A Hundred Names

I grew up in a time when many children were forced into Sunday School, or religious training of some sort whether they liked it or not. My earliest memory of church was sitting on a shiny white pew watching the blood of me dripping beautifully down onto that pristine whiteness; dropping in tiny circles until my mother realized I had a nosebleed and pressed my father's handkerchief against my nose, impeding my breathing and making me feel acutely uncomfortable.

Later, whenever my grandmother had me, she took me to Baptist Sunday School and it was there I have my first memory of Jesus. I was still very young, perhaps three, and I thought Jesus was the calf standing beside the sheep and a baby in a box full of straw. I didn't know why they called him the lamb when he was so obviously the calf and I wasn't sure why Jesus loved me, but the Bible told me so. I knew the Bible was a book and I liked books.

After that there were scattered, odd attempts to bring us up as the Episcopalians we were supposed to be, except neither of my parents really was that anymore, so we were sent with the priest's wife on some Sundays where I fell in love with the song, Onward Christian Soldiers, and I liked it when we went up to the front of the church and the priest touched my head and made me feel special. I spent quite a bit of time marching around back then, imagining saving people from terrible things.

By the time I was twelve I took myself to the Presbyterian Church across the street from a house we had moved into. They promised a white Bible to any child who had perfect attendance and I wanted that book so badly I never missed one Sunday, but I didn't get the book. It seemed your parents had to be members of the church for that to happen. I was disappointed, but we moved to a tiny town where my father taught after that and I got myself and my siblings all involved in another Presbyterian Church there. It was a small white clapboard building that wanted me to play my violin at the Christmas service. It was also here that my brother used to sit in the congregation and shoot rubber bands at the minister during the sermons until someone figured out he was the one doing it.

We moved back into the city shortly after that and I became a candy striper at the local hospital run by Franciscans. I fell in love with some of the younger sisters who lived at the mother house where we went for picnics and one of them who played guitar and sang with us died there after nursing the people in the tb clinic. It was about this time I decided to collect saints! I would look up their stories and carefully write them down, secreting them in the bottom of my desk drawer and bringing them out to pour over them as only a romantic teenager can do. I wanted desperately to be a saint, to rescue people and die bravely for a cause. I also wanted to live in the mother house with its castle like atmosphere and fairytale round top doors. I loved the smell of incense and the soft singing of the sisters there. I liked the idea of community, but I wasn't Catholic and no one took me seriously and we moved again.

I went to Catholic folk mass in college and married a man who was still serving at Epsicopal weddings and services as an altar boy while we were dating. I loved standing by his side in church, singing the hymns when the huge pipe organ filled the room with music and sunlight flooded it through the stained glass windows. There was another family there and it felt like we were a real family, spending many hours and days together in rituals as old as the church. It was a heady thing for a long time. I taught Sunday School and the children grew up and I grew with them until suddenly I felt awkward and often at odds with the very people who had been my surrogate family. Growing pains, I know that now.

And now? Now I believe in a beautiful order to this universe. I believe there is something so great I will never understand it. I am awed by the miraculous manifestation of these things I see around me, the bird songs, and the seeds that produce mighty oaks. I cry when I hear the song at the hospital that signifies a new baby has been born. How that tiny human being came to be fills me with constant wonder. My life is as full of wonder as it was when I was a child and first heard about the blood of Christ as I watched the stark and awful beauty of the red blood falling onto the white pew.

There are a hundred names for this and none of them is really right, or wrong. It is as incomprehensible now as it was when I was two, or three, or, I suspect it will be if I live to six hundred years old.

It is awe and wonder, joy and fear. It is not knowing and loving that not knowing.