Is There a God of Punctuation?
Faith Lilac Way. Or Faith, Lilac Way?
Easter, bound with Lent to the lunar calendar, falls on the last day of March this year. It won’t be a clean transition. I have no plans, no spiral-cut ham to serve or pastel eggs to hide. The scaffolding rituals of this most holy of days, the unshrouding of the Cross followed by the sound of trumpets: once again, not for me. I lost that bulwark long ago. I’ll pay my end-of-March bills and do my best to push away my boulder of grief so I can get on with the tasks I can no longer put off.
April is always a month filled with freight I do not want to unpack. Birthdays, yard waste, taxes — haven’t started them yet, haven’t even assembled the paperwork — and the storage of woolens. This year, things are harder. April marks the first anniversary of my husband’s death. He died of lung cancer after forty-three years of marriage.
Decisions I should have made long ago eat into my sleep. Why am I still paying for service to his phone, when the only calls it receives are spam? Should I do something about the gutters? The soffits and fascia he was so obsessed with? Should I have the piano tuned even though I’ve never learned to play? Should I learn to play the piano? Where did the year go, and why am I still living in it? These are the inert questions that weigh me down as I sit in the sunroom with my coffee.
I scroll on my phone, read The New Yorker, stare out the window. Two neighbors walk by. She pushes a small terrier in a stroller; he follows ten feet behind with an identical dog on a leash. Just outside my window is a single lilac bush. Because it has only started to bud, I can watch their determined progress, uphill on a flat sidewalk, through its skinny, gnarled branches. I planted the bush and ignored it for two decades. Last fall, I fed and nurtured it, hoping it will relent and give me more than a single bouquet.
In Minnesota, lilacs bloom late in May or early in June. I know this because I’ve lived here my entire life. But April is unpredictable. Last year, ten inches of snow fell on April Fool’s Day, fooling no one. This year, following the warmest winter on record, the month might side with T.S. Eliot in the cruelty competition. We may very well see April breeding lilacs out of the dead land.
But I watch the couple, strolling with their dogs as they do every day, and am filled with longing. Not for routine alone, but for certainty. The dog on a leash will stop at the trees and hydrants that will always be there, and sniff, and know which dogs came before.
My two children were baptized on Easter Sundays in April. No lilacs were in bloom, but neither were my kids. That took years, not weeks.
Faith Lilac Way is the name of a Lutheran church in a Minneapolis suburb. It was not the church I attended as a child. I haven’t researched its history and have never been inside of it. It sits on Forty-Second Avenue above an off-ramp overlooking Highway 100. That’s all I know. I want to retain its mystery.
The name of the church has always thrilled me: Faith Lilac Way. Or maybe it’s Faith, Lilac Way. I think of it as a swelling, joyous, encompassing hope that all are welcome to share. The ground stirs with life every spring. I refuse to see dead land. Or cruelty. Not this year.
I reach for my notebook, and write the church a poem.
Faith Lilac Way
1.
Before losing out to a number, Forty-Second Avenue,
Lilac Way was a road. Highway 100 was The Beltway: lush
With great clumps of lilacs and stone beehives, busy
With picnics. To burgers cooked in those beehives, cloths spread on damp tables
Children returned with bouquets that would be limp by nightfall,
Clutched fiercely in small hands as dads pulled into driveways.
(Sepals pinched off, juice sucked from tiny funnels, floors littered with purple
Scraps. Sticks were swords, as child tribes used all parts of the lilac
Even after someone almost got an eye poked out. Biblical wails: Sunday drives.)
2.
Thinking of that world of Lutherans and Catholics
Where Methodist was a hospital and
Presbyterian a foreigner, I have a few questions.
Is there a God of punctuation?
Is it Faith Lilac Way or Faith, Lilac Way?
Does God pause, or rush ahead
New apostle, impatient to finish this sermon
And be off to spread the Gospel over at Trinity?
Is there a comma, an em dash —
Giving the reader, the listener, time to think
About meaning, and love, and the Creation,
Granting grace, allowing us to lean
Forward into those throats of scent
Until the next word is spoken? Afterwards,
To stop at the beehives and break bread?
Or does God roar past the Beltway speed limit
In a hurry to share the good news
Of resurrection, or
To favor one denomination and smite another.
Are both paths equally righteous?
Is it Faith Lilac Way, or Faith, Lilac Way?
For myself, I like both approaches
And try not to take them seriously.
I was a kid once, a run-on sentence,
Poetry in nonstop prose. God answers
In a still, small voice: Both ways are holy.
Children run before they walk
And now they text, and don’t learn
Cursive. The world still turns.
Slow down. Breathe.
3.
I’m not saying anyone is right. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
The city long ago burst open its Beltway, widened away the lilacs and beehives.
Now there are sound barriers holding back sounds.
I’m not saying that cars were safe before seatbelts, or that
Lead-spewing Sunday drives were better than these battalions
Of SUVs, white like Star Wars death troopers.
I’m saying that lilacs honor the living and dead equally
And I want to honor him in death as in life.
With every leaf a miracle . . .
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green
A sprig with its flowers I break . . .
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
~ Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
All subscribers will receive my newsletters in your inbox at least once a week, and can read and comment on all posts. If you value my work and have the means to do so,* I offer a monetary option. Doing so has given me, for the first time in my life, the privilege of calling myself a paid writer. Subscriptions are now 30% off the regular price, until the end of time. Just hit the button below. All subscribers have my undying gratitude.
*I’m mindful of the inequalities in our world, and the challenges we face in our lives. I offer a few small extras to paid subscribers; if you’re interested, let me know. I will comp you, no questions asked.
Mary, my son died at age 46 in 2017. It has taken me five years to write, lyrically, a prose piece about him--that no one seems to want to publish, yet anyway, as if he's disappeared, never to be heard of again. I've revised this piece numerous times and now believe it's finally finished. I admire you so for writing this gorgeous tribute to life, to punctuation --brilliant metaphor-- and April as the cruelest month. Though I am Jewish and don't celebrate Easter and Passover moves towards me with force in time, we share this moment. Congrats again on your success on Substack. My honor to have found you through Jeffrey Streeter who mentioned us in the same sentence. Blessings to him and to you.
Lilacs. A small bush grows aside my bedroom window. I like to leave it open so their fragrance can drift in once they begin to bloom. Tho being a ranch home, it's the first floor, and it made me nervous, that first year after he died, to leave it open. And then I thought: what nonsense! Someone could have broken in any time over all those years he lay next to me. What would he have done? His best to protect me, no doubt, as we both struggled with our Cpaps, and wondered what on earth, and reached for our cellphones charging on our nightstands. If someone breaks in, let them take me. I'll be momentarily terrified. And then - PLEASE, then - let him be waiting for me, arms open wide, saying, "Hey, baby." And hopefully there are lilacs there, as well.