Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [51]
David would sit there in his kippah, openly delighted with the blow-by-blow description of the game. While the Shabbat candles still flickered on the supper table, every light in the room was on a timer. When one of them clicked off (signaling bedtime), all David had to do was nod and one of us would turn it back on again. We were David’s Shabbat goyim—his gentile friends who could do things for him on the Sabbath that he could not do for himself—which sometimes included making popcorn in the kosher kitchen.
I still remember the night someone asked David if it did not kill him to have to sit home on Friday nights while his team was getting slaughtered in the high school gymnasium.
“No one makes me do this,” he said. “I’m a Jew, and Jews observe the Sabbath.” Six days a week, he said, he loved nothing more than playing basketball and he gladly gave all he had to the game. On the seventh day, he loved being a Jew more than he loved playing basketball, and he just as gladly gave all he had to the Sabbath. Sure, he felt a tug, but that was the whole point. Sabbath was his chance to remember what was really real. Once three stars were visible in the Friday night sky, his identity as a Jew was more real to him than his identity as the star of our basketball team.
When I was seventeen years old, I had never heard anyone my age say anything like that before. Thirty-seven years later, I remember that living room as clearly as if I were looking at a photograph of it, with David sitting on the sofa like a rabbi teaching the rest of us the way of life. Sabbath was not a burden for him, any more than it was a private day off that he could take or leave. Sabbath was who he was. It was his stake in the ongoing life of his community, the one set day each week when he entered into communion with God and his neighbor. As much as I loved the Druid Hills Red Devils, even I could see that there was no contest.
If my first loss upon leaving church was my regular Sunday job, then my first gain was the Sabbath. I resolved that I would worship but I would not work—at anything—for one whole day a week. I would read for pleasure and I would prepare simple food, but any activity prefaced by ought, should, or must in my mind was automatically disqualified. I would not turn on the computer. I would not pay bills. I would not go near a laundry basket or a litter box.
On that first Sunday, even the prospect of public worship was too much for me. I could not go back to Grace-Calvary, and I could not fathom going anywhere else. I felt like a religious invalid, still weak from my recent fever and embarrassed by how I looked. I did not want to be touched. I did not want to be asked how I was feeling. I did not want to endure any real or imagined questions about what I was doing sitting in a pew instead of standing up front where I belonged. Once the sound of Ed’s car had disappeared in the distance, I took a prayer book out on the front porch and read the morning office with the birds.
No one complained about the hymns. I did not sweat the sermon. The best part was the silence—mountains and mountains of it between the populated valleys of the words—with no reason to hurry for fear of holding anyone else up. When I came to Canticle 12, the words flew off the page.
Let the earth glorify the Lord,
praise him and highly exalt him forever.
Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills,
and all that grows upon the earth,
praise him and highly exalt him forever.
The view in front of me was half earth and half sky. The stone outcropping on Mount Yonah shone gray through the still green trees. In the pasture, heavy-headed thistles and joepye weed both flowered purple while the fallen muscadines fermented on the ground.
Glorify the Lord, O springs of water, seas and streams,
O whales and all that move in the waters.
All birds of the air, glorify the Lord,
praise him and highly exalt him forever.
I heard my neighbor’s roosters crowing down the hill. I heard