John Updike's Churchgoing

On the way home from running errands, NPR was airing a tribute to John Updike episode of A Prairie Home Companion, and this striking (at least to me) bit of prose is what I heard Garrison Keillor read:

from Churchgoing

There was a time when I wondered why more people did
not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what
could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a
venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean
for us one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison
and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths
worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not
listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to
console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts,
hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of
divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the
mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the
windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers
arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered
spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for
all this, no more than we are moved to give-surely in all
democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed, it is the most
available democratic experience. We vote less than once a
year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our
supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal
arithmetic of equality: one equals one."

--from Churchgoing, from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, 1962, pp 249-250

(Text pulled from http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2009/01/31/scripts/updike.shtml, where you can also find a link to the audio.)

Summertime

Seventeen school years is enough to train a 23-year-old person to expect something different by the time June rolls around, and this is the first summer in my memory that has not included a significant change of pace (read: a different job). It's weird. I have no better way to say that.

The spring went by so quickly. It had just been Christmas by the time it was Ross's birthday (April 8) and there was scarcely enough time between his birthday and mine (May 19) to get anything done. Now, though, we're halfway into July and it feels like May was forever ago. The summer is just dragging on. Fortunately, I love summer, especially in Colorado, where yesterday I went to Lilith Fair in 98-degree heat and enough sun to give even my resilient skin a sunburn, and it wasn't even a problem because there is NO humidity here. Colorado is the best. In Kansas it would be 104 and 95% humidity.

Anyway, June and July have been full of events -- camping, friends visiting, our anniversary, two weddings in Kansas, farmers market on Saturdays, quilting class on Wednesdays, recreational kickball on Mondays, Lilith Fair... and yet my longing for newness in everyday life has kept all these events and commitments from feeling like a whirlwind.

I should be grateful that this favorite season of mine is taking its time to pass, yet I have been uneasy since the beginning of May. That expectant student whom I am used to being is still in the stressful May-time when days and weeks never seem to end and yet are never long enough, waiting for finals to be over, for a break from classes and juggling work and extracurricular activities, waiting to escape to a 9-to-5 workday for three precious months. Only now that the 9-to-5 workday is the everyday normal, I want to escape from it.