Sorrow and Joy

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:24:57 -0600

Being a rambling account of nausea, preaching, mother's day, evil, and a few other subjects. It's too long, covers too many subjects, would be rejected if I submitted it to any decent publication, and is probably very self-indulgent, blah blah blah.

I was strangely ill last week. I say strangely because any illness seems strange to me. I'm one of those people who rarely get sick. I will admit I've been pretty smug about that over the years, though I don't know why. It's not like I have anything to do with being sick or not being sick. I just sit here in my skin and take whatever comes to me. I guess we all do that.

So anyway Tuesday, out of the blue, I got severely nauseous. I don't have a lot of experience with nausea. I haven't thrown up since I was a small child. They tell me I threw up on my teddy bear when I was three. Apparently, it was so disgusting that teddy had to be thrown away. I'm sure it was traumatic as hell, though I don't remember anything about it. Maybe after that I just decided to opt out of the whole throwing up thing. However it happened, I don't throw up. I can't. I don't even know how to get started with it. It looks to me like some sort of heaving of the chest precedes the event itself, but I couldn't tell you for sure. I will tell you this - by Tuesday afternoon, I wanted to throw up badly. I wanted to, but I never did. Instead I just rolled around in bed for about 7 hours, trying to find a comfortable position.

Did you know that there is no position that is comfortable when you are nauseous? None. I tried them all.

I was plagued by this strange, unexpected nausea all week long. Wednesday wasn't so bad. Thursday was another rolling around in bed day. Having lost two complete days, I was nowhere near ready for the sermon on Sunday morning. I got to church early with a page of scribbled notes and a general idea of where I was going. I had to throw the entire sermon together in a couple of hours. You can get away with that kind of thing if it's an emergency and if you normally do your work. But if you try it too often, you will not survive. Preaching every week is something you can't fake your way through. Fakers have a few years of sermons, and then they move on to another church. That's how you spot fake preachers, in case you were wondering. Lot's of shuckin, jivin, and movin on.

I got the sermon together, I guess, but I was anxious and uptight all morning. Somewhere in the middle of the delivery I sort of lost the sense of what I was doing. I can follow my notes and plod through a sermon, but I like to be emotionally connected to what I'm talking about. That emotional connection is critical to preaching. And it's another thing you can't fake unless you just give up and become completely evil. And I'm trying to adopt Google's motto for my preaching - "Don't be evil."

I figure it's the least I can do.

Anyway, while I was speaking and looking at my friends out there in the chairs, the sermon began to feel heavy and disconnected. The paragraphs, transitions, and various sections became isolated and alone in my mind. They felt like slabs of heavy beef coming down a conveyor belt. I unloaded each one in turn, but the whole thing never came together for me. I assume I made reasonable sense. I hope so. But if not, I've probably earned an off Sunday.

Look, if one of my sermons is good or if it meant something to you, then I'm happy about that. If my sermon was bad or boring, just consider it penance. We all probably need penance now and then. So you can endure my sermon or crawl up some stairs on your knees like they do in Rome. Your choice.

Oh, Sunday was also Mother's Day. I was over at Spidey's blog and read about what happened at her church. That got me thinking about Mother's Day and churches. I have mixed feelings about recognizing this holiday during worship. I've been to churches that go way overboard with this. All the mothers get corsages, and sometimes they all stand up in the worship service. Then the preacher says, "If you've been a mother less than 10 years, sit down." A bunch of young women sit down. Then he says, "Okay, less than 20 years sit down." They keep doing this until only one woman is standing, the woman who has been a mother longer than anyone else. She gets some flowers or maybe just everyone claps for her and looks real happy. I don't know, that kind of thing seems surreal to me. And it can lead to the awkward situation where you have some woman praying that another woman will finally die so that SHE can be the oldest mother in the church next year.

You laugh, but that kind of thing happens.

In the short history of our church, there have been two women among us who were unable to have children and were deeply grieved about it. Maybe in larger churches you can get busy and caught up in the day and forget about that kind of thing. But in a small spiritual community, it's rather hard to miss. So I've always been aware that Mother's Day is a very sad day for many women. Some never had children and that grief has dominated their adult lives. Others have lost children or perhaps never married and have no reasonable hope for having a child. I don't know, to me it has always seemed like a day when the mothers get yet another blessing, while the heart-broken woman on the back row of the church dies inside one more time. The whole thing reminds me of the kind of person who goes on and on and on about how great her children are and how they have straight A's and are perfect and all that stuff. Of course, she's talking to her friend whose children are making horrible grades and have all sorts of problems, but she just prattles on, either unaware or unconcerned about how this is making her friend feel.

Have you ever known someone like that? I have. And I'm sad to say it, but churches are often like that. All the shiny happy people are handing out awards and celebrating this or that. You can make the broken people feel even more broken if you're not careful. That would be bad enough, but it's even worse if you consider that the basic message of Christianity is that we're ALL broken and need help.

Mother's Day isn't a Christian holiday anyway, so in my mind it deserves at most a quick mention and perhaps a prayer. And the prayer had better be the most inclusive prayer you can come up with. A prayer for mothers, and for the women who have been like mothers to children in need, and also some kind of careful and solemn recognition that every joy, even the joy of being a mother, has its dark side. For every joyous heart, there is someone crying and alone.

So I did my Mother's Day prayer on Sunday like I do every year. I tried to say everything that needed to be said, but you can never pull that off. You can never get that prayer worded right. There really aren't words that can speak for the joy and the sorrow of mothers. And I wasn't at my best anyway, coming off a week spent mostly in a nauseous haze. I kind of stumbled through the whole service, if you want to know the truth. I can't remember what I said during the Mother's Day prayer. It was probably okay.

When the service was over I retreated quickly to my office and didn't come out until everyone was gone. Wow, it's been a long time since I did that. In the old days, sometimes I would close the door to my office after church and pray that no one would come knocking. It's okay. I needed to retreat, so I did. I doubt anyone noticed. And hey, I'll be back next Sunday. I'm in this for the long haul, not for the quick fix.

Well, Sunday is over and gone. And I can now look at it with a new perspective, almost as if Sunday was preserved in a jar. Looking closely at it, I can see that last Sunday is a clear reminder to me that the Church must be a place of both joy and sorrow. It has to be a place where friends celebrate but never forget each other's pain. It has to be a place where you can shake hands and laugh, or retreat to a back room and cry. Joy and sorrow. They are never very far apart.

You know you are a part of an authentic, spiritual community when you can hide and you can't hide. You can run to a back room or sob on the back row, and people will give you the space and privacy you need. But at the same time you hear the Word of the Lord. Amazingly, you hear this Word in the voice of your very imperfect and even comical minister. And in his or her shaky voice, you are reminded that nothing is forgotten, neither your joy or your sorrow. Neither are forgotten because they are both somehow packed into a single hour of worship.

rlp

Ash Wednesday

Sat, 10 May 2008 19:44:24 -0500

Growing up Baptist, I had no idea what Ash Wednesday was. Only when I got to San Antonio and started rubbing shoulders with people of other faiths did I find out what a wonderful spiritual exercise Lent can be.

Real Live Preacher - Worship

Sorrow and Joy

Ash Wednesday