The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [114]
That utter transparency was evident to Ephrem’s contemporaries; they found in him a sage who had sensed the interconnectedness of all things and was gifted with the language to articulate it. I’m grateful to Brock for making available another ancient story about Ephrem. A venerable monk had a vision in which angels sent by God with a scroll full of writing were discussing who on earth to give it to. They finally said, “No one can be entrusted with it except Ephrem.” The tale concludes: “It is said of Ephrem that when he was a boy he saw a dream, or a vision, in which a vine shoot sprang up from his tongue; it grew, and everywhere under the heaven was filled by it. It bore bunches of grapes in proliferation, and all the birds of the sky came and ate of its fruits; the more they ate, the more the bunches multiplied and grew.”
Ephrem died at nearly seventy years of age in the city of Edessa, while caring for people during a plague.
SMALL TOWN
SUNDAY MORNING
At the worship services of Hope and Spencer there’s a time after the sermon, and before the Lord’s Prayer, in which people are asked to speak of any particular joys they wish to share with the congregation, or concerns they want us to address in our communal prayer on that Sunday, and also to pray over during the coming week. It’s an invaluable part of our worship, a chance to discover things you didn’t know: that the young woman sitting in the pew in front of you is desperately worried about her gravely ill brother in Oregon, that the widower in his eighties sitting across the aisle is overjoyed at the birth of his first great-grandchild.
All of this pleases the gossips; I’ve been told that on Sunday afternoons the phone lines in town are hot with news that’s been picked up in church. For the most part, it’s a good kind of gossip, its main effect being to widen the prayer circle. It’s useful news as well; I’m one of many who make notes on my church bulletin; so-and-so’s in the hospital; send a card, plan a visit. Our worship sometimes goes into a kind of suspended animation, as people speak in great detail about the medical condition of their friends or relatives. We wince; we squirm; we sigh; and it’s good for us. Moments like this are when the congregation is reminded of something that all pastors know; that listening is often the major part of ministry, that people in a crisis need to tell their story, from beginning to end, and the best thing—often the only thing—that you can do is to sit there and take it in.
And we do that pretty well. I sometimes feel that these moments are the heart of our worship. What I think of as the vertical dimension of Presbyterian worship—the hymns in exalted language that bolster our faith, the Bible readings, the sermon that may help us through the coming week—finds a strong (and necessary) complement in the localized, horizontal dimension of these simple statements of “joys and concerns.”
For many years this aspect of our worship has also been strongly ecumenical. If your neighbor who’s a Catholic, or a member of the Church of God, had a heart attack the day before and was flown to Bismarck in the air ambulance, you ask for people’s prayers for him and his family. Our prayers also extend to those who seldom darken a church door. Not long ago, the congregation learned from one of his longtime friends that Bill O’Rourke had died. (Wild Bill to his friends, way back in his drinking days.) Most of us knew that he’d been failing in the Veterans Hospital in Sturgis for some time. I knew him casually, but missed him. An old-time cowboy—he broke horses for the U.S. Cavalry between the world wars—he was permanently bow-legged. In retirement he’d become a fixture at the cafe on Main Street; you could nearly always find him there, holding court. More rarely, I’d run into him outside. Bill would wait for someone to come by who would stop and admire one of the Ford pickup trucks from the early 1950s that he kept polished and in running condition. When his death