I spoke in the church I attend in all three of last Sunday’s services for Stewardship Sunday. Here’s what I wrote:
I’m not a seeker of answers. The same is true for definitions, and facts. When something has been tangibly and palpably proven, I tend to shrug my shoulders and wonder, “What else?”
I prefer to experience the mystery of things: my daughter, Harper, dancing in church on the evening of Ash Wednesday with women she’d called her, “new friends.” They gently mentored her through not only the steps to the dance, but what those steps symbolize. She lifted her arms and twirled to words I’m unsure she’d understand if it weren’t for the dance, and her friends.
I prefer to return to the story, as Dorothy Piatt explained to Hadley and Harper one winter morning in Montieth Hall, moments before they would take communion for the first time. “Every time you take communion, a different part of you will be ready for it,” Dorothy said. “Nobody understands all of it. You’re stepping into a mystery and you’re standing there for a while.”
I prefer to consider the Maundy Thursday in 2017. It fell on the same evening as a Michigan Spring formal and I think also a Cubs game. By then, Hadley and Harper were familiar with our drive to church, but they hadn’t seen this place nestled in Greek Row in the evening with twinkle lights, and music, red cups and ping-pong tables, girls in fancy dresses and boys in suits. “Is this college?” Hadley gasped, her head as far out of the window as she could get it.
“This is part of it,” Jesse told her.
That evening, the sanctuary grew darker as the service progressed. Symbols were taken away, and out of sight – no longer could we rely on the music, the words; the objects to guide us through what we were grasping to understand.
At the service’s end, Reverend Rogers slammed the Bible shut and Hadley and Harper both startled and watched with wide eyes as the pastors walked silently out of the sanctuary. We were left in the dark, in the silence, in the emptiness.
It was an evening that should’ve been rainy and murky and cold, but it was warm and bright and the sanctuary’s windows were open and outside a group of boys sang, “Hey Chicago, whadya say, the Cubs are gonna win today. Go Cubs, Go!”
Shouldn’t they have known? Shouldn’t we have told them about the darkness and the silence? Or did they know and they sang about baseball anyway? Is this also part of the story?
“Try to curb your violent questions,” Jeanne Murray Walker writes in her poem, “The Voice,” based on Psalm 46:10 – Be still and know that I am God. “Why not believe the beauty you see?”
The beauty of dancing to make words known, the communion I’m never sure I’m ready to accept but take anyway, the dark and the silence, the spring air that arrives unexpectedly, the voices of those who don’t question what they’ve been given but instead, relish in it, the part of the story I’m looking for, and the part of the story that finds me.
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