…some melodious sonnet

I’m not sure how my friends and family got the impression that I’m an absolute heathen. I majored in religion! I went to divinity school! But, evidently, heathen it is. 

So when I mention that I’ve been hanging with the Jesuits on Sunday mornings, the usual reaction is shock. 

My honorary daughter was gobsmacked. “I need to sit down.”

And I think it was my Lutheran pastor friend who said, “WHY?”

Why, indeed. My glib answer, which is also accurate, is that church-going is a low-commitment opportunity to sing our little lungs out once a week.

This seems to satisfy. Which surprised me. Because I had been under the impression that a nobler reason was required. 

I once went on a date with a guy who told me, disdainfully, that his mother only went to church to sing in the choir. I wasn’t savvy enough at the time to think to ask, “What would be a better reason?” But I was savvy enough to think, “Well. We’re checking you off the list, bub.”

It’s not only the singing, though, that delights me. As someone who lives alone, I like the opportunity to look around at the other parishioners, simply be, thinking my thinking-thoughts, engaged in the “work of the people” but without the stress of social performance. 

Usually, I take little notes in the bulletin. A few weeks ago, though, I had forgotten my pencil, so I had to memorize the delicious:

• Contact lens crisis in the row ahead, all through the homily, and just ahead of her to the right was the happiest and homeliest little baby, who was aggressively enjoying the very old man just down the pew. Matching bald heads.

• The siblings in front of us silently aggravated each other, the girl child turning to look when I sang too loudly, which was every time I sang. Their mother was moved at one point, verklempt, and her husband reached across both children to touch her back, and then leaned in to touch foreheads.

• I noticed this when I wasn’t playing peek-a-boo with the maybe-two-year-old ahead, who, when finally picked up, was intent on licking his mother’s face.

• It had been a while since I’d seen the family with a young adult son in a wheelchair. He randomly vocalizes during the service, and there is something about the quality of his voice and the cadence that I find moving. What, around him or in his mind, stirs his need to make sound?

• Hymns were good today, too.

It always comes back to the hymns. I had to adjust, of course, because I grew up in the Episcopal Church and learned different words. But I finally got the hang of having to smoosh all those social-justice-y syllables into the old melodies.

I have no problem with social justice. But I do sometimes miss the poetry. Every week we sing the creed to the tune of Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. Which I have always loved, especially the soaring bit, “…teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above.” And other snippets come to mind when I sing, “tune my heart,” and “prone to wander,” and “here’s my heart.”

Last week as I was opening my hymnal, I heard the opening strains of another favorite, and I accidentally gasped aloud with pleasure. Be Thou My Vision—a schmaltzy video, but lovely on the harp. Fitting all those new syllables in was exhausting. But the melody triggered the memory of the poetry, “…heart of my own heart, whatever befall.”

Always, with every hymn and with the creed, these other lines hum in my mind.  

The melodies and the poetry, those I learned first, form a sort of architecture in my mind. They remind me who I am, that longing and a thirst for beauty are essential to the human condition. And after a few years of profound disorientation, these weekly reminders were just what the doctor ordered. 

Watching the babies is excellent, too.