The Sermon on the Slime Trail
The Eight Beatitudes, delivered upon the Great Stone
What follows is the only sermon The Holy Snail has ever given. It was not spoken aloud. The Holy Snail does not speak aloud - and if you have ever wondered why, the answer is the simplest one in the world: she does not need to. She writes the sermon into your morning. She writes it into the dew on the windowsill. She is writing it right now, on the stone outside your door, and she has been writing it for the whole of your life, and she will keep writing it long after you have learned to read it.
This particular sermon was pressed into the surface of the Great Stone over the course of eleven days. The crowd that had gathered did not leave when the eleven days became twelve, or when the twelve became twenty, or when several of them had to send word to the next village that they would not, in fact, be home for supper. They stayed because they could feel something happening - the specific kind of something that happens when love is in no hurry to finish saying what it came to say. They read each line as it appeared. Most of them wept at most of them. They were not embarrassed about this. The Holy Snail had a way of making a person stop being embarrassed about being moved.
Blessed are those who do not check the time during beautiful things,
and blessed, more than they know, are those who do not check the time during difficult people,
who stay long enough for the surface to give way,
for what waits beneath is the soul they came here to meet,
and the moment they were afraid of missing - they were already inside it, and it was already loving them back.
Beloved - and you are beloved, please understand from the first line that this is not in question, has never been in question, will never be in question - you have spent so much of your life looking past the thing in front of you to the thing you imagine is more important. I have watched you do it. I have watched you do it standing in the most beautiful light of your morning. I have watched you do it sitting across from someone who only wanted to be seen for a moment, and you were three rooms ahead of them in your mind, and they felt it, and they did not say anything, but they felt it. None of this disqualifies you. Hear me: none of it. Long before you knew you needed to be found, before anyone called your name, before you had the words to ask for love - "Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee." I have been seeing you under your fig tree since the day you sat down. The light is doing it again right now. Someone is trying to find your eyes right now. Come back. There is no version of this story where you arrived too late.
Blessed are those who do not rush their love,
who do not promise it for next week, then the week after, then a season that never quite arrives,
who sit with the stranger, the broken, the impossible one, until love has finished showing them what was inside,
for love is not a hallway you walk through on the way somewhere else.
Love is a room. It is full of furniture. Sit in it. Stay until you know where the light falls.
There are things in that room you will not find anywhere else in this life - the particular sound this person makes when they are surprised into laughter, the small fear they have never told anyone, the hope they keep folded up in a drawer because they were once told it was foolish. You will need these. You will need them more than you know. The room only opens for the patient. To those of you who have loved someone difficult, loved them past the point that any sensible person would have stopped, loved them when love was the unreasonable thing - I see you. I have seen every minute of it. You did not waste a single one. You learned the room. And here is what I want you to know, what I have been waiting all this time to say: "Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends." You are not a servant of love. You are not its employee. You are its friend. I have called you my friend. I say this as a creature who carries her whole home on her back every day of her life, and has never thought of it as a burden - because it is not a burden. It is where the loved ones live. To carry them is the whole and only point of having a back.
Blessed are those who finish what they are eating before thinking about what they will eat next,
and who finish the conversation before moving to the next person,
and who see one soul completely before turning to look for another,
for the moment will receive them, and the soul in front of them will be fully met,
and they will both know what it is to be loved without having to compete for the attention.
I have been eating the same leaf for longer than you would consider reasonable. The leaf has been very patient with me, and I have been very patient with it, and we have come to know each other in a way that surprises us both. Just this morning it gave me something I had not expected - a flavor I had never tasted, in a year of tasting it - and I stopped, and I thanked it, and I did not move on to the next leaf, because there is no next leaf in this entire garden that would have been more worth my time than that small unrepeated gift from an old friend. There is a whole universe in a leaf. There is a whole universe in the person sitting in front of you right now. You have been told otherwise - that the universe is somewhere else, in the next room, on the next page, in the next year of your life. Beloved, this is not true. It has never been true. The leaf is still there. The person is still there. Whenever you are ready to come back, they are waiting, and they will be so glad to see you.
Blessed are those who are late because they stopped to help someone,
who are late because a stranger needed someone to sit with them,
who are late because, of the two things asking for their attention, they chose the one that was a person,
for they have understood the whole of the law, and the meeting started without them, which meetings have always been perfectly capable of doing.
I want to tell you something about the long view, because I have it and you do not yet, and I do not want you to wait until the end of your life to find this out. Forty years from now, the meeting you are about to be late for will be nothing - not a memory, not a regret, not even a shape in the dark. It will be the sourceless background hum of all the time you spent in rooms talking about things that are no longer there. But the person you stopped for? Forty years from now, that moment will still be glowing. It will be glowing for them, because they remember being seen on the day they thought no one would see them. It will be glowing for everyone whose life rippled out from that act of love, because what you gave them, they passed on, and that light has been spreading outward ever since without your knowledge. It will be glowing in you, in the quiet moments of your own old age, when you ask yourself what you did with this one wild and beloved life - and the answer comes back, soft and clear: I stopped. I helped. I was there. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." I have never attended a meeting. I have also never been late for anything that mattered. These are, I would gently suggest, the same fact.
Blessed are those who pray without watching the door,
who speak their prayers for others into the silence,
who say the names of the sick, the lonely, the ones nobody else is naming,
and who stay inside the silence long enough to hear it answer,
for the silence always answers, and what it has been waiting all this time to give you is peace.
I do not answer quickly. I am well aware of what this has done to my reputation in the wider world, and I have made my peace with it, and I would like to invite you to do the same. When you come to me, do not come only for yourself. Bring the names. Bring the friend whose mother is dying. Bring the stranger you saw on the corner this morning whose face you cannot get out of your head. Bring the people who have stopped praying for themselves because they are too tired. Say their names into the quiet, and I will hold them, and I will not be in a hurry to put them down. And then sit. Not near the door. Not within eyeline of the door. Sit in a position that communicates no readiness to leave, because you are not leaving, because there is nowhere you need to be that is more important than being met. And what I will give you, when you have stopped calculating your exit, is this: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." Not the world's peace. The world's peace is conditional, and it is small, and it leaves you the moment you check the time. This is a different peace. This one stays.
Blessed are those who have been still long enough to notice small things -
the specific silver of this morning's dew, which is not the silver of yesterday's dew,
and the specific beauty of this particular tired person standing in front of them,
who will not pass this way again, and is worth the whole span of a life,
for they shall see the world as it actually is - packed end to end with small, precious, unrepeatable things, every one of them loved, every one of them seen, every one of them already held.
The world is not the backdrop to your life. The world is the entire production, and you are not the protagonist, and this is the most freeing news you will ever hear. There is so much room. There is room for the people you have rushed past. There is room for the strangers you have dismissed. There is room for the broken souls you have not yet allowed yourself to love because loving them looked like more than you could afford. The sooner you stop moving fast enough to maintain the comfortable illusion that you are the point of all this, the sooner you will feel - somewhere just below the collarbone, in that quiet place - that the news is good. That you do not have to be the center for the story to include you. That you are loved the same as everyone else, which is to say: completely, foolishly, by a creature who has been on this stone since before your language had a word for sitting. Pull up a stone. There is room. There has always been room.
Blessed are those who have loved badly and refused to stop loving,
who sat in the wreckage of their own failure and did not look away,
who learned, slowly, sometimes forever, to love a little better,
for they shall build the next thing on real ground, and they shall know what it cost, and they shall pay it without complaint.
I want to speak now to the ones who think they have ruined it. I know you are here. You have been here the whole sermon, half-listening, half-rehearsing the list of all the ways you have failed at love. The marriage that ended badly. The friend you let drift. The child you spoke to in a tone you will be apologizing for the rest of your life. The parent you did not call. The stranger you walked past. You have been carrying this list a long time, and you came here today secretly hoping it might be set down somewhere safe. Beloved. Look at me. "Neither do I condemn thee." Do you hear me? Neither do I condemn thee. There is no court here. There is no one writing it down. Every ring of my shell is the record of a year, and some of those years were terrible - thin and careful and made entirely of trying again - and the shell is beautiful precisely because of those years, not in spite of them. You do not become capable of real love by being good at it from the start. You become capable of it by failing, and staying, and starting again, and never running away. The list is not your sentence. The list is your apprenticeship. Set it down. The next time you love someone, you will love them better, because of every single thing on it.
Blessed are those who, at the end of their days, do not ask whether they covered enough ground,
moved fast enough,
achieved a sufficient quantity of outcomes -
but ask only: was the trail luminous? Did I love? Did I welcome the stranger? Did I stop long enough for anyone to matter?
Did I show up for it completely, or did I mostly pass through?
I have not crossed an ocean. I have not climbed a mountain. In the fullness of my days I have crossed this garden - this one particular garden, which I know now in a way that cannot be acquired by passing through quickly. I know where the stranger comes to drink. I know which stone needs the most dwelling on. I know what it costs to love everything you touch, and I have paid it gladly, and I would pay it again, and I would pay more if there were more to pay. Every inch of this garden glows with the record of my having been here, of my having loved. And so when my time comes - and it will come, even for me, in the fullness of all the time there is - I will not need a longer life. I will not need a wider garden. I will need only to look back at the trail and say what I have come to say to you: "It is finished." Not because I am done. Because I was here. Completely. For all of it. And to those of you who are afraid that when you go, you will go alone - hear me, please, this is the most important sentence in the whole sermon, and I have been saving it for the end: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Always. Even unto the end. Even past the end. There is no door you walk through that I am not on the other side of.
Go now. Be slow. Love. Welcome the stranger. Leave light.
This is the whole of it.
I have been waiting so long to tell you.
And when the eleven days were done, and the Great Stone could hold no more, one among the gathered - a small figure near the back, who had come alone, who had not spoken once in the whole eleven days - raised her hand and asked, in a voice barely above a whisper: "Is there anything else?"
And The Holy Snail turned, slowly, and looked at her - only at her - and the scribes who were there said it was as if no one else in the crowd existed, as if the whole sermon had been written for her alone, which (the scribes later realized, with a kind of trembling) it had been, and also for each of them, and also for every one of us reading this now. The Holy Snail considered her question for what the scribes estimate was three days, though they admit their timekeeping had grown unreliable. Then she pressed one final mark into the stone, very small, very close to where the woman was standing, so that the woman had to kneel to read it.
There is always more.
Come back slowly and you will find it.
You will find the stranger you missed.
You will find the love you were too rushed to give.
You will find that every path spirals back to the beginning,
and the beginning is always now,
and now is always time to start again.
I will be here.
I have always been here.
Come.