May 29, 2011- The Church of the Blues
I used to be a churchgoer. Sunday mornings growing up were a blur of tying hair bows and searching for a missing dress shoe, hustling into the car and wriggling in church. It never occurred to me to wonder what other people did on Sunday mornings until I started having middle school sleepovers with my best friend. Her family was a beautifully unchurchy Jewish-Methodist hybrid, and Sunday morning at her house meant laying around in our pajamas and eating lox on bagels at the kitchen table. It was lazy and wonderful, like a tiny summer vacation at the end of the week.
But I kept spending Sunday mornings in church until my mid-twenties, when I became a heathen and reclaimed my weekends. In that time of self-discovery I found out about brunch and the New York Times, black coffee and the blues. How could I ever give up a Sunday morning again? It's the sweetest time of the week. (Well, besides Friday night, which never loses its heady sense of freedom.) For many years I slept gloriously late and then lounged around until noon, dawdling over the paper and drinking endless cups of coffee.
Now that I have a munchkin who wakes with the birds, those Sunday mornings are a little less leisurely but no less sacred. D and I take turns sleeping in on the weekends. Sundays are my mornings with A, my toddling companion in footed pajamas (why don't they make those for grown-ups?). I curl up on the couch in the sun with my coffee and the paper, A sits amid her books on the floor, and we worship at the church of the blues on the radio. Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and BB King restoreth my soul for a couple of heavenly sabbath hours, until D gets up and we head off to the Sunday farmer's market. It's a good way to spend a morning.
“Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is a time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace of spirit that sustain and heal us.”
