This thing – this routine -- called “Worship”

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Old time members told the story – for it wasn’t deep enough to be a parable, it was just a story – of the lady who’d lost her mother and father in less than a week’s time. The surviving family had come together to grieve and then her brother had slapped her with a lawsuit, some sort of pre-emptive move to secure all of the inheritance. That spring she would always seem to be heaving the dry offspew of blocked tears into her tissue with one hand while warding off the blows of her brother’s lawyers with the other. Only someone who has been through this can know how unfunny and grim it feels. And is.

She gained 30 pounds in 3 months. She stopped sleeping and thinking. Her little prayer book whispered to her and couldn’t console her – because in the first months nothing could – but it did keep her alive. Because those little prayers, she couldn’t feel them but somehow she could still distantly *know* them – know that their comfort still existed on the other side of a locked door. A door temporarily locked. And someday “they” were going to unlock that door and embrace her again. It was a promise. It got her through. But she admitted, just barely.

Meanwhile what? Driving to clerks and appointments, driving to offices, filling out forms. Living the semblance of a forward daily life. She seemed to spend hours in her car.

She would turn her ignition and corny Christian rock would come on and then her blocked tears flowed at last, because here was the place for her: the last solitary place left on earth is a car. And just listen to those songs! When she reached her destination she would turn the key counterclockwise and just like that the tears snapped shut, her face was dry. It was a routine as chaste as a rosary. A grasp of an invisible hand. And so very slowly she got through the terrible months until a sort of attachment to life returned (and the frivolous nasty suit was dismissed). She told her friends that she stopped listening to the songs but that they play inside her continuously nonetheless. Or like a lifted needle you could say they hover ready until they are needed again. (And they will be.)

Why did these songs turn her feelings on like a spigot? Why did she need the mechanism of the radio to enable her to feel what she actually felt?

She didn’t tell us that. But sometimes she would ask the other ladies what they thought: why do you suppose it is that when we already do in fact worship, when our faith is already a fact, why do you suppose it is that we need this routine, this entity, this weekly impetus and prodding – this *worship*? Why do we need this routine so very badly?

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