You Are Like a Pipe Being Played by Water

A reading of "The Rain Stick" by Seamus Heaney

…what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for.

I don’t (and won’t) often talk about my faith in this space, but I did in last Friday’s memoir essay, and I would like to unfold a little more. For decades, I have attributed my disinclination to speak of church things to emotional kickback against the oversharing encouraged—even required—by the cult-adjacent evangelical groups in which I tried to find a home.

I’m sure religious trauma is part of it, but as I continue to understand my autistic self, I realize just how much I’m disinclined to talk freely about God for other reasons. Trying to encapsulate my experience with the Divine is painful; giving words to the way I touch and am touched by the great, burning Love that made the world feels like a betrayal of something deeply true.

There is a scene in Holy the Firm in which Annie Dillard purchases wine for her church’s communion table. She stows the bottle in her backpack and walks home from the store, marveling as the blood of Christ presses against her ribs. These are the type of things I can talk about, but—you understand—I learned years ago not to share them in any broadly evangelical church group. The blank stares. The furrowed brow. The idea that this insight is a little too strange.

Today, I hefted an enormous bottle of cheap port that has been rolling around in my minivan for the last week and carried it up a downtown hill and into the enormous, shabby building our congregation inhabits. I cradled the heavy vessel like a baby and thought of Annie Dillard. Down at the front of the church, I set the table, which is another way of saying prepared communion for the service, which is another way of saying I touched and was touched by those elements which would, within the hour, touch each individual in the room in a way that transcends words.

This is my favorite job I have ever held in a church. Moving from a highly prescriptive, fundamentally legalistic tradition to one that is, on the one hand, highly liturgical and repetitive and, on the other, open to mystery, has been freeing. “Saying the same prayers in church every Sunday makes faith grow stale,” I once was taught. “The words lose their meaning.” “Taking Eucharist every Sunday becomes rote,” I was warned. “The motions will seem less meaningful over time.”

On the contrary, not having to manufacture my own words for the unsayable is a gift. Engaging every week in a sacrament that cannot—absolutely cannot—be true, but moving toward it nonetheless, is faith on a scale I never knew could be possible.

Every second Sunday of the month, it is my turn. I unscrew the wine bottle and pour fermented red juice into a little glass carafe like upending a rain stick. The weightless wafers skip count in my hand by fives, clicking against each other like grit falling through a cactus stalk. The fabric draped on the chalice—the veil, the burse, the pall. Each silent step means something. The mystery is no less incredible for having prepared this feast four, eight, twelve weeks before.

Every second Sunday of the month is the only Sunday, even all these years after quitting the cult, that I don’t get a knot in my stomach on the way to worship. Every second Sunday of the month, I am a rich woman entering heaven through the ear of a raindrop—or the amethyst liquid filling a glass carafe. Every second Sunday of the month, I am silent against the mystery of faith. I listen now again.

Unsplash: Stephanie Krist

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