I recently bought my first BCP.

We had a copy of the Book of Common Prayer in the house years ago, but I can’t find it.  My husband liberated it from an Episcopal church in Athens, Georgia about the time R.E.M. and the B52s were finding their feet. The only book I recall taking without permission was a nice hardbound copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems from my high school.  Not my favorite poet, but he was beloved of Patti Smith. And there was something beguiling about her.

Even now, I’m grateful to Ms. Smith for taking no quarter. It’s difficult to doubt the unseen world of which she speaks.  Her song, “Dancing Barefoot,” is true to her and, to me, it reads like a prayer. However far afield from traditional methods of worship, it helped me relearn how to float, on occasion, without having to decide which world to live in.

Growing up in a home with alcoholic, emotionally absent parents, I think I believed there was a truth to words like family, home and love which was better than what was paraded in front of me. When in elementary school, I suspected that secret agents must live this way, never revealing who they are and always hyper aware of what their enemies are up to. They must learn to float in a sort of limbo.

Being not uncomfortable in limbo seems like a sort of safety valve. Otherwise we might lose hope. When we’re hurt, it’s only after this world has left us utterly in the dark that we find light from a window in another room we never even realized was there. 

Floating and resting in the space between is a knack I’d forgotten. I now recognize this as having to do with faith. Not faith in God, at first, but in good and love. Or, maybe it’s just another word for hope.

It’s fraught with obstacles,
even trying to form your mouth
into the correct shape
to say the word ‘God.’

It’s not such a leap from loving the worlds you find in music, art and letters to loving the stories people have told for as long as time. Often, the images and consequences I love in art embody the same themes of wonder, love and acceptance I hear in stories about God.  I don’t mean only Christian stories, but those are the ones I’m most familiar with.

It’s fraught with obstacles, even trying to form your mouth into the correct shape to say the word ‘God.’ Trying to talk honestly with others about it takes so much love and patience that I wonder how we manage it at all.  I’m wildly grateful when it happens.

I joke that Patti Smith may have ruined me but, as a shy teenager away at boarding school, I fell so deeply into “Horses,” her first LP, that I never completely made my way back.  It affirmed for me that the world is often a charade and that you often have to contort yourself in the world’s eye, or leap, to make what you believe in tangible. 

The stories I read, the things I dream are still almost as important as what passes for reality. I don’t think I could stand it any other way. These formed a sort of on-again-off-again twisting bright filament that pulled me, bashing against things real or imagined, out of the sad, dark place I first landed.

My eldest brother recently saw something I’d written and he sounded surprised when he said, “it was so positive, upbeat.”

Well, yeah, and with a will.

If I don’t, even if only occasionally, believe the world is potentially more wonderful and mind-blowing than I could imagine, I fear I would spend most of the time staring at my feet. People can be incredible, surprising and deeply real.  When I believe that, I wonder if it doesn’t help me aim to be more than I normally would.

That’s one of the nicest things about having God in your thoughts. Sometimes, you might try a bit harder than you would if you didn’t.  And being reminded not to be an ass on a weekly basis is no bad thing.

So, I bought my own copy of the book we use in the church I love.

There is a lot more in the Book of Common Prayer than I realized. It includes litanies to follow through the service, but it is neither an instruction book nor a membership manual. It seems to work more like a two-dimensional map to a four-dimensional world. Or, better yet, an invitation to a dance, with a million other people and an unseen partner and, sometimes, if we float, we might hear a few notes strung together and put a foot right.

I ordered the blue paperback with the familiar inwardly tapering gold cross on the front

The first time I used it was during morning prayer with a few people on Zoom.  While reading with the group, I smiled when I thought for a second that the text read “Jesus Out Loud.”

Later, and in better light, I saw that, in my smaller book, the 9 pt. type actually said, “Jesus Our Lord,” but I recognized the nonexistent phrase immediately as the difficulty of trying to talk about any of this. That faith communities have hesitated to speak the name of God makes a sort of sense. In some ways it’s a comfort to just rest in love for something without having to think beyond that you love it.

Ineffable is real, y’all. We’re all looking at the same world and trying to imagine what we can’t see. And seeing the word ‘ineffable’ so often beside ‘joy’ just makes you happy, doesn’t it?

What a crazy idea, that a God who made people wouldn’t want them to find them in their own absolutely eccentric way, with the brains and imaginations built to purpose.