What Gets You Through?
A church community in Greenwich Village in New York City recently hosted an art installation. One of the “pieces” was a makeshift confessional. It was painted white and softly curtained. A screen cutout in decorated shapes both beautifully welcomed and separated speaker and listener.
Those entering were not there to “confess” in any traditional sense. Instead, they were invited simply to relate their life stories in order to make sense of their own journeys and discern what had “gotten them through” the worst of life’s challenges.
The listener was not a priest but a poet, whose mission was not to forgive, to issue penance, to absolve but to shed fresh new light on their lives’ sorrows, mysteries, and blessings.
When we think about a new church for a new day, doesn’t that idea of what a renewed version of confession might be somehow made sense?
My friend, a dressmaker and gardener, who has had many physical challenges in her life , stepped into the confessional and told her story. This is the poem priest/poet – if we believe in the priesthood of all believers – Hayden Saunier created:
A Gardener’s Song Is Sometimes Silent
Moving for years, she leaves behind
what needs to be left: majolica teacups,
a square grand piano, somebody’s ancestral clock.
Everywhere, she leaves behind a garden.
Gardens and gardens of iris enough
to fill a friend’s truck twice with apricot silk.
Impatiens, coleus, scented geranium,
crown of thorns upright and green-leaved
in a sliver of dirt between sidewalk
and church. Sunflowers tumbling from roadblocks
to clay pots to tree wells to side lots, bright
splashes of yellow the brids have replanted,
a glory she started that now the whole
neighborhood hears. She’s stitched with both needle
and trowel, refitted a dress for the world
with these small alterations. Taking in
letting out. She’s made her own patterns,
learned how to quietly tune herself to
herself to the place of each place, how to help
each seed sing its solitary song to the earth.