We Will Go Rejoicing, Bringing in the Sheaves

The sunflowers are drying out for the year.

Some of the Lemon Queens and the Autumn Beauties are still giving me a firework display of blooms, but every one of the great big Mammoth sunflowers is drooping over. I’m keeping them upright in the garden as a feast for the birds. Last year I had only one goldfinch on my sunflowers, and this year I have at least six, plus my friends the cardinals. When I come out to pick some tomatoes, my goldfinches go flying out of the flowers as if a sunflower’s petals all came to life and grew wings. They are far too fast for Charlie the garden cat, who looks up in a bemused way when they cross the sky overhead.

Charlie herself has grown. She was skin and bones when she came to me for refuge, but now she’s fat and spoiled. Sometimes she sleeps on my front porch and sometimes she sleeps on the neighbors’ porch, but she always comes bolting to me when I open the door. That was why I was surprised when she was bolting off the porch away from me, when I opened the door late Sunday morning.

My head turned to Charlie first, so it was only after half a second that I noticed the raccoon.

I’d seen the beast on the porch sometimes when I took out the trash at night. I wasn’t too afraid of her because the Steubenville animal control officers scatter bait blocks: a rabies vaccine baked into a fish-flavored tablet that raccoons love to eat. But I’d rarely seen a raccoon outside in the daytime like that.

I posted a funny status about the encounter on Facebook, and took Charlie out to look over the garden. The pumpkins are all harvested now: I’ve got six in my dining room, ready for jack-o-lantern carving next month. The summer squash bushes are spent. Last month we had such a bumper crop that I had to make zucchini bread for the neighbors and still had enough to eat for dinner all month. I’ve been pulling in handful after handful of beautiful paste tomatoes, but the candy-sweet heirloom slicing tomatoes were nearly six weeks late because of the cold May we had. They’re only now getting ripe: a golden orb here, an orange orb there, a green one with yellow patches near that sunflower stalk. It won’t be long before I get my heirlooms to share with everyone.

After patting the cat goodbye, I went over to Jimmy the Mechanic’s house to catch a ride to Sunday Mass. We’ll have our usual car back by the middle of the month, but she’s a 15-year-old car who finally needed a major repair after running fine since October. Jimmy’s been giving us rides in the Dodge until it’s fixed.

Mass was what Mass has been for me, the past few months: not exactly comfortable, but not bad. I still duck out of the church when the priest starts preaching the homily, because I’m afraid of it triggering a panic attack. I’m still unable to sit with the congregation; I hover in the back. I’m still a little wary of Jesus, but by the end of the liturgy I’ve begun to feel all right. The world I thought was real does not exist. The Church I thought was a spotless maiden turned out to be a deeply flawed, selfish mother. The Charismatic Renewal is a cult. Father Michael Scanlan was not a prophet, but a cult leader and a predator. The fact that my whole life was destroyed when I came to Franciscan University doesn’t mean God hates me, because God is not on the side of Scanlan and his cronies after all. They served mammon. God is with us.

That doesn’t mean the religious trauma will ever stop hurting, but it doesn’t hurt as much now.

It was so pretty on the way home, I didn’t mind being in that ridiculous geriatric car with the broken air conditioner and all the windows rolled down. I scrolled on my phone while Jimmy and I talked. He knows everything about the parts of cars and how to source them, and getting by when you’ve got next to nothing. He knows how to hunt a deer and process it without help. He’s got stories about the houses we pass as we drive– he laid the bricks for this one, and he used to know the people who live over there. I was shocked last month when I found out he’s almost exactly my age. I thought he was much older. I could hope to be as helpful and knowledgeable as him, if I lived to be a hundred or so.

When I got home, I saw Holly the Witch had commented on my Facebook. The raccoon surely wasn’t sick to be out in daylight like that, not if it ran away when I came out. It was likely a sow, a female raccoon. This time of year, they have very large babies who are more like teenagers, taking up the whole den and eating her out of house and home. She probably came up to borrow some cat food because she was terribly hungry and needed quiet time. She most likely lives under the porch in the tall weeds around the haunted house, where the yard has turned into a hay meadow. I was glad to have another garden visitor.

Adrienne and I laughed and talked and started making soup for Sunday dinner.

Jimmy’s boy came over to help me around the house. He thinks I’m teaching him to cook, but I’m mostly letting him play with the implements in my kitchen tool drawer while I cook and chatter with him. Somehow, while I was browning the chicken,  he found the package of chopsticks. Then, of course, I had to give him a demonstration of how to pick things up with chopsticks, and then I had to find things for him to drum on with a stick in each hand. He used the chopsticks to do battle with the biggest sunflower and scatter those seeds and petals before I stopped him. He asked if he could sharpen the chopsticks in the pencil sharpener. I said “no, but you can sharpen these colored pencils for me.” I ended up with pencils with a point at both ends. He picked up the stuffed guinea pig and tried to get the live guinea pig in the cage to play with it. Finally, he played with Adrienne’s Legos and scattered them around the house before it was time to go home. His visits are always a bit like a tornado touching down.

Lately, we haven’t been eating dinner at the table. We’ve been eating bowls of soup in front of the laptop, watching episodes of  Little House on the Prairie. 

Half of the time we laugh when it’s corny, and half of the time we genuinely like it. Pa Ingalls is far too pretty to be a real pioneer farmer, and Ma Ingalls never manages to get any stains on her pure white apron, and Baby Carrie’s acting is so atrocious it’s astounding. But the little vignettes are comforting and sweet. Tonight’s episode ended with the whole congregation in that tiny little schoolhouse belting out “We Will Go Rejoicing, Bringing in the Sheaves” a capella with no hymn books.

Adrienne, who’s never been to a Protestant church service, started belting out “WE WILL GO REJOICING BRINGING IN THE CHEESE!” and I burst out laughing. I told her that when I was little, I thought the  lyrics were “Bringing in the Sheep.” Then, of course, we had to look up a performance of the hymn on YouTube, and we started belting it out along with the choir, substituting any words we could think of for “sheaves.”

“Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness, sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve; waiting for the harvest and the time of reaping—we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the CHEESE! Brining in the SHEEP! bringing in the SHEETS! We will go rejoicing, bringing in the SHEARS! Bringing in the CHEEKS! Bringing in the SLEEVES! We will go rejoicing bringing in the CHEESE.” 

I said it sounded like a hymn I’d sing after I’d been planting in the garden all day, when Jimmy’s boy came over to play and scatter random objects. After he left, I’d have to pick up the cheese and the shears and the sheep and the sheets and take them all off the lawn into the house. Adrienne agreed. That’s exactly how it sounded.

I realized again that I am happy.

It took until I was forty years old to be even a little bit happy, and now I am happy so much of the time.

I am not doing any of the things that I thought I was supposed to do with my life. I’m not at all the prim and scrupulous Catholic I thought I had to be, to sidestep hell and get a foothold in purgatory. I am only me.

I think, perhaps, this is most of what following Christ is. It isn’t running away to find an ideal community and be as scrupulous as you can in it. It isn’t winning some kind of deranged competition to be as Catholic as you possibly can. It isn’t currying favor with self-important men you think are prophets. It isn’t having a wonderful time every Sunday at Mass, because the Church is perfect and you fit in perfectly. Rather, it’s living your life, wherever you find yourself. Being good to your neighbors and letting them be good to you. Making a welcoming space for everyone– of course the humans in your neighborhood, but even the birds and stray cats and raccoons. Growing a garden and cooking a soup. Sowing seeds of kindness and bringing in the sheaves.

I thought of that song again, after Adrienne went to bed.

Going forth with weeping, sowing for the Master,

though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves;
when our weeping’s over He will bid us welcome—
we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves. 

Bringing in the sheaves,
bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Bringing in the sheaves,
bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.