Wednesday Rambling: Church Windows

When we came home from church Sunday, I sat and looked out of the windows in the kitchen sitting area.  I contemplated that morning's sermon and then fondly recalled other pastors who've preached sermons that stirred me deeply.  I thought how much those who don't attend or watch a church service miss.

That made me think of a conversation with someone a couple of years ago who cried out that they missed going to church!   Well, there's one just about anywhere you care to look isn't there?  But I did understand what she meant.  She missed the church she went to most of her life, a simple country church that was closed down 40 years ago.

I had often urged her to go to other churches and visit, but that day I thought of the churches I know now.  I thought about the coffee and donuts and the separation of families into separate buildings with teens here and children there and adults in still another place.  I thought of the theater-like sanctuaries and the concrete floors and sound bafflers on the walls. I thought of the big screens, the chairs instead of pews, the music, the low lights. I thought of the lack of hymnals and the current trends in Christian music.  I thought of how many people have attended the last few churches where we've cast our lot.  And then I thought of the lack of windows, stained or otherwise.  

I said honestly, "I'm afraid you'll not find another church like the one you remember."

Then I sat and remembered my first church, the same I attended for 32 years of my life. 

Ours wasn't a fancy sort of church.  It was a simple wooden building.  In my childhood the 'facilities' were of the old-fashioned sort, located in the woods behind the church.  Baptisms took place in a mill pond about five miles away.

There was just one big, long room with a central aisle and handmade pews either side. with shiplap interior walls and ceilings, uncarpeted wood floors.   The walls were lined with plain paned windows, filled with wavy glass.  In the summer, they were raised to allow for a cross breeze to cool the occupants within.  In the winter, no one wanted to be near a window.  They mostly huddled at the other end of the pews near the big old kerosene stove in the middle of the aisle.

If I could get the 'window' seat I was happiest.  We children vied for that position. Mama wasn't prone to have us scattered about where she couldn't keep her eye upon us but now and then she'd relent and let us each sit at the window end of an aisle if there weren't too many visitors.

The windows on the right of the aisle looked out over a straight line of old cedar trees and just beyond was the neighboring farmer's fields.  We never played on that side of the building outdoors.  The adults told us there was an old well on that side and no one could recall just where it was.  Beyond the line of cedars was barbed wire fencing.

On that side of the building, we watched the fields go through their natural seasons. I remember seeing the earth plowed and ready for seed.  And the first green shoots poking up through the ground.  Each year I awaited the moment when we could finally see the crops come in enough to tell what they might be.  I watched corn grow tall and tassel and then dry in the field, destined to be feed corn and silage for livestock. I saw the ripening of the wheat and how the stalks bent their heads when they were mature.  After the wheat was cut the farmer would cut and bale the wheat straw, leaving large rectangular bales in the field.  We saw cotton grow and bloom with their lovely flowers and later watched the field grow white, what we often call Georgia Snow because it's as near as we get most years to seeing anything white on the ground. 

We watched that field as it changed from season to season, from year to year. From sowing through harvests, we saw every stage of a crop.   

And when the field was allowed to go fallow, the farmer would put cows to graze in it.  We'd see the heifers heavy with new life, we'd see newborn calves and yearlings.  Is there anything more peaceable than watching a cow graze?

The windows on the left looked out over the old graveyard.  It was a very organic graveyard.  There were trees, shrubs that flowered in the spring, and benches.   For many years a magnificent magnolia stood in the center of one portion of that graveyard.  It was so large that ten children holding hands and stretching hard could just barely reach around it to complete our chain.

Graves were scattered here and there.   At one point all the graves were marked in some way with a field rock, a stob, or a small tree, but tragedy happened when a man was hired to mow the church yard with a tractor one spring, and he plowed it instead.  Many markers were lost then.  I'm told that the members stood staring at the plowed ground and sobbed.  No one had a record of how the old graveyard was plotted because the old records had been lost in a church fire many years before.  Eventually some of the graves formed a 'sink', a depression above the old gravesite but who was buried there is a mystery still.  

There were other graves, too.  Some had Confederate iron crosses at the foot of a plain gravestone.  There were concrete curbs about a few family plots, fancy yard wire fences and gates about some, and ornate wrought iron fences about others.  One that puzzled me often was a set of graves surrounded by a lovely old iron fence, with no gate to get into the plot.

There were family graves that were oddly grouped, some facing one way and some facing another all crammed into whatever available space there might have been, all kitty cornered as though the family had just sat down to picnic or chat together right there and everyone fitted in where they could.

There was an old creche over a child's grave, with knobby posts and a cedar shingle roof that had gathered a coat of moss.  I was half convinced as a child that the spot for the manger looked a great deal like that creche.  There were graves that were marked by tall cedar trees.  There were elaborate markers at the heads of some of the graves, and some had just pillow shaped stones.  Some had polished marble gravestones, and some were of plain old concrete.  Some were professionally carved with names and dates, a few of the concrete ones had obviously been written in by hand and a few more were left blank known only to the family who buried them there.  There was one grave that was a false crypt made of stacked stones.  

The whole graveyard was bordered on one side and behind by deep woods.  It was a lovely old graveyard.  It is still a lovely old graveyard. 

And there we were in church, between the two.  That field full of life on the right, in all its seasonal glories.  The old graveyard on the left, a gentle peaceful place of final rest.  Life and death with the church positioned just between.  

Yes, I miss those old windows and their views.