call to worship...again and again

 

Call To Worship

The possibility that the zero gave birth to the universe,
that all our somethings come from nothing, the fear
of being alone like that, children of chance, orphans
down to our atoms, is mother to the idea of god. God

is a dress we slip over solitude, a mask
for oblivion to wear, a rule-giver in a world
where no flower or bear cares that we are here
or what we do.

I prefer a theology of silence, the eschatology
of the shrug, a religion of holding my wife’s hand
for now.

But, if the industry of the church is what it took
to give me bells ringing Sunday mornings,
to which crows sometimes rise and deer turn,
I’m grateful for a sound that pulls me out of myself,
lifts my head toward sun and clouds, into the up
and all, the blue, the on and on of it, when I bend
the only knee I have to bend, feel
happily small, contingent, and held, by what
I can’t say, short of everything.

• Bob Hicok

This poem reminds me of a day many years ago when I sat in a pew waiting for our son’s baccalaureate to begin and out of nothing, nowhere, came a crystalline call, chant of the Imam, noting that worship was to begin. I couldn’t locate the person, I could only receive the sound in the atmosphere. In some liminal space just before the call we had descended to zero, to a space of know not what. That allowed the call to worship to take effect and create response.

Saturday we buried my father. It was a crystal blue sky into which the steeple of the Church of the Redeemer chapel ascended; it was a crystal blue sky into which a family gathered and offered remembrances, prayers and music. It was the same sky the day we interred my mother; it was the same niche which now holds them and our drawings and messages blessed. Or should I say the same niche which holds their ashes. Their eternal souls are in that clear crystalline azure now merged as One with One.

This poem arrived on my doorstep on a similarly colored day. This poem arrived as I struggled to find the words to preach, as I struggled to untangle the roles of daughter, sister, mother, aunt, cousin, grandmother, wife from priest.

And what spoke to me was the assurance and comfort of “nothing”. Stripped of everything, every thing, there is still something albeit mysterious and numinous. 

That sky, untouchable but holding everything; that almost sapphire blue untouched, unmarred, beckoned a worship and reverence and assured all would unfold if we simply got back to zero, to nothing, to birth, to creative energy which presupposes eternal life. 

Well, it was simply an amazing day! Tension seemed stripped away and only love, crystal blue love was refracted through the stained glass and onto the faces he loved so dearly. There was nothing else for those moments. I felt eternity as never before. “Nothing” is unseeable, so is grace. God is unsayable. From zero we make sacramental attempts. 

Grace became visible and sayable in a blue sky and in tender tears.