To mark the anniversaries we are all facing, I just revised and added a little a passage from my paper journal of just over a year ago. Leafing through it, I see that I was writing there last year more than I remembered. Here it is:
The wildness of loneliness. The tenacity of communion. Solomon Stoddard thought that communion was a converting ordinance. Jonathan Edwards lost his church over an attempt to reserve it to those who could give spoken testimony of experiences of grace.
Once I took communion with my beloved friend Lynne at MCC San Francisco, where she -- who has studied, thought, and noted so much about that church's history, -- told me, they had decided that anyone could come with those they love and be held and be kissed, with the blood and the body, the bread and the wine.
I think of loaves and fishes, with fishes in their own worlds, own times, spawning upriver, pulled by the smell of the young of their kind slowly maturing in the mud of the banks. Let me love that well. Let me be pulled by the smell.
The prayer of the journal is holding.
My feelings surge. I need to contain them, to limit, and also to release, uncover, and dance with my ambitions, fears, loneliness, grief, longings, joy. Bodily soundness and weakness or not. Telling stories have saved me more than once, including my telling of them, and will save me again..
Long, gold socks I gave my mother that she gave me back. The women of the arthritis aqua aerobics class. Old women, happy to see me. Now, a year later, Maura, the last one to help and hug me, gone.
Praise the day. Do the work. Be in the day.