Chapter four in A Room Called Remember (Buechner, read more here) is written on hope and the role the church plays in a rather hope-forlorn culture. As God told Moses, the ground he was standing on was holy, set apart. The general premise of the chapter was that awkward, unsure and faithless as we western church-goers are, there are reasons that we continue to go back on Sunday mornings: in hope that we will see, hear, taste, feel or smell God in that place set apart.
I thought of the service we attended yesterday. A few rows in front of us sat a woman with special needs. That’s how ignorant I am: I can only say that she had needs others sitting around her didn’t have. I would guess her to have been 35 years old, and it appeared that her mother or a caregiver sat in the pew behind her.
It was confirmation Sunday, and unless you think high school kids great, which by great fortune I do, you might have thought yesterday at church to be one of few during the year God doesn’t take roll call.
The service, led by the youth pastor, was a barrage of contemporary music, kids sharing their testimonies about how their beloved pastor pointed them in the way of God and they can’t now fathom how they would ever have become a Christian if not for the youth guy and confirmation.
And as it often unfolds for me, the message wasn’t spoken from the pulpit. It was communicated in disruption.
The woman a few rows in front of us was swaying a lot during the music. Her right leg seemed to want to walk out of her socket, but she wasn’t going anywhere. She was clapping, if I remember it right. When it was time to sit down, she sat like everyone else. But she was jittery. At a couple of, what most in the church would have deemed inopportune times, she clapped, sort of like someone trying to start a clap, or the wave, except that she could have cared less if anyone joined. She started clapping, almost wildly, as if she might even stand and start bucking her arms wildly.
A nanosecond into the inappropriate clap, the woman in the row behind her put her hand on the clapper’s shoulder. She diligently obeyed, and the service went relatively uninterrupted. The younger woman’s enthusiasm didn’t wane, though. I could see that she wanted to clap again and again and then another time during the service. She was almost beside herself with something like giddiness. It was an enthusiasm that was contagious, at least in my head.
I found myself wishing I was more like her. And maybe that’s something the church in my town is missing: more of us with special needs, clapping wildly for our God simply because we can. Because we have beheld Him in a sanctuary, or heard him in a cool new song led by a hip youth pastor, or felt Him brushing against us in a too-packed pew. There are more reasons than breaths to sway our hips, clap our hands and cheer for our Creator.
We don’t need reasons really, to clap for God, to get excited, to show a little enthusiasm. Acknowledging my past and embracing my future and new name should be enough to get me going. And maybe watching this woman clap for God moved others to look for God not only on confirmation Sunday, but in other holy places.
