Because I'm old, I take a diuretic to make sure my body doesn't retain water because my body works about as well as a 1982 Ford. It's a tiny dose, and I split it in half, but even then, I still gotta pee for two hours when I take it.
Normally I just make sure I don't have to be anywhere for two hours when I take it. This morning, because I make bad decisions, I decided that I was a grown damn man, and I gotta go to church in 30 minutes, but I can still take this tiny little half pill and not have any problem.
I hate having to leave a room with something going on for a latrine break. Once you've done it, there's the awkward business of retaking your seat. About two-thirds of the way through Sunday School, it hit me. I wasn't going to make it till the end, which I hated because it was a really good discussion about how we decide what morality is.
After visiting the cis-gendered, handicap-enabled little boys' room across the hall from what most of my life had been the fourth and fifth-grade Sunday school, I decided there were only five or six minutes left in class, so rather than facing the walk of shame back into the room, I decided to find a spot in the sanctuary for the eleven o'clock service.
Getting settled in the sanctuary early, I got to see our youth minister working with her third graders as she explained to them the ritual of the church, presenting them with bibles. I knew this was coming because I actually read the church bulletin email, but I wasn't really ready for the wave after wave of memory watching them produced in me.
Fifty-eight years ago, it was my turn to sit on the front row to receive a bible with my name stamped on it. Five or six of my readers were there too. They're much, much younger than I am, but we were third-graders together. In the congregation were my parents and grandparents, who can't come anymore, just like Eudora Welty, Lance Goss, Ross Moore, and others, but there were some people there today who were also there fifty-eight years ago, Kay Barksdale, TW Lewis, Red Moffett and more.
None of my classmates were there. Some are current members of Galloway, but they either attended the 8:30 service or didn't come today. Others don't live in Jackson anymore. Some are not even in Mississippi. One runs the most famous restaurant in Oxford.
Membership in Galloway isn't a comfortable kind of Christianity. As I study our history, I'm learning how many times Galloway was the steady ship in a bad storm with a hull thick enough to break the ice in uncharted waters delivering its cargo to calmer seas. Yesterday, Galloway helped host over six thousand people for the Mississippi Book Festival. Galloway is uniquely suited to do this, both because of its physical proximity to the Capitol but also because of its historical connection to Mississippi writers.
Most of the people in my Sunday School have Ph.D., MD, or JD after their name. One is a judge, and one is the first boy to become a Rhode's Scholar from Millsaps. My daddy always thought he'd be governor one day. That never happened, but he did fabricate governors all over the country. He'd probably object to my choice of verb here, but if you're in his party and you want to win an election, he's your guy. We're readers. We read in several languages and look for things to read to challenge our worldview. I can't think of a congregation better suited to the broad spectrum of thought that makes up the Mississippi Book Festival.
Christianity is ancient. It is the conduit of so many of our cultural threads going back through the millennia. It connects us to all the wonders and beauty and pain and regret of the centuries. Galloway acts as a light-house through time. There are rough seas ahead, there were rough seas in the past, but Galloway provided a beacon then, and it provides a beacon now.
It hasn't been easy forging a culture in this country, particularly in Mississippi. We've made horrible, painful mistakes, but if you build your house on solid ground, you can weather any storm. Matthew and Luke both recount the parable of building on solid ground.
Galloway is built on an ancient site. Did you know there was a graveyard underneath it? A small plot with the mortal remains of some of Jackson's earliest residents, the sanctuary was built over it. The graves and the gravestones still stand undisturbed, save for decades and decades of organ music. We are a light-house to history. Their history sits with us every Sunday.
Generations and generations of eight-year-olds have been folded into and made a part of our congregation. There's so much more to it than just accepting the Lord and learning a few bible verses. At eight years old, you become part of something ancient. You're eight, so you don't understand this, but the thread of culture going back to the pharos continues through you.
My diuretic stuck again, and I couldn't finish Cary's sermon, but I listened to it on Youtube.
Driving home, I thought, the world is a confusing, sometimes frightening place. Bringing eight-year-olds into this ancient battle seems like such a strange thing to do, almost cruel, but it's an ancient and honorable ritual. Standing up in front of your parents' friends and accepting the gift of a book seems like an odd thing to do, but it's the start of something. It's the entrance into something very ancient that struggles to find the good in life and fight for it and fight for you as you fight for others. You're eight, but now you're a light-house keeper. Even if you don't stay here. Even if you move far away and transfer your membership out of Galloway, you take some of us with you, and we keep some of you with us. Don't be surprised if you look at your books when you're sixty and say, "Wow, that's my third-grade bible."
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