Whips and Wafers

March 8, 2015
Whips and Wafers 

How do I put this? – a friend of Roz, or a sort of friend, a former colleague, a woman who used to live here, Peggy: actually, from here – she grew up here, her family is from here, except they’ve all moved away except one sister that she can’t stand and that can’t stand her. Even her name in her mouth, the sister’s name (Miri), turns Peggy’s soft round face square.
     She is one of those women who loves Family history, Family stories and legends, Family connections, who loves all things Family but gets along with no one in it.  Peggy, for Margaret, named for her maternal grandmother, has been staying with us since Thursday; she leaves tomorrow.

     Today we got up before the sun to go with her to her paternal family church, a small limestone, red-doored, dark-inside Episcopal church one town west of us. Roz drove; I sat in the back seat.

With regard to church I’m always – how do I put this? – more interested in the lyrics than either the music or the dance: more attentive to the words in the prayer book and from scripture, and the sermon than to the standing, the sitting, the kneeling, and the eucharist.*

Purple Huxley, 1923

     The young priest, long, narrow, attenuated, looked strikingly (even to the shape of his glasses) like Max Beerbohm’s cartoon of the young Aldous Huxley – his white and purple dress adding to the Oriental cast of his small, dark head. He preached on the gospel passage from Matthew, the one often called “the cleansing of the temple.” 
     He gave several definitions of whip, then explained that here it was Jesus’ whip hand we were seeing, not his hand for blessing children, not his hand for healing the blind, not either hand that for our salvation received its nail. This was his whip hand raised against all those things that stood between us and God.

     What were those things? he asked. What keeps us from being with God and God from being with us? What separates us from our neighbors? He was thinking particularly about habits of mind and heart and spirit, the kind of “thing” that keeps Peggy and her sister at loggerheads with one another.  But he ignored, it occurred to me as we wandered to the altar rail – that separated us from the table, from him, from the elements themselves until he tremblingly laid the wafer in our hands and raised the cup to our lips (though not mine or Roz’s; we kept our wafers in our hands and intincted the wine).  His hands were the color of ivory – they were unsteady but beautifully kept; he wore the most beautiful black shoes.  He was ignoring, I started to say, that it is the employees of the temple that Jesus chases out. They are the ones separating the people from their God.

There’s no moral to the story. There is no story, only an observation.

     We stopped for breakfast on the way home, at McDonald’s.

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     *Which my spell-checker tells me to capitalize; I have decided not.