A Lifetime of Sundays

Sunday morning during my childhood was a familiar routine: be woken up by my mom and complain about having to wake up on a weekend and go to church. Then, go to church, either First Presbyterian with my mother and grandfather and brother, or with my grandmother to Christ Church, the little Episcopal church a block from First Pres. I preferred the latter, as I liked the ritual of having to bow and to kneel, and puzzling over the mysterious wording of the liturgy (what did it mean, for instance, to "vouchsafe"?). I felt fed, in a way that I did not understand then and scarcely understand now, by the words that seemed to point to something mysterious and ineffable.

After church, the five of us (or six, if my Aunt Hadda was in town) would regroup, pile into my grandparents' mammoth Chrysler Imperial, and go out to lunch. It might be the Heritage House, or Howard Johnson's, or if my grandfather felt like driving we would take a trip outside of Springfield to New Salem, or maybe the Virginia Country Club.

After lunch, we dispersed, my mother and brother and I back to our house, my grandparents to theirs. Hopefully my friend and next-door neighbor Bill would be available and we could go out and play -- I honestly remember little about what we actually did; we just "played" -- or, if not, my brother and I might go with my mom over to her school at Douglas Avenue Methodist Church to help her get the room ready for class on Monday. That was the ostensible reason, at least ; more often than not we would help for a bit then go poking around the building that housed mom's school, which always had a distinct smell, very antiseptic. Even now if someone blindfolded me and took me into that building I would know where I was from the smell alone.

Sunday is not what it once was, but it still feels like a day set apart. During the many years I did not go to church I often noticed a melancholy about Sunday afternoons, a sense that it was a day without a foundation. The weekdays had school, and Saturday was a day for play, but Sunday without church could feel like a day cut loose from its moorings.

So these days I go and say the familiar words and seek and sometimes feel some communion with God, and communion with the giants of my past, my people, those sturdy presences who taught me, "this day is different, and it is different for a very particular reason." They invited and drew me in to a mystery, and through their words and their actions told me that it was a mystery that was at the heart of life and I would do well to draw closer to it. It is a credit not to my faith or intelligence, but to the persuasive power of their quiet example, that I finally listened to them.