Preface
He approached the house; the window was open; the moonbeams fell on Hanna, who was sleeping by it. Her head was supported on her arm; her cheeks glowed; her lips moved, gently murmuring his name.
“Sleep sweetly, my darling. Dream of everything that is good, and yet the awaking will surpass all.” He made the sign of the cross over her, closed the window, and gently withdrew.
In a few moments the whole village was buried in slumber. Only the moon hung as brilliant and wonderful as before in the immensity of the Ukraine sky. The divine night continued her reign in solemn stillness, while the earth lay bathed in silvery radiance. The universal silence was only broken here and there by the bark of a dog; only the drunken Kalenik still wandered about the empty streets seeking for his house.
A May Night, Nikolai Golgol
9:07am
Just after 9am I walked up the long sanctuary aisle and into the chancel. The chancel. That place of reverence. That place in the sanctuary raised up a handful of steps “so people in the back can see and hear the liturgist and preacher better,” but can easily smell of Babel and the tower built there.
Whatever the reason, the chancel always feels holy. Perhaps it feels holy because of the countless people through the ages who have read scripture and prayed to God from the top of its steps. Perhaps I mistake it feeling coly, confusing it with my own feeling of being scared to preach the Gospel Truth to its fullest.
The Chancel is a holy place, for all these reasons and more. Nothing will be able to change that. Nothing can distract from the Lord and his Wonder while up here, on these lofty three steps above the ground.
Except maybe that scratching noise. Is it coming from inside the wall or above me?
“Dennis! Come in here! I think there’s a squirrel in the church… again.” He was an expert at getting the last one out. This one should be no problem, especially because we know exactly where this one is.
“I hear it,” he said, halfway up the aisle.
“Do you hear flapping?” I asked, but before I finished asking my question, I had my answer. I not only heard flapping, but saw flapping, from the wings of a large black bird, which zoomed past us, far overhead, to the back of the sanctuary, landing on top of the organ’s swell box.
Dennis and I looked at each other.
“Well ****…,” I didn’t say. I didn’t have to. He could see it in my eyes.
We opened the doors to the parking lot on either side of the holy chancel, then we split ourselves up to try and force it toward one of the doors. But, it didn’t work. It flew too high, taunting us (or, more likely scared of us two white men – he must have known what kind of damage we can do to innocent lives) from the top of the swell in the choir loft, to the high crown molding left of the chancel.
This was my new reality: An ominously black bird was stuck inside the sanctuary on Ash Wednesday.
I feared if we could not get it out it would return to dust sooner than necessary. So, we tried everything we could think of.
This is what didn’t work:
- Climbing to the top of the swell to keep it from landing on the organ pipes while Dennis corralled it from below.
- This attempt also came with the satisfaction of knocking the high C pipe out of it’s holder with my butt; it falling at least 10 feet to the ground and bent in more than one place.
- Luring it down near an open door with foods from its natural habitat: shelled pistachios stuck in peanut butter.
- This attempt came with using the only peanut butter I could find in the building: a completely sealed, unopened, unused jar that expired in 2016
- An even deeper, more personal loss was the sacrifice of my own personal, now very expensive, pistachios. All to unsuccessfully save one of God’s creatures.
Finally, though, it happened! In a stroke of genius, we chased it into one corner, still 30 feet above us, where he found the hole he entered in from and exited peacefully, only a few scratching sounds on his way out.
2:00pm
I finally sat down to write the homily.
30 minutes later my computer dinged with a reminder for a home visit to some members of the church.
“Well, I guess the homily is good enough…” I said to myself as I pressed my forehead to the glass desktop.
5:22pm
The Choir Director Calls
“The bird is back.”
Never left, I thought.
“Are we moving the service to the chapel, then?” I asked.
“No, it should be fine. If it moves, we’ll just call it the Holy Spirit moving among us.”
Well, it wasn’t fine. The bird did not like the sound of the handbells all through Bell Choir practice in the sanctuary, and so flew around… and around… and around… and around the perimeter of the sanctuary the entire time.
6:12pm
The Choir Director Texts
“Let’s do the chapel.”
“Is it getting annoyed and are people worried?” I asked.
“It’s really distracting. Moving around a lot.”
One major problem presented itself immediately. We have different hymnals in the chapel than in the sanctuary, and, of course, the hymn we want to sing is not in the chapel hymnal. So, I left my son in my office to watch some un-educational YouTube video while I ran off copies of the hymn and frantically stuffed them in the bulletins, as people were starting to arrive for the 6:30 worship service.
But, as is often the case, God is good, and we were all set for the somber occasion that is an Ash Wednesday service. All I had to do in the minute and a half leading up to the start of the worship service was go to the bathroom, put on a tie, and quiet my heart and mind for worship.
6:34pm
The first hymn starts with a refrain. It’s a pretty song. The words, obviously, are what I chose the hymn for. We finish the refrain, skip down to the first stanza, and something feels wrong. I know this tune and it is longer than what can fit on this page.
I instantly know what’s going to happen, but no one else in the chapel has any idea. We are going to sing the last words on this page: “Reaching through your…” and we are not going to finish the sentence. The deeply moving, potentially life-changing thought that ends that stanza will be completely lost to us because, in my haste to print hymns, I didn’t check to see if it was a one-pager or a two-pager. This went on for six stanzas.
I apologized after the hymn, to which everyone laughed.
6:42pm
The homily.
The incomplete (?) yet complete enough (?) homily; complete with an ending to a short story by Nikolai Golgol, where the main character makes the sign of a cross over his loved one as she sleeps during a Ukrainian May Night, which no one, other than the WSCC English professor in attendance, seemed to care much for.
But, I don’t want to sound too upset at their lack of knowledge of or interest in Ukrainian literature because they were pretty distracted by a red-haired child in the back, who looks a lot like I did when I was his age, who kept yelling, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” as people chuckled all around.
The congregation also laughed as I went through Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. He told them that he himself had (and we should follow his lead) overcome all his hardships with purity and patience, to which I confessed I had not endured the sanctuary bird saga with much patience. A bird saga which is continuing as of the writing of this tale.
6:50pm
Finally, a decently somber moment, of marking God’s children and reminding them that they will return to dust, the same dust from which we came. The moment felt strange, yet important. Because of the events of the day, and how well the worship service had gone up to that point – which is to say, not at all according to plan – the moment felt so wrong and still so appropriate.
The whole day and the whole worship service felt like I was wandering drunkenly through the night, trying to find my way home, the houses and streets only lit by a divine, silvery radiance.
The failure of creating an appropriately somber worship service didn’t matter because in those vertical and horizontal strokes we felt God’s presence among us. I saw the mortality in each persons eyes as I repeated the words over and over, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But, in the meantime, perhaps it’s okay to laugh through the darkness.