Attending to Sundays

29 Tuesday Nov 2011

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What is it about church that gets into a person’s blood, that makes them put aside their Sunday paper or doings to attend?

Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s God.  At least, not for me.  If two years of abstinence from church has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t need church to find God or to experience the Holy.

I sense God everywhere.  In the everyday. The sunrise, for instance.  Or sunset.  Sometimes in a bite of buttered toast.  Or the smell of rain — especially this year.  The smell of a newborn — always.  Looking into a dog’s soft eyes.  Laughter.  Tears.  Hugs.  Hope.  Joy.  Beauty.  Truth.  Forgiveness.  God is in whatever it is that makes my heart sing, in that which makes me stand in attention and awe.

So if not God, then what?  Well, there is the pastor.  And the sermons — most which I can’t recall an hour after hearing them.  Here it is Tuesday and I’m wracking my brain for Sunday’s topic — surely it was about Advent — I know I listened.  But all I can remember is what the preacher looked like and what he sounded like.  Not a word he said.

Ah, but there are others words for which I do have a soft spot in my heart.  All that rich liturgy — and why wouldn’t I? — being a writer of sorts, there’s something a mite powerful about uttering ancient words passed down through the centuries by those who first heard them spoken by the Christ — or his Apostles — which they recited over and over to ensure they got just right, so they never ever forgot the seeds of their faith.  So help them God.

For the same reason, I adore singing hymns though I can’t carry a tune.  The music, of course, is memorable.  But again, it’s the words that hold and carry such power across time and space:

“Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.  Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us.  Let us find our rest in Thee.”

Who in their right mind doesn’t wish to be free of fear and sins and guilt?  Surely we’re united in this, whether ‘churched’ or ‘un-churched.’

But as I think about it, it’s not just the words.  It’s the act of speaking and singing them in unison.  Or taking communion in unison.  Being a church-goer is about being part of something bigger than myself — sitting in the pew surrounded by others like-minded but totally different sitting in their own pews — with their own individual joys and fears and gifts and quirks.  And when church is really good and right, all these gentle souls simply fade away to leave space for communion with God.  And when that happens, even I fade away.

Something like this happened to me last Sunday.  I was in a chapel full of worshipers, and a preacher in robes in the pulpit with a booming voice  — and for a brief moment,  all I felt was God.  Afterwards —  I think it was afterwards —  I began to remember a recent conversation with my spiritual director; about how I felt Jesus, of late, had become like one of those Facebook “friends” — you know, the ones you knew and hung out with, many many lifetimes ago — that you’d all but forgotten until behold, they found you again on Facebook and asked you to become their friend.  The kind that you say yes to — or is it ‘accept’  or ‘confirm’?–  for old times sake, rather than because you believe saying ‘yes’ will make them friends again.

Well, as I was thinking about this snippet of spiritual direction confession, it came to me that I should read a book  — something contemporary, preferably fiction — where I might actually bump into Jesus and get to know him again.  To really become his friend again.  And so that’s what I’m doing.  I’m reading Margaret George’s novel, Mary Called Magdalene, which I began last Sunday.

Perhaps the best part of attending church is that one never knows what will come of it  — sort of like everyday life, when one really attends to it.

Advent Already

28 Monday Nov 2011

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Beyond my big picture window, the world dresses in blue shadows, as it does every clear day before the sun rises to yellow its world.  I sit in my same comfy chair with a cup of coffee beside me and pen and paper in my lap.  I’m suppose to be writing, but instead my eyes bounce between the view outside — to the view inside, where with help of man-made light, lives a tiny world of my making on top my coffee table — a table-scape where fake pumpkins have just given way to flickers of a winter candle.

The year revolves around the dance floor, each turn coming faster and faster, making it a struggle to keep up.   Then, just like that —  the dance slows down.   The music stops.  And I look up —  I look up  to see it’s Advent?   How in the world can Advent already be here?

Well, it is.  I know because I went to church for the first time in two years yesterday.  And to top that, I went for the best reason of all:  I wanted to.  For me, for now, It was time to wake up.  Time to crawl out of a warm bed into the cold of a morning.  Time to resume everyday life with church being part of the picture window.

And how wonderful to do just that.  To wake up to the sounds of a beloved husband snoozing.  To dogs snoring and sprawled all over the bed as if they owned it.  To listen to the swooshing heated air falling out of ducts hidden within my walls.

It’s Advent.  Advent, as in, ‘coming.’  As in Christmas is coming soon.  As in, all is well. All is calm, all is bright.  Sleep in heavenly peace.

And what’s not all calm and bright — well — Advent grants us time to prepare ourselves — to put our best faces on, so to speak —  sort of like putting a dash of red lipstick on in the rear-view mirror of the car, while waiting for a traffic light to shine green — or for some, less mobile, while sitting in a wheelchair waiting for death and two tacos from Taco Bell to come.

Still alive, though a far cry from her everyday self, that’s what my lovely mother-in-law did during yesterday’s daily visit with my husband, her son.  She put on a dash of lipstick and a few other cosmetics to make herself feel better while waiting for a couple of fast-food tacos.  Perhaps she did it to make herself feel more like her old self  — maybe to reclaim a small fragment of an everyday life she no longer owned.  Or leased.

And who knows that maybe the gloss did the trick for a while, since she and my husband enjoyed a leisurely visit for a change —  instead of one truncated by sleep, like others this past week.  But by nine o’clock, the shine must have worn off because nothing was calm or bright in Janice’s world.  We know because — completely out of character — she called my husband on the telephone to fix it.  And after failing to do it, she asked for me.

Hello.  That’s all I remember saying before she launched into a series of short whispers.

She needed to find a place to stay for a couple of days.  Her husband needed a break from his around-the-clock care-giving.  She knew her husband hated her.  Stuck in bed, she wasn’t tired.  She couldn’t sleep.  She was desperate.  Needed to get out of there.  Tonight.

I listened until she grew too tired to talk, until she had said her piece, until she wound down enough to fall into what I hope was a peaceful slumber —  in a world far removed from heavenly peace that — well better to face it — doesn’t even try to put its best face on most of the time.  Unless it’s running for office.  Or posing before a camera.  And then not always.

The call left me unsettled.  It left me feeling powerless.  It left me feeling blue.

How strange that blue skies denote happy times while feeling blue is anything but.  There is a heaviness to blue.  But thank God, not so heavy to keep the sun from climbing the sky to lighten life up a bit. For the calendar to chug along its way to the light of Christmas Day.

Real light, true light — why it’s enough to warm a soul from the inside out —  to set a face aglow.  No lipstick required.

Advent Already?   Yes.  Advent Already.  Amen.  Amen.

Come what may.

Habits to Dreams

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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The patterns of our lives reveal us.  Our habits measure us.  Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real.”                    — Mary Oliver
 

I enjoy Mary’s Oliver’s prose — as much or more than her Pulitzer-prize winning poetry.

Even when the full meaning of a particular passage is beyond me — like that last line about habits and dreams — I take pleasure in what I do understand.  Like a small child at a Disney Pixar film, I don’t worry that others — with wider experience and better minds — will receive more than me.  And who knows but that maybe, in some mystical way, my spirit absorbs what mind fails to grasp, since Oliver’s words fill me with hope of a better world.  And a better me.

Sometimes it’s good to tarry over words, to not speed-read through life.  Sometimes I linger over language with little choice — as I do every time I encounter a sentence that unites any form of the words ‘dream’ and ‘reality.’  Who knows why I wonder.  What is it about these words — that their combined weight stops me in my tracks, at least within my interior world?  And this, no matter how used and arranged to convey thought.  Yet, I take comfort that in the exterior world, a blinking yellow traffic light cautioning me to slow down works to similar effect.

This hasn’t always been so.  A reminder of a different reality sits on my desk, near my computer — an old photograph of Cousin Deb and me, taken by my Aunt Carol.   As most old images do, this one bears a date stamp in the white frame surrounding it telling its age.   It reads September 1957.   Deb was three.   I wasn’t yet two.  And poor Deb’s doll, probably younger than both of us, looked older than its years.

This wasn’t the photo Aunt Carol wished to give me last August, the one Sis and she and I spent hours looking for.  But I suppose she gave it to me anyway, to serve as an icon of remembrance — to help me remember myself as a young child.  Perhaps even to help me remember her.  But most of all, to help me remember her favorite, oft-told story of me that  —  though she tells it better  — goes something like this:

One day, when I was not much older than that pictured child above,  I turned up at her front door unexpected.  She opened the door.  Stepped outside to see who had brought me.  To find no one.  When she focused her attention back on me, I told her what had brought me. “I’ve come to play with my cousin.”  As if running away from my young father  — who was busy visiting with the shopkeeper of the local fruit stand a couple of blocks away — was no cause for alarm.

Strange how Aunt’s Carol’s recounting her memory of that day stirred my own to life, for I now remember walking down the street from the market, then crossing a bridge, wondering if I was on the right track. But too young to fear — too young to know I was throwing caution to the wind — I plowed on, knowing all would work out.  Because the line between dreams and reality is all but invisible in a young child’s life.

Running away to chase a dream was something I did more than once as a child; it wasn’t difficult with Daddy left in charge.  Unlike Carol, who was always immersed in reality, Daddy lived in a dream world of his own making. But no matter how different, they were close in other ways that mattered more.  Surviving a tough childhood, they had learned to watch after one another.  And in some ways, that never stopped — as I learned a few months after Daddy’s death —  when Carol shared how Daddy was always after her to give up smoking.  If not for her sake, then his, he told her.  He didn’t wish to be left behind.

It took years.  But Daddy’s hopes and dreams waited for Carol to catch up.  Only later did I learn she quit smoking the day Daddy quit life.  She went cold turkey, as they say, without special aids.  Without much rhetoric.  Without thought of consequences.  Why the way she let go of that habit — to allow her reality to converge with Daddy’s old dream — was almost childlike.

Maybe this scrapes at the reality of Oliver’s dreamy last sentence.  But if not, those words with their weighty meanings will wait for me to catch up.