It feels strange to be here on a Wednesday afternoon, when this place is empty and unnaturally quiet.
Everything looks different than it normally does, even the light. It’s more diffused and sideways as it comes through these windows, as familiar to me as my own kitchen window back home.
I tiptoe in and take a seat, on the left side.
How many times have I sat here over the course of my lifetime? I wonder.
Well, not exactly here. No this doesn’t feel right at all. I get up and move a little farther toward the front. Nope. Still not right.
I finally move to my usual place, three rows back, three seats in, on the right side of the overflow room. Ah, yes. This is the spot.
It’s so familiar to me that, if I wanted to, I could lift a cap off one of the chair rails in front of me and find a tiny drawing my son has hidden there, and checks on each week.
But instead, I simply sit, quiet and still at the end of a day filled with phone calls and rushing around. I need to get home, I think. I have homework to supervise. I have library books to return. I have a meatloaf to make.
But for a moment, I let myself just be.
I look around. Every Big Event of my life has been celebrated here, inside these light blue walls and on this red carpeting.
My wedding. The baptisms of my three children. My dad’s funeral.
As a kid, I sat up there in the choir loft, singing in my robe and that white, cape-y thing that always made me feel like an angel but never quite had that effect on my behavior, as I passed notes and whispered to my friends, trying to escape the choir director’s eagle eye.
As an adult, my father took my arm and marched me up that aisle, to the accompaniment of Handel and our back-and-forth mutterings: “Don’t cry.” “I’M not going to cry. Don’t YOU cry.”
Oh, I cried plenty here anyway. At weddings and funerals and even on an ordinary day when my heart was simply too full of something and leaked all over the place.
This is where my parents brought me to learn about love, the kind of love that is selfless and endless and stretches backward and forward and, frankly, is often hard for me to even imagine.
But it’s here that the good people who gather together every week showed me how to live that kind of love every day.
Even though I’m the only one here, I can picture them, like me, in their usual seats, the kind of people who are always ready with a casserole or a kind word, who ask about your mother or josh around with your kids.
And now this is where I am bringing my own children to learn about love. Like all lessons you teach your kids, you hope it sticks somewhere in their heads and their hearts but you have to wait a bunch of years to see how it will all turn out.
I’m a Lutheran. Many of us are the shy sort when it comes to this kind of thing, the type who, as Garrison Keillor wrote, “sit in the pew where we always sit. And we do not shout Amen. And if anyone shouts or raises their hands, they’re not invited back again.”
Honestly, I’m feeling a little weird even sharing this or sitting here on this wintry Wednesday afternoon, still in my coat and gloves, a little worried that someone I know will see me and wonder what in the world I am doing here.
But in another week or two, my church — that’s the way I’ve always thought about this place, it belongs to me somehow — will move to a brand-new sanctuary at the other end of this building.
And I need to say goodbye and to somehow acknowledge what this room has meant to me.
I know the power isn’t in the walls, but thanks just the same.
For sheltering me. For sustaining me. For holding my joy and yes, my leaking heart.
As the old Lutheran greeting goes, peace be with you.
I’ll see you soon in a new place.
———
The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.
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