Advent in the Church Bathroom

In the women’s bathroom at church, there is a border of wall paper running just below the ceiling with the words, serenity, home, creativity, simplicity, and beauty on it. The words are printed in what looks like a medieval font, so there’s a seriousness to them; a sacredness to them. I read them while I’m waiting for a stall and I wonder if these are words a woman ought to strive for, ought to use in her pursuit for a Proverbs 31 woman life. Harper and Hadley are in choir practice and Jesse’s looking for cookies we bought from the Youth Group but doesn’t know where the Youth Group room is, and doesn’t have time to look for it because he has to run some Christmas errands, so we drove separate cars to church so the girls could stay at choir practice and then we will run another set of Christmas errands on the other side of town. Our home needs to be cleaned, lunches need to be made for tomorrow, outfits need to be picked out, and I’m stuck on an essay and I’m not sure how to get unstuck, and standing here in this church bathroom I’m wondering what serenity and creativity have to do with each other. I wonder if I will ever obtain simplicity in my lifetime. I think I won’t if I keep trying to write.

The last three essays I’ve published have been written under a thick blanket of doubt – the yarn weak and ripping and I don’t know if it can be mended together, no matter how much I love it, no matter how much I want to hang on to it, it seems to be disintegrating. And so these days I’m writing lonely and I’m writing faithless, but I am still writing.

One woman walks into the bathroom with a cane. “Hello,” she says to me, and her smile is so sweet that I want her to tell me everything she knows about beauty and simplicity and serenity and home. Tell me everything you know in this small bathroom with the clanging radiator and the frosted windows.

She lifts her cane onto a shelf and says, “Oh, my! These are real!” She turns to me, totally delighted to tell me a handful of sprigs with red berries on them are real. Like, what better thing could there be to know then something is alive? “They’re standing in water!” she exclaims.

“They’re beautiful,” I say because they are, but I also don’t know what else to say. I hadn’t noticed the berries. I was ruminating over my lack of simplicity.

Another woman walks in, and she goes right to the vase with the berries. “Those are real!” She says, equally pleased, and the two hover over them, not touching the berries, but their hands form a cup shape, as though they are getting ready to hold an infant’s head. “What kind of berries are they? Are they holly? No, they can’t be holly.” The two discuss why the berries couldn’t be holly berries. I don’t remember what the explanation was, but I remember the color of the berries – a red pop I hadn’t noticed until these two ladies pointed it out – and I remember their voices, like young girls at a birthday party who scored the slices of cake with the frosting flowers on them.

I left the bathroom and walked up the stairs to where the girls were practicing the song, “Light Dawns on a Weary World.” “We shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace, as all the world in wonder echoes shalom.” I could hear it from down the hallway, young voices singing about the arrival of someone notable, someone come to bring us joy and peace and wonder. Maybe it’s our job though, to allow room for the shalom we are to echo. You can’t echo it if you don’t see it in the first place.

Maybe I’m not supposed to figure out what each word has to do with the other. Maybe what it is they have in common is that they point to something alive, and understanding that, I am to say, “This is real!” Delighted and mystified, and echoing the life I see but do not always understand, and nothing more.