The “Writing as Spiritual Practice” workshop last week was lovely. Mount Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara is a bright and still place of refuge overlooking the bay. The quiet alone would have been restorative, but in addition I got the company of 22 writers, including Nora Gallagher and Barbara Brown Taylor. We had every morning to write and each afternoon to discuss, Eucharist every day if we wanted it, wonderful food, comfortable beds. I felt like someone opened the windows on a stuffy room in my brain.
But then Thursday evening I got horrible news. A member of our community was killed in a car accident, along with her sister-in-law. Friday morning I learned that my successor at Spirit Garage lost both his parents to a car accident last week as well. I changed my flight to a red-eye Saturday night so that I could be back Sunday for worship and visitation in the evening. Turns out a sister of the deceased was on the same flight.
The visitation took place here at the church last night, and people started arriving 30 minutes before the published time, blinking as if they’d just been awakened at midnight by a harsh and unfamiliar alarm. Members of our congregation who have entered this building thousands of times looked disoriented. Before long the line to the coffin in the sanctuary extended into the narthex and down the hall, the whole length of the building. People who rarely hug embraced as if they had been away on a long journey. Some stood in that line for two hours, but not a word of impatience was spoken, not a complaint about aching feet or backs.
Earlier in the afternoon we had hosted a birthday party for a woman in our congregation who has turned 100. She has outlived most members of her family, including her daughter, and there was no question that this was where the celebration should be held. She wore purple, a classy ulstra suede jacket and a big corsage. There were mounds of food and music and laughter, and then the odd transition began as the building put on its mourning clothes. Friends and family members packed up the birthday cards and sweets as the funeral home arrived with the body of this woman, just shy of her 60th birthday, killed in an instant.
I am proud of this community and the love it pours out in joy and in sorrow, but I am even more grateful for the existence of the church, this place where the old have family when the blood relatives are gone, and where families who suddenly find themselves literally motherless can also gather, where senseless loss is shared, and held, in the embrace of God.
