“Forty-five minutes to Ålesund,” the Rev says, “depending on how you drive.”

“How do you want me to drive?” I say.

“Rask,” he says. “Fast.”

On a narrow road in rural Norway, I am driving at forty kilometres an hour. Reverend Hansen-Bang has been quiet for the last few hours. Which was lovely – a pleasant break from the lectures on politics and history, and the interrogations about why I’m single, why I’ve abandoned the church, and what on earth I believe in now.

“But…” I say.

“Hva?”

“I’m liking the slowness. I can really take things in.”

“The faster you go, the more you see.”

I’ve been soaking in the endless shades of green flowing by in a blur of beauty – the quiet consolation of chlorophyll. But in me – bees – looking for flowers, hungry for nectar, far from home. My whole body is buzzing. It’s not coffee. Didn’t have one today. And it’s not the hum of the car, that’s physical, this is more metaphysical.

In the centre console, between the Rev and me, lie my dad’s old fountain pen and my journal, its dog-eared pages a kennel for the whinings of my black dog.

Reverend Hanson-Bang is my great uncle, sometimes he’s great, sometimes he just grates. I’m just a Hanson, no Bang – both in name and character. And even though we live continents apart, since my dad died, we’ve been catching up for road trips.

We’re heading to Ålesund, which is just a name on a map to me, a small city hovering on the coast of my dreams. There, Reverend Hansen-Bang and I are attending a spiritual retreat: The Opening Heart – three days of stillness, singing and sharing. Not my choice. He insisted. I relented. I still find consolation in the routines and rituals of religion, but now, instead of Christ being at the centre of my galaxy, there is a black hole around which everything revolves. I still pray, but only to that great void.

“Can we listen to some music? Like Madonna?” the Rev says.

“No. I want the quiet.”

“What about Kylie Minogue?”

“How are you so gay and still a reverend?”

“How are you so smart and still irreverent?”

“No, seriously.”

“It’s just not been such a big thing. I love God, I love men. I love the Body of Christ and I love the body of Chris Hemsworth. I love good theology and I love good hair. Is that so weird?”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” I say. “And I know how far you would go for good hair!” I look to him and tap my scalp just to the left of my widow’s peak.

He knows what I’m talking about. It’s family legend.

Back in the eighties, a young, handsome, golden-locked priest from Norway, with a hairline fast retreating, travelled to Thailand. There, a clinic was offering a revolutionary treatment at a bargain basement price. The operation: taking small crescents of skin from high on the nape and transplanting them on to the front of the scalp, on each side of the widow’s peak. The operation went well, and for a year or so, all was good – the lush, vigorous growth of the transplants restored his original hairline. But over the following years, his hairline kept receding and the balding intensified – except – for those two tufts of hair. They looked like puppy ears, or bonus eyebrows, high and bushy. In the nineties, he took to shaving his whole head.

“What’s the spiritual meaning of balding?”

“It shows transcendence.” he says, “I’m beyond the need for hair.”

I start musing: “What hairstyle will you have in Heaven? And will your hair keep growing? And does a person keep growing and learning and evolving?”

“Are you asking if there is evolution in Heaven?”

“I s’pose.”

“God moves—”

“Don’t say ‘in mysterious ways’!”

“No, I was going to say – God moves… between imminence and transcendence in a dance we perceive only in echoes and shadows. But I will say that hair grows in mysterious ways.” 

“Especially on your head,” I say.  I come to a stop sign. I stop.

“Come on,” the Rev says.

Looking over to give him a raised eyebrow, I notice through the passenger window a goshawk hovering low over the field next to the car. Its wings are a blur of movement, its head as still as stone.

I stare.

“What,” he says, “is your problem?”

I point.

He turns and sees the bird hovering.

In that moment, time itself begins to hover. Nothing moving. The car – stationary.  The Rev and I – stationary. My journal and pen – stationary.

“So still,” I whisper.

“Nothing’s really still,” the Rev says.

“Well…” I say, “it feels still.”

“Pffff,” he splutters. “Your feelings again. So many damn feelings.”

“I’m not going to apologise—”

“Nei, sorry,” the Rev cuts in. “Have whatever feelings you want. I don’t want to get into that again. I just want to say everything’s in motion, even if you can’t feel it.”

“Yeah, I s’pose.”

“Even though the car’s not moving, petrol’s still being injected, and the crankshaft’s still cranking, at what—,” he leans over to read the tachometer, “nine hundred revs per minute but we’re not going anywhere.”

Still watching the goshawk hovering, I’m still, and still buzzing.

“Why aren’t we moving?” the Rev asks.

“Because everything’s already in motion apparently,” I say. “And apparently, I’m having too many feelings and apparently I don’t feel like moving anywhere.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” the Rev says. “I’m just saying, scientifically, everything’s in motion.”

“Well, I’m saying, scientifically, you’re relentless and pedantic.”

“Well, let me be relentless and pedantic AND scientific! You seem to think men of faith cannot be scientific as well!” 

“No…,” I half-heartedly protest.

“I presume you know,” the Rev continues, “within your body, just about every cell, is right now exchanging molecules and amino acids and ions through endocytosis and exocytosis and gap junctions, and even when you’re not thinking – which seems to be often – your neurons are endlessly exchanging electrochemical messages with each other, and even though your neurons are so close together, they never touch – neurons never touch.”

“I didn’t know that and that’s actually quite interesting.”    

“Tusen takk, my boy,” he says with a mocking head bow.

“Neurons never touch,” I muse.

“Their synapses stand before each other like lovers on opposite sides of a window,” he says, “palms to the glass.”

“I like that,” I say. “It feels like loneliness is embedded within us.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch,” he says.

The goshawk moves to the left, peering into the long grass with that unyielding predatory focus – its blood is up. My blood is coursing through the river systems of my body, rushing to my face, filling capillaries in my cheeks.

“And you know,” the Rev says, “you are filled with hydrogen atoms that have hooked up with oxygen atoms that manifest asH-two-O – ninety-two percent of your blood – and each of these atoms are circumnavigated by electrons traveling at eight million kilometres an hour.”

Thoughts begin flashing through my mind: How am I not flying? How am I not a god? How am I still holding this body and this life together?

After a beat, I say, “That’s obvious.”

“Well, good,” says the Rev. “And that’s just movement on a micro scale. On a macro scale, this entire Norwegian landmass is inching its way north, and our blessed planet is pirouetting through the void of space at one hundred and ten thousand kilometres an hour.”

“Of course.”

The hive of my flesh, the bee-swarm of my thoughts, and the honey of my hopes are surging through the fabric of time itself from one unrecoverable second to the next – buzzing with a sense of existential vertigo. I keep staring at the goshawk – so still, and yet so frenetically in motion. That I am stopped at this stop sign, is at best a tiny percentage of the truth. I have stopped, enough for any Norwegian cop to acknowledge I have obeyed the signage, but really, stopping is an illusion. There is no stopping. There is only un-perceived motion.

“Kan vi komme oss i gang, vær så snill!”

“What?”

“Can we get moving, please!”

“We never stopped moving, did we?” I say, as I switch the engine off and hop out of the car. I glance side-to-side. No cars. I haven’t seen another car on these country roads for nearly half an hour. Around me all the fields seem to roll into each other with competing tones of green. The smoothly curved hills are pierced with sharp pines or softened with shrubbery and in the distance there are high mountains with stylish winter caps.

I walk over to the very centre point of the crossroads, and stand there, slowly turning 360^o, stopping to stare down each stretch of road. The Rev is still sitting in the car, throwing some words in my direction that I can’t hear, and don’t want to.

The road I’ve been traveling down stretches on for a few hundred metres more before dipping out of sight, and the crossing road seems to emerge from one green fog of flora and disappear into another, while the road behind streaks back like an affirming tick.

I keep turning – left, right, forward, back – but these terms begin to lose their meaning, as each road could be left or right, each direction forward or back.

I stop to watch the hovering goshawk. Its wings and tail continually re-adjust, but its head seems magically locked in place, as if held by some invisible scaffold.

And I feel a sudden pressing ache – talons closing over my soft, fleshy heart – envy! This bird is living this moment with such clear purpose; it has a singularity of focus and a simplicity of desire. I ache for such things! So often I feel like I’m the skittering, scampering prey, scrambling blind through a tangle of stalks and sticks, flinching from threatening shadows.

In a single, sweeping arc, the goshawk shifts to a new spot over the field, hovering just metres above the grass.

The goshawk dives.

Hawk-eyed, I watch to see it emerge.

A gentle wind ripples over the fields.

A small cloud passes in front of the sun.

The goshawk is nowhere to be seen.

Presumably it’s gorging itself, safely hidden in the grass, or somehow it flew away, low and undetected.

As I stand in the middle of a crossroads, seemingly locked in place, I remember standing at another crossroads, at the front of a church at the end of a service in the Eastern Suburbs Bible-belt of Melbourne. Anyone who wanted prayer could walk down to the front of the small hall. So, I did. I was open, open as I could be, to the divine speaking into my life. An earnest, motherly woman with lemon ear-studs listened to my sour story – dad dying, crazy crying, endless why-ing. She prayed over me, and then, in the low-key prophetic style of Aussie Baptists she ended by giving me a verse from Isaiah:

He will raise you up on eagle’s wings…

I literally grimaced.

In that moment, I felt no consoling gust of love from the Holy Spirit to elevate my soul, all I felt was a woman grasping at low-hanging fruit – easy answers to band-aid the sprawling wound of my grief.

He will raise you up on eagle’s wings…

I have a disgust for clichés – dead metaphors – they spoil all the sweet and juicy words around them, they are rotting fruit on the vines of language.

In the echo chamber of my old faith there was always some answer from God, or what I thought was God. To my queries, hollered out within the high stone walls of my beliefs, I still got answers, albeit in ever diminishing tones:

“Should I go?” —go—go—go—

“Should I fly?” —aye—aye—aye—

“I want to know!” —no—no—no—

In that moment, at the front of the church, with hollow prayer in my ear, a God-void began opening up inside me, walls and floors falling away until there was nothing left to lean on, nothing left to hold me up, and nothing left to reflect even the tiniest whisper, or the loudest scream.

He will raise you up on eagle’s wings…

And now, months later, I have still felt no raptor-lift from the divine. And right at this moment, I suspect I – myself – need to be the eagle, and maybe the only ‘He’ to raise me up is me.

The goshawk has disappeared. Still no cars. Still the Rev sitting in the passenger seat with a baffled look on his face. Can an eagle ever emerge within me?

I take in a long, slow breath, imagining wings opening up inside my chest. I hold still, holding breath, holding the image of wings within… until the whole scene collapses in the emptying rush of a gusty sigh.

Sometimes it’s just so damn easy for me to spin and dive and swoop through words and thoughts and dreams. And often, at such times, momentarily, my body is left behind. Such is this moment. My body frozen at the very centre of a crossroads.

In my peripheral vision, the Rev is waving at me. Waving and pointing. I follow his finger – a classic Ford Thunderbird heading straight for us brings me back to earth. I run to the car, jump in, slam the door, turn the key, and put my foot down.

We fire down the road.

“What the hell were you doing?”

“Just thinking… and growing some wings,” I say.

“Well, you can flap a little slower now,” the Rev says.

“What?”

“Slow. Down. The cops are brutal on speeding in Norway.”

I pull my foot off the accelerator and let the car coast.

In such a way, Reverend Hansen-Bang and I, not too fast and not too slow, coast on to the coast, mostly downhill, on to the dream of Ålesund, advancing towards a retreat.

I reach across to my dad’s pen, hold it, roll it in my hand, think of him, it’s a habit I’ve taken to. And despite my lack of faith, I can’t help but imagine him flying, silver-winged and free, somewhere just above me.

“Do you know where the name Ålesund comes from?” the Rev says.

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“It’s Old Norse, ‘åle’ meaning ‘eel’, and ‘sund’ meaning sound, as in a narrow stretch of water.”

“Eel sound.”

We sit quiet for a while, me watching the road, the Rev staring out the window.

“Do eels make a sound?” I ask.

“Of course,” the Rev says. “You think human beings are the only ones chatting away with each other?”

We fall into mute wondering as the sky is repainted from cyan to indigo. The buzz in my body has settled into stillness and silence. Do I even need this retreat?

I’m not using the car’s nav system, I’m trusting the signs. The road is narrow, and on we travel to the narrow stretch of water where the eels are having a chit-chat, gossiping and joking, or maybe, there’s some eel sermonising – the truth is slippery but he’s had a revelation – he’s addressing a swarm of eels caught in an eel trap: “You’re destined for more than slimy bald skin, in heaven you’ll have flowing locks! But small is the gate, and narrow the creek that leads to hair, and only few find it.”

Image: Polina Kuzovkova