it was converted into a room for tourists, travelers, and those looking for something other than home. I am struck by the quiet of the room and the realization that perhaps, a monk breathed his last breath in this room a hundred years before. I think of his tired eyes and the wrinkles that betray his age, the peace in his heart, and the callouses on his knobby knees from a life spent kneeling before an Eternal God. I think of a different monk who had just answered the calling of his Lord, and who undoubtedly spent sleepless hours looking at the same stained glass I am now admiring, asking himself if he had made the right decision when he abandoned all he knew and followed the cross. I imagine that many men before me longed for the touch of a woman, of companionship; and yet, I take the man beside me for granted. I think about the prayers that were prayed below the little stained glass window, a beacon of light in the darkness. I imagine poignant words in a native tongue, where Dios is Lord and life is vida. I envision the quiet of the monastery after dark and the battles that must have waged in the souls of the inhabitants: the line between faith and disbelief is undoubtedly thin to some when the lights are out and solitude entices their souls. Sleep finally comes, late, after I have exhausted my imagination and taken up the practice of the men who slept here before me: I pray to their God, in a different language and in a different time; yet, I know He hears me just the same.