I Have Loved the Beauty of Thy House

At 5:00 on Sunday morning I pulled a crying June from her crib and tucked her into bed next to me.  I have not done this– she has not asked me to do this— since the night before her first birthday.  I lay down with her and rubbed her back and prayed for her to go back to sleep.  She did, but I stayed awake.  And although I didn’t know it at the time, just a few miles down the road the church that I have loved for nearly 10 years was burning to the ground.  By 6 a.m. the church, in the words of our minister, belonged to fire.

The church was built 170 years ago by people who knew many things that I do not know.  They knew how to thresh wheat, and how to butcher an animal.  They knew how to mix a salve that would heal an infection and how to steep a tea that would end a pregnancy.  They knew how to sew bandages and how to ferment cider.  They knew how to build a church so that the morning sun would enter the windows in every season.  The people who built our church were the children of Revolutionary War veterans and the grandparents of boys who died in the Civil War.  They were people who loved their children and feared their God; people who spent their few precious hours of rest each week listening to sermons about serpents and demons, and fire.

Can I describe the church?  Can I conjure it for you?  I can’t.  And what would I say, really?  Beadboard walls, iron sconces, a wooden pulpit.  No cross.  I can tell you that you would have loved it, that you would have walked through the door and believed that this was what a church was meant to look like.  I can tell you that during the long and lonely years when I was waiting for my roots to take hold in the rocky soil of these hills that church was my salvation.  In that little room my life was made holy:  in May the flowers on the tiny altar were the same as the ones that bloomed by my mailbox; in March the congregants’ muddy bootprints covered the painted wood floor no matter how carefully they wiped their feet at the door.  These were people with whom I shared the same late  harvest and early frost, the same relief at the sight of steam rising from the maple sugar shacks in February, the same joy in swimming in cool lakes that we had skated across six months before.

On Sunday afternoon we gathered at the Parish House.  I parked on Main Street and walked toward the church.  There was bright yellow tape strung across the road leading up the hill, but I could still see what was left.  I cried loud tears at the sight of it, and kept walking.  During the service we prayed and sang and laughed; we clapped and we cried.  We collected an offering for Haiti.  I cried for all my Sundays there, and especially for our girls’ baptisms, and I tried to remember that they were baptized with water from a creek that still runs and by minister whose heart still beats strong in his chest.  So much remains.

There will be a new church.   And as a consolation prize, it might even have a bathroom.  But I hope it doesn’t have much more than that.  I hope it is one small and simple room nestled against that ancient rocky ledge.  We are a wild and creative, a holy and raucous, congregation.  We love big, we dream loud.  We stomp our feet and we laugh; we hold each other’s hands and each other’s babies and each other’s fragile hearts.  We are, dare I say, a bit undisciplined.  That church, that 170 year old building, held us.  It held us down and it held us up and it held us together.  It kept us quiet (sometimes) and it kept us humble.  That 170 year old building was built by people who loved these hills and who knew so many things we do not know. When it comes time to rebuild it I hope we bow to their wisdom which was, of course, born of necessity but also must have been born of grace, and of the prescient knowledge that nearly 200 years later we would need nothing more than a room filled with pews on which to rest our  bodies; nothing more than a dozen windows so that we might see each other’s faces in the morning light.