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.