"our constant companions"

this is one of the reasons I enjoy living on the rim. on my way to church in eau claire this morning I stopped to gas up the car, and after I finished I heard a whoosh above me that sucked the air between me and the sky out. a bald eagle took off from the pump shelter as I looked up and then wheeled over the interstate and on into an adjacent field. I wonder if they have the same experience as I imagine the people living in the irregularly-spaced farmhouses I see along the highway have: that their ancestors settled in fifty-some years ago with the expectation of having no neighbors around, utter solitude, and then woke one year to discover there were hundreds of cars each hour zooming within earshot.

I attend what's become my home congregation at least once each month, usually when my friend wendy is preaching. this was my second visit there this month, however, as I'd gone a few weeks ago in order to hear michael perry, local author and minor regional celebrity, and also a member of the congregation, speak. mike's talk, about growing up in a fundamentalist xian household, was pretty good and more spiritual than I might expect someone who's written about chickens and trucks ought to be. but I was going to hear him speak with the same intention I have of going to listen to robert bly or terry tempest williams speak, and that's not especially for the same reasons I go to hear a sermon; and while I could argue that listening to gary snyder speak is a spiritual practice too, my attending a sermon satisfies a different thing.

the eau claire unitarian universalist church is a fine old one. each time I go there I arrive a little bit early so I can sit in my favorite spot: there is one end of one pew that gets full-on sun for almost the entire hour, and I sit back and bask in that light like an old dog. but it is a unitarian universalist church and so I never really need show up early, since early for uus means "after the hymn and before the sermon." today was no different: I counted roughly 50 people in the pews when the bell was rung, and when I counted again a half hour later, the congregation had swelled to at least 80 (not including the children and teachers in the basement). it's always good to see a sizeable attendence at a uu service, especially since we're constantly arguing with ourselves over whether we'll die out this month or next.

for xians today was palm sunday, but for us it was psalm sunday, and wendy focused on the roughly 40 psalms that make the point that no matter how lonely it feels during our dark nights of the soul, we aren't in fact alone. during her sharetime with children she showed them her great-grandfather's breviary whose existence, while it may have meant nothing to them beyond its age, gave me a delightful shiver. she didn't wander into the xian's fields, using the j- and g- words, but was secure in her humanism: we are here for one another, we should take comfort in one another, and it is to one another we ought to turn. her title was "so you thought you were alone in the universe?" and by the end it was clear that no one was, or no one ought to be. it was a good reminder that for every psalm 137, there is also a psalm 98, for every thin-skinned god there is a god in which we can be refreshed.