What we keep

My hands started to shake the second I tucked into my pew.

I sat where I always sat - on the east side near the back, just like my parents would have done. Everything about the church is familiar, even the carpet, even though I don’t think I have stepped foot in it in twenty years. There was a good crowd, but I did not recognize a single person. I left my house before 7 am and drove three hours for the funeral fo a 90-year old man that I can barely remember meeting. I certainly would not have recognized him on the street. Nor he, I.

The man in the coffin up front is my friend’s grandfather. She texted me as she struggled to write his eulogy. So I go to watch her honor her grandfather, but I know I am also there to grieve my own. I don’t remember it, but I suspect I went to his funeral thirty eight years earlier.

It was probably in this exact same room.

Maybe some of the same people were there.

Sitting on these same wooden pews staring at the burgundy carpet.

Someone sings from the choir loft. I remember him as a kid, but now he is a professional musician and performer in Chicago. He sings familiar hymns but his voice fills the whole church. My brain can’t reconcile it, but I see a ten year version of him instead of a 40-year old bald man belting out hymns like he is on Broadway.

The pastor steps up to the lectern to give the sermon and I have to look twice.

My old pastor has returned for the funeral.

The same one I remember from high school.

The same one that confirmed me at twelve and married me and my husband twenty years ago. And from my pew in the back, he looks almost exactly the same, just slightly thinning hair. His voice rang with the same inflection and sincerity.

The pastor spoke slowly simply and with great heart.

I wondered about my childhood faith in this place. In this old and dying church.

About how much I got wrong.

The church itself is slightly smaller than I remember. Like most things from our youth.

And I wonder if this traditional place could hold my now unruly faith.

If there would be room for it here.

The sanctuary is long and narrow.

These days my faith is wide and stretched thin.

But as he spoke, he was so earnest and I couldn’t help but think maybe it was just true. Then and now. His words were not messy or complicated or political or outdated.

They were simple and heartfelt.

The gospel of John spoken for a man named John.

Spoken for me.

Time plays tricks and does not stand still in a place like this.

It moves backwards and forwards.

A place with so much history houses who we were and maybe even who we will be.

Jesus is the same yesterday today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

And I wonder how much of me is the same.

Most days, I’d like to think I’ve grown and changed and my sixteen year old me would barely recognize the forty three year old version.

But today in this familiar pew, I am feeling a little more generous.

I feel like she would and she’d be glad for the parts she held as well as the ones she outgrew.

Two days later, Ash Wednesday, and I stopped by my own church on the way to work.

I hesitantly walked into the chapel and stood there while a pastor dipped his thumb into the ashes and painted a cross on my forehead.

I did not leave it on my head for long.

But the scent of the ashes lingered with me all day.

I smelled of fire and death.

It was a reminder that sometimes we need to burn it all down to begin again.

What do I need to burn? Control. Expectations. Striving. Unforgiveness.

But maybe a better question is and I question I felt on those familiar wooden pews -

What do I need to keep?