You’ve heard of a half-way house? Well, this was a quarter-way. For those who no longer needed a locked facility. But only just barely. The quarter-way residents had not been in jail. They’d been where you go when someone decides your brain might bring you harm. But all that was behind them. They’d completed the programs. Had their meds re-adjusted. Now, they were free. Or a quarter-way free.
One had been through a life that left her skittish and cagey. She smoked on the stoop, trying not to remember. Another had nearly completed a doctorate in math at somewhere prestigious before it all came unraveled. But that was years ago. Now, he held court in the kitchen, his lap stacked with newspapers, haranguing the staff in imperious tones. Then there was a woman I’m going to say was called Gina.
Nothing about Gina could not be called big. A hairdo that spread out in every direction. A winter coat sewn with a giant in mind. And a voice with claws that could find you there down at the end of the hall. You know how some people’s complaints are poetic? Well, Gina’s poured out like sludge from the back of a cement-mixing truck that can never turn off and will never run out. A hospital was only two blocks away. That was the place Gina went to shoplift.
As for me, I worked there only a month, maybe two. I left with the idea that I could do better.
By that point, through the years, I had worked for too long in two other group homes. Had subbed around here and there on the overnight shift. Every place was the same. They would make it all homey. You had the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms, what-have-you, where everyone who lived there could wander all over. The industrial sofa would be urine-resistant. The pictures hung up in frames with no glass bolted down to the wall. Then, for the staff, a locked office, and a lounge with a couch.
A staff area was like you were hiding off-stage. Resident areas? Back on-stage again. Like the set of one of those sit-coms where a family does pratfalls in a brightly-lit house. Except in this sit-com, the girl shaves off her eyebrows to sing Billy Joel, and the teenage boy wipes his own shit on the door. But here’s what I’m getting at: the on-stage and off? Those were other homes, far away. The quarter-way house didn’t come with an off. You were on all the time. Just like part of the family.
How things were laid out wasn’t the only thing different. At the previous homes, I had worked with teenagers. With a teenager, you can make yourself think there is hope. But at the quarter-way, the residents were in their forties, their fifties. The question of whether to hope or not was long settled by now.
But it is in the nature of hope to flicker up just at the moment it seems to be gone. After escaping from Egypt, and passing through the Red Sea, the people of God are out in the wilderness, years from the Promised Land. It says that they murmur, but that’s putting it gently. They are starving. They’re lost. What they do is freak out. Which is when, in the story, the manna appears. Is it dew? Or hoarfrost? A filigree of honey-sweet flakes that you eat at first light, before the sun burns it off. You don’t store up manna. You don’t save it for later. The next day, scripture says, it will stink, crawl with worms. So, it’s food for right now. Just enough to go staggering on toward the dream.
You know the hospital two blocks away? In the cafeteria, you’d see families draped over lunch-tables, on break from the rooms where their loved ones were already failing. If you were hungry, you could get a tray, load it down with whatever, then take it to the lady at the front so she could ring you up. You’ve been somewhere like that. You know how it all goes. The point being, this is not what Gina did.
Baskets of bread-rolls were set out to go with your soup or your salad. Gina would head straight for them and fill her winter-coat pockets, six or seven bread-rolls in each. And then she would just leave.
Did she explode if you said it was theft? Was the concept of stealing beyond her somehow? It’s been so long now that I just can’t remember, but I know we were not to discuss it with her. It was a directive. You didn’t want to praise her for shoplifting, of course. But you weren’t supposed to scold. So, when she slammed through the door, crowing like her pockets had diamonds, not bread-rolls, we all kind of shrugged and averted our eyes.
The night the supervisor heard second-hand I was planning to quit, he called up the house phone. Right there in the living room, with an audience of staff and residents both. Maybe he was upset because now he’d have to find somebody for a job that nobody would want. But what he focused on, in a voice loud enough that it bled through the receiver and out into the room, was you just don’t waltz in and out of people’s lives. Especially the residents, who had been abandoned again and again. If anyone was going to get better, if anyone was ever going to be happy or stable, it was going to take trust, and hanging in there, and patience, and faith. He went on for some time. Wanted to know exactly what kind of person I was. As if there was an answer.
Here’s what I can say. Two weeks before, Gina slams through the door, just like always, coat bulging with bread. But on this day, instead of pushing past me, she stops. Digs a roll from her pocket, holds it out. The shift is over. I’m clocked out. In my wired-shut heart, I’ve already resigned. But I take what she offers. Without speaking, we eat. I do not feel, in that moment, the presence of God. But I see we are lost and that she is my sister. Which is food for right now. Just enough to go staggering on toward the dream.
When my sister was born, she made herself known. Screamed so loud, they moved her to a room far from all the other babies. But two years later, when I came along, it was different. I did not make a sound. In fact, I was so quiet, from what I understood, my mother was pretty sure I must be dead.
As a child, death was never too far from my mind. Long and hard would I gaze upon roadkill, awaiting a twitch. In fifth grade, a guest speaker came to frighten us about drugs. He included a statistic on teen mortality. Said you could expect at least one of us would not live past eighteen. I concluded it would be Brenda, a girl who had dandruff. In the days after, I watched, amazed, as she continued to eat lunch, and perform other ordinary tasks, as if the long black shadow didn’t hover so close. You might call it a preoccupation, these thoughts. Or a hobby, but not the kind you enjoy. Through the years, teachers would ask what I spent class daydreaming about, but how to tell them, “We are all soon to die.”
So, the story of how I was born made me wonder. What if no one had noticed that I was alive? What if I’d ended up tossed in the garbage, or whatever happened to babies in cases like that? On the other hand, what if my mother had been right all along? What if all who loved me were only pretending that I was alive, so as not to hurt my feelings, when the unavoidable truth was that I was actually dead? It might account for how my fingers and toes in the winter sometimes wouldn’t warm up.
The thought of being born dead stayed there, hung in my firmament, a very long time, with facts like “my people are stout” and “I have a large head.” Things neither good nor bad, only true. Until some time, as an adult, when I mentioned the story of my birth in my mother’s hearing. “Dead?” she said. “No! C’mon! I said I thought you were deaf.”
What if it the story you live by got handed down wrong? Or at least incomplete? Take Jesus, for instance. Go into any church around Christmas. Their Nativity Pageant has the wise men on stage, hanging out with the shepherds. It’s fine pageant, true. But what they are doing is not in the gospels. Luke has the shepherds. The wise men? In Matthew. Mark skips any birth story to pick up with the baptism of the full-grown Jesus. And John tells it the way a man on the bus mutters about the government and somebody named Sharon. Some will point out that no one took notes at the birth of a no-name in backwater Nazareth, that any version at all was only tacked on much later, to fill in the blanks. What we’re left with is less like a story than a bag of bright Legos, dumped out on the rug.
So, go ahead, mash them all together. Shave down the edges. Make one seamless whole. Many put on a pageant. Who can blame them? We need something to go by when the night is so dark. But the truth, it still whistles around and through us, not to be bottled up. Not in one single story, nor in any one body. Christ comes in fragments, in disjointed gospels. Like broken glass on the pavement that only hints at the whole. And what is true about us might be somewhat the same. “I am large,” said Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes.” And even that wasn’t the whole of it.
So, look, I don’t deny that each breath draws us closer to our last. We are bound for the grave. From dust we have come, and to dust we’ll return. But that’s only one story, only one way to tell it. Others alongside it tell of far greater glory. Of how the eternal turned out to be here, all along. How the flesh, squeezable, lovable though it may be, could not be all we are. Amazing stories. Ones, if you heard them, you just would not believe.
Early in ministry, there are skills to be learned. Preaching, counseling, the coffee-hour nod that says, “Yes, I’m listening,” even if it’s not true. Oh, and another one. Boredom. Overcoming it? No. Letting it pull you down below where you can breathe, and then holding you there. For hours. It’s important to know how to be there, in boredom. But for me, it was something that didn’t come easy. Some skills will take practice.
Apprentice clergy go through a form of ritual hazing known as Clinical Pastoral Education. Here’s how it works. For a few months, full-time, you’re a hospital chaplain. Your mission? To offer support when situations get bleak. To help people face pivotal, primal questions just at the moment something vital is being torn from their lives. And also? Despite the plastic badge that says “Chaplain,” you have not the foggiest how a person would do this. Like when someone lifts her tear-stained face, and says, “Why would God let this happen?” And, in response, you decide now is the time to fetch everyone coffee.
Later, with other glassy-eyed lambs of the chaplaincy, you gather in a conference room with a senior chaplain, to think about what you have done. You do this through something they call a “Verbatim.” It’s just like it sounds—a blow-by-blow you write up of some fumbling interaction you’ve just had with a patient. The purpose is to reveal how very far your attempts are from whatever it is Jesus might have done, had he himself served a turn as a summertime chaplain. With a Verbatim, the lambs become wolves, tearing each word apart. Why, for instance, when the conversation turned to cancer, did you launch into a long story about the time your aunt thought she had leprosy, but it only turned out to be a bad rash on her neck?
Still, basic incompetence has never stopped me, and it would not this time. I got myself assigned to the edgiest units. Ones with names like “Critical” and “Emergency.” No hang-nails for me. No mere broken limbs. Give me “touch-and-go.” Give me “hours to live.” Throw in the surprise arrival of an estranged sister, and I’d be all a-tingle. I strolled the halls, seeking crisis. Buttered up the tough nurses, so they’d let me know when anything truly awful went down. The family room outside surgery was a good place to find trouble. The family room is where the dutiful adult children endure their hopeless grown siblings as loved ones off somewhere undergo God knows what. The dutiful ones keep information in a folder, and they keep track of the time. The hopeless ones are tear-stained wrecks, sprawled on a sofa that’s strewn with wet Kleenex. With luck, they’ve been drinking. Here’s how a chaplain can stir up some business. Walk into a family room, perch on a chair and murmur, “So, tell me, how is everyone?” Like fish in a barrel, friends. Fish in a barrel.
As we breathlessly parsed the Verbatims, the chaplain supervisor rarely ever spoke. He hailed from the great state of New Hampshire, and was a motionless model of the state’s famed reserve. One got the sense that you could have taken a bucket of ice water filled with dead mackerel and dumped it over his head, and the most he would do would be to glance out the window, and emit a slight sigh. It was clear, however, from the way he would occasionally purse his lips in the midst of my Verbatims, that he was of the opinion that a person could stand to tone it down just a hair. Of course, those dry lips that pursed and un-pursed could have meant anything. In the absence of a bucket of ice water, and the way the hospital air-conditioning sucked all the moisture right out of the air, it could have been simply that the poor man was just parched.
In any case, my ministry was one of inserting myself where I wasn’t strictly required. For example, a sober conversation with the heartbroken family of an eighteen-year-old about whether the time had come, finally, to turn off the machines that had kept their boy alive. Already, the small room held the hospital’s medical ethicist, a representative from the organ donation company, and another chaplain named Frank. Did they benefit, as well, from my luminous presence, the guttural tones of my active listening? Because the answer to that question was not yet clear to me, I made sure to be there. Up in critical care, I appeared in the room of a man who was dying alone. He was beyond speech by now. Conversation was out. Companionable silence is something I can do for two minutes, three tops. At last, I hit upon an idea. What the old fellow probably needed was for me to hum hymns. So, that’s what I did. “Old Rugged Cross.” “Amazing Grace.” And, even though it was the middle of summer, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” In my defense, I did hum it slow so it came out a dirge.
Later, in the Verbatim, someone gently mentioned the effect that even a brief outburst of humming can have on the nerves on a typical day, let alone in the hours one is attempting to peaceably die. A otherwise kindly soul said that, in fact, my humming might have helped to hasten the poor man’s demise. Another wondered whether the nurses who had popped in and out all afternoon might have been not actually smiling approvingly at the humming young chaplain, as I had reported, but instead only smirking.
An old friend says I went into ministry for the second-hand thrills. The chance for a front-row seat to life’s wreckage. As if I were a ghoul. Which, years later, still seems off-base. I went into ministry for a regular paycheck. God knows I was not ever going to be any good for much else. You know how all the want ads say the employer is seeking a “detail person?” Well, me, that is not. I once spent ten minutes looking for my glasses only to realize that I was wearing them. My only talents are whistling and catching peanuts tossed into the air in my mouth. Besides, since I was a kid, people have sought me out to tell me their problems, and—God forgive me—through it all, I have been fascinated. Fascinated by how people can manage to get themselves into such an intractable mess. And fascinated by how they can get themselves out. Or else learn to live with it. Or how sometimes they learn to live with it, but then are transported out of trouble through no effort at all of their own, in a way that some will call grace, and others call luck. If there were bleachers on the sidelines of human society, I would enjoy sitting there, watching. Well, watching and cheering. Taking honest delight. Perhaps with buttered popcorn. Yes, I had advice, but I offered it like anyone sitting up in the bleachers who calls out advice—with the full confidence that it will be ignored. By the end of my twenties, it had dawned on me that, to get by in this world, I would probably need to get paid doing something. And ministry seemed easier than teaching kindergarten. So, I was in. And, ok, maybe it promised a front-row seat. Not to the wreckage. But to what stirs within it.
There came the day, late in the summer, when nothing was happening in Critical Care. Nothing in Emergency. I was bored, restless. So, I wandered up to other units, outside my assignment. In one room, a woman lay dying, her family gathered around. But the nice-enough priest sitting there didn’t seem to grasp that this was his moment to shine. I forget how I convinced him, but soon, I’d replaced him, intent on marching the whole family through all the stages of grief, perhaps twice, before the old woman had even taken her last dying breath. Was I badgering these poor souls? Who can say. But, whatever the case, I was summoned for a chat with the chaplain supervisor.
He said that if I went into parish ministry without learning how to be bored, there would come a Tuesday afternoon when things would be slow, and I would stir trouble up out of my own need for action. For the rest of the shift, he said, I was to walk the halls, but to visit with no one. To practice being bored. For me, that afternoon, ghosting the halls without purpose, was more difficult than responding to people who’d been hurt in a wreck. It took some time before I was able to breathe. Walking by rooms where people seemed upset, especially, was like walking by the donuts at a Weight Watchers meeting. Just one? But I couldn’t. And, I will tell you that, as I walked, I realized that, even without an eager chaplain on hand, people would continue to suffer and also to find ways to lessen their suffering. They would die, and the ones they left behind would figure out how to live. Sometimes, these things would happen more easily if I were not there. Sometimes, my absence helped more than my presence. The Taoists have a word called “wu-wei,” the power of inaction. It is there when one is in harmony with the Tao. With the way of all things. Another person might say, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” As if there were a power beyond the merely human.
For over ten years, I have served the same congregation in the same little town. Have I stirred up trouble? Oh, yes. Ask my people. They’ll tell you. But, here’s the thing: without ongoing study in the practice of boredom, without learning wu-wei, a ministry composed purely of action could have made things dramatically worse.
There was a time I thought I was in hell. It was Texas. I had dropped out of school and worked stocking bulk at a grocery store. As part of the job, before dawn once a month, they made us show up to get our morale boosted, which was seen as directly related to sales. Praise for good attitude. Hand-clapping. Prizes. It was noted when we hurt ourselves less on the job. Something like that—it was so long ago, it was always so early. On those days, we likely stole more than we did other days. But who’s to say it was stealing? Let’s just say you’d write off damaged goods. No matter how they got damaged.
Two mornings a week, they had me down for receiving. That meant being ready for the five o’clock truck. I don’t know what you call it, but picture a ladder–not with rungs, but with rollers. That’s what I set up, at the angle between where the truck would pull in and down where I would stand. Then silence. It was, after all, before five in the morning. Like a horse tied to a post, I might have drifted to sleep on my feet. Then, all at once, here was the truck, and now here was the driver, shot out of the cab. The white rabbit? In Alice in Wonderland? Always so worried he’s going to be late? Turn the worry to anger. Give the rabbit cocaine. Get him hounded by fathomless demons. That was this driver. The truck would hardly have jerked into place before there he was in the back, flinging frozen product down the rollers at me.
They say that, these days, when you get in a wreck, an air-bag will save you. But I’ve heard it’s like asking a heavyweight to lace on his gloves and deliver a punch. You don’t die, so there’s that. But you can’t escape bruises. And you’re staggered a bit. So, I can’t say the frozen product flung at me by the furious man in the truck could have, in any way, taken my life. But the body is tender, and what happened to me was not unlike how you get saved in a wreck. Then positioning yourself to let it happen again.
In those years, the physique that I boasted was like a balloon filled with duck-fat, and held up by string. Muscles were what people in magazines had. So, every time, as the truck screeched away, my back was in ruins. There was a faraway throbbing sensation. My forearms were pink, and my whole torso tender. I fantasized what a lottery ticket would do for my life.
On these mornings, Johnny Frozen was always around. He bounced, when he walked, on the balls of his feet. He took life on a lark. One of those people who doesn’t add up. He managed the freezer. Off the clock, martial arts and a Spartan existence. I wanted him to want more. Did he dream of travel? Of wealth? Of anything outside the walls of the walk-in? Couldn’t he see that we were in hell—the driver, me, and him, all ensnared? The misery he was missing! I could have just howled. But it never sunk in. In fact, he had something he thought I should know.
Judo is a word that can mean “gentle way.” (With “Ju” as the gentle and “do” as the way.) See that unconquerable force coming at you? You want to clench up. But don’t. Only see it. Accept it. Employ it, in fact. Channel it to new ends. And that, in a bungled nutshell, is judo. Which Johnny Frozen showed me how to use on the boxes. A person didn’t have to just plant himself there, at the end of the rollers, as the product shot down. Instead, you could eyeball what was oncoming, and step away just in time, allowing your arms to carry through with the force, using one sweeping motion to end the box up on the top of a stack. As if it weighed nothing. Before, I spent the shift cringing, trying to minimize harm. Now, of all things, you would have thought I was dancing.
I was staggered by so very much in those days. Life out ahead seemed the dim prospect of hunkering down. Of learning to take it. Writing off what got damaged. That it could be otherwise was a revelation that haunts me down to this day with a whisper of hope.
One spring had me moonlighting on crisis response. I was far from an expert. Only shadowed whoever was on-call, to learn what to do when there’s nothing to be done. Mostly, the work took you out into homes where the children who are wanting to harm themselves live. But one Friday night, the call was from a prison several counties away, near the Kentucky line. It took forever to get there, and, when we got near, you could not see a thing because that low valley had been drained of all light.
The prison wasn’t for everyone. Only if you got locked up before the age of eighteen. Like training wheels, to prepare you for the prisons they build for adults.
At the heart of the complex was a windowless room. It had bolted-down tables and the cheer of an emptied-out bottle of glue. Wide-body guards pressed themselves to the cinderblock, like bashful teens at a dance. A prison administrator came in, then went out. And then came in again. There was paperwork, but no one knew exactly which of it was necessary for this kind of case. Of course, the woman I shadowed and I had our usual documentation: cataloging the horror, making a safety plan, writing down at least five positive personal goals.
Finally, one of the guards went to bring back the cause of the problem. He came shuffling out of solitary confinement. Dressed in a pink paper gown that covered only his front. But it wasn’t the gown or the bare ass you noticed. What you saw was the wounds. What he’d done to himself. Gouged furrows of injury striping his legs. Arms like the ground beef that bleeds in its plastic. Any sharps, if it had a point at all, they had taken from him: pencils, forks, spoons, his toothbrush. They’d cut his fingernails, so he couldn’t use those on himself. But still, he kept on. Had spent the day chewing away the side of his lip, so it hung in a flap, giving a direct view on yellow teeth and sick gums. His lip hanging free slurred his speech, but you could tell somebody somewhere had taught him to say “sir” and “ma’am.”
They’d put him in solitary because the psychologist that morning had said, “suicide watch.” This psychologist was young, the prison administrator let us know. Prone to making things out to be more than they were. But, financially speaking, it just couldn’t go on. Suicide watch ties up your staff with the one-on-one coverage. It means you’re understaffed elsewhere, or you’re paying overtime. Surely, we understood.
In fact, it was why we were there. Crisis response could change things. Could override prior orders. Maybe somewhere, they could afford to do suicide watch. Maybe somewhere they had the money to give all the prisoners neck-rubs and footie pajamas. Maybe somewhere. Not here. Surely, we understood.
Of course, there was a story. When he was very young, someone had done horrible things to this boy, to his innocent body. After that, he’d been passed around, house to house, up there back in the mountains where his family was from. Now, what had been done to him, he had done to other small children’s bodies. The trial kept getting delayed for one thing or another, but there was no question. It was open-and-shut. This boy would not see the outside of a prison for as long as he lived.
After Jesus dies on the cross, and is laid in the tomb–but before Easter morning–he goes missing. Scripture is silent on exactly where to. But people began to say that, after his death, he must have gone straight to hell, to set free the captives. Maybe something like freeze-tag, Jesus tapping each person gently, saying, “You’re free now. Un-frozen.” But, arriving into that windowless room, with us all in a tableau of stone-faced despair, what could Jesus have done? Who among us could have been unfrozen? The prison administrator? The guards? The prisoner? The woman I shadowed and me, with our black ball-point pens and unfinished documentation? And what is it we’d do? Sing and dance? Clarify our positive personal goals? Open the gates and run free till the Sheriff caught up?
It may be too late here to say the word, “sin.” Well, whatever the word, listen: sometimes, it isn’t any one thing any person has done. Sometimes, it is the overall ruination. The unholy mess we have found ourselves in. Maybe it’s not an Easter story we’re wanting, of rising up from the wreckage. Maybe what’s needed is a clean break, a fresh start, maybe no less than Christmas.
So, here is a Christmas. It’s a starless dark night in a forgotten dark valley, and somehow, we have ended up huddled together in prison–the prison administrator, the psychologist, the guards, you, me, everyone. Not a prison of cinderblock. Stronger: made of suffering, and of the blindness to it, with walls so high and so distant, we cannot find the gate, and don’t always remember it is where we are. Our hearts are scabbed over. We live without hope. But on this night, the news comes: all of that is now over, the prison dissolved, like a change in the weather, and the world is made new. It is the strangest thing, and we cannot believe it. Here we are, shy in our love, in the presence of God. And here, Lord, is this child. He needs cleaning, a blanket, to be held, to be cherished. He has not yet been wounded, his flesh has not yet been torn, he is not yet in prison near the Kentucky line. Mortals that we are, we cannot promise our adoration will prove to be more than fleeting. But for this flickering instance, in the holy presence of the tender child we will one day betray, the doors of our hearts now are standing wide open, and we are amazed.
The first sermon at the first church I ever served (which is also the only church I have served) was called “Swimming Lessons.” Countless seminary papers and exams had brought me to this moment. Now, time had come to climb into the pulpit to impart the great wisdom available to a young man with a Divinity degree on his wall.
Here’s the gist: as a swimmer learns to trust that water will hold a body, so, too, must a person learn to trust in the Holy. Have you attended any church in the world for, say, four or five Sundays? If so, you yourself will have heard a take on this very same sermon. It’s like arguing that people should remember to floss when they brush. But, with my pressed khaki pants, and a hair-cut that shone, I delivered the message with messianic conviction.
I told the Congregation that they and I would be learning to risk faith together. It would require of us allowing ourselves to be known and be held in the Spirit, as a swimmer is held by the water. As a sign of my willingness to be seen as imperfect—lest there be any doubt—I confessed to them that, at my advanced age, I didn’t know how to swim. But, I assured them, I intended to learn. So, as their new pastor literally learned how to swim, we would all learn to navigate the metaphorical waters of the newness we shared with one other. Everyone seemed pleased when it finally came time to sing the last hymn, and then go on to the social hall to drink coffee and gossip.
What I imagined the Congregation would take from the sermon was a fresh understanding of the nature of faith. But, a couple days later, it became clear to me that this was not what most had gained from my talk. What seemed to stick with most in attendance was, instead, that the new pastor was bent at long last on mastering a basic childhood skill.
Obligingly, a few of the church elders had already inquired at the Civic Center for me about adult swim lessons. They learned I’d be welcome in a morning class offered for seniors which met three times a week. It was all arranged. The coach would be waiting. The class was made up almost entirely of women several decades older than me, and was called “Swimmin’ Women.”
After a lifetime on dry land, had I really intended to learn how to swim? Well, sure. Almost certainly. Probably. I would have no doubt looked into the matter. At some point in my life. But the congregation seemed to believe that, simply because I had declared from the pulpit my intent to take swimming lessons, I had an intention to take swimming lessons. They assumed, in other words, that I meant what I said.
Growing up, my sister and I had, in fact, spent a lot of time at the faculty club pool down near the University of Tennessee. But, while my sister had spent these summer days in the water, and ultimately competed for the swim team, her stout younger brother could be found outside the fence, on a hill overlooking the Tennessee River, with a steak and cheese sandwich you could get at the snack bar, charged to the account.
It was not that I was afraid of the water. It was that, when you get in a pool, there were people who want to splash you in the face. Some want to grab you and dunk you, while others stand in the shallow end, gazing in reverie at passing clouds while they urinate. If someone offered you the choice of spending summer days being splashed with chlorinated human waste, and then dunked in it, or else going out to a hill on a river by yourself to enjoy a steak and cheese sandwich, you too might end up as an adult who didn’t know how to swim.
Either I live in a small city, or else a large town. Whichever, news here travels fast. So, within a few days, it seemed that everyone around was aware of my future with the Swimmin’ Women. At the grocery store, at the video rental store, everywhere. Wherever I went, there were kindly smiles that only barely masked gentle smirks. People knew.
To that point, my history of physical exertion had been sporadic, half-hearted. I tended to sign up eagerly, then not follow through. It was my way. No one seemed to mind, least of all me. But it seemed I was now living a life in which my preferred sluggishness might become a matter of public concern.
The Swimmin’ Women coach was named Bobbie–a retired gym coach who was all business. She lined up her swimmers according to skill. This meant that, while swimmers who had swum since the Truman administration took up the far lanes, where their perfect strokes sliced the water, I had the slow lane entirely to myself. Well, except for the kickboard. Bobbie, it turned out, was a stickler for form. I was not going to dog-paddle, nor run out the clock with my limb-draping take on the dead man’s float. No. More was expected of a Swimmin’ Woman. Bobbie was determined. And so, as I churned through the water behind a kickboard, making my way, lap after lap, there she was, right above me at poolside, calling down corrections to whatever my legs had been doing.
Four months later, at the Christmas party, the Women gave me a new swimsuit in recognition that, while any of them could have beaten me in a race, it could now charitably be said that I knew how to swim. The gap between my declared intent and my actual life, at least with swimming, had been closed. In its place, a grudging pinch of integrity.
Everyone knows that congregations are boring, old- fashioned, and more political than Congress before an election. But, on the bright side, they can also be judgmental. Think of an old friend who lets you know exactly the one thing that you need to hear. Now, picture a whole community like that in your life. Maybe how things are for you matches precisely how you intended them to be. All I know is that, when it comes down to me, for a long time, I was only floating. And it was a congregation that finally required me to apply myself to practice, and keep in the struggle of effort, which as it turns out, is what it takes to swim.
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Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.