October 30, 2007
Ten
Of the ten congregations I’ve “served” over the years — serially as layreader, deacon, priest — one eventually became a beauty parlor, one a funeral home, one a cathedral, one was a collegiate chapel “absorbed” by the church next door, two were razed, and four remain more or less as they were in one carnation or another. I know of none did the kingdom arrive as I had once vainly expected — or depart, I hope not.
I know about these. I’ve often wondered out of all the marriages God has solemnized at my aegis, how many have dissolved in one way or another, how many have “worked…” how many dead folk the undertakers, grave keepers, and I have put away have made it on to wherever they’d hoped. And ever so often, I wonder about that baptism — and the babe now grown up — in which I forgot the blessing of the water, a prayer that has got to be one of the neatest and more memorable in the BCP, a doozy one has to work on to forget.
At this Halloween time, I wonder how many haunts remain in those places, especially the beauty parlor and the funeral home. Actually, though, I suspect there about as many as at the cathedral. Whenever I need a count, I just remember it comes to about as many as were there before, during, and after my tentative tenures. Just imagine, all those saints, couch-potato-ing it through eternity.
Church just bams along regardless of how hard we work to impede it or define it or exclude or include folk from it. That might tell us something if only we’d listen instead of talk and fret so much.
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