Sanctuary

sanctuaryThe sunlight streams in through the massive stained glass window over the choir loft illuminating the blues and purples of the cross, the white and gray dove flying in the center. During the sunny days of the spring and summer months, a beam of sun comes through the skylight and finds me on my third pew from the back. The choir and people on the stage appear to have a “faded” filter until the sun moves further across the sky about ten minutes before the benediction.

There is a rhythm to the service. One of the youth walks forward and lights the altar candles, opens the Bible, and then the choir proceeds in. They split at the foot of the altar, half going left around the pulpit, the other half going right around the lectern.

We – the twenty to forty scattered in the pews, the half a dozen in the choir loft – sing mostly old hymns. We join together to say the Lord’s Prayer and after the ushers collect the offering we rise and sing the doxology. Another song and then someone reads a scripture from that week’s lectionary. We all call back, “Thanks be to God” as the reader closes the Bible with, “This is the word of the Lord.” After the sermon, the candles are snuffed and as we rise to sing the benediction response the smoke from the burnt out candles inevitably drifts towards me and I inhale a bit of it and cough out the last few bars of the song.

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When I was 17 I took my first plane ride to London, England with about a dozen other teens and a couple of adults from my church. We were going on a mission trip to work among refugees living in North London. That Sunday we went down to the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral. Built hundreds of years prior, the building was grand and impressive – filled with ornate stone and glass work. The missionary who was hosting our trip explaining to our Southern Baptist group that the service would likely be a bit different than we are used to, but to try and really pay attention to what was happening.

I was a very assured 17 year old, confident in my beliefs.  We arrived early and our group occupied the front row of the cathedral. I turned around to watch the procession of men in robes walking down the aisle – holding a cross and swinging a ball of incense. They sang in a language I did not understand and I found their short homily uninspired.

I felt bad for them as they read through a call-and-response, certain that these often-repeated words could hold no meaning. When they called people forward for communion, I remained in my seat. I don’t remember if we were “allowed” to partake in this Anglican observance or not, but regardless I was not going because they used wine. And everyone knew Christians don’t drink.

And yet, as I sat there in that sanctuary, taking in the ornate art of the building, listening to the songs and scripture and words, and smelling the faintest incense in the air I heard an unmistakable voice inside my head saying, “I am here too.”

I squirmed in my seat; my assurances cracked ever so slightly that Sunday in London.

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I left my church about seven years later. It had slowly become a place that I didn’t fit. I left, slowly, and then definitively. For a few years – my life was fairly transient, so while I found churches to attend, I never settled too deeply into any church. Then I made a move that I knew was more permanent, or at least more long-term.

A firm believer of the importance of the local church, I landed in the second-closest church to my front door. A church with the massive stained glass and the beautiful woodwork. A church where we say and sing some of the same words over and over and over again every single week.

The one where the smells of candles literally take my breath away.

Each week I am astounded at the way that I need to say, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.” I need to say it out loud. I need to say it with community. I need to hear the excited voice of the children rising above the controlled tone of the adults.  I need the moments of silence that come each week – moments that are sometimes punctuated by the rhythmic hiss of an oxygen tank, reminding me of the life in that room and the lineage of faith. I need to stand and sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” each and every single week as I stare at rows of empty pews in front of me. I need to remember these truths as I strive to live into doubts and questions.

Almost 20 years after I rolled my eyes at the repetitive, smells and bells, of St. Paul’s Cathedral, I have learned that I need the smell of burnt-out-candle at the close of each service – an olfactory memory that triggers the acknowledgement that God is here, too.

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Nicole bio YAH

 

Alone Together (New Wilderness)

Baby…we’ve been alone too long.
Let’s be alone together –
let’s see if we’re that strong. 

Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle”  

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I forgot about Lent this year. I forgot about it even being a thing on the calendar that happens. And while I might be excused for my forgetfulness – I’m not Catholic and didn’t grow up Catholic or in a liturgical tradition – I have to admit that being oblivious to it caught me off guard.

I only remembered it when, one particular Wednesday in February, while at the supermarket – a bottle of wine in one hand and my iPhone in the other – a woman passed me with an ash cross smeared across her forehead. Hazily noting her gray smudge, I was seized by, well, not guilt (“Protestant Guilt” is a topic for another time), but a sudden burst of surprise.

I paused in the aisle, looked at the bottle of wine and a curious ambivalence surged through me. On one hand, given the pace of my life the past few months, I knew I could benefit from a contemplative period of intentional, spiritual reflection, if not also a detox and fast from you name it.

And then I decided to forego Lent. I decided not to indulge myself this year.

Right, indulge myself. I know. That seems implausible. It contradicts the spirit of the season, on one hand. But let me explain.

Ever since I first learned about Lent in my mid-to-late-twenties, I wanted on board the Lent train. Not even wanted on board. Knew I was already on board – one of its passengers.

After all, for as long as I can remember, I’ve adored all the wilderness imagery evocative of the season. Whether the spare, stark pictures of U2 on its Joshua Tree album, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” or every Tatooine scene in the Star Wars films, desert wanderings and joshua treewilderness imagery and references have always spoken to something deep at the heart of me.

For as long as I’ve known about and observed Lent, I’ve delighted, too, in its meditations on death and mortality. My lonesome inner-adolescent – still carrying a torch for the bummed out musings of The Smiths, The Cure, and Tears for Fears – can’t resist feeling an albeit maudlin affection for the overtly melancholy tone of the season.

So, for many years, I’ve anticipated – with a kind-of adult version of the excitement kids possess for Christmas – that one Wednesday towards winter’s end, when the church lights go dim and the organ inclines towards slow songs in a minor key. More than that, however, I think I’ve reveled, too, in how Lent affords me – a shy, introverted individual by nature – righteous permission to avoid the hustle of the marketplace and everyone passionately competing for attention from one or another soapbox there. While it’s certainly not written into its script, or part of The Book of Common Prayer, Lent enables a guy like me to justify stealing away into literal or metaphorical prayer closets, solely in the interests of escaping any undesirable or annoying chaos or hullabaloo that rubs me the wrong way. And always under the guise of a spiritual endeavor.

I know it must sound strange, on one hand. Many good-hearted, pure-intentioned loved ones and mentors admirably and enviably enter into this contemplative season. It’s only recently that I began sheepishly second-guessing my impulses, my fine-tuned behavioral patterns and the creature comforts these serve.

I blame happiness. Joy. Will go out on a limb and accuse Love of revealing a shortsightedness on my part. I’ll also blame an altogether bewildering and, for me, mostly uncharted territory I only know to name as Relationship.

joshua tree yikesTaken together, these, for me, add up to prove an altogether different kind of wilderness. Actual wilderness, perhaps. The kind that Tolkien’s hobbits dread, that explorers for centuries have strived to tame, erase, or domesticate. Relationship, for me, has long remained a region too frightening to bravely explore – even, regrettably, while “in a relationship” with someone. Relationship too frequently proves thoroughly terrifying ground, a terrain more distressing than any postcard-esque desert landscape or overabundance of welcome monastery silence. More than any solo adventure I’ve undertaken, relationship leaves me thoroughly exposed, and so also at perpetual risk, often underdressed for its dangerous and unpredictable weather patterns, unprepared for its unexpected turns, its steep climbs, and deep, shadowy valleys.

That bottle of wine I was holding on Ash Wednesday? I was buying that for dinner later, to drink with a woman I’ve spent nearly every Wednesday with since mid-August of last year. In fact, somehow, sometime last autumn, my Wednesdays earned the status of Friday, solely given the degree of excitement with which I look forward to seeing this person.

So, you might pardon me if ashes and meditations on my mortality were the last thing on my mind this year.

When we first started talking late last summer, we certainly didn’t see landing here nearly eight months later, together, in a strange, wild place called Relationship. One evening, we simply and unsuspectingly engaged in a memorable conversation. We decided to pick up where we left off a couple weeks later. The conversation continues today.

Meanwhile, I can’t help trusting that my otherwise predictable flights into the desert – the oasis of those welcome, lush silences, and the “do-able,” time-limited fasts from whatever – can wait for now. These aren’t going anywhere. They’ll rest ready for me if I need to return to all things overly familiar down the line.

That night, as I walked towards the checkout counter, the mystifying opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” poem came to mind: 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves… 

I wondered then – bottle of red wine in my hand on Ash Wednesday, longing to lean into the good evening ahead – do I have what it takes? Can I find it in me to bravely, wildly, and only love what I love?

Something unfamiliar whispers that it’s worth the risk. That the journey could prove epic.

SeasideSeward

Five Years Time

Five years ago, around this time, I was driving down a sunny Indiana road under a canopy of tree branches adorned with bright green leaves.

It was spring in Indiana, and it felt like the return of the humidity that seemed to go somewhat dormant during the winter. It looked like stepping carefully over the worms who had found their way to every sidewalk on my small college campus. It smelled a little like decay, as the leaves from the previous fall were exposed to fresh air again.

That spring, I was knee deep in a romantic relationship, the first one I’d had since my first love. I have never cried so much about anything as I did during that relationship, but when the leaves turn green and the light filters through them, I don’t think about the tears, I think about those Sundays driving home from the sweet little Episcopal church I was learning to love, listening to a mix cd he’d made for me.

There was a song we both loved by Noah and the Whale called Five Years Time. It’s about a relationship and wondering about the future.

In five years time I might not know you

In five years time we might not speak

In five years time we might not get along

In five years time you might just prove me wrong

Every time I hear that song, I think about that spring in Indiana. Part of me wanted us to find a way to make it work, just as I do with every relationship.

That spring was the beginning of many lasting love affairs for me. It was during those months that I first slipped between the pages of Harry Potter, devouring the series in just a few short weeks. I listened to the music of Over the Rhine for the first time, playing “Drunkard’s Prayer” and “Born”  on repeat through headphones in my dark dorm room, while my roommate slept. I began to practice yoga, tentatively, stretching muscles I hadn’t known existed. My crush on liturgy blossomed into a commitment.

Five years have passed and I am still wild about those things, if not about that person. The song Five Years Timeproved to be prophetic, we don’t know each other now, we haven’t spoken since that clear summer day when he called and told me he didn’t see a future for our relationship.

Recently, I was talking with someone about the way the seasons remind me of relationships. The first day of spring marks the birthday of a long lost friend who was once very close, the winter and new year remind me of a relationship I chose to end, and the freedom it brought. It seems that every season carries a context now. There are no seasons without memories, without twinges of sorrow, or joy, often intermingled. Memory triggers are everywhere, unavoidable. I’m doing my best to embrace them when they come, rather than shrinking back from the emotions they provoke.

When I graduated from college, I wanted a way to mark the occasion, to remember what it felt like to be in that moment. After doing a little research, I purchased a bottle of wine I liked a lot at the time (something I’d had on a promising first date). I wrote instructions on a sticky note, telling me to open the bottle in May of 2015. That bottle has sat in my wine rack all this time, waiting until the time is right. Soon, I will take it out and open it, allowing it to breathe in glasses before taking a sip.

I hope that five years have improved the taste of that season, but I won’t know until it’s open, sliding warmly down my throat.

How to Measure Time

On Sunday mornings, in preparation for the arrival of small band of 1st and 2nd graders, I make sure a great green felt arrow points to the right small rectangular piece of felt. There are 52 pieces of felt to represent every Sunday of the year in four colors: green, purple, white, and red. They form a circle on the wall like a two-dimensional stonehenge. The most numerous of those felt squares are great green growing Sundays. Next come purple preparation Sundays that come before the great white felt mysteries of Christmas and Easter. Easter has seven white Sundays. The mystery of Easter is such that we have to ponder it for a long time. Almost hidden, where 5:26 would be on a clock, is red hot Pentecost. Red hot Pentecost Sunday is a favorite with the 1st and 2nd graders. They all know that tongues of fire came on red hot Pentecost. We all say, “SSSS” like we’re frying bacon, when we talk about red hot Pentecost.

Even without a great circle calendar, as a preliterate kid I could recite these seasons of liturgical church life. It wasn’t too hard, usually the different colored stoles the priest wore gave it away. Pentecost happened towards the end of spring but before school got out for summer. After Pentecost, came VBS, summer camp, the choir summer musical in between swim team practices, meets, and waiting for the ice cream truck.

Soon after school started and the leaves changed to yellow, orange and red, we celebrated All Saint’s Eve. The entire church was transformed into a playhouse for kids, with crafts, cakewalks, mazes, duck ponds, and face painting. After All Saint’s Eve and its hayrides, two-pound bags of candy and glow-sticks, church entered the purple season of Advent. During Sunday school, all the kids would go to the undercroft (a large fellowship hall complete with stage) and make crafts for an “Advent Make and Take.” Leftover evergreens from trees and trimmings turned into advent wreaths. Plain candles became works of sequin, glitter, and wax stickers. Clothespins became angels with curly hair and perfectly sharpied o-shaped mouths.

The altar guild meanwhile would transform the church with festive evergreen wreaths the size of cars, neatly tied with red ribbons. The live nativity would be set up outside for the Christmas Eve service. With the brick walkways covered in hay or snow, the holy family (actors from the congregation) processed in under a tapestry canopy held by fellow acolytes in long white robes.

How To Measure TimeThe green and red of Christmas decorations would disappear as magically as they arrived, right before Epiphany. The following dreary days of winter lead into another season of purple, my favorite season: Lent. Ash Wednesday is to this day, as it was when I was a morbid nine year old, my favorite service. So solemn, so somber, so deep and beautiful. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The bigger youth groups kids spread rumors that the ash placed on our foreheads was last year’s Palm Sunday branches—a rumor I never confirmed, though there was a catalogue, kept in a cupboard in the sacristy, where they could order ashes, along with acolyte robes and communion wafers.

After Lent, as daylight increased and so did the temperatures, Easter arrived. My brother and sister and I would decide whether we would serve as torch bearers on Palm Sunday, or chalice-bearers at Maudy Thursday’s foot washing service. Some years we would acolyte on Easter Sunday and wear new crosses over our white robes. And every year they would nag us about wearing the proper footwear: NO FLIPFLOPS or TENNIS SHOES.

And after the white of Easter and the red of Pentecost, the church year reset. I would acolyte at weddings and at funerals. I learned by heart the prayers, scriptures, and rhythms of each rite of worship. I knew where the extra robes were for when I spilled wine down my robe in the middle of communion (or the robes of the adult lay ministers; pouring is a tricky business). I read Prayers of the People at the lectern. I taught Sunday school. I lit candles before the service and extinguished them at the end.

My family left this church when I left for college. I’ve never gone back. I’m not sure why and I’m not sure I need to. Because in a way, I don’t think I ever left. How can I leave time itself? The seasons of the church are always there, no matter where I find myself worshiping. I am always home on Sunday, in great green growing Sundays, purple preparation Sundays or the holy, mystical mysterious Sundays of Christmas and Easter. They are the only home I’ll ever need. For they are to me the liturgy of Faith, the hope and the promise of the world to come.

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Hudspeth_Family_0018_2“How to Measure Time” is by Sarah Hudspeth. Sarah is a mom of two kids full of life and mischief, a wife of a grad student, and a middle school math teacher for students with learning needs. Coffee is her favorite, as are books, Twitter (@eviesmomhuds), and any day spent outside. Sarah lives in Durham, North Carolina and eats extremely well due to food trucks, her garden, and the eat-everything-local movement.