49/365 Lent Preparations at church

"How about I just come on down?" I offer to Sr. Hildegard after we keep trying and failing to make ourselves understood on the phone. We're trying to set things up for Lent. So I get Leo dressed and walk out into the February gray.

In church, no one is there. I walk up to the sacristies and start the work anyway, thinking Hildegard and Jack must not be far behind. Something about setting up is making Leo completely inconsolable--the church is big and he is small; I've put him behind the altar on a small step up that he doesn't know how to get down from. He's stuck and sad.

I finally call Hildegard on my cell and she comes right over. I'm hunting through purple fabric, hoping with very little reason that the purple banners are not the stiff ones I hate. But they are. I dump them on the floor of the sanctuary and drag out the purple fabric. I see what I'm going to be doing this week.

Jack comes in and we talk a minute about where to put the curtain rods up in the choir loft. We've hung banners from there before, but they've always been secured with random objects: a pair of scissors, a music book, a screwdriver. They slip and I have to hike up there and readjust them. I really like the look of the banners hanging down, sort of enveloping the congregation in the color of the season, but we need a better system.

Which is what Jack does. For a long time before I met him I knew him only as "Magic Jack" because that's how Hildegard referred to him. Something broke? Let's see if Jack will fix it. Something needs changing? Jack could probably do it. He's a friend of Fr. Miguel's who started coming to church here when Miguel arrived. I know there are many others like that, just like I'm sure we lost people when Bill left, but we were the winners on that balance sheet. I like Jack. The same things about the parish that annoy me, annoy him. And that goes a long way to establishing oneself in the positive column.

So we stand there in the sanctuary pointing up at the choir loft and saying things like "the third circle with a cross has the rectangle to the side, not the little rectangle but the big one that envelopes it, and I was thinking we could hang banners...." Which was almost as bad as trying to do it over the phone but we managed to make ourselves understood.

I had a flash, after he left to go buy curtain rods, of using several different colors of purple and doing something, well, interesting. But then another word came to mind: Lent. Maybe for Advent I could do something fun with purple. But Lent needs to be more formal. Set. Not eye-catching and inspiring as much as a reminder that it is Lent.

So I came back after school, after Mike was home, and I rolled out the big never-ending bolt of woven purple fabric on the floor of the sanctuary and cut yards and yards of it with floral scissors not up to the task. I folded it up to take home and hem. Then I wrapped the grapevine wreaths with purple floral ribbon for the outside doors. Found the brown pots and put the curly willow I'd saved from November into them. I love curly willow, and with nothing else in the pots it is stark and thirsty looking. Good for Lent.

I realized suddenly it was 5 minutes until 6, when I had to pick up the girls at their after school art program. I grabbed up the purple cloth and the two pots for the back of church by the holy water fonts. I turned off the lights and headed out in the darkness. The church doesn't scare me anymore like it did last fall, even in the darkness with the votive candles giving off strange shadows on statues. I placed the pots where they belonged and fumbled with my keys in the darkness, finally finding the correct key to let myself out of church and into the dusk of February, the cars blowing past, the strangers walking on the street. It felt like Lent.