2013.08.11 Instead of Church—Or Was It Church?

Today is Sunday and we’re on our two weeks vacation in Nantucket.  My oldest daughter and her two teen age daughters have been here for the weekend.  The weather has been close to perfect, not too hot and not too cool. Windy for good waves but sun and sand for warmth.

So it’s Sunday.  To be honest we don’t often go to church while on vacation—not policy but preference.

Still, it was Sunday and my daughter suggested that we do a little informal prayer something for a close woman friend who is in the throes of a cancer battle. She is a valiant and bright presence and hopefully will soon be well.

So we all agreed and I was appointed the “priest.”  Dick agreed to be the camera man and  video tape our little effort so we could send it to our friend. 

We all sat outside on the back deck, dressed in our beach clothes and created a very informal set of prayers for our friend for strength, wisdom, courage, and truth, a song to the Holy Spirit, a blessing and lots of laughter and smiles and waves to our invisible friend. I’ve never dramatized a get well card before. It was a creatively spirit-filled experience with a message of love and hope.

Myself, I’d call this church at its very finest without the finery. It didn’t matter what exactly each of us believed or whether we were religious or not. We weren’t doing it for us.

A small communion gathering— well consecrated, sacramental and downright holy.

In truth, we don't go TO church, we make it.

2012.02.29 Blogoir I

Once upon a time I broke into life with the help of my mother’s pain, sweat and sorrow, and before that my father’s sperm.

Mom had planned to “give” my father a boy, a son (the holy status of sonship is the Bible’s fault—well, also the patriarchal culture’s) who looked just like him and would be named Michael McDonald.

I arrived in obvious feminine form and messed up her plans. But she “adored” me anyway, sometimes too smothery much.

My birth year was 1938, a teetery year between wars but one full of hope for prosperity and a brand new line of Buicks, soon the car of choice for my family. The date was August 7, only 6 weeks before the 1938 hurricane blasted New England, especially Long Island. After the damage was fixed we spent many summers on Long Island, the Hamptons no less.

Being born on a Sunday earned me the legacy of the rhyme, “The child that is born on the Sabbath day is blithe and bonnie and good and gay.” This descriptor did not fit my developing nature—somber, serious, solo, and shy. The rhyme described my mother who tried to bequeath me her own personality, but you really can’t manipulate a “miracle” can you?

My birth place was Manhattan in Leroy Sanitorium, a hospital name that later caused me to ask about my sanity. Spelling is everything.

I have a photo of myself in utero. You can’t see much of me through my mother’s expanded belly. She looks happy with a cigarette in her hand. She’d had 3 miscarriages before I made it out whole, a joy to behold, beautiful, a miracle. I really looked like a squished pink frog covered with black hair.

Love can see through absolutely anyone and make her beautiful.

I managed to look like Dad who gave me my name Lynda Hall Gillespie. But after that it was all down hill. I was as different from Mom as a dill pickle from a jelly donut.

Up to three all adoration was mutual, but at three the pinafore wars began. My mother had a pinafore obsession and I was already an overalls kid. The only good things about pinafores was their wings.

Mom, in spite of the miracle status and the perky personality she’d conferred on me, called me a sour puss. There’s photographic proof of that, too: Mom all smiles and me all scowls. We’re dressed alike in pinafores.

Miracle status didn’t work for me. It took an act of God to naturalize me. It also took a helluva a long time.

2011.06.05 Slow Down for Sabbath

Today in the world the weather slows us down; in fact it can bring some of us to a grinding halt, forcing us to to pay attention.

Occasionally going to Church can slow us down, praying in silence and in community, listening to lessons, sermons, or drifting free; or listening to music or your lover’s breathing next to you—or your own.

I don’t think the current measure of time is a clock. I think it is a speedometer. To wit:


Now I Become Myself
by May Sarton

Now I become myself.
It's taken
Time, many years and places;

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people's faces,

Run madly, as if Time were there,

Terribly old, crying a warning,

"Hurry, you will be dead before--"

(What? Before you reach the morning?

Or the end of the poem is clear?

Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,

Feel my own weight and density!

The black shadow on the paper

Is my hand; the shadow of a word

As thought shapes the shaper

Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place

From wish to action, word to silence,

My work, my love, my time, my face

Gathered into one intense

Gesture of growing like a plant.

As slowly as the ripening fruit

Fertile, detached, and always spent,

Falls but does not exhaust the root,

So all the poem is, can give,

Grows in me to become the song,

Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.

O,in this single hour I live
All by myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran.
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun.