white with foam

I can’t remember the last time I set foot inside a church. My streak continued on a technicality: the service that Mom and I went to Sunday morning took place out on the lawn of Rosedale UCC. They had invited the congregations of two other churches to join them: St. Paul AME Zion and Colonial in Prairie Village. So the group was multi-generational, multi-denominational, multi-racial, and multi-speciesal with the addition of three dogs under the big low-hanging tree there.

I like to have gagged when the service started off with “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” Clapping on the downbeat and whatnot. The theme that had been developed for the day was an environmental one, born of the central concept of The Green Bible: that the ostensibly patriarchal dominion passages in the Bible are in fact promoting proper stewardship of the earth because it’s, you know, god’s creation. Just as there are plenty of collective, non-canonical arguments against murder, covetousness and other bad behaviors, so are there good reasons to not shit where one eats, planetarially speaking. This thought helped me pass among the god-fearing people gathered that morning outside the old brick neighborhood church.

And yet, and yet. Few things will clog passion better than self-consciousness, and few sources of self-consciousness are more loathesome than the armchair cultural anthropologist in church. So I really was trying to get into it — even as I spoke and sang and ate of the potluck bounty. Here are the actual lies that actually came out of my actual mouth:

You shut in the sea with doors when it burst forth.
You set bars and doors, and said,
Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped.

Ultimately, though, it was the confession, the apology to the earth itself, that literally choked me up. I thought of the Gulf of Mexico, which was surely there subtextually, and felt ashamed to even address the extent of the damage with pretty iambs:

Forgive our reckless plundering and waste.
Forgive our greed and carelessness of power.
Forgive our haste that tempers unaware.
Help us to share, consider, save, and store.

I suspect Mom has little truck with such formalities, either. She’s a hands-on worshipper, and it was her I took my cues from that day. So we drove down to the farmer’s market on Southwest Boulevard and Rainbow and helped set up tents. This market accepts Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program chit, a screaming deal that very few people know about. It was mom’s understanding that we were going to be handing out literature to spread this particular gospel, but instead, after the setup, we ended up operating the Colonial Church bread sale until it was clear they had plenty of hands. I went up the hill to get a few jugs of cold water, and after distributing that all around the market, we were more or less done.

By the time we got back, Mary and the girls were at Mom’s, poolside. She had gathered some flowers from Jim’s yard, and Mom threw a chicken in the oven just before we headed out to the cemetery to visit with Dad and Grandma & Grandpa Edgerton. Mom always complains about the sorry-ass state of the tree, at the base of which is a plaque honoring my dad. He might appreciate the grand cosmic joke of such an anemic representative of nature’s wonder, but Mom sure doesn’t. It’s something to talk about, I guess, while we’re there.

After dinner I went with Mary and Rachel down to the area east of the Plaza to see (and shoot) in the formal gardens of the Kauffman Legacy Park and the Nelson. I had never seen the Bloch Building addition to the Nelson, and I was anxious to be there at the Blue Hour. We arrived a little early, so we also had time to walk around the limestone houses in Hyde Park and eat some ice cream by the famous (and surprisingly boho) J.C. Nichols Fountain. Back at the Nelson, with the sky darkening, Rachel hopped right in to the wide, shallow pool out front — and was promptly chided against doing so by a booming, disembodied voice from somewhere above the rooftops. Later, that same voice corrected us once more for posing with the headless “Standing Figure” statues; it was so startling that we didn’t even get what would have surely been a hilarious photo.

Other photos still here, on Flickr, including one from the grain elevator grounds that makes me giggle every time.

Tags:   Kansas City · Kauffman Memorial · Nelson-Atkins Museum · RosedaleNo Comments