Churching

Yesterday was a long, teary day. I'm not sure what set it off--though oddly, perhaps, it may have been urged along by having not quite enough to do, moment to moment on a busy Sunday. There was a lot of emotion on display, here, there, and everywhere, and insufficient distraction.

Or maybe it was something I read and thought and talked over with myself before leaving for church. I'm reading "Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light," by Rachel Marie Stone, and inevitably it's led me back to retelling birth stories--stories of my children's births--sometimes to others, more often, to the couch and the easy chair across the living room.

I won't start in on the stories here, though they are stories worth telling--well-crafted by this point, inflected to serve as prophecies for the people those babies have become, or became: Kris, the longed-for, with the long labor; Eliza, the smart and beautiful daughter, diagnosed with Down syndrome; Kurt, the thoughtful and self-contained philosopher, even at birth.

What I was remembering, I think, early yesterday was the dark place one goes to in labor, the powerful rushes of contractions, the painful sensations of the uterus opening, the powerful mechanics of a baby moving down the birth canal and under the pelvic bone and out onto the breasts of a delirious mother.

Probably I should not go to church in that state. Every little thing that follows can hurt when you're in a state like that, and Western liturgy was not designed to affirm female life experience. I don't wish to debate that right now, because debating in and of itself is part of the problem.

Skip to the end of my church day--which was the Carl Schalk descant to "O Day Full of Grace." Vowels and consonants, I told myself, my strategy-of-choice for emotional spots in music. Just sing the sounds, not the words. But my mind snapped back to my son Kris's death last summer already as  I sang "When we on that final journey go," and the gut-it-out low notes that followed for "We'll gather in song, our hearts aglow," were the end of me.

Powerful feelings. Powerlessness. Was the Spirit present?

I pray she was.

May evening

I'm sitting in my backyard typing up a cheat sheet for junior high students performing Finian's Rainbow. It's a cool show, with singable, stylish songs originally from 1947, but it's not one of those shows where the story is thoroughly integrated into the songs. So it takes a little studying to know what comes next. The kids won't know it, but putting together the cheat sheet about who has to be where is as much for my benefit (I'm the director) as for theirs.

It's almost dark and the birds are singing good night. It's only my second night outside this spring. People walk their dogs. Just watched a man in a dress shirt use the flashlight on his phone to help pick up dog poop. High tech, low tech--we're all these things these days. If this were a fancier, newly remodeled backyard, I'd probably have a charging station coming up out of the ground underneath my patio umbrella. Alas, I don't, so this will be a short post.

I think I hear a rotary, push mower going a couple yards over, speaking of low tech, or low-tech nostalgia. I tried one of those for a summer, then bought a new electric mower.

It's good to be out in the spring air. With sounds. the occasional neighbor walking by, soft, quiet darkness.

It was a long winter. It is a much-longed-for spring.