Held in Readiness

When you “grow up in the church” you learn its language. While different ecumenical traditions produce their own dialects, the meaning of some phrases is the same. Now I grew up in a hymn-singing church. In the age before screens and worship software, this necessitated hymnals. I can still remember the sound of 150 hymnbooks being drawn from their wooden slots on the pews. I can hear the pages being rustled – a distinctly different sound that the delicate pages of Bibles being turned. And we loved to sing. My childhood was filled with Sunday evening “Sing-Spirations”, where several local congregations gathered quarterly do nothing but sing for 2 hours. I remember leaving feeling like we could’ve stayed all night. In fact, there was an “All Night Singing” we attended each September. It was held in a pole barn down the road in South Georgia. In South Georgia, it is still really hot in September. For this reason, I remember my mother declining the invitation to go but my grandmother was always game for a road trip. We’d pile up in her Caprice Classic and take the 2 lane back roads south - she didn’t believe the interstate highway system because she said she’d learned to drive without it.

Now truth be told, I probably enjoyed singing so much because it was really the only thing a little girl (or grown woman) could really contribute to Church. I learned to harmonize and read music before I could read words. My ear became trained to the sounds of the melody going up and down the scale at a young age. Our hymnal also used “shaped notes” which made it really easy for anyone with a reasonable understanding of geometry to learn the sound of each “note”. (Not really, but this is just the way “I was raised…in The Church”.) Reflecting back, I am pretty confident in saying that women in our church took singing so seriously because it was their only offering to God. Singing was the Main Event for me. The “lesson” (or preaching) was just something that had to be endured between songs.

I am reflecting on a phrase I always heard just before the preacher got up to deliver his sermon. The worship leader would always announce the next hymn so that, upon the Invitation, singing could commence immediately. (I guess we weren’t high church enough to have one of those signs up front that you could change the numbers on.) So after the song before the sermon we’d hear, “Hold in readiness hymn number….” In this manner everyone would be ready when the time came for the Invitation. Holding a hymn “in readiness” could involve putting an attendance card in it’s spot or marking it with the silky page marker that ran down the center of the book. “Holding in readiness” never entailed turning down the page of a hymnbook or laying it open face down on the pew beside you. This was sacrilege.

So each week we practiced holding something in “readiness”. It never occurred to me how odd a phrase this was. I suppose it was important for the hymn to be “ready” when the preacher finally wound it down, but couldn’t someone have come up with a more creative phrase? It seems to me now this was tantamount to having the get away car running so that we could make a fast escape after the sermon. Remembering my grandmother’s disposition, I am surprised she never made fun of this herself. “Okay, keep your finger there – even if it turns blue - cause we gotta be READY!” (As you might guess, she and I were often separated during church because we misbehaved.) But I wonder now about the period during which we wait for readiness.

How do we know when we are ready? Does God have a timer going somewhere that is going to ding when I’m ready? Will there be such a radical transformation of my character that everyone will automatically know when I am ready? And ready for what by the way? I still attend a denomination that is predominately male lead. There are still precious few things a woman need even be ready for. We might be asked to read scripture or pray, if the setting is right, but that is pretty much still our limit. When you’ve been asked to pray aloud you’ve pretty much peaked in your ecclesiologic career as a woman in the South.

Enter “Theology Barbie”…

True to form, I am in general dissent with this practice. I don’t particularly have a “feminist theology”, I just like to tell people about Jesus and I happen to be a woman. I still love to sing and I can read the heck out of a passage. I can probably read it too well. Years of Sunday School and Bible Bowl has given me the distinct disadvantage of over-familiarity with Scripture. I know it, literally in some cases, backward and forward. But its more than that – I crave it. Knowing about the Bible makes me want to know it more. I’m not happy unless I can cite the passage I want to reference without looking it up first. It’s like a drug or something. My textbooks for my first semester of seminary just got here and it’s like I’m on crack or something. I start Greek in a little over a week. I’ve waited my whole life to learn Greek. Actually, I borrowed a textbook from a buddy and studied all summer. I find myself seeing the Greek word when it’s read aloud. Sometimes I even substitute it without realizing I’ve done it. This is not normal. I am not normal. I’m not even close to normal. I can’t even see normal from here.

The number one question I’m getting right now is: What are you doing with your ministry degree? The answer (which is technically “nothing but reading”) is: Going to seminary. The number two question is: What are you going to do with a seminary degree? The answer, technically and officially is: I don’t know. That’s the ugly truth of it. I just have no idea where I will ever fit into the picture I’ve been given of Church. As a matter of fact, I can be pretty sure that I won’t. But I still have a sense of longing and passion to do this. Am I wasting my time? Have I heard the wrong “call” (how I deplore that phrase…)? Is the return going to be worth the investment? Am I just driving my family into the poor house for nothing? Will I ever have a place in the Kingdom where I belong? Will I know it if I do? Is it possible to live for an extended period of time with this much uncertainty about the way God “gifted” you? I feel like a balloon with the air let out of it one minute and I run to my Greek flashcards the next. Is this healthy? Am I addicted to Mounce? How much Nouwen, Hauerwas and Wright can a girl read during a summer? (That one I actually know the answer to but decline to answer for fear of incriminating myself.) When will I know if I’m “ready”? And ready for what?

So I feel “held in readiness” right now. I try to focus on the word “held” rather than “ready”. I am aware that few of us ever feel ready. But to be held, that is a different proposition all together. I am desperately clinging to the idea that God is holding me. Holding me up…holding me in…holding me back….holding me together. I know not for what purpose. But I want to believe I am being held by the hands that formed a little girl’s brain differently - despite her church culture. I want to believe that there will be a time and place where I may be “ready” to be of help to someone again.

My skill set is, well, let’s just say diverse. I feel the first impression of being both too much and not enough at the same time. I’ve been told that I am among a rare breed of female theologians. Some days I feel downright endangered. But still I cling, tighter to the hands that “hold me in readiness” for something. Like that silk cord that marked a place for us to end our time of worship, I am shut tightly in a place where I’ve little room to move.

So I’m trying not to move at all, but rather grasp the hands that hold me in readiness.