“I keep my eyes open even when I can’t see & call that prayer.” (David Eileen on Vesper)
David Eileen is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue III: Vesper. They are a lesbian poet who recently crash-landed in the mountains of Virginia and are still laughing about the impact. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Black Warrior Review, and Southeast Review, with others linked at david-eileen.com. Deeply concerned with queer lineage, labor rights, and care for the planet; they would absolutely love to talk to you.
We asked three Opus II, Issue III contributors for their personal definitions of vesper: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is David Eileen’s vision of an event horizon, a bell tolling in a vacuum, a cicada’s song harsh and generous enough to wear twilight to bone…
When I talk about being raised Catholic, about the inside of church & what we did together, I don’t want you to think about religion as it’s so often made in America. Dismiss any ideas of lace-edged bobby socks or navy blazers, waking to beat the sun to the pews. While I was raised somewhat in the clean, modern Christianity of Teen Devotional Bibles & modesty seminars, the Catholicism that molded me is the archaic kind.
Let me tell you about my vespers.
Before I mangled Latin in high school classrooms, I knew its imperative verb form. Not out of love of the language, but for the music retreat every summer named Laudate, the commanding verb of praise. Really, it should be: Laudate! As in, You must praise!
For one long weekend a year at the religious center in middle Ohio, I bunked with a hundred other Catholic youth who sang or played instruments for church. Occupied all day with practice & music theory lessons, service took place in the evenings. Nighttime church, like a dog suddenly standing upright & turning a doorknob: uncanny wrong-rightness, recognizable elements recombined into something less than familiar but far from foreign.
Our prayer service, called vesper in the daily schedules hole-punched into each attendant’s binder, resembled the ritual of my childhood churchgoing, one or two services built into every week of Catholic instruction (not counting obligatory Sunday Mass, never to be missed). When us kids were lucky, school services were held in the French monks’ Taizé tradition. Most Catholic services are rightly associated with rigid calisthenics: stand, say these words, kneel, now sit, now kneel again. But that wasn’t Taizé.
Stone altar steps were draped with thick, nubby linen colored according to the liturgical season: purple, green, white. Cloth wound around oiled wood stands holding icons of saints framed by radiant halos. Their faces were drawn in right angles, with blocky features & a wide, sightless gaze: hypnotic, almost inhuman, perfect to lock eyes with as the ritual began.
Like Taizé, vespers at Laudate were meditative. We sang simple refrains to lose ourselves, rounds echoing against the walls. Music would envelope time, knitting ever thicker until we all lived inside the chant. Form & content overlapped: one chorus we sang both at school & Laudate was “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ / yesterday, today, & forever,” eight words the music director stretched for minutes on end in a perfect loop.
Unlike Taizé, vespers happened late: stained glass black, icons candlelit, saints’ eyes dancing in flicker. As teenagers devoted enough to willingly spend summer nights praying prostrate, we were solemn. Music rivered us. Our reverence often gave way to sobbing, taken by emotions that waited for darkness to emerge. Now it’s hard to know why I cried. Some things require closed eyes to feel through.
At my request, I’ve been formally excommunicated after years of chrism & ministry. I clawed my way out of the morning Mass routine, its philosophy & mandates, as though removing my name from Catholicism’s ledger would remove my senseless guilt, my original knowledge of original sin.
But I’m still in this body. I have these eyes that love candlelight, that dance with it even when they’re closed, projected colors of flesh twisting. These ears, this thick tongue, easily overcome by old hymns. Divinity hasn’t untangled from me: a mystic atheist, it’s my calling to lift up the scorned as holy. I gave up the certainty in sunlight, 8 A.M. Sunday service. But aureole, catacomb, vigil, vesper: those have stayed with me.
I hum when I step onto my porch at night. Under a new moon, song goes down & through me. I’m gathered up, folded into the dark, certain I’m not singing alone. I’m still carving out room in the evenings for the calm & safety that requires faith because it arrives without light. I make a space that has to be felt to be known &, without shame, I am felt. I am witnessed. I keep my eyes open even when I can’t see & call that prayer. I go nowhere near a church but I remember.
David Eileen’s “Dusk Story” is featured alongside twenty other pieces in Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue III: Vesper, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. The vesper issue does not arrive so much as descend: unhurried as smog or sleep paralysis, inevitable as the ouroboros’ endless coil. A shattered mirror multiplies the face of darkness, silence textured and breathing, the body made uncertain of its edges. You’ve been here before, in the dream that returns you always to the same locked room. The door opens only inward. You’ve been knocking all night. Come inside.