On Traveling Mercies

This excerpt of a longer piece was written a few months ago, coming back from a conference, stuck in an airport for several hours, when I took refuge in the airport chapel and found a strange, lonely solace there.  Today I share this little essay in all its unfinished glory because it manages to say something more gracefully than I can manage at the moment, in the middle of congregational challenge.

If you can give yourself to something, then you should. For me, I try to give myself unselfishly to the duty of finding the scattered bits of grace and meaning in a world where they can be rarities.  I ran across this bit from a poem that Sharon Olds wrote, that I have loved for a very long time, and it made me remember what I do, and why:

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
--Sharon Olds

Here I am in an airport chapel in Tulsa, 221 miles from home, sitting by a fake tree and and a plug-in air freshener that smells just awful.  Planes are taking off and landing, a carousel in my line of vision rounds endlessly, and people come and go like clockwork.  The carpet is stained and the exit signs glow garishly.  This place is so far from holy, but it’s better than nothing.  

Someone has taken the time to bring in holy books from several of the world’s religions, and there are two beautiful, worn prayer rugs.  And the decal on the door, of a person on his or her knees, praying, is a little surreal, in a good way.  I don’t remember seeing that on a mass-produced decal before. So this place is what it is, an airport chapel in Tulsa, a sacred space carved out of the modern madness for those between point A and point B who need a place to pray or just rest, any hour of the day or night.  It’s the one place I’ve been in an airport where the loudspeaker voices-- warning of heightened risk levels and the extreme importance of minding your bags lest ill-doers do ill to them in an unattended state—don’t reach.  The respite from the repetitive dire edicts is enough to make it sacred to me, but the books and the rugs and the dim lights are a traveling mercy beyond that, me stuck in negative space, waiting for a ride home.  

The chapel seems to exist in its own shadow, dimmer than the spaces around it. It’s an anachronism, a vestigial organ, a ghost, fading into the million things around it that fit better in this airport, this algorithm, this age.   Mostly, I don’t think folks see it, or know what to do with it in their minds when their eyes roll across that strange word, chapel, amidst all the chrome and noise.  Except when, like me, they need a traveling mercy.

Like a good DRE, I took the time to put all these books together on one shelf, so they could talk.

I’ve been at a kind of continuing education seminar for the past three days, in Glen Rose, Texas.  Folks from Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships in the Southwestern district of UUs do a Fall Conference there every year, and it was my fourth time to attend.  If you work in religious education, as I do, it won’t surprise you to learn that it is a grueling kind of job, requiring you to bring your best self to the table every single day, even— especially—when there is conflict between or among members of the congregation, staff, or clergy.  Even when there is political drama in leadership. Even in transition and during times of great change.  Even when you aren’t being paid for the hours you work, which is most of the time, and even— especially—when you wonder why you are there, amidst all that anxiety and struggle and doubt.   

Bringing love and compassion and delight and reverence to children’s lives is easy.  Showing up for all the rest of it can be daunting.  Scarce resources (time, talent, and treasure seem to always be in short supply in a cooperative religious education program), competing interests and priorities, and difficult relationships seem to be in the very DNA of church work, though we might think it shouldn’t be that way.  And when your minister is also your boss, and there’s no objective person to whom you can turn to vent, or ask for help in untangling all the threads, you can add a deep sense of isolation, and sometimes outright despair, to that 

mix.  

That’s what makes these trips I take to little Glen Rose Texas so important.  I go to get healed.  They are like an old-fashioned revival, if you are willing to accept that they save my soul from damnation on a regular basis, which in religious education programming work seems to be required about once a year.   This time, I almost waited too long.  Far enough away from the challenges of the very real community of my church, I can see the patterns emerge, the big picture coalesces, and I remember that human communities do the same things over and over again, in our attempts to make meaning. It is like I am in a plane, high enough to lose detail but gain perspective on the landscape. I see a story, not just a headache.  A story, I can manage.  A little space and time and distance, and serendipity shows up...a traveling mercy.