This mini-essay came out of a writing exercise (the first one in “The Practice of Poetry,” edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell). It’s a collection of exercises written by poets. The first one is from Ann Lauterbach and she just says to write about an early experience with words. She says the purpose is to “trigger your initial experience with language” (3), and to link experiences with reading and writing. I did the prompt and thought it was something worth archiving in my blog. I may keep working with it and better shape it–polish it, but here it is in its rough form. Also, I may have written something like this on the blog before because it’s a memory I come back to a lot. Whatever. Enjoy.
Each Sunday my parents took me to a meeting with their Christian fellowship. We met in an elementary school. I was younger than six and too young, at least for me, to wonder what was the function of the room when it was not used for the Sunday meeting. The room was simply where we went on Sundays before I went off to Sunday school; it was the place where I must sit still and endure three songs, sharing, and a prayer. I recall a brown carpet, folding chairs. The room was narrow and there was a hallway with a staircase nearby. Sunday School was up these stairs and in another room that was small and also brown and had lots of bookshelves. I was too young to wonder what kinds of books these were and I don’t know if I was old enough to read. This is the very fact that makes me think that in this memory I was too young to read. If I could, I would have been more interested in the books because I am pretty sure I have been obsessed with books since I knew how to use them.
Our church was never called church but called “fellowship” and our services were never called services but “meetings”, which now strikes me as a bit cult-like, but really, the gesture was meant well; the grown ups did not want to align themselves with the unattractive aspects of how Christianity had evolved over the years.
We began each meeting with singing; these songs were not planned out beforehand but requested on the spot from fellowship people. In other words, we sang what other people felt like singing. It was democratic. We used a songbook somebody in the fellowship put together by numbering songs and sticking them in a folder with a table of contents. (These folders were definitely brown, though the other brown details I am unsure of. It could be that because these folders were brown that I see this entire memory in different shades of brown). The lyrics were typed on an old type writer and I believe ridden with typos, though I didn’t notice this yet because, again, I couldn’t read. Most of the songs were hymns, popular hippie christian songs (a crust of bread in a house of peace is worth much more than the finest feast), or songs people in the congregation wrote. My mother had a song in this book that I would hear many times before I knew it was hers.
So, we were singing. It was right before my father prayed for the kids to go off to Sunday school–or as I later joked, “prayed the kids out of there”–and one of the songs, called “Yahweh,” had an eerie tune. I took interest in darkness even as a toddler and I tended to prefer songs set in a minor key. I still prefer them. In the song we sang, “Though I walk through the fire, I will not be scorched or burned.” I realized what the song was saying and thought about them somewhere along the lines of: whoa. shit.
I was sitting next to my Sunday school teacher, Claudine (a Swiss woman who was the mother of my best friend at the time), and I asked her what those words meant. Why was the speaker of the song walking through fire (and the sea in an earlier verse)? Wasn’t that dangerous? She asked me to bring it up in Sunday School.
I don’t remember what Claudine said about it to the other children. Undoubtedly, something about God’s protection. I don’t remember who else was in that room or what the other children said. I probably said a lot. I talked a lot then in class as I do now. All I can remember is that I understood that the fire in the song was not a literal fire. I think this was my first time understanding that language can be figurative, that language can have layers, that it can be used in different ways to connect to people. In this case, an image: walking through fire unscathed.
Homeward Bound 