The ordinary Sunday

"And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another." — Hebrews 10:24-25

I was at church this morning and there is nothing to report, which is itself the report. The sermon was about something I have already forgotten, which does not mean it was not good, only that I did not need the sermon today. I needed the showing up. The parking lot and the door and the pew and the people on either side of me who also showed up.

Edna was in her pew. She wore the blue dress she wears in summer because it is the coolest thing she owns and she has told me this and I believe her. We talked after about the heat and the garden and whether the rain they were calling for would amount to anything and I said I did not think so and she said she did not think so either and we were both right.

There is a kind of Sunday that is not remarkable and I have come to believe those are the most important ones. The Sundays when nobody is sick and nobody is grieving fresh and the preacher is not on fire and the hymns are the ones you have sung a hundred times and you drive home and eat lunch and sit in the chair and the day passes the way days pass when nothing is trying to teach you anything. Those Sundays are the ground the other Sundays stand on. They are the ordinary dirt the roots grow in.

I am home now and the house is cool from the stone walls of the church, which is a thing I just made up, but the feeling of church is still in me, and that is what I mean.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.