still cooked on a wood-burning stove. She baked all their bread in this contraption. It pained Arlan to buy anything he could make himself—or have his wife make.
There was an obsessive minimalism to him. He liked getting by with little and worked at getting by with less and less. I offered him a cup of coffee once and he scoffed at the idea, proudly declaring he drank nothing but water. (I helplessly thought of General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove.)
I liked Arlan and, despite his quirks, had a lot of respect for him. He was bull-headed and he didn’t have the broadest outlook on life, but he had a commanding air, great natural dignity. He drove one of the school buses, and I heard his discipline was both absolute and effortless.
One day, after one of the milestones of life—birth, marriage, or death—had brought Arlan to the church grounds, we were talking on the front lawn, beneath the large cross on the church’s brick front. Arlan pointed at the church’s name, very elegantly set in metal letters across the brick. He said, “I gave those letters in memory of my daughter. She died in a car wreck the year they rebuilt after the fire.” It was characteristic of Arlan that he gave me no other information, just noted the memorial and the reason. But it was a proud and solemn pronouncement, and it was a moment with something to say about church and community.
For this man who never came to a regular worship service, this place was holy ground, a fitting site for holy things, things set apart in devotion and love.
(A few years later, Arlan’s wife, Flo, was killed in a freak road accident when they were on one of the few vacations they ever took. I told someone that doing that funeral was like burying my grandmother. After the funeral, Arlan gave us a dozen rolls Flo had baked and frozen before the trip. She was a fabulous baker, but I had a hard time bringing myself to eat them: it was like eating consecrated bread.)
I used to point out to my confirmation students that there’s no scene in the New Testament that depicts Jesus telling his disciples to write down what’s going on. I was trying to make them think about the essentials of faith and the growth of tradition. Jesus never tells his disciples to get busy and build churches either. Yet Bibles and buildings are part of the reality of Christian faith. It’s not only impossible, by now, to think of Christianity without its writings and places of worship; it’s impossible to think of this community enduring through time without preserving its stories or venerating the sites of its central acts.
Births and deaths happen where they happen, but a community brings the babies and those prepared for burial to the place of worship for those events to be marked, marked by symbols of a greater life. It’s the action of marking that gives weight to the site. Baptize enough babies, marry enough men and women, say the last words over enough loved ones in the same place and you can’t think of it as anything but holy ground.
But that place is there for those times only because it’s there already for something more encompassing: it’s the place we enact the primary rituals of faith, every week of every year for as long as the community lives.
This is the dominating rhythm of every pastor’s life. Everything I did, everything that happened to me, all the things I’m setting down in these fragments, happened within the movement of each week toward the Sunday service, and the place of that Sunday in the cycle of the church year. Both the joys and the sorrows were tempered by the worship cycle. (One more thing for the reader to remember.)
It’s not hard for most people to appreciate the beauty of ritual, but I think its power, its force over a community, the way it steadies and broadens life, can only be grasped if you’re living with its rhythms. In a strange way, the stylized world of ritual and symbol takes you out of your life and into a greater life. That’s where the steadiness comes from.
There are always reformers around who want to dissolve “Sunday” into “Monday” concerns, as though faith would be enriched that way. It never seems to occur to them that faith could just as easily be impoverished by the pettiness and provincialism most people’s ordinary lives are overwhelmed by. I often thought, when we prayed the Prayer of the Church, that many of us were being forced to think and feel beyond our own lives in a way we seldom did otherwise. I thought, in any given week, the Sunday gathering was probably the most profound encounter most of us had with thought, music, history, and the great world beyond our little place.
(On a smaller scale, I was always amazed how quickly and surely the Lord’s Prayer could steady and uphold a roomful of grieving mourners.)
I saw once a stole worn by one of the pastors who was trying to make the traditional Sunday more reflective of ordinary life: instead of the symbols of the faith, he had placed on it corporate logos, reflective of the businesses people in his congregation worked for. He looked like a walking billboard.
My first thought was: has this moron ever worked a day in his life for one of these companies? And does he actually imagine people that work for them want to pray to them?
My non-attending member Arlan understood more about the presence of the church in a place than this thoughtless clown who served as a pastor.
Hanging Out
You have to love the basic rhythm of church life, the inexorable, unstoppable turning of every week toward Sunday, when, ready or not, you have to bring what you have for everybody to receive. I went into every Sunday energized, stomach turning over, anxious to start, riding that performer’s wave of aspiration. I was jittery with nerves until I could enter the service and have it carry me along. Every Sunday was like opening night: it could make you so sick it would be easy to hate it if you didn’t love it.
But all around that great moment and that basic rhythm were the sloppier rhythms of ordinary life in a small town parish: the people you see every day in town, the shut-ins you visit, the classes and the meetings, the people going in and out of medical care, the people in nursing homes who are never coming out. The years pass and you bury, baptize, teach, and marry generation after generation in the same families. You have to love that, too.
In grad school, we were members of a university church and the turnover of members was constant. The handful of funerals that occurred during our years there were shattering experiences for that gathering of the young and vibrant. But, during our service as pastors, funerals were a defining mark of the communities we served in, a clearly visible, ever present stage on life’s way. When we buried the old ones, children would be taken down the hall of confirmation pictures to see their grandfathers and grandmothers in their confirmation robes.
One long winter, I was reading Siegfried Sassoon’s fictionalized memoirs of his service as an infantry officer in World War I, and it struck me that life in a small town parish had some similarities: nobody’s winning anything; nobody’s going anywhere—in fact, you feel guilty when you leave; all you can do is keep the life you have going with as much courage and humor as you can summon up; when there’s a change, it’s usually brought by death.
(During one of the worst winters, I started to see myself as something like a junior officer in the doomed German sixth army at Stalingrad: in a trap like that, it made no difference what you knew or what you did; you had simply come to a time and place where you were going to lose. I can remember coming up with that comparison as I trudged to the post office in a howling blizzard, but I’m thankfully distant from the depression that must have spawned it.)
And yet I generally enjoyed that weekly, yearly round within the lifetimes of the people who happened to be living at the time and in the place where I happened to be serving.
I had my own personal rhythms my life moved to, as well. It’s amusing to look back and realize that in such a public, exposed life, I tended to begin and end each week in absolute solitude. Since
