I’m just back from 17th century England, by way of downtown Savannah. What must it have been like for churchgoers in those turbulent times? After worshipping (or at least spectating) in Latin for one’s whole life, suddenly the priest is speaking the service in English, and so is everyone else. While it wasn’t time travel, it felt like it! We took a whirlwind tour of the Book of Common Prayer from its majestic beginnings in the Roman Catholic Sarum rite through an intense century of English Reformation between 1552 and 1662. We traversed from there across the Atlantic to the present, all within the hospitable environs of St. John’s church on Madison Square. The Daily Office and Eucharist services (as much of it as I could attend with a wiggly, vociferous toddler), coupled with reading 200+ pages daily in a small apartment just walking distance from the church gave the entire experience a monastic feeling.
“Ora et labora,” St. Benedict once exhorted, “Pray and work.” This still feels true, although I am about as far from the cloister as one can be. Back in Kentucky, my husband and I split and stack wood on the porch against the beginning snowfall. I savor the balmy, jacket-less trolley tour we enjoyed this time yesterday, before leaving town. Shrimp and grits with bread pudding on the riverfront inaugurated my 42nd birthday, and we headed north to beat the incoming weather. Awaiting the onslaught of snow and ice near the fire, my thoughts turn from gratitude for enriching experiences toward something darker, a bitterness mingled with what is sweet. I find myself instinctively singing, with the Psalmist:
“So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”
– Psalm 90:12-14
Often, the completion of something worthwhile often invites morbid rumination, for me. I am alternately beaming with pride and revolted by what I have to show for my life at this juncture. Noticing this movement within me, I turn to wonder. Do I need experiences like this to draw me out of my newfound fear and dislike of travel? COVID, parenting a terminal cancer patient, and then bereaved parenthood took the fun out of travel, for me. For awhile, I didn’t want to go too far from her grave. Perhaps travel is an invitation to reconnect old skills to new memories, and resume the pursuit of enduring longings. Perhaps it is also an opportunity to hear an old, familiar word, in a new location.
There was a moment of this hearing with new ears, the last day of our trip. It was prophetic, in the sense that it was foretelling and truth telling. A man walked up to me, introduced himself and invited me to record a poem for Sylvia. I did not competently record the poem, so I have just these words, and this picture:
“Sylvia is a Celestial Pearl sent from above,
Heather a Queen Mother who works together with her Creator like a glove.”
When he was done rhyming we chatted. He said he had witnessed the love between mother and child radiating from Sylvie and I. He wanted me to know that motherhood is so important even when it doesn’t appear that way, and the best thing is to just be the difference, “because people always follow their tribe anyway,” so you can’t convince them motherhood matters by arguing.
There was a joyful ease about him, and at the same time, a sad elegance I sense he had acquired across long, patient years. He did not seem to be in a hurry, but neither was he going to waste a moment, a single opportunity to connect with someone in his path. He said I should look him up on YouTube, which search has yielded just how intentional he is, the impressions left, with many others. Here he is, singing his “Savannah Song.”
Divine appointments take many forms–in this case, an impromptu conversation that was mostly him preaching to me, in the best sense of the word. Nothing about it was wasted. Even the words he used mean something very deep and specific to me. The heavenly “Pearl” is full of Kingdom meaning from CGS and the Atrium, working with children. It suggests the slow, hard work of the Kingdom of God, for which we must give everything away that we might acquire it. There are also the tiny “pearls” of wisdom dropped into our palms along the way, which the children themselves offer to us almost effortlessly, as we learn to labor and wait.
Listening to God with the children, we are like kings and queens of the realm: because we are only busy with Kingdom work, we find (even tempted by impatience, orwhen others are waiting on us) that we are never truly late. The “Queen Mother” is a Jungian archetype best expressed in the Holy Mother, Mary, who is joy overcoming sorrow. Toni Wolff says that she characteristically “nurtures without condescension,” and in this way she promotes thriving for those in her care. I recall reading this nearly a decade ago, and thinking, “Wow, I have exactly none of that quality, but I would like to have it.” The better part of a decade has gone by learning to spot, bring forward, and practice the feminine, sovereign qualities that once were so foreign and underdeveloped in me. Nothing about it has been easy, but it has been good: a transformation supported both in community and solitude.
At the moment James walked up, I was tempted to feel sorry for myself for missing Eucharist to be with a toddler who would not brook more quiet waiting, but instead was eager to move and vocalize. I was missing my train to quiet contemplation, but I was also glad to be outside in the green square with her. Tentatively, I began processing the ending of a full week of studies, where masculine-style discourse had daily left my mind elated and the rest of me exhausted and tender. That slipped into the background as James and I found ourselves naturally, effortlessly, speaking of Mary, quoting her Magnificat, and he explored the relationship between Mary’s name (“You know it means “bitter” in Hebrew” he reminded) and the Greek word for Grace…the “Charis” in Eucharist.
And just like that, a total stranger brought mystical and corporeal Body of Christ out to me in the square. By his presence, he reminded me that Sylvia herself had been engaged in her own form of preaching all week long. She offered us the opportunity to relish the smallest things–a clump of Spanish moss, a book she had never seen before, a little song and dance she composed on the spot. In spite of knowing well enough to look for it, I did not always know how to welcome and receive the gifts of the toddler: both unabashed joy on one hand, and utter limits on the other.
In her never-ending struggle to master herself by repeating experiences that seem right on the edge of chaos, she was a walking, babbling sermon proclaiming that the life of faith is falling down and getting up, grabbing lovely things that unintentionally shatter on the floor, growing weary and needing rest, climbing compulsively for what is just out of reach. If we had ears to hear, she was certainly saying all of this, mostly without words. I should stop being surprised by these moments. Yet I ponder them with wonder, in my heart, barely able to even speak of them.