Drawn like a moth

Garrison Keillor, who has taken gentle, Minnesotan swipes at Unitarians for years, put this up on his blog/newsletter/column/whatever it is this morning:

How many Unitarians does it take to changed a lightbulb?  -- "Unitarians believe that incandescent and flourescent and neon are equally valid paths to light, and if, in your journey, you feel the need to change your lightbulb, we will come to your home and recite a poem about radiance and perform a dance about the rising of the sun."

I grew up Unitarian, and still consider myself one.  

He's not wrong.

However, I won't be coming to your house to dance around your lifebulb.

Although I do have one that needs changing...

Life seen through a prism

Clicking on any of this photos will enlarge them.

Early on a Friday midsummer morning, I wandered out on the grounds of the First Unitarian Church of Victoria, waiting for Demeter to arrive.  I had arrived separately because I had just completed my last night in exile, in the spare room of this summer's failed house-sit.  Back at Demeter's condo, my Double Leo Sister and her family were packing up to depart, but Demeter and I had made plans long ago to attend the memorial service for a prominent church member who died in the aftermath of a stroke suffered while driving the Pat Bay Highway.

As I crossed the parking lot, I saw a sign marking a "memorial pathway".  There is a memorial garden, with a wall containing more familiar names each time I go to visit it, but I didn't remember this pathway.  The church moved to this location four years before I left Victoria, and in the intervening sixteen years, I've only caught brief summertime glimpses.  Demeter wouldn't be arriving for another fifteen minutes or so, so I climbed the steep dirt path between the ancient trees.

I spotted an Oregon Grape plant, which, despite its name, is native to this area.  Demeter planted it in our garden about twenty years ago.  The current owners uprooted it ages ago.

There wasn't much time to climb far, so I was soon in my seat, acting as interpreter to Demeter, scribbling notes in my small book when I knew she wasn't able to follow.  There is a sound system with a loop that usually works well, but this morning, we were listening to people who weren't experienced in public speaking, and grief-stricken to boot.

He wasn't a man I knew well, for all his deep involvement in church affairs. He was an avowed atheist - Unitarians range from reason-worshipping atheists, humanists, and agnostics, through ethereal and downright wacky Wiccan and Neo-Pagans, to the more traditional theists and Christians.  The last group were the dominant group in past centuries in the Unitarian Church, but are now very much in the minority, and of course, it was through Unitarian theism that I came to know his wife twenty years ago. 

I was deeply moved to see her singing passionately back to her church sextet, from her seat amongst her children and grandchildren.  

Did I feel I knew more about her dead husband after experiencing him through his family and friends?

Well, yes and no.

It occurred to me that a memorial service is rather like a prism.  People speak their memories, but the memories are refracted through personality, time, and perspective.  The image we get of the dead person may not match the image we had of him while alive.  It's not an inaccurate picture, really.  Rainbows aren't illusions; they're just light after it's been bent and sorted.

My hostess drove me back to her house to pick up my suitcase and take it back to Demeter's for my final week in Victoria.  On the way, we talked about the wide range of beliefs, and she declared that the only combination that she found "ridiculous" were Unitarian Christians.  "Well, the Unitarian Church started out as a Christian church..." I began.

I'm a Unitarian by birth, so I really should have known better, having grown up in a church dominated by very determined humanists and agnostics.  Besides, apart from being a Leo, my hostess is Dutch.

"No.  Christianity is belief in the Trinity. Unitarians are the opposite."

"But Christian Unitarians follow the teachings of Jesus..."

"No.  It's ridiculous.  We won't discuss it."

Sigh.

It's a panorama shot.  Try clicking on it!

Billy Collins is not a kind of drink

Through the wonders of live-streaming, I can pop into Sunday services at Demeter's church.  I watch her toddle up after the offering to light a candle, and sometimes I see her bun hovering at the bottom left of the screen. It's oddly reassuring.

One recent Sunday,  I tuned in to discover that the morning service would be a lay-led poetry reading and that my mum was among the readers.  To my delight, my mother's selection was from a poem-a-day anthology I'd sent her a year or so ago.  With a world-weary wryness that matched the tenor of the poem beautifully, she read "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins, and told us afterwards that she was unprepared for the laughter. The lady who had organized the service, a long-time friend of my mother's, made a comment afterwards about Billy Collins being "accessible". I have a nasty feeling that she was not being complimentary (she's a writer and artist herself and can be a wee bit snarky about those kind of things), but hope I'm wrong. Here's the man himself reading "Forgetfulness" and a poem that is particularly pertinent with Mother's Day coming up -- "The Lanyard":
I first became aware of Billy Collins when he was a guest on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, about the same time he became the US Poet Laureate. Almost immediately, I got myself a collection of his poems, accessibility being a plus for me. It must have been about 2002 because elder daughter was turning ten, and I knew this was not the moment to show her this poem:

On Turning Ten 

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in a bad light ---
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
 It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, 
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees.  I bleed.

- from The Art of Drowning (1995)

Another favourite of mine is called "Passengers" and I'm putting a link to it for two reasons:  1) you may like the option of hearing it read as well as reading it; 2) if you're travelling by air any time soon, you may want to skip it.  Trust me.

A flash of light

I've known her since I was a teenager; she's in her nineties now. I remember the measured tones of a thoughtful accountant; now deafness cuts her off from most conversation and her carefully chosen clothes don't always survive the long ride to church. I'm in the passenger seat when we draw up to the apartment to pick her up, so I'm the one to ascend the steep steps and signal her through the glass where she's waiting in the lobby. I greet her, but she's concentrating on negotiating the transferral of her cane to accommodate the changing sides of the bannisters. In the car, the rest of us chatter and she is silent. I know better than to try and include her over the roar of the traffic and her hearing aids. She clambers out of the car as we pull up to the ramp leading into the church and she makes a beeline for today's greeter who embraces her and guides her to a seat.

In this Unitarian congregation where I grew up, it has become the custom over the past few decades for those who choose, to line up after the offertory and light small candles off the larger flaming chalice, planting them in one of two bowls of fine sand where they will burn until just before the closing song. I follow Demeter and light my own candle, thinking of loved ones in Hades. As I turn to move back to my seat, I see a hand reach out. It's my thoughtful deaf accountant glowing and smiling at me. I smile and grip her hand, then find my way back to Demeter. I tell her what happened, and she says, "She had just remembered who you were."

(I'm halfway through a house-sit where the computer is, oooh, roughly twenty years old. It's a dial-up. You may not hear much from me until the end of August when I'm back in the grip of Hades.)

The Rites of Mid-Winter

This has been a rather solemn week, liturgically speaking, particularly for a Unitarian married to a practising Anglican.

On Sunday, I decided to accompany the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter to church, having given it a miss for several weeks. I used to be a regular churchgoer, but the Unitarian church here in Ottawa doesn't feel so much like a church as a country club, only with a air of earnestness and social responsibility. So, after five years of banging my head against a brick steeple, I started accompanying my husband to his church, which sadly has only emphasized the fact that the one thing I've truly learned from all these years of being married to an Anglican is that I'm definitely not an Anglican. Still as Anglican churches go, the RFB's is not bad. I'd even go so far to say that it's the most Unitarian Anglican church I've ever attended. And that's saying something. This is probably due to the high percentage of gays that attend this particular church. I'd never met an Anglican church with a "rainbow section" before. (You don't have to be gay to be Unitarian, far from it, but the Unitarian church was blessing gay unions many years before it became legal in Canada for gays and lesbians to wed.)

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with why I decided to go along with the Resident Fan Boy last Sunday. It was Candlemas, a holy day I've always rather liked. (Groundhog Day has to be one of the lamest ideas ever.) I love watching younger daughter's face as she grasps the lit candles and the lights go off for the reading of the Gospel. And watching my daughter's face in the candlelight, I found myself choking back tears at the words of the gradual hymn, sung to the old English folk song O Waly Waly: "O little love, who comes again/ the Word reborn to make God plain..." For Candlemas, like most liturgical things, has a strong undercurrent of sorrow. It's based on the story of Simeon who saw the infant Jesus being brought to the temple to be presented, so it contains the Nunc Dimittis, the canticle of Simeon, the words you hear at nearly every Christian funeral: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace . . . ." And the not-so-comforting words to Jesus' parents: "a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also . . . ."

These strange shining pools in the centre of the dark, festivals in wintertime, are like roses with thorns for parents, particularly parents of special-needs children. But all the same, it is beautiful, and although I cannot in good conscience call myself a Christian, I do rather love the words from the opening of the Gospel of St John: ". . . the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not". Modern translations say: "and the darkness has not overcome it" which is no fun at all; I like the idea of the darkness saying "Huh?" Rather like my younger daughter shining out there in the sea of neurotypicalness...

Lent comes early this year, treading on the heels of Candlemas, so the service was supposed to end with the "burial of the alleluias" which we missed because the service went overtime and we had to catch our bus. All the same, this meant hauling out some of the best hymns for the last time before Easter, and younger daughter particularly enjoyed "All Creatures of our God and King" which is called the "Mr Bean Hymn" at our house. (Younger daughter adores Mr Bean who surely must be a little PDD himself.) And tonight we'll have pancakes and bacon and sausage for Shrove Tuesday. Tomorrow, the Resident Fan Boy will decide whether to brave the elements to get his forehead smudged on Ash Wednesday.