Sunday

There were years I ran from it. Ritual. Our childhood faith. Those metal folding chairs. Those fragile card tables pulled out for potluck. The old grammar of grace.

I ran from it.

I needed my own blood, not the kind dripped in grape juice or broken in pieces of Wonder Bread.

But.

Something remains in my heart, soft as the echo of an out-of-tune piano in an empty sanctuary.

The hymnals had a smell, like dust and linen, like your favorite grandmother’s lap. Even the pews creaked like they were tired of kneeling.

The older women touched my cheek with hands soft from years of service, smelling faintly of rose water and Sunday kitchens. They called me sweetheart the way one might hum a hymn without thinking— a gentle note in the liturgy of love. "Let me hug your neck..."

We pulled into gravel parking lots where the grass had just been cut, a smell that meant someone cared enough to prepare a place for the invisible.

I watched the deacons shift in their suits when my father kept preaching, like time had betrayed them for something holier. I loved it. How he kept going past kickoff time. Like maybe God had one more thing to say and wasn’t done yet. "Let's sing the last stanza of 'Just as I am' for an 8th time'...."

My mother’s voice, still in conversation with a circle of women who knew the words to every casserole prayer.

Inside the church, the air buzzed with theology. Outside, cicadas. And somewhere in the droning, of sermon, of fan, of heat,

I stopped understanding the words and started to feel peace. Not belief. Not doctrine. But peace.

A different kind of communion. Like the hush of Sunday afternoons between services, when time folds like linen after The Lord's Supper, and everything rests.

Older now I don’t miss the creed, the dogma but the choreography: the folding of bulletins, the way we bowed our heads like the grass after rain.

Not the liturgy, but what we made for it... the small, stubborn rituals that built a kind of love out of repetition and heat.