Martha Spong

When my mother died early on a spring evening in 1993, the ladies of the garden club and the bridge club gathered around my family to stand sentinel over the old-fashioned ritual of paying calls on the bereaved.

If it hadn't been for the snakes, I might have let the reader continue. Instead I went to the lectern and quietly said, "we are stopping at verse 8 today."

Last week we drove 350 miles to Smith College, where our daughter was singing with the glee club at Christmas Vespers. Each year at a pair of services, campus and community enter liminal space by hearing sacred music from student choral and orchestral groups, pondering poetry and biblical readings by students and faculty, and singing carols together.  This year it also became a setting to turn attention to other matters. As a Facebook event page put it, “You can’t sing carols if you can’t breathe.”

I try to keep worship to an hour, even on communion Sundays. I keep a side-eye on the clock and move certain things along, because I want to take plenty of time when the congregation comes forward. I look each person in the eye as I give the bread. But that morning they seemed to barrel toward me two by two.

“I’m having a wardrobe crisis!” “It’s just a retreat,” answered my sensible wife. “Saturday morning casual. How would you usually dress for a retreat?” “Usually I would be the pastor,” I replied. This was different. Today I was both the new girl and the pastor’s wife. What to wear? Who to be?

A colleague asked a few months ago, “Why did you stop writing for the local paper?”

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