Dear St. Luke’s

Dear St. Luke’s,

I still haven’t driven down Goodwood. I don’t want to drive past and see your ashes, because right now, you exist in my mind. 

If you trust my memory, a church sits at 8833 Goodwood Boulevard, a church whose only ashes are from Ash Wednesday and the thurible’s fragrant incense.

How can you be gone? How can I accept that your stained glass exploded outward, your tabernacle melted, your lecterns dissolved? 

You have seen more of my life than anyone but my immediate family. You have held enough of my life to compete with my father, mother, brother. You know me better than a friend. You have formed me for 25 years. 

Before I was one, I was baptized with the water of your font. I have the baptismal candle that your fire lit. 

In first grade, we moved up to big kid chapel. I sat in the front left pew and watched an ant that wasn’t moving. I worried about it. I wanted to give it a little food to see if I could revive it. At the communion rail, I pretended poorly to eat my wafer and Mrs. Barbara had to pry open my hand. Good thing she did. She didn’t know why I was saving it, but if she’d let me, Christ’s body would’ve been tossed to a dead ant on the church floor. 

Erik and I used to rush out of your wooden doors – before they were replaced with glass – so we could drink lemonade from Pope Hall. We put cans in the wagon on school chapel days. Once, we sat in the coveted choir loft. It must’ve be Christmas, or Easter, and we must’ve been little. The pews were full and dad herded us out of the narthex and up a mysterious staircase. We were on the balcony! We could see everything! I didn’t even know people could go up there.

On the other side of your narthex, I was a tiny flower girl in the cry room. I watched Celeste cry before she walked down the aisle to Tyler, and I learned that some tears are happy. I thought of that moment, sixteen years later, when I got married in a different church and I cried myself down the aisle, arm linked through my father’s. 

In my memory, I can feel your cold stone tile, blue-green and shining, and the grit of its grout. At four, I felt it on my knobby knees when I crawled down the aisle dressed as a lamb. Again at fourteen I felt it as I knelt in my VBS tunic and demonstrated the Pharaoh, Pharaoh movements I’d learned before I could read. At twenty-four, I felt it subbing for the Pre-K assistant, while babies tried to climb into my lap to watch the fifth graders sing. 

After Good Friday service last year, I shared leftover wine with people who’ve known me most of my life. The chalice passed around the sacristy until it was drained, and I studied semi-cryptic messages left on the whiteboard by altar guild ladies, like we have plenty of candles!! The thuribles hung on hooks by the door to the church, and torches needing repair stood by the steps. During confirmation, Mrs. Margie took us outside and showed where the sacrarium empties straight into the earth.

In my memory, stained glass paints prismatic pools in your shiny stone aisles. Father Bryan preaches while morning light passes through the prayer garden and through the stained glass so God can give us a rainbow again and again and again. 

How could fire taken out those walls of hewn chunk glass? That stained glass is special. I’ve always been so proud of our windows, unlike the light, thin panes of most churches. Our glass felt natural, like it was spit, half smooth, from the ocean in stones of color. Holy prisms were cemented beside the pews, behind the chapel, alongside the altar.

Under your rafters, Father Bryan washed feet and Deacon Reese announced the gospel. Under your rafters hung gothic pendant lights, lanterns which look like gazebos. I used to imagine little people in them, looking down into our church services like Liesl and Rolf looked out in the rain. 

Do you expect me to believe all of that is gone? The face of your Christus Rex, St. Luke’s, is the face I pray to. He no longer hangs above your altar?

I know the gloss on the dark pews, sealed so well the wood feels silky soft. Have I sat in every one? In ten years of school, did I have that chance? In twenty years of Sundays?

You are the church I served. I learned every corner and tile as an acolyte; I memorized you like a home. I could navigate you in the dark, moving my hips away from corners and fingers toward light switches.

I have lit the altar candles before church, my dad striking a match from the box stashed near that narrow stained-glass window, lighting both of our brass-handled wicks. I know to shuck the long wax wick in and out of its sheath when I’m finished.

I have prayed before the Stations of the Cross and the red glass of the tabernacle candle, and with your blue hymnal and your red Book of Common Prayer.

All those red and blue books are gone. All the little golf pencils I used to color in the bulletin. Is your nativity gone too? 

Less than a week before the fire, loosed particles of ash floated in your air, past stained glass rainbows and through singing lungs.

Your eaves and your organ pipes listened with your people as palm ashes crossed foreheads and two voices echoed:

Remember that you are dust

And to dust you shall return. 

You are dust again. But you are also here. In me. In my heart and my memories and in the tears that were shed for you in Baton Rouge and Sarasota and Naples, and in every child you raised like me.

If I close my eyes, you’re still here.

I stand at the bend in the communion rail, where you wait for the offertory plates to be reunited like heavy nesting dolls. They used to go on the shelf beneath the credence table, but now they go on the altar.

Across from the credence table, there’s a big return air vent. I stand against it and wait to wash Father Bryan’s hands, bowl in my left hand, steel flagon of water in my right. The flagon’s lid is already tipped open, the linen cloth folded over my wrist. The vent sucks at my vestments, pulling them flat to the wall.

I carry the bar from the communion rail to its notch, a perfectly designed thing, and struggle to keep the heavy wood from thunking loudly against the tile. 

I remember everything.

The swell of voices saying “we will” at a baptism. 

The chiming of bells as the monstrance leaves the church on Maundy Thursday.

The darkness during Silent Night.

Bell choir. White gloves. Women stripping the altar reverently and creating a garden of Gethsemane like magic in Pope Hall. 

I remember that Pope Hall’s water fountain was the coldest, and that it held a gift shop before it held vestments. I remember how the library was a forbidden, mysterious adult place. The vibrant red and green carpet. The pink bathroom. The sounds of doors, a push bar activating and the sound in the quiet of ongoing church as I snuck to the bathroom. 

I remember Karsten Thompson holding little Karsten Steinbron after my 8th grade graduation on the pebbled concrete in front of Pope Hall. 

And I remember, as Vonnegut said, “It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”

Because I remember more than the moment before you burned.

I remember the exact pattern of the carpet where I would stop to genuflect before extinguishing the candles. Once the carpet was gone, I never felt I stopped in quite the right place. 

And I remember Dr. Dart playing the organ, and see her sensible shoes on the pedals, and all those little glowing buttons. I hear hymns I will never enjoy as much without her, because she played them fast and without her they feel too slow. Not victorious enough. Not triumphant enough. No one can play Lift Up Your Heads Ye Mighty Gates like Dr. Dart. 

And when I remember those things, that passed before you did, I know that Vonnegut was right. “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

Perhaps that is why, when you lose someone you love, you can’t seem to find the right verb tense. Somewhere between past and present, they are still here. They are within you. Past, present and future, always.

In my memory, St. Luke’s, you are infinite. You are here, in my heart, in color. And when I finally look upon your ashes, I will not let them smudge you out.