I sagged with exhaustion not knowing how I was going to get through this holiest of weeks, at least to Christians. Why did I ever want to get into this priestly vocation in the first place? I didn’t remember. I walked down the aisle, checking pews, gathering leftover palms. I slumped down in the last pew and closed my eyes. I could almost hear echoes of cheers—exuberant Hallelujas, or was it Hosannas, zinging about in the empty sanctuary. What is the point of all this anyway, I asked myself?
What’s the point?
My father often said, “What’s the point?” It was his favorite phrase when he felt defeated by life. I don’t think he expected an answer. In fact It was the last thing he said to me before he died. I was standing at his bedside, taking my turn in the death watch. I don’t know what any or us, his family, expected could come out of this death watch, but my mother, my younger sister, and I took turns sitting vigil at his bedside.
I stood over the bed and looked down at the haggard, pale, familiar face of Daddy, the one whose affection I’d zealously sought in competition with the martini glass, the one I’d loved all my forty-four years, no matter what. Now his dark hair splayed out over the white pillow case as he groaned out his salvation, wrestling his demons into submission. Then silence. Was he dead?
“What’s the point?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. Then, seized by a sudden wave of guilt, I took his hand and added. “But if you find out, come back and let me know.”
It took my father several more days to die. It took me several more years to mourn, and even longer to forgive my looming pastoral burnout.
Now I sat in the church asking myself his old question. What, dear God, is the point?
I closed my eyes, hoping to doze off, not into death, but into some kind of tranquility, some sweet detachment. It was then that I heard some steps, almost inaudible, as if someone were sneaking into the darkening sanctuary. I looked up. A young boy entered the sanctuary, its doors still hospitably open. I watched. He looked around as if to check his surroundings or adjust his eye to the gloom. The he walked forward toward the altar, pausing along his way to look around. I stayed quiet and watched.The boy walked all the way up the aisle and bent over. What was he after? He picked up a lone green palm. It was lying in wait at the foot of the steps up to the altar. How had I missed it?
The boy picked up the solo palm. He walked the two steps up into the Choir, and then two more steps to the high altar. He placed the palm onto that high altar, gazed up at Jesus ghoulishly nailed to a cross exalted, stood for a minute or more. I watched—breathless.
Then the boy spun around and ran back down the center aisle and out into the dusk.
©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2022
