Blue Sunday

I'm not sure any church under the sun can effectively create what our church--like many others--calls a "Blue Sunday." It's a noble idea, but the whole enterprise is overhung with the normal conventions of Sunday worship, meaning, specifically, the unwritten resolution that you can't leave parishioners hanging or gasping at the end of a service--you just can't. If you do, you're not being true to your contract or the gospel. 

You can use, as your text, Psalm 88, the darkest hymn of the scripture, a psalm in which there is, quite literally, total darkness. You can try, of course, but most pastors, like our own, feel it's mission failure if they just read the Psalm or play BB King or Muddy Waters and don't lift souls from despair. 

Still, I came away from worship last night with embarrassing tears in my eyes, not because the sermon wrenched my soul. I don't think thoughtful, rational discourse can do that job. 

And let me just interject here that the Schaap family has every reason to take to heart a "blue Sunday." In June, we lost half our house to a flood when the measly Floyd River, a third of a mile north of us, surpassed it's own blame flood record by five feet!--that's right, five feet, not five inches--and gorged its tremendous appetite on our lower floor. Our neighbors had it worse, much worse.

That's not the end of things either. Sometime a year ago, I started losing my legs. I can't get to church without a committee wedging me into and out of a wheelchair my wife needs recruits to lift out of and into our trunk. I've been a cripple for a long time. As the flood waters rose last June, I could do absolutely nothing but sit on my butt because my quads were already torque-less. I just finished a three-month tour of duty at a local manor where elderly and infirm comingle with residents like me--those in need of daily rehab. Let me be clear, I am not the man I was a year ago, when I don't think I attended Blue Sunday in our church. 

And then there's this: we lost all our Christmas trimmings--lights and such--and this Christmas we'll be alone, which isn't wonderful. We've got no lights and no available family. What I'm saying is, if anyone was owed a luxurious Blue Sunday baptism, it's the Schaaps. Good Lord, we bin' blue. Yes, we have. Let me count the ways. 

But let me confess something I don't begin to understand--for the last year, I've been teary more than I've been in any era of my life. I honestly don't think I'm suffering a heavy case of self-pity. But certain unforeseen images, as well as old stories, make me cry like a baby.

At Heartland Home, my wife called just a couple days into my stay to tell me that our granddaughter was holding her brand new baby, our great-grandchild. I couldn't help it--something threw the switch on my waterworks for reasons that had nothing to do with the blues. They were tears of joy.  Nurses walked in while I was trying to turn off the faucet, but instead of helping, they bawled too. Just the thought. There we were, all tears, when I was there for healing. 

I fear they're hair-trigger too. Last night--I could have guessed it would happen--whoosh!--once again the tears flowed. Music did it mostly--I'm a sucker for "Silent Night," while a church full of people are each holding a candle. That'll do it all by its lonesome, if I let it.

But last night it was more. Two widows stood on either side of our pastor, the whole bunch front and center--maybe a little too much flood light on them. For me, last night, they were the story.

One of them wasn't singing, which doesn't mean the music wasn't in her soul. She just wasn't singing, and I couldn't help but guess at cause-and-effect. She had a birthday--90 years old--and just that afternoon had celebrated with a full range of her progeny enough to fill up a whole row of chairs at morning worship. She's been a widow for decades--sometimes she likely forgets what it was like to sleep with a healthy husband. For years and years, she's made it her calling to help people with steep emotional problems, has probably heard more sad stories than anyone in our church. At 90, she just this week gave up the leadership of an organization she founded and led for forty years. To her, I'm guessing "Silent Night" just suggested silence. If she just wanted to listen, so be it, I thought, wiping tears.

And on the opposite side of the pastor stood another widow, a woman who, a half-dozen years ago, lost her a handsome, much beloved husband, although she told me once at the time that she had lost him a half-dozen years earlier when Alzheimer's helped itself to what there was of a mind once devoted to her, to his family, to teaching, to local history, to poetry--my own colleague for years.

Unlike the widow with the candle on the other side, this one sang like a robin in spring, face wondrously, even thrillingly uplifted. Sorry, it was beautiful. Those two stood right beside the preacher, ministering the way out of a blue Sunday.

I had no Kleenex. I could only use my fingers--you know.

I don't know what some people might want out of Blue Sunday, but this morning, after a good sleep, I think I left worship with what was there offered. 

And now it's Christmas, after all, so there's always reason for joy--this morning too, a cold and windless dawn, "all is calm, all is bright."