Communion

Today is World-Wide Communion Sunday, a fine idea. This got me remembering various communion services I’ve attended. In the little village church of my youth, we went to the altar and kneeled, receiving the bread and little silver glasses of wine from the minister bending over us from the other side of the altar. The choir came down from the choir stall to sit in the front pews, where we had a good view of the soles of the kneelers’ shoes. Once when I was about twelve or thirteen, my friend Ellie and I saw that one of the soles had a hole in it. We got to giggling, and the more we tried to stifle the giggles, the worse they became. I was pleasantly surprised today that I could recall the event without embarrassment.

When my brother was in seminary, he decided to conduct a Watch Night Service, complete with communion, on New Year’s Eve, using John Wesley’s program. It was memorable for many reasons. First of all, the church wasn’t heated, it not being a Sunday. My brother determined to have the sanctuary lit by candles, so there was the strangely moving power always provided by such unusual light and shadows in amongst the pews and altar. There were only a few people there: our mother and father, Bill and I, and a few of our parents’ friends. One of the women had just undergone a sadness, I can’t remember about what, and afterwards she told our parents that the ceremony had touched her deeply. The service was very long, perhaps two hours. John Wesley never spared his congregation. He used to preach outside the collieries to the miners coming off work, and he would preach for an hour on, for example, justification by faith.

Once when my sister-in-law was having an operation, I went to look after their children, then about 6 and 8. After school I set out a snack for them, grape juice and cookies. As they were drinking the juice, the younger one said, “Aunt Nancy, you gave us the communion juice.” They thought that was a great joke. Afterwards my brother explained that he kept Welch’s grape juice in the refrigerator so that he could bring communion to the sick and shut-in.

When I first came to Fredericton, I was charmed by the communion. The members of the board of sessions would come to us in the pews and serve us cubes of bread on silver plates and little glasses of juice carried in silver cases. We would hold the cubes of bread until everyone was served and then eat it all together. After we had all been served the wine, we would drink together, and then you heard clink, clink, clink as everyone put down the glass on the holder on the back of the pew. Now we usually go up to the altar, dip a piece of bread (sometimes a piece of pita bread) into the wine, communion by tinction, it is called. There is available a rice cracker or water for those with allergies. Today we did it the old way.

Sometimes in church, my tears spring up, often for no reason I can discern. Today they had something to do with gratitude – just a flash of thanksgiving accompanied by tears.

The Good Samaritan

I have a new hero, Roseanne Smith.

This morning in the Globe and Mail there was the story of Ms. Smith:
“When Rosanne Smith and her husband, Armand, stumbled upon Curtis Dagenais on Tuesday morning lying in their hay field with only a water bottle at his side, one of the first things the man accused of killing two RCMP officers wanted was a hug. ´He probably hasn't had a hug from anybody in his family for probably 25 years. He has been abused physically and mentally for years and years and years,’ Ms. Smith said yesterday during an interview.”

The Smiths “coaxed” Dagenais into their kitchen and talked to him for 6 hours, trying to convince him to turn himself in. At one point he talked about suicide, but Ms. Smith persuaded him that wasn’t a good way out of his troubles.

Imagine the compassion and the physical courage it took to give the man a hug, to coax him into their kitchen and to talk to him for 6 hours. I had tears in my eyes reading the article. Going through the newspaper is usually a very dispiriting activity, but every once in a while, you come across evidence of the potential goodness of humankind.

Last Sunday in church I read the scripture lesson, the story of the Good Samaritan, and the minister preached on the story. Roseanne Smith gives this world-shaking parable new life.

God's in his heaven

In an e-mail, my friend Ted commented on my blog entries about God’s presence and absence, about God holes. Here is some of what he had to say:

I know Peter Short preached sermons about God being absent, and in genocides, etc. it looks that way, but it’s just a matter of epistemology isn't it? I feel God’s always here, though my sore toe might keep me from paying attention. As I withdraw from all committees and as much responsibilities as I can, I’m neglecting people and sometimes, often, it feels as if God is all there is, and I don’t respect Him much. I blame God for everything; he can’t get out of it. But his answer to Job: esthetic, works every time. Even with the 6 rotting ducks and 2 cormorants that washed up on my shore this last week -- which I had to put in garbage bags. Rank, but I can't help being Whitmanesque about little rottennesses. I have spells of despising humans; I CANNOT understand how some people like the music they obviously do, and I think it’s evil that they do and think that God is gravely remiss. His damned plenitude -- just goes too far. God’s presence is what gets me.

Yesterday was a lovely day, bright blue sky, perfect temperature, long phone calls from loved ones, and a delicious seafood buffet at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel. To top it off, our new sweet neighbours, finding out that it was my birthday, brought me over some of their wonderfully exotic, exciting food. It did seem as if “God’s in his heaven --/All’s right with the world.”

Filling

How can I fill my God Hole at this stage of my life? A good question. One of the reasons I began this blog was to find out just that. When I was young, the hole was filled by reading religious books and writing what I think of as religious novels. Church played a big part, not because I could sense God’s presence – that strangely was usually absent. However, it was, and is, good to be with people who also are seeking the Realm of God, The Community.

Recently I was given the task for a church brochure to ask some parishioners why they go to church – what do they get out of it. Almost everyone mentioned the community. Two mentioned religion, no one God, prayer, or Jesus.

Prayer is the usual way to fill the hole, isn’t it? “The value of persistent prayer is not that He will hear us…but that we will finally hear him.”(McGill) Lately, God has been absent. Perhaps that is because I have abandoned my strict regimen of going to my office and there reading, praying and writing. I don’t know. Is it something that happens to people as they get older?

God Hole Gene

My grandfather was an early Jehovah Witness, joining the sect about 1920. It was founded about 1916 by “Pastor Russell” as my grandfather called him and later was led by “Judge Rutherford.”

I am not sure which of my grandfather’s eccentricities were his alone and which were associated with his religion. He was a blacksmith by trade, but by the time I knew him well he must have been retired, because he spent his time walking long distances, going from house to house, spreading the word. He would visit my father’s sister, Tempie, and seeing an abundance of vegetables she had just harvested, he would request some to take on his journey. “Mrs. Bartlett could use these.” He also carried discarded clothing to the needy. If we saw him walking up the hill to our house, we would alert my mother, who would quickly hide her cigarettes and ashtray. He remonstrated with me about crossing my legs at the knees—this was bad for circulation. I still don’t cross my legs at the knees. He brought my brother and me treats from the health food store--this was back in the 1940’s--candy made from carrots, for example.

On one memorable afternoon he preached to me and my boyfriend for about an hour about God. I wish I could remember what he said. I was amazed at this memory – he quoted many passages of the Bible – he seemed to know the whole book by heart.
I suspect that what attracted him to the Jehovah Witness sect was its scholarly nature. After he died, my grandmother gave me his Bible. Half of the volume is the actual Bible, half study apparatus. She also gave me his interlinear translation of the New Testament.
His father was a shepherd who had emigrated from England. The story goes that he went to work in the wool mill and at one point had a conversation with the owner. When the owner discovered that he had been a shepherd and was working towards bringing his large family over and eventually having a sheep farm of his own, the owner offered to pay for this dream. I learned from family research done by a cousin that Tom Senior had given some of his land to the Plymouth Brethren to build a church. The church is still there although it has changed its stripes several times over the years.

Tom Senior was long gone when I arrived in this world. He died 6 months after my mother’s birth. My grandfather married late, in his forties. He was 20 years older than my grandmother.

My mother remembered the slight embarrassment of being called in from playing to evening prayers. “The other children knew why I was being called in.” My aunt doesn’t remember the embarrassment, but she does remember the evening prayers. “My father would kneel with me beside my bed.”

I think my brother and I have inherited our God holes from this grandfather. Alas, we didn’t inherit his amazing memory.

An Answer

I am reading Peter Short's new book, Outside Eden, so that I can write a short review of it for our church newsletter. Peter is on leave from our church because he was elected the moderator of the United Church of Canada. I read this on page 71, "We don't go to church because God is present there. We go to church because in most of our experience, most of the time, God is absent. Oh, there is the rare and stunning moment God's appearing in the landscape of the day, but it is a brief and passing moment. "

How Do You Fill a God Hole?

Both my brother and I inherited a God hole from my mother’s father. About 1960 my brother received the call to become a minister. He wrote about this call in a poem titled “Softly.” “Softly, almost unnoticed, the spirit of Christ/ Enters and becomes. No hysteric act displays itself/ His coming unto us/…Jesus enters softly.”

I thought that if my beloved Robin was going to devote his life to the church, I should support him if I could. A year or so later, the local Methodist minister came to visit – he was visiting all the people in our apartment complex – and found me reading John Wesley’s biography. Soon I too was involved with the church. I’ve been attending church since then, although there was a period from 1965 until about 1975 when my attendance was sporadic but still faithful.

I can’t say that the church has been much influence on my religious life. Only occasionally do I feel there as if I am in the presence of God. Just once has Communion constituted a religious experience for me, and that was when Robin led a Watch Night service in our village church. Why then do I attend? I don’t know.

I had an intense period of reading religious books, from about 1965 until about 1990. My religious experiences have come often when I am either reading or writing. I was profoundly moved and changed by reading Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. I have led my life under its guidance ever since. Reading W.E. Hockings’ The Meaning of God in Human Experience changed the way I think of the world, of God and especially of what happens after death. I studied the Bible, read Biblical scholarship, and read works by the Mystics. About 1990 one of our ministers, Rod Sykes, led a seminar on the Reign of God, and that became a huge part of my thinking.

All my novels use a religious a structure but not an obvious one. (No one, not even a reviewer, has mentioned such a structure.) Flora used the Book of Revelations for its structure as written about in Farrer’s The Rebirth of Images. Wise-Ears used the Book of Proverbs. The Opening Eye and Samara used the first part of the Book of Acts. The Irrational Doorways used the Book of Acts and others of Paul’s writings. The current, unpublished novel, Temple House, uses what I can grasp of the Reign of God.

Body and Soul II

I wanted a baby very much, and a miscarriage gave me a melodramatic fear that I couldn't have one. When I did get past the first 3 months, I was happy, but then I began to worry about all the things that could go wrong. When the baby was born, I felt, for the first time, the presence of God. It was as if the air had become thick with this presence, and I thought to myself, in wonder and gratitude, God is present at my baby's birth. At that moment this presence seemed to say to me, Having a baby is a sacred trust. I have wondered ever since what that experience really did mean. Did it mean only that some kind of physical change had taken place inside me--some release of endorphins perhaps or a flood of hormones? Was I just imagining the whole thing? Do I now remember incorrrectly? Or was indeed God present that July evening in Waterbury Connecticut?

Body and Soul

In 1963, when I was seven months pregnant with our second child, my three year old son and I had rabies vaccinations, 14 shots, one a day, in the muscle of the abdomen. The doctor explained that these were exceptionally painful shots. Bill and I felt terrible that our son had to undergo the ordeal. For me far worse than the pain was the worry about what these shots were doing to my unborn baby. The doctor said that he doubted whether anyone in my condition had ever had these shots, so although he could assure me that there would be no side effects for my son, he couldn’t give any such assurance about the baby.

A month and half later, the obstetrician told me that the baby was going to come earlier than the October 26 due date. Four weeks passed, the doctor seemed perplexed that the baby hadn’t come, and I was growing more worried by the hour.

On the night of November 17, when the baby was 23 days overdue, at one of the lowest points in my life, we heard a woman screaming. My husband went outside to see what was the matter. He came back to tell me that the police had arrived.

We went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. After awhile, a scene presented itself to me. Bill, our son and I were coming into my mother-in-law’s kitchen. I could smell the perking coffee, Mrs. Bauer was hugging us, my father-in-law was beaming. They were exclaiming how well we all looked and how big Ernie had grown. It was a scene that had been enacted several times, so I could have been recalling the memory, or could have been recreating it in my imagination, or could even have been asleep, dreaming. But that is not what was happening as I lay there in despair that November night in North Carolina. No, I was wide awake, I was actually there in the kitchen, and I could feel my mother-in-law’s joy at our arrival. I could really smell the coffee, I felt enveloped and comforted by Mrs. Bauer’s radiant love, a palpable presence. I relaxed and went to sleep, and several hours later woke up with the happy realization that I was having labour pains.

Grace was born at 9 that morning. Student nurses were present, and their professor was teaching them how to do the APGAR check list for newborns. I heard her describe to the students each part of the baby, and then I heard her say, "This is unusual. She has a perfect score — ten!"

The Holy Spirit, whatever it is, was present to me that night: present in my body and in my soul.

A Presence
When I was six, we moved to a house down a lane, near a canal and Stony Brook. Across the lane was a beautiful pine wood where I went exploring for hours. One summer morning, I came across a pool deep in the woods and had what I would now describe as a mystical experience. I remember the details vividly, and a few years ago I used the experience in my novel Samara the Wholehearted. I had been seven when this happened; Samara was 21. “She pressed on. Abruptly she was there, at the source, a round deep pool. The place was as dark as evening with the spruce coming right down to the edge of the water. The woods here were very still. She hung her knapsack over the limb of a tree and squatted down beside the pool. It was alive with tadpoles. A spring must be feeding this, she thought. There was something not quite right, not quite real about the place. She inhaled an earthy smell and another smell too, like the odour present before it rains. The air thickened; she knew that a presence was there. Her skin crawled. She stood up. The presence was good, she felt, but frightening too, as if a specific personal responsibility was implicit in it. The water and the tadpoles were transfigured into worthiness.” In the novel I changed the pine woods of Massachusetts into the spruce forest of New Brunswick, and I think I added the part about the odour, although I now can’t really be sure. I don’t remember if I told my parents about this, and they are now both dead so I can’t ask them, but I don’t think I did. The encounter made sure that I would always know that there was a presence out there, that the presence was good, but that it also required something of me. Years later when I first read the sentence in the Luke gospel, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required,” it hit me hard.