On transitions and the Holy Spirit

Mar 01, 2025

A month ago, I sat at my desk working from home. Mired in documents and tabs on my computer, not having seen the sun all day, I heard the strangest sound. It crept in from the periphery of my awareness until I realized it was something I hadn’t yet heard in New York: church bells.

Raised Episcopalian, church bells are a sound of my life. Every Sunday growing up, I sat in the pew next to my mom, repeated the words, inhaled incense on special holidays, carried the candles as an acolyte when I was old enough. Despite evolutions in my beliefs over the years, the Episcopal church is a safehaven where I know to find the same, friendly old liberal welcoming me, whether in Tennessee, Washington DC, or Scotland.

As church bells rang in Manhattan, all of the worlds of my life blended together. Winter Sundays in Tennessee, fog so thick you can’t see fifty feet ahead, and hamburgers and chocolate peanut butter cookies from the university town’s dining hall. Week days in high school and rushing to the chapel amidst a chorus of Southern boy drawls. Quiet days in Scotland, the streets consumed by a hollow grey and the cry of seagulls only making the world feel more empty. In those moments of feeling so far away, church bells tethered me to a former reality, one with chocolate peanut butter cookies and my parents following me down the pebbled sidewalk in the cold, misty afternoon light.

Early on in my days in New York, I found that an easy conversation topic is how difficult it is to live here. New acquaintances cling to these as small talk: rent prices, slow trains, jobs people hate but stay in, how horrible the winter is, the smells. If the city is so terrible, why remind ourselves of it in casual conversation? Why do we flock here? Why do we stay? Why do we all simultaneously hate and love New York City?

I was in my building’s laundry room one morning when it all came to a head. Rushing to get back to my apartment before I started hyperventilating next to the folding table, I desperately punched the >CLOSE DOOR< button on the elevator and hoped I wouldn’t meet anyone on the ride from the basement and the 4th floor. Safely in my sublet, I came to a conclusion: I was moving to Wyoming.

I called up the letting agent and canceled an apartment deposit. Then, I called my former boss in Wyoming and asked him to save my place on the staff. Then I called my mom, who also lived in New York in her early twenties, and she said to me, “I always say, the Holy Spirit packed up and left that place a long time ago.” Her sentence affirmed that all of the worst things about New York are true. 

That weekend, I planned to fly home for my sister’s baby shower after which I was to re-pack my entire life for winter in a Rocky Mountain ski town – I don’t ski. However, the powers that be, or the New York subway system in January, graciously gave me a case of the Norovirus, and I was forced to confront my own mind during forty-eight hours in one room.

“The Holy Spirit packed up and left that place a long time ago,” bounced around in my thoughts while I called everyone I knew to ask their opinion on which major decision I should make for my life. Was the Holy Spirit – this nebulous force of God – present in the streets of New York? Not in the squished rat I artfully stepped over on Houston Street, or in the hundreds of soulless corporate salad chains dotted across the city, or in the cries of beggars as they make their way from subway car to subway car while travelers pretend they aren’t there at all.

New York is a place of extremes. It is either horribly dirty and expensive, or endlessly exciting and filled with opportunity around every corner. Perhaps New York is the yin-and-yang of American cities, and that is why we flock to it with such fascination. For every squished rat there is the best jazz bar you’ve ever been to. For every display of suffering, there is someone embarking on the dream of a lifetime. For every late train, there is a chance encounter that might just change your life.

“I always say, the Holy Spirit packed up and left that place a long time ago,” continues to drift through my mind as I cross the street in the morning rush, street salt blowing into my face and sticking to my lips. I walk to work now in the early spring sunlight, church bells ringing over the buzz of the city, and remember the many places I’ve called home. And always, for the first months or even years of being there, I felt lost. As much as finding “home” somewhere can be metaphysical, it’s also conscious and rooted in the decision to make it work, even when you find yourself crying in the laundry room.

New York is the light and the dark, the success and the struggle. Maybe the reason we love to hate it is because it is just that: in balance with the human experience itself. Would we cherish the highs if the lows were not so low? Would we resort to misery in small talk if we weren’t all here seeking the spectacular?