memory

Ah, September

/ Beth Merrill Neel / 2 Comments

I had forgotten so much about September in these past few years.

I had forgotten that those who can flee for beaches and mountains and just plain other places over Labor Day weekend, squeezing in one last breath of summer like pause. I forgot how quiet the block is, how fewer people show up for church.

I had forgotten the absolutely delightful sound of children screaming in fun on the nearby school playground; the posting of all the first-day-of-school pictures on social media; the sight of parent holding their kindergartner’s hand as they head to school for the first time.

I had forgotten the nostalgia and melancholy that whisper to me as the days are now visibly shorter, as the occasional cool night remind me of what is coming. I had forgotten that long-planted desire to buy a plaid skirt and mary janes.

I had forgotten how busy things get again for people, for families with kids in school, at church when all the programming starts up again and there are room schedules to juggle, and information to get out, and more demands on my time. I forgot how very extroverted I get in the fall.

Two years of a pandemic changed what I remember. In the midst of this weekend’s fire warnings across the state, I remember two years ago when the air quality index was literally off the charts bad. I remember the depressing silence of the nearby playground. I remember meeting everyone’s dogs, and then meeting those dogs’ people. I remember preaching to the tiny camera on my computer. I remember sleeping well and worrying a lot.

This September I am restless. I know I’m forgetting things despite my well cultivated to-do lists. I am restless for any weather other than skies that smell of smoke and have no color and host a pink sun. I am anxious to know if the families at church discovered other ways to spend their time on Sunday morning. At the end of summer, I long for a vacation.

So many September songs – I am not the only one who finds this a provoking month. “Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow.” “Do you remember the twenty-first night of September?” “Wake me up, when September ends.”

Well, it is a transitional month and we are in a liminal time, so perhaps restless or nostalgic or sad, or excited, or eager, are all valid.

Maybe I’ll go buy some back to school shoes.

My Favorite Sunday

/ Beth Merrill Neel / 4 Comments

ray of lightThe celebration of All Saints is, hands down, my favorite Sunday of the year.  Not the Sunday before Christmas, not Easter, not Epiphany or any other, but All Saints.  As the preacher of the day, I always want to capture this elusive feeling/image/sense I have of the day – something glowing, radiant; Ralph Vaughan Williams, gold and white, a packed house with nary a dry eye.  Rarely does it come together that way, but we can have our aspirations.

The church I grew up in didn’t celebrate All Saints; few Protestant churches did in the ’70s and ’80s.  My first experience of the holy day was at seminary, when in the chapel service a list of the dead was read and in the Latin American tradition, after each name was pronounced we all shouted, “Presente!”  They are present.  The saints have left, and haven’t.

This year, it’s a ten-day celebration of saints for me.  It began last Saturday with a memorial service-ish for someone I’d never met, a woman who was not particularly Christian any more, whose friends filled just about every nook and cranny in our sanctuary (which seats around 500.)  Last night, I led our evening worship service, borrowing elements from the Day of the Dead tradition.  People were invited to bring photos of their beloveds who had died, or to write their names on a card, and to take the photos and cards to the communion table and decorate them with flowers and candles and chocolate and other things.  Last night was no glowing, white and gold majestic thing.  It was colorful, vivid, as down-to-earth as you can be while singing accompanied by guitar and accordion.

This coming Saturday I’ll preside over another memorial service, for a young woman who was a member of our congregation whom I knew a little.  She was murdered a few weeks ago, having fallen in with the wrong sort.  Shot in the head after a night at a strip club, she died alone in the middle of the night.  I want to throw up, and scream, and go back in time to save her.  But I can’t.  What I can do is offer a place for her varied group of friends to come and remember her, to testify to the good and to the mess of her life, to build a community so that, at least for a few hours, some light will shine in the darkness that surrounds her death.

And then there’s this Sunday, my favorite, golden and gleaming (maybe).  Good hymns, good liturgy, the roll of the deceased read and the opportunity to name loved ones who are gone.  Communion, too.  I love it, and hope to do it justice but know that really, that’s not up to me but the Spirit who usually does show up when She’s invited, and often shows up when She’s not.

Why do I love it, this day that can be so sad?  I can’t get through “For All the Saints” when we sing that line, “through gates of pearl stream in the countless host.”  Why do I love it? I think because it’s a thin place, All Saints Day.  Earth and heaven breathe on each other like a mother and child snuggling at bedtime.  It’s a thin line between the living and the dying, because all of us who are alive still face the mystery of death, and because those who have died linger among us in their gifts and legacies, and their eerie presence that we still feel at unexpected times.

All Saints Sunday is coming, and I am glad for that.  In the meantime, there is a memorial service to plan and, I just learned, another one after that.  There are committee meetings to prep for, and a poetry class that starts this Sunday.  There’s a newsletter article to write, and one last pumpkin to carve at home.  I might even put up a few cobwebs for Halloween, and I still need to buy candy.

In the meantime, life happens as it happened for all the saints.  We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.  That’s what I’m counting on, when my meantime ends and that thin line is crossed.