Renunciation and Adherence
The bishop made those being baptized
redo their renunciations so that they rang out louder, stronger, for he knew they would need it when evil’s fear plays hide-and-seek so well in our lives that no one can find it so they just give up looking, letting fear run the show. |
One day during a youth lock-in
we were playing sardines and Glen went to hide, only we couldn’t find him, as the game requires. He’d slid through the secret door of the pipe organ’s Victorian oak paneling into the compartment that concealed all the pipes, the place where the organ repairman works. There, in that secret chamber, Glen couldn’t hear us calling and calling and, when we gave up (figuring he’d show up soon) and turned our attention to other games, he fell asleep. When he didn’t appear, we grew alarmed, secretly panicked that he might have been abducted. We ran around the church checking the locks until at last the youngest kid there remembered that she’d seen an opening into the bottom of the organ through the door at the back of the sanctuary when she came to church early one morning long ago to help her father put on the coffee and turn up the thermostat. Knowing that Glen was an organ student, we tried this last spot before calling the police, groping the oak panels for a latch like actors in an old Hollywood movie looking for a secret passageway behind a bookcase. At last, we found it and sprang the dazed and dusty Glen into manifestation at last. We’d spent so much time searching for him that we’d had little fun and too much fear. Glen, too, was shaken and stuck fast with the rest of the group all night until his parents claimed him in the morning light. |
Metaphors fail in seeking evil,
for it hugs shadows, seeping into those places so hidden away as to be forgotten, sometimes sleeping, awaking only to feed on fear. It especially enjoys languor in adjustment spaces where we try to fine-tune ourselves, forgetting the grace of being found. The latch that springs us, as the bishop knew, is a resounding renunciation of evil’s perennially hidden desire to let fear play all our stops until sin sends us rogue. So in the midst of searching saints he made us practice faith’s obdurate daily office of renouncing evil and resolutely adhering to the One who finds, tunes, and holds us fast. © June 2017, Tess Lockhart. All rights reserved. |