When darkest was the night

One of the reasons I like to be here in Conway for Christmas is the St. Peter's Christmas Eve service. Growing up, we usually had an evening church service and then a Christmas Day afternoon service with communion. But I had never gone to midnight services before I got here.

Our handbell choir usually plays -- another good reason to be at home, since it's difficult for a handbell choir to function with members missing. This year we're doing only one piece, but it's a showstopper: a version of "We Three Kings" performed with mallets banging on the tables and each other in a drumline fashion.

What's best about the midnight service, though, is the darkness. The winter solstice has just passed, and the night is at its longest and deepest. The whole service is cloaked in shadow, with only a few candles at the beginning, with more lit as Christmas, and Christ's advent, approaches. Carols quaver from the unlit pews. Scripture is read. And as the clock ticks toward the very heart of the night, we sit in silence and wait.

I'll be in the sanctuary for about three hours tomorrow and on into the day after tomorrow, all told. Between showing up early for a last handbell practice, the Christmas cantata before the service begins, and the lengthy readings and Eucharist, it's one of the longest nights of the year. But that's as it should be. That's what we're celebrating -- the arrival of light in the midst of the deepest darkness. That's what cultures the world over celebrate at this time of year, and that's the archetypal symbolism that Christians have found so congenial for their celebration of Emmanuel, God with us.

There's no place I'd rather be.

Big church

A couple of months back, Archer decided that he was more interested in keeping track of the liturgy than in the activities provided for children during Sunday morning services. At the same time, Cady Gray proclaimed that she didn't like children's church and wanted to stay with us.

So for several weeks they've been sitting through the regular church service -- what I used to call "big church" when I was a kid. Archer enjoys tracking the activities on the program, moving from hymnal to prayer book to printed inserts, numbering and recording the time each one begins and providing whispered commentary to us on the duration of prayers and the estimated time the service might take.

Cady Gray reads comic books. In a development that has warmed both her of parents' hearts, she's embraced Peanuts and Archie and just about every other bit of sequential art we've tucked into her bookshelf for her to find: Cul de Sac, Richie Rich, Calvin & Hobbes, Mutts, Little Lulu, even an old Doonesbury collection that got mixed in there by mistake.

As she sits crosslegged in the pew, intent on the Fawcett collection of Snoopy strips passed down from her dad, I feel an intense tug of memory. How many of those double-sided Peanuts collections -- the ones where there was one book starting at one end, and another upside down starting from the other -- did I check out of the church library and devour during services?

I think Mom and Dad were more forgiving of comics reading during Sunday and Wednesday evenings than Sunday mornings; at the most important worship of the week, I usually had to content myself with studying the underutilized Old Testament books or contemplating the mesmerizing curves of those hip line drawings in my Good News Bible. But I memorized the output of Charles Schulz from those readings and rereadings -- during church, in the back of the station wagon during long trips, anytime one of those paperbacks was within reach.

And perhaps it won't be taken amiss if I suggest that it's possible I learned almost as much about what matters in the world from Charlie Brown and Linus as from the sermons I was supposed to be listening to.

Imagine all the people

Today's post, marking another knitting milestone crossed, is at Toxophily.

This morning at church I went to get Cady Gray from the nursery when it was time for Eucharist. We came back into the sanctuary as the congregation was saying the Lord's Prayer, and I set her down beside me with a doodle card and a black pen. She immediately set to writing. "I ... LOVE ..."

I watched her with benevolent pride, looking forward to a nice souvenir commemorating the special bond between a mother and a daughter. Then she leaned over to me, just as the church went quiet while the acolytes and deacons received the elements, and in a stage whisper audible for several rows in either direction, asked urgently:

"Hey Mom! How do you spell everybody?"



(I helped her with "every," but then she took over: "Now buddy!" she announced.)