Sunday Morning Once Again

St Michael's Episcopal Church, Manhattan - newyorkyimby.com

It’s been almost twenty-five years since I entered the pillbox community, men and women who own a little plastic container of fourteen little compartments, which we open morning and evening and take our pills, a sweet ritual for me, marking the time since I likely would have died. I was born with a heart defect that Dr. Mork heard when I was 12 and told me I couldn’t play football and that Dr. Orszulak surgically repaired when I was 60, an age at which numerous Keillors had dropped dead. The pills are to keep me functioning. There is no pill to make a man exercise regularly but otherwise I’m okay.

So in a couple months, I’ll be as old as my grandma Dora who used to send me a dollar on my birthday. She died of a stroke. I take pills to ward off strokes.

These bonus years were given me by flocks of anonymous men and women who excelled in the subjects I got C’s and D’s in and pursued their studies when I was amusing myself writing fiction. I am grateful and I pray for their health and happiness. It’s hard work being so smart. Telling jokes is easy. Ole lay dying at home and awoke to smell fresh-baked rhubarb pie, his favorite, and crawled to the kitchen and found it on the counter and got a knife and Lena grabbed it from him and said, “That’s for the funeral. I got you a cupcake.”

My church, St. Michael’s, is less than a mile from home, an easy walk for a sinner to contemplate the goodness of his life, and up the steps into Romanesque splendor and I take my place in the second pew, and up in the loft, Brother John is playing a delicate prelude, a tranquil pool of music in the midst of Manhattan, which ends in a long hushed chord and we stand for the opening hymn, a spiritual, Guide my feet, Lord, while I run this race, I don’t want to run this race in vain. We sing Psalm 33: The Lord loves righteousness and justice. The loving-kindness of the Lord fills the whole earth. Happy are the people He has chosen to be His own.

I feel at peace. I’m not running a race, I’m watching other people race and people on my team are limping, slowing down. The preacher ascends into the pulpit and due to a poor sound system, the sermon is mystical, fifteen minutes of speaking in tongues, charismatic Anglicanism, but it’s okay, the line from the psalm says enough: The loving-kindness of the Lord fills the whole earth. We confess our sins, what we have done and what we have left undone. I have failed those I love, I am careless with my health, I am not a good citizen, having stopped paying attention to the news. I am forgiven and I reach out to people around me and exchange the peace. I take Communion. We sing There is a balm in Gilead that heals the sin-sick soul, that makes the wounded whole. A favorite hymn of my mother’s sisters, all of us standing around a piano, when I was a boy.

Just before the sermon, the little children are asked to come forward to be blessed and sent off to Sunday School, and so few children are present — one can see that, at least on the Upper West Side, Anglicanism is fading away, like the Amish in Pennsylvania or my Plymouth Brethren in Minnesota. Rents are high in our neighborhood, a young couple pays an arm and a leg for a one-bedroom walk-up on the fifth floor. I see families with kids on the street; I should lean down and say, “May God bless and keep you always, may your dreams all come true, and won’t you join us Sunday on 100th Avenue?”

But Episcopalians don’t evangelize. We tell jokes. Baptists confess having taken a drink, Catholics confess sins of lust, Episcopalians confess having worn stripes with polka dots. And maybe people of childbearing age find organ music stuffy, pretentious, and we need to switch to Stratocasters and percussion. When you’re 84, you’re not on the cutting edge and you can’t speak about the long-term future, so I just sit and listen and feel grateful for the doctors in my life, Nash and Fink and Johnson and Taylor, and in their honor I savor the day, avoid TV, join the conversation, and cherish English. What a godsend. Enjoy the day.

Garrison Keillor © 06.15.26