On Salted Fish

In the morning, when I find time to meditate, it is often a mess of thoughts like pebbles in your shoe. My guides — a therapist, a spiritual director, authors both contemporary and ancient — tell me to let the thoughts come like a wave. To place my thoughts on a leaf in a stream. To use a sacred word — just one — to call me back to attention, and only gently. Every distraction a chance to come back to the divine presence. Every distraction a prayer.

This morning, I opened the window of the small room in the back of our rowhome. It was a chilly morning in the city, and our heat was on, but I wanted to let the cold enter in narrow gusts. And, as I sat rehearsing the sacred word, I smelled the sea. A mix of salt and fish. It was a familiar smell, comforting, if not quite appealing. I peered through the windowpane into the morning dark. Below, in my neighbors breezeway — where usually there are garbage cans and a clothesline with towels and sheets — was a string of fish, flattened. Each filet was tied to a wooden rod that had been hoisted onto the concrete blocks that formed the perimeter of the small backyard. Another rod held long, thin strips of red pork.

What is a prayer if it is the stink of salted fish?

My neighbor goes by Jason, and he lives with his parents. On occasion, when timing catches us right, we will stand on our stoops and chat. He is from China, and he has taught me a lot about the country, in part because he was annoyed with how much I didn’t know. But, he is always kind, even if a bit shocked at my ignorance. He laughs with his whole body. His parents, though, don’t speak English, so we communicate mostly through sign language. We wave. The father — a smoker, though only outside, so we see him quite a bit — is particularly taken with my youngest son, and he will make hand gestures about how big he is getting every time we see him. My son waves and says hello. The father smiles, always a big smile. In the morning, I can hear his smoker’s cough through the walls.

This is all a prayer.

Jason is married, though his wife lives in China. They were married almost 4 years ago, and he has been working on getting her to come to the United States ever since. The administration’s immigration policies held up her arrival for months, for years, and now the pandemic has further complicated her immigration. He usually visits in the spring, but he wasn’t able to make the trip this year.

My hope is that the salted fish and the drying pork are for a big party. A celebration. Maybe a wedding feast. This hope is a prayer, but it is not the whole prayer.

The stink of the fish and the sea is the whole prayer.

The close quarters of the city is the whole prayer.

My favorite part of Advent is how we are forced to live in the messiness of the Christmas story. How we must anticipate it, wait for it, and dwell in the frailty of our human world. A young unwed mother. A hostile political climate. An active religious persecution. Homelessness and midnight flights under the cover of darkness. An ego-maniacal political leader and his grip on power at whatever cost, including the lives of the most vulnerable. All playing out against the backdrop of a crowded town, on the outskirts of a huge metropolis. Just imagine all the smells of fish coming from the Mediterranean and the market stalls.

Imagine all the touching. All the breathing.

And imagine a quiet hope amongst it all, almost invisible, tiny, singular yet containing the magnitude of the human condition.

A quantity like seven salted fishes that multiplies for thousands.

It must have stunk.

In the summer, I helped a local church deliver boxes of food to families in South Philadelphia. The homes where I delivered were south of Snyder, a main dividing street in the neighborhoods of South Philly. It was hot on this day. My car windows were down, and my air conditioner was blasting.

Usually, I would put my mask on, carry the boxes to the front stoop of homes, knock on the door and sit in my car, waiting for the boxes to be claimed. Sometimes the residents would see me, other times, they wouldn’t.

But, I pulled up one side street — one of those quintessential Philly narrow streets. I drove my car up onto the curb to inch past the parked cars, careful not to swipe off the side view mirrors; this is all familiar to those in Philadelphia, a city built for bodies and not for vehicles.

As I scanned the numbers on the homes looking for a match for my last delivery, I noticed a young girl outside on the sidewalk. She was with a young man, her father I presume, a thin man who was shirtless in the summer heat. The young girl was examining jars lined up along their steps. The number matched my delivery, so I stopped the car in the middle of the street and got out. I kept the boxes in the backseat, and I hoisted the last one out through the driver’s side door.

The father came toward me to receive the package. As I got closer, I saw the jars more clearly. They were filled with fish filets, brining in a yellowish liquid in the summer sun. The man smiled, and he spoke to me in Tagalog, but I couldn’t understand. I smiled exaggeratedly beneath my mask to force my cheek bones high, to show I was smiling without being able to see it. He didn’t wear a mask, and he approached me and held out his arms to take the box.

As I put the box into his arms, we touched. It felt like reconnecting a circuit breaker — it was electric and shocking. Still, till this December day, he is the only person I’ve touched outside my family since March.

I think about this man and his jars of brining fish regularly, though I haven’t seen him since. But, it wasn’t until I saw the fish filets outside my window — when the stink of fish and the counterintuitive frailty and durability of community aligned — that I realized this man was a prophet. That the spark was prayer. The static electricity of connection — denied in many ways in our current pandemic-moment in an effort to preserve its future, to preserve the ability of touch to again be at the foundation of our relationships — emerges in the messiness of human life, in the connections both denied and enabled.

And, in all this, I hope the fish tastes good, too. That is part of this prayer. I expect that it would be delicious.