Pageantry

On Saturday and Sunday my church put on their annual Christmas Pageant. People--especially the people who are in it--go nuts over this thing. My first autumn at this church, I was enlisted to be a "Traveler," in the "King's Procession," and in the "People of Other Lands," and I hadn't even seen the production yet. I mean, I know the Christmas story, of course, but I hadn't seen this version of it, and by the time it was all over, though I had a rough idea of all the components and how they all came together, I was still a little uncertain about what I had just been involved in. Mostly all I knew was that we were talking about Jesus' birth and that at the end the narrators said that one day people of all walks of life and all nations of the earth would come and worship the One who gives us life, and then there I was, a white girl in a sari, walking down the aisle.

Last year I got to opt out of the "King's Procession," but I still didn't get to see the whole production until this year, when one of our three narrators couldn't participate. I jumped at the chance. My family read aloud to each other up through the time I graduated from high school, and beyond, so I love reading and being read to. It didn't occur to me that by taking this role, I would also get a different perspective on the Pageant.

On the night of the dress rehearsal, it was not maybe such a good different perspective. Everything was chaotic and we kept having technical difficulties and the whole thing lasted far longer than I had expected or hoped. (God promises to do more than we can ask or hope, but . . . somehow that wasn't what I had in mind.)

On Saturday I had a raging migraine, such as I have not had in a long time (though I've been getting them more often again, of late). I sat up in the balcony far earlier than I needed to be there and tried to relax and stay warm and drown out the low hubbub that was going on around and below me. Then it got to be 2 o'clock and they turned off all the lights and I sat in the quiet darkness and waited for the first scene to go by before I had to read anything. The Pageant had begun.

As it went on, the pain all over began to subside, and I watched as adults and youth and children I know and care about made postcard-scenes in their bits of cloth and glitter and gold lam'e. And I noticed something strange. The best descriptor I could think of for it was Picasso's pithy saying to the effect that "Art is a lie that uncovers the truth." Here we were, a whole bunch of ordinary people, telling an extraordinary story, but not telling it in a very realistic way. There were songs and darkness and spotlights, and no one's costume was, I don't suppose, legitimately first century or Middle Eastern. We had two sheep and a donkey (who at one point almost stole the show because she did not want to exit stage left), and magi wearing bits of drapery and upholstery, and the combined effect was truly beautiful. I hadn't thought those things, which in real life would be quite tawdry, really, could have that kind of a result.

Maybe it helped that I know people here now and all the teens who played Mary and Joseph and the major angels are "my" teens in "my" youth group, but it just seemed like something about everybody's getting dressed up totally differently and putting themselves in a completely "other" context brought out things about them that highlighted who they are, that ennobled them. People carried themselves differently, or the colours they were wearing highlighted certain features about them that made them "more" than they usually seem, or someone caught just the perfect facial expression for the character they were portraying, or the spotlight hit someone just right so that they looked glorious.

Churches nowadays are really "big" on authenticity, and rightly so, I think. I'm really big on authenticity. But sometimes (and I feel I can say this because I feel I've fallen prey to it on more than one occasion) what is touted as "authenticity" turns into self-promotion or self-indulgence, and maybe it's time to recover something that other Christians of other times understood, and that was a sense of wonder and a sense of pageantry and that sometimes, while you don't want to make the costume and mask the place that you live, if they are just temporary measures, they uncover a truth greater than we would have expected.

Look at the Birds of the Air

A few evenings ago I had supper with Mentor-Liz. Then we had ice cream. (Note: "cherry-vanilla" ice cream is nothing like the black cherry ice creams I like, such as Ben and Jerry's "Cherry Garcia.") Then we went for a walk. It was a short walk, but it was long enough for us to see a bluebird.

By which I mean, a real live, in-the-wild bluebird. It was sitting at the top of a chain link fence, and it stayed there for quite some time, undoubtedly so we could admire its beautiful blue plumage and red breast.

Back when I was really really little (like, probably too young for anyone to believe I could remember any of it) I thought I saw a bluebird once, but when I talked about it to anyone as a slightly older child, everyone told me that was impossible because they were extinct. They told me I imagined it. I very well may have, but the fact is that bluebirds are not, after all, extinct, even though people thought so for a while, and the other fact is that I really did see one, finally in real life and not just in pictures, and all of three nights ago.

Birds have always kind of seemed to me like messages from God. Not messengers, but messages. The messages are never verbal (Obviously. They're ornithological), so it's always kind of hard to explain what I feel God is saying through them. Maybe sometimes He's not saying anything. Maybe He's just showing me something He made that He thinks I will enjoy. I think He does that sometimes. It's just that the showing always comes with a little extra sense of His presence. This has happened to me with cardinals, chickadees, swans and parrots (yes--parrots living in the wild in Connecticut--I'm not kidding, or making it up). This time it happened with a bluebird.

I didn't think about this until I started writing this post, but sometimes there are things that you know exist, that you know can happen, that you're even pretty sure you've seen before . . . but maybe you've just read about them in books. And everyone says, "You've seen that happen? That doesn't happen anymore. You've just imagined it."

But maybe you haven't. Maybe that thing is just waiting in hiding, like a legend or a myth or an extinction, waiting to come out at sit on a chain link fence where you can finally see it and admire it's plumage and say, "Ah! I knew you were real!"

Sneaking Up

The Milk Guy has morning glories. Well, they don't yet have their glory (i.e. flowers), even in the mornings, but the plants are growing in profusion, with the promise of more beauty even than heart-shaped leaves, to come.

There's a fence for the tendrils to wind up, and some of them are doing so, but others are growing back along the ground. The Milk Guy was contemplating training them up the fence, too, but they're too far entrenched along the stonework or whatever it is down there, so he said, "I guess there'll be some 'creeping glories,' too, then."

"That sounds funny," I chuckled. "'Creeping glory.'"

"It would make a great name for a band," he said. I'm sure it would. The band we saw recently was called "Raging Grace." I'm not positive it occurred to him right then how similar in genre the names are. Regardless, I just think it's an unmitigatedly great phrase, whether it's referring to a band or not.

It seems like it should be mitigated. Creep, creeping, creepy--none of these have very nice connotations. They make me think of certain customers we have . . . There's a sinister undertone to any word with "creep" at its root. But I think it's apt anyway. I think sometimes the onset of glory feels sinister, even if it's--well, glorious, in the end. Ultimately, we probably have to die first, which doesn't have really fantastic connotations either. And even the hints and whispers of glory we receive here are often hard-won and feel a little bit like dying.

Also, they're usually just hints and whispers. "Creeping glory" reminds me that sometimes the glory of God doesn't burst upon us like a thunderclap, but sneaks up and surprises us. It makes me think of the parables Jesus told about the coming of the Kingdom--it's like a mustard seed, which surprises us with the large shrub that's inside it; or like a tiny bit of yeast, which surprises us by rising a whole batch of bread dough; or like a treasure, hidden in the ground.

Being Glad

That Barrington day? I was walking back to my car after the breeze got too much, and found myself absolutely riveted by the sight of a dead tree. I couldn't stop looking at it--or taking photos of it. An older couple walked by and the man said, "Pretty wood, isn't it?"

It was a relief to know that someone else got it, even though I'm quite sure "pretty wood" didn't encapsulate it. I don't know how old that tree was, or what killed it, but there was that pretty wood, rising sinuously out of the ground, as if the tree had spent its life pouring itself upward.

I know I keep going on and on about trees. I just can't get enough of them. They make me think of God for some reason, but it isn't a consciously unpackable reason. I mean, sure, there's lots of tree imagery in the Bible--the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Cross of Christ, the Tree of Life, and even the trees of the fields clapping their hands. But I don't usually look at a tree and think, "This reminds me of a cross" (it very rarely does) or, "This makes me think of the Tree of Life in Ezekiel." Even though I appreciate all that imagery, of course.

I'm a great one for analogies and allegories, but I just don't think there is one to sum up why trees remind me of God. They just do. They remind me of God in a glad way--even if I'm mad at Him or something (which I'm not, currently, but I have been a fair bit), if I look a tree it calms me right down and makes me feel like thanking Him anyway.

Oh. And I didn't do this on purpose, but . . . Happy Earth Day, everybody!

Winter Wonderland

The snow began softly falling on schedule today at 1 p.m. I say softly, but there was sure a lot of it softly falling at once. My shift ended right around then, and so did Kiran's; he didn't have his car, so I offered to give him a ride home.

Here's the thing. This part of the world gets snow. Sometimes a lot of it. We scoff at Southerners who shut down entire cities when one flake of the stuff falls from the sky. But if the truth were known, we don't really handle it too well either. Here we have been hearing warnings about this snowstorm (and the one coming up later this weekend) for the last two or three days. So you would think that all these seasoned snow warriors would just hunker down wherever they were for a couple of hours and wait until a few plows had been through, and then head home after that. Leaving the roads clear so those of us who had already worked a full eight hours and had stuff to do in the afternoon could head home among the first couple of flakes. Er, snowdrifts.

But no. Instead, everyone completely freaked out (or took advantage of the situation) and left work/school/the gym early, so that probably the entire county (minus the four people who were still working at Starbucks) decided to converge on Park Ave and Main Street all at the same time.

It was nice having someone to talk to in the car for the first two hours. Unfortunately, I was on my own for the last three. I'm not going to go into the part about how when I finally got home, I had no place to park and got stuck in a drift twice and had to dig myself out both times--and then dig myself in, as it were. And how that was kind of upsetting. (Or at least, I was kind of upset.)

But I do have a theory about why "my people" up here are so silly about snow. This batch of snow really is quite beautiful. It's soft. It actually shovels pretty well, yet it's also not too bad for making snowballs. (The best part of the commute today was when a car-full of college students scraped some snow off their own car and pelted it at mine.) But here we all are--poor us--having spent our childhoods making snowmen and going sledding and having snowball fights in our ill-fitting snowpants. And then we grow up and suddenly all we have time for is shoveling and trying not to skid into somebody else's car on the way to work. It's a let-down. Snow wasn't meant to be so mundane, I don't think. It certainly wasn't meant to take five hours to go ten miles in it. I think we were all just supposed to stay home and enjoy it.

Accidental Church

On Sunday we went to Catholic church by mistake.

I will vehemently speak up for the Church universal. As discussed (though maybe not in as much detail as possible) in a previous post, it has a lot in its history--and its present--to discredit it. But if the Bible calls the Church as a whole Christ's Bride, and if He died for her, then who am I to denigrate her? And who am I not to invest my time and effort into serving in a local expression thereof?

On the other hand, I really don't like going to church when I'm on vacation.

I don't know what it is, exactly. You'd think with all this highly-sanctified-sounding talk about the Church, I would embrace every opportunity to participate in fresh expressions of worship with the people of God. And I do--on missions trips. Or when I first move to a new location (although even then, I tend to settle on one congregation fairly quickly; I hate church-hopping). But if I'm on holiday, I'd rather not venture out.

Last weekend, I felt, I was on holiday. So when Paulina talked about visiting a church even she had not yet attended, I felt mildly ill-at-ease. Sort of like you might when you head home for dinner and realise that you forgot to go grocery shopping, so all you have to eat is maybe a baked potato with some cheese--if it hasn't gone bad yet. (Oh. Maybe you don't do that.) You know you'll get through it, and you'll receive some sustenance, but it isn't your all-time favourite dinner option.

On Sunday morning, Paulina herself was not feeling one hundred percent, so I subtly hinted that, you know, if she really didn't feel up to it, we could maybe pray together at her place that morning, and leave it at that. But she rallied. She really wanted to visit this Episcopal church not too far from her house. So we got in the car and set out.

As it happened, the Episcopal church was just moderately farther from her house than she had thought, and there was a very similarly-structured Catholic church on the same side of the road . . . so we ended up at it, instead, and didn't realise our mistake until the people in robes at the front started talking about how they were going to baptise some new babies into the Catholic faith that morning.

But, well, we were there, so we stuck around. A lot of things happened in the service that I could talk about I guess. For example, one of the poor mothers got overheated and passed out on her way to the exit, and then didn't even get to be present for her child's christening. Paulina had the compassion and presence of mind to jump up and help out with damp towels during this exciting interlude in the mass.

However, the observations I really want to make, as the daughter of a Baptist minister, are these:

1. My parents, though willing to talk about differing theologies, have never put down the Catholic church, for which I am grateful. However, I do recall someone in my family saying that Catholic hymnody is virtually non-existent. I don't know about that, but at this church they sang a lot of hymns, and they were really good, beautiful hymns with good theology, which were a pleasure to sing.

2. Here is where liturgical churches have an advantage over non-liturgical ones: if the person up front is having, say, an off week, there's still so much Scripture and prayer and powerful words about God spoken around and over and through and by the congregation, that it's always possible to come away with something. Granted, it could become an excuse not to prepare a good sermon, I suppose. I'm not going to say that the priest at this particular church proffered the greatest homily ever. Then again, he did have a woman pass out in the middle of it. (Some charismatic pastors might give anything for that to happen in their talks, I think--and I am speaking from experience, here, by the way.)

3. I didn't know, any more than I ever truly know, in any congregation on any Sunday morning, what percentage of the congregants have what is sometimes termed a "true, saving relationship with Jesus Christ." But I do know that I was worshiping Him there, and I'm pretty sure that I wasn't the only one. And it just reminded me that yeah. I really do love the Church.

Photo by jennw2ns, 2007: Catholic church building, Costa Rica.

A Good Idea

The other day I was weeding. I don't particularly like this task, which is why I've been doing it a lot lately--because I hadn't touched the weeds since probably May. The flower beds here have sort of been overtaken, and my parents are coming home for a month in a couple of weeks. They're great gardeners, and this is their house and . . . anyway, you get the idea.

I was sitting on the ground, which I kind of enjoy, getting scratched and very close to poison ivy, which I really don't enjoy at all, when I looked up and saw this:I know my opinion here doesn't really matter a whole lot, but lilies were a great idea God had, I think.

Also, this afternoon after work, I ate half a cantaloupe, with plain yoghurt in the cavity where the seeds used to be, and dusted over with cinnamon. Yum-my.

Photo by jennw2ns, 2007: Daylilies.