Dear Mrs. McQwen,
Thankfully, memory is its own resurrection, so today, I raise you from the grave. I remember your gentle flame of a voice, the kind that an inquisitive child could pass her finger quickly through and not be burned. You, like all adults to me back then, cast no shadow; I had nothing to fear. I was seven years old and you were my Sunday School teacher at East Glenville Community Church, in Saratoga, New York.
In those days, the early sixties, the church was crowded with families. Friends gathered with siblings and parents; girls dressed up in frilly dresses and patent leather shoes and boys in clip-on ties. Women wore hats and high heels and men wore business suits. There was decorum, self-respect, and a certain kind of honoring the community by how we showed up. I learned what it meant to be part of a greater family when we sang together, my voice one of many, blending with hundreds of voices into something large and strong and beautiful, united. Church taught me that I was never alone, and I could depend on others.
Memory is its own resurrection.
I was one among a gaggle of students sitting around a child-size table on Sunday mornings. I remember our faces, like all children’s, were full of unsung lyrics, soaked in notes and stories. We were beginning to arrange the composition of our lives, even though there were so many conductors waving their batons, hushing us or calling us to grow louder, teaching us what it meant to be part of the larger world that we were taught was a symphony and we had to find our music to play. So close to the earth, being small and short of body, I swear we could hear the earth spin. Sound traveled through us.
On this one early spring Sunday, I remember your ginger-colored hair was styled into a not-so-high beehive. You were wearing a green shift–a dress that was straight, unencumbered by snug darts, tapered waistlines, and crispy petticoats. You were soft of body like our mothers. You taught us the parable of the “person who built his house on a rock and the one who built his house on sand,” and when the winds and storms came, the house built on sand was swept away, but the house on the rock remained steadfast.
We watched as you poured a Dixie cup of water over two Monopoly houses to demonstrate. The smell of sulfur flowed up the water and smelled like rotten eggs like all the water did at the church. It was a simple lesson. Then you told us the person who built the house on the rock is the person who builds their life on Christ. Afterward, you asked if anyone wanted to accept Christ and start building their lives on the rock that would hold them steadfast.
I alone raised my hand; you invited me to stay after class. I wondered what I had said yes to. After the others were dismissed, you took me into an adjacent office and leaned against the wooden desk.
You said, “Sherry, pray after me.” We closed our eyes and on my closed-eyed scrim I saw darkness, falling stars, fireflies, a sense of the earth before creation was spoken into being — and it was as if I could hear and see everything clearer in that closed-eye cosmos — time didn’t exist somehow in that realm. Such was this sense of always beginning I had as a child, that creation was an ongoing thing, full of miracles, bursting with things yet unnamed, and I was hungry for a language to articulate what I saw and knew intuitively; I knew that a parable was not literal but was some kind of magical, unveiling story.
You said, “Sherry, pray after me.” We closed our eyes and on my closed-eyed scrim I saw darkness, falling stars, fireflies, a sense of the earth before creation was spoken into being — and it was as if I could hear and see everything clearer in that closed-eye cosmos…
I repeated the phrases. “Jesus, I am a sinner.” Then, “Forgive me my sins.” “Come into my heart.” “Amen.” Fourteen words. I knew what you meant by sin. I had a conscience. I already knew the syllables of shame, what it was to lie, to take what wasn’t mine. I carried both innocence and guilt in my small body. But I hadn’t yet learned to hate, judge or victimize the other or myself for the sake of another.
“Come into my heart.” With those words Jesus came. Not in a flesh and blood, but in presence that flowed almost like water into me from some unseen sea and some part of me flowed out, washed away.
Jesus was in me and would never leave no matter how many times I tried to scrub him from my stained soul. No matter how many dark nights I wandered without light. Always the beginning, always the cosmos, always hope. Somehow everything felt different then, and I could see through things, and the colors outside were more vibrant, and the ground I walked was abundant with sprouting seeds.
My dad picked me up from your office that morning. I don’t know if he thought I was in trouble and had to stay after for a talking to, but before walking me into the sanctuary he took my hand and then he cupped his other hand over mine for a moment like he was praying over me, over my in-between hand, praying I would be protected from those storms you talked about in class, although he didn’t, if ever, speak of such things. It was in his touch, in his holding me, even in the act of taking me to church.
You wrote the exact date, March 3, 1963, into a little green book you gave me a week later. The Good Shepherd Jesus was drawn on the cover, a staff in his hand, a lamb around his shoulders. Throughout the years I know now that it is me that Jesus has had to carry.
I’ve wounded and been wounded, strayed from green pastures and still waters, wandered into deserts where I nearly hungered and thirsted to death. I still clutch onto that little green book, tucked into my decades-old King James Bible, sealed with a zipper. This handbook for life holds the first and last word, the beginning and end of time and everything in between. Forever complete, its own entity. A living document. Forever complete, the bundle is complete, its own entity. A living document. At 8, I attempted to read the bible from cover to cover; I am sure I skimmed through much of it, especially the names and genealogies.
When I opened it back then, I pressed its spine so that it would lay flatter, its skin-thin pages looked like arms on a cross. I studied it, breathed it in so that the words would form the Word inside of me who had to also be unzipped, stretched, pressed, and written onto its pages. Thank you for this gift that continues to cipher grace and redemption and salvation into me.
Maybe it started then, this turning words inside out to find what is hidden inside them, discovering a galaxy in each, a universe when words are gathered into a sentence, complete with mystery and dark matter. Words are explosive, setting off big bangs in my head, and when spoken or written, words create worlds. Words are the most powerful things I know. The Word has given me a vocabulary of being.
My family moved that summer to Rochester, New York. I never saw you again. I don’t know when you died or anything about you except one thing—that you loved Jesus and you wanted your students to know what you knew—that life has terrible storms, that there is only one rock to build a life upon and even when the tectonic plates shift underground, the rock does not open to swallow what is upon it.
You knew of what you taught. Thank you for volunteering to be a Sunday School teacher, for caring about us, for showing us Jesus who continues to come to me as an unseen sea, washing over me again and again.
