Community Worship

Sunday, July 31, 2011
Community worship each month at church makes me uncomfortable. I’ve often wondered why. It’s not that I believe that there is anything wrong with having the children in church. But I do find them distracting. Children often haven’t learned the social cues of when to whisper and when not to.

And how they pay attention to the music!

When I was growing up, we sang hymns. I liked the hymns, but there was nothing to them to make me want to dance with abandon. I should note that I don’t think that I have ever done anything with abandon, so watching the children dance wildly, with abandon, makes me very uncomfortable. It’s hard for me to take my eyes off them and concentrate on worshipping. And, yet, at is what the children are doing: worshipping.

But there are so many things I’ve observed as I’ve watched them over the past couple of years. First, it doesn’t seem to matter which children are involved in the dancing at the front of the stage. All are welcome. Two sisters dance together. Two brothers, one white and one black, bounce up and down to the music while holding hands. A small girl looks on as a circle forms, and the children open the circle to her, and they all hold hands and bounce.

Second, the children don’t seem to care that people are watching. I am watching, and I know their parents are there making sure that everyone is safe and supervised and not too wild. And, yet, the children continue on. They take the adult correction and keep going. They are focused on their dancing worship.

Third, the dancing (if that is what going round and round in a circle or bouncing up and down is) changes. Sometimes all of the children are in a large circle slowly moving around. Then they’re all bouncing. Suddenly, they’re all doing their own things individually. Then they end up all back together in a big circle. It’s fluid. And the changes don’t seem to bother them or interrupt them.

Madeleine L’Engle discusses this childlikeness in Walking On Water. As we age, we lose our ability to simply BE in the presence of God. Perhaps the reason I’m so uncomfortable is that I’ve never truly learned to BE in a corporate worship setting. I have moments on my own, but almost never in a congregation. That’s something I’ve noticed in Chaim Potok’s Asher Lev books. There are certain celebrations where the Hasidim dance with abandon with the scriptures, and there is nothing wrong with it.

I must remember what Jesus said in Matthew 19:14, when the children came to Jesus. “Leave them alone,” he said, “for the kingdom is made of such as these.”

San Francisco – Days 8 and 9

Monday, July 11 and into Tuesday, July 12
Today was checkout day. We had an 11:30 p.m. Flight, so we still wanted to be able to visit the city before heading to the airport. The only difficulty was that we needed a place to store our luggage so we didn’t have to lug (spot the pun!) it around. lee had read that the visitor’s center offered luggage storage until 6 p.m. For something like $10 a bag. To our delight, we discovered that our hotel offered a locker rental for 50 CENTS. We could open the locker as many times as we wanted to, but each opening would cost 50 cents. Both our suitcases fit in one locker. What an incredible deal!

We walked up and down streets in Chinatown, and discovered the Oldest Buddhist temple on Waverly. One of Lee’s former students, who is at school in Berklet but who’d been away camping in Colorado, had told us to look for the temple. It was pretty neat, but we didn’t hang around long. No picture taking in the temple.

In our wanderings we happened upon a tour group that was at a music shop. It was pretty cool to go in and see the various instruments, which included quite a few traditional Chinese instruments. This is Chinatown, after all. The Chinese Cultural Center, unfortunately, is closed on Mondays, so we were unable to do anything there, but we did see a lot of Chinese men (and quite a few women) in the park gambling. I didn’t feel uncomfortable except when we walked through an alley and I looked in the back door of a storefront that was crowded with Chinese women, whom I assumed were playing mah jong. I did get a dirty look from one of the women, so I kept walking.

Lee and I got snacks at a Starbuck’s. It had emptied out, but then became quite crowded, so Lee asked if I wanted to find a park to go to or if I wanted to go to the library. I’m always game for checking out the libraries of different cities. On the way to public library (where I started writing this travelogue), a black man asked Lee, just plain as day as we’re walking by, if he wanted to buy some weed. I couldn’t believe how bold he was! It wasn’t the best part of town. But there were tourists around so I figured we’d be safe enough.

Outside the public library, the SFPD has a mobile command unit. Several officers were near their vehicles, and I asked if I could get a picture. They said sure. I am pretty sure that my husband thinks I’m weird.

The library, while pretty, was very annoying. Does the phrase “You can’t get there from here” strike a chord with you? There were certain floors where I couldn’t get from one side to the other and not every floor had a restroom. We spent a couple hours at the library reading and working online and then left to find dinner and retrieve our luggage.

We planned on arriving at the airport around 9 p.m. So that we’d have plenty of time to check in and go through security. We took the Montgomery Street BART all the way to the airport. When we arrived, we learned that e incoming flight from Cincinnati was not going to arrive until after 1 a.m. due to the fog.

Lee and I took turns freshening up in the bathroom. He had a complete change of clothes; I, however, did not and washed the makeup off my face and brushed my teeth. I managed to sleep on the plane, but Lee did not. We arrived in Cincinnati with not a minute to spare. We managed to make it to our connection’s gate just as boarding began.

We arrived in Orlando around 11 a.m. The heat exiting the plane was horrible. It was just suffocating. Poor Lee was exhausted. Mom picked us up at baggage claim, having driven to Orlando all by herself. We took her to lunch at the Perkins Restaurant she likes so much, but poor Lee was just beat. We got home by 2 p.m. and dropped into bed for a 6 hour nap. Boy! Were our time schedules messed up! We spent a couple weeks getting used to our time zone.

San Francisco – Day 7

Sunday, July 10
On Sunday we took a 30 minute Amtrak bus ride from the Ferry Building over the Bay Bridge to Emeryville. The bus ride was at 6:30 a.m. We then had a 4 hour train ride to I was so tired that I slept on the train. While Lee was in the dining car, I curled up in bother our seats and managed to get a really good two hour name. I did hear woman across the aisle from me tell some kids to keep it quiet because there was a lady sleeping. I was listening to her and her companion’s conversation, but I just managed to conk out. It was one of those situations where i knew I’d be cranky if I didn’t get a nap, and so I took one.

We arrived in Mariposa around 11. At the station I talked to two Brits who were going to spend 21 days hiking to Toulumne. One of them had just been in Australia, so they were a bit tired from the time difference.

Next we took a 2 hour bus ride from Mariposa to Yosemite. The scenery was incredible. The driver on the way into Yosemite was able to tell us a bit about the rock formations between the town and the mountains and when we entered the park he was able to point our attention to spectacular views of the falls along the way. He even told us about a 2006 landslide that was still being studied and which had caused them to build a single lane bridge over the Yosemite River to get around the slide and another to back. It required a 15 minute wait while traffic cleared.

Unfortunately, Lee got I’ll on the bus ride, so by the time we got off the bus after 2 and a half hours he was sick and hungry. We ate and the lodge and then took the easy path to view Lower Yosemite Falls. It was an incredible view, and I’m glad that we didn’t have to drive down there because it was incredibly crowded. I had thought that Muir Woods was crowded, but this was even worse.

Instead of leaving at 6, we took the bus back at 4 p.m. And transferred, for a fee, our train tickets to an earlier return, which meant that we returned to San Francisco the same way we’d left (instead of having to take a train farther inland and having a longer bus ride).

I would love to back, but I would want to be where there are fewer people. The Sierra Nevada are unlike the mountains back east.