F5: Goodness in a Week of Slog.

(Weird, two posts in a week that have "five" in the title. Not on purpose!)

First off, this was a hard, slogging week. As soon as I woke up on Monday I could feel it - maybe it was the rain, or the insane busy-ness of Sunday so that it barely felt like a day of rest, or Sean having a cold, or all of those things and more. On Wednesday (or was it Tuesday? the days all blurred together), one of my coworkers said with a big sigh, "Doesn't this week just feel long?" 

Yes. Full of meetings and not sleeping well and more rain and sometimes forgetting to get up from my desk for a couple of hours at a time (ick).

And yet.

I've started making a running list early in the week for these Friday posts, and I feel myself get giddy when I realize that I'm in a good moment or have had an experience that I can scribble down in between work emails. This practice, and sharing it with you all, is definitely making me pay more attention.

What's saving your life this week?

1. Faraway friend catch up. I had a long overdue phone call with one of my kindred spirits and favorite people, and it was so refreshing to pick up right where we left off. I'm grateful for folks like her who get me as soon as we start talking.

2. On not giving in to fear. Rev. Canon Gina Gilland Campbell, an alumna of the school where I work and the canon precentor of the Washington National Cathedral, gave a phenomenal 13-minute (a.k.a. short enough for you to listen to right this second) sermon on Tuesday about fear. Quick excerpt (but really you should listen to the whole thing): "Fear is on the rise. It's as if our ordinary days are filled with the potential for extraordinary danger. Fear can serve an important and creative function. [But] constant fear diminished our imagination, degrades our spirit of adventure... chronic fear eats away at the roots of faith."

Listening, presidential candidates? Listening, white America? I was so grateful to hear this good Word in person.

3. Spring is in the air... Well, it hasn't felt like it later in the week, but on Wednesday morning it sure did. There was a moment during my walk to the office where this cool fresh wet breeze kicked up and I thought we had zoomed on into April. It gave me hope.

4. A love note. Yes, even (especially?!) when it is written on the refrigerator dry erase board and you catch it at six in the morning, it is a love note. And it made my whole day.

5. The universe expanding. Not talking outer space here, but just this feeling recently that writing and teaching (also, being done with my MFA so that I have time to do those things) have opened up relationships, possibilities, and opportunities that are really lovely and neat. Hell, I doubt it will feel this way every week, so I'll take it when I can get it.  

Honorable mentions: I finally read The Martian and it was great; dinner with my in-laws; I love my hall of coworkers; started a new Headspace meditation "pack" (30 days of exercises) on relationships; this Jessica Smith kickboxing/weights video (I am so graceless but it felt good); the penultimate Downton Abbey episode (duh); the little girl across the street calling "Bye, Abuela! Thank you for coming!" to her grandmother as the car pulled out of the driveway; the joy and giddiness and nostalgia of watching my church's youth group put on yet another fun drama production; this essay I wrote on traditional church in a millennial world.

To quote Mark Watney's eternal optimism, yay Friday!

Five.

Five years ago tonight, some guy and I hung out in a bar booth until about midnight and I didn't stop smiling for the whole thirty miles home. To celebrate, here's a little excerpt from my (definitely still needs lots of revising so don't judge too much) memoir manuscript.

Sean and I drove the half-mile from his house to Davidson’s athletics center where his office was located, along with the basketball arena. On any given winter Saturday night, this place would be hopping in the lead-up to a Wildcat basketball game, the hum of voices mixing with the buzz of brass from the pep band and the squeak of shoes on the court. If I could, I would have bottled the smell of those nights: rubber, chlorine, polished wood, popcorn, a warm and heady mixture that spoke safety to my bones.

Since I couldn’t bottle it, I kept coming back. Davidson basketball games, though not technically a world religion, came as close to Glenn Church in North Carolina as I could get. There was something about the tiny, closely packed arena filled with faces and memories that grew more familiar with each passing year. “When the ball drops, this is church,” a friend wrote of it once, and he became a pastor, so he should know. As a student, a basketball game was my favorite place to be. When I stayed nearby after graduation, I realized this was a part of Davidson where I would always feel welcome.

Today, in late July, the athletics center lobby was dark and empty. We let ourselves in by a side door with Sean’s massive set of keys, and I savored the silence, so different from those winter nights, though I could still feel the remnants of buzz and brass pulsing in my ears.

He and I had met right outside his office after one of those basketball games in my first year out of school, about three weeks before he walked into the town bar and sat down in my booth. I was part of the stream of people about to burst into the chilled February air when a friend pulled me out of line. “Claire, do you know Sean Lennox?”

I knew that I had heard his name before, and I recognized his face, but had never put the two together. This was a common occurrence on such a small campus, where everybody seemed to have heard of everyone else. He grasped my hand firmly with a broad smile. I don’t recall him speaking at all.

“Hi, nice to meet you!” I said with a blithe smile. Then I left.

Three years and six months later, Sean unlocked the blue door in the corner of the lobby, squeezed between a refrigerator and a drink machine. The lights revealed two desks belonging to Sean and his boss. The white walls were covered with posters from old sports seasons. The floor was strewn with countless boxes of brochures, media guides, and expired tickets. Every part of this room was familiar to me, from the physical remnants to the memories. 

We had talked briefly in this office two days after our unexpected long evening at the bar. The building was beginning to amp up for a game. I slipped in through the blue door to say hello, and Sean smiled that up-to-his-eyes smile that I hadn’t been able to forget.

“Want some King Cake?” he asked me, gesturing to a colorful box. His aunt sent one from New Orleans every year for Mardi Gras, he explained, and it was always a hit with his coworkers. I chewed the sugary clumps of glaze and tried to carry on a smart conversation. “What are you doing before the game?” he asked as I wiped my sticky fingers on my jeans.

“Going to see my friend for a little while; she’s a sophomore,” I said. 

“Cool. And what are you doing aft–…” Just as my heart began to flutter, his slow solid voice trailed off and his eyes flickered to someone behind me. “Hi, can I help you?”

He returned to his game day duties and I backed out of the office, beaming.

Two of our friends had offered their gifts of calligraphy and drawing to make our wedding invitations one-of-a-kind. In Sean’s office, we took the final versions, printed on cream-colored paper, and began cutting and gluing each one to red cardstock as a backing. At one end of the table, he measured and cut, while I pasted and pressed at the other.

Except for the office lights, the athletics center was dark and cool and silent in the way that only a small college campus can be in the summertime, like a secret. I loved being able to still hold parts of this place, to have chances to exist within it in new ways, thanks to Sean. Both of us were quiet as we cut and glued the words to our shared future in this space that knew both of us.

The only interruption today came in the form of Doodle. Doodle, an older townsperson, helped oversee and maintain the facilities no matter the season. If you were any kind of regular at the athletics center, you quickly came to know Doodle and his floppy white mustache. Today he shuffled in with his vacuum cleaner, nodded and smiled at Sean, greeted me with a slightly premature “Hey, Mrs. Lennox,” and shuffled out again.  

Doodle would be here on frosty Tuesday mornings in college when I arrived outside of this building at 6:30 a.m. and joined the line to pick up game tickets. We weren’t allowed to wait inside (Doodle would crack the door open to take a furtive look at us, then close it again) so I’d bundle up and plop down on the cold concrete, often with an English paper draft to edit. In the days when the legend of my classmate Stephen Curry had begun to build, the line would snake around the edge of the building and down towards the fraternity houses. Senior year, after Steph had left for the NBA, the number of early risers dropped considerably. I could have picked up a ticket much later, but couldn’t shake the habit of being one of the first in line.

Thankfully, I had a friend who was just as devoted. She would meet me outside with her pink Snuggie in tow. We would each plunge an arm into the fleece, our breaths slapping the air with white steam as we talked. We tended to land smack in the middle of a group of football frat guys who made it their goal to always be at the front of the line.

At 7:00 a.m., the director of ticketing would appear and prop the door open. The football players whooped and stampeded inside. We stuffed the Snuggie into a backpack and scurried into the thick warm air. We slogged over to the folding table that had been set up on the dingy carpet where bleary-eyed athletics department staff members sat in front of piles of tickets.

“Endzone, please,” I’d say automatically as I approached the ticket table. The man in the baseball cap picked one up from the pile on the left and handed it to me. I folded it once and tucked it into my right pocket.

When I thought about moments like that – of which there had been how many? –

I wanted to freeze it, walk around the table, bend down and look into the bleary, early morning eyes of the man in the baseball cap. What would I have seen there – any sign that a future husband awaited me? If he had looked at me, what would he have seen? How had our eyes, our hearts, the way we looked at each other, shifted and transformed over these years to arrive at this new moment that I wanted to freeze? The moment in which the same man, wearing no baseball cap and much more alert vision, on a sweaty Saturday afternoon in July, carefully trimmed the edges of our wedding invitations.

High Church with Heart.

I'm so pleased to kick off the week with a piece I'm proud of about a place that means a lot to me, even though I haven't been there in nearly eight years.

A couple of weeks ago, my North Carolina friend (and gifted writer) James Hogan asked if I would write something for the quarterly magazine published by his church, Trinity Episcopal in Statesville. Something on faith and "modern" church, he suggested - modern faith observations. Did I have any related ideas or interests?

I spent a couple of days brainstorming, trying to gather scattered thoughts about so many elements of this umbrella topic that seems to matter to me more and more. How could I cover so much ground in just a magazine piece?

Then my heart and mind hit upon Chapel Field.

The gorgeous design from Trinity Episcopal's quarterly magazine, Trinity Topics. Read it here - my essay starts on page 18.

I found a new church today.

I wrote this in my journal on the last Sunday of September in 2008. I have one in Georgia, one in North Carolina, and now one in England, of all places.

It had taken a conscious effort that morning to pull myself out of bed in my room at the University of East Anglia, eat a handful of dry cereal, and hoof it from my flat on the outskirts of campus to the bus stop at its center. I stood on the empty corner with a city map wadded in my fist, and hopped on the first 35 bus heading toward City Centre.

Still in the first month of my semester abroad, I’d recently attended a gathering of the campus religious life group called The Christian Union. In a meeting room, nearly one hundred students lounged and listened as, one by one, clergy from local Norwich churches made presentations that seemed more like political pitches: Here’s Why You Should Come To Our Church! If my millennial memory serves, some used PowerPoint, others jogged through the crowd to Christian rock, all of them wore blue jeans and gestured wildly.

Must be hard to sell college students on church in any country, I thought. These pastors seemed to hold back nervous stutters behind their wide smiles. They talked up the worship bands, the lights, being saved by the one and only Savior. They promised free transportation from campus into the city on Sunday mornings. The brand of Christianity that I had thought of as so vividly American – raised hands, closed eyes, pop tunes sweetened with nebulous praise – had crossed the ocean. It didn’t appeal to me any more than it did on my home side of the Atlantic.

And so the church where I headed that last Sunday morning in September wasn’t represented under the fluorescent lights that night with The Christian Union. Instead I had stopped by the chaplain’s office, where a ruddy-faced reverend who looked suited to an A.A. Milne story scribbled a name down on a slip of paper and pressed it into my palm. This church didn’t offer free transport from campus, so here I was, stepping off the 35 alone, trying not to look too confused by the map in my hand and the unfamiliar street corner. I was already five minutes late...

Read the rest here, starting on page 18.

Thanks to James and the Trinity Episcopal team for the opportunity to share this story!

P.S. If you're interested, here are links to the reports I reference in the piece:

1) "Churchgoing in the UK" - Tearfund, 2007

2) "Brits Making Mass Exodus from Methodist Church" - CharismaNews (originally Religion News Service), 2014