Alone, Alone, Alone…
Just inside the door, other church members are standing with masks across their faces, mumbling through them muffled words of greeting. We enter slowly into the sanctuary, the old darkened walls gathering about us.
In the straight rows of pews, the sparse congregation sits spaced, eyeing us as we approach. There is hesitancy here, as if no one knows exactly what they should say or how far away they should be when they say it.
The 'new normal' is in play.
I had to call off the Easter cantata this year. All that time spent carefully practicing, paying attention to the nuances, memorizing each part: The women's parts as well as the men's. We bought books, and tapes, and were in the final stretch, just weeks before the final performance. Our sound man was delicately balancing the system in the hall for our debut. The soloists had been practicing their parts diligently, and the choir — an amateur group which had been studying their parts as assiduously as any professional one, had been listening to their practice tapes which had been supplied them, going over their individual parts since Christmas-at which time when we presented what I would best describe as a well-done effort that was edifying for the body of believers.
At least, that's what everybody said after the recital.
But, that is all behind us now.
There was to be no Easter choral presentation. The members were dispersed to the winds now, between the demands placed on them to find new jobs, mind their now non-schooled children, and mandates to 'shelter' at home.
We are all back in our caves… pushed back into them by circumstances beyond our control; like we never came out this
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‘Wordaholic’
By Robert Hall ROBERT HALL (cont.)
winter into a spring, that even now is terminating into an uncertain summer.
Until this Sunday morning, where one member brought a bag of sanitizer to share. Another sister had worked at hundreds of masks to hand out to the parishioners. And in our mutual prattle, we repeat the things of the outside world that we have heard: Stores down on their luck, others requiring gloves and masks, lining people up at the entrance to let them in sparingly. The half-empty shelves of paper products and TV dinners, macaroni or eggs.
Beef has skyrocketed and no one knows why purveyors are not going to prison because there is news out there that cattle is being slaughtered and bull-dozed into ditches and being covered
Milk being dumped out — yet you can't find it in the stores.
Toilet paper non-existent, yet advertisements lying to us, telling us they are doubling, tripling manufactured quantities.
Our government is spying on us and each other.
Endless investigations, counter-espionage on opposing political groups, soulless Chinese unleashing hell on earth and disappearing its own sick population in Wuhan, its doctors and journalists vanishing as well into a black hole from which they will never return — just like during the previous 20th century horrors they committed against their own citizens.
And yet, there are those in our own media who would defend that behavior-that is opposed to all that is good and decent in the worldand, instead choose to hate President Trump more than the communists, just because Hillary didn't have what it takes, spurring divisiveness.
And I?
I am still yearning to listen to the Easter music that we missed this year. Maybe, I'll dial up
its music and words is simple to comprehend.
We are not alone.
Yet, I forget sometimes.
Like the old gospel song, ' Remind Me, Dear Lord,' tells us, with the line: “Just remember I'm a human, and humans forget.”
It took my pastor to remind me this morning about it.
His sermon was about when the Jews entered the Promised Land. Moses, their leader, was taken from them by God and was replaced by Joshua.
And what did The Creator personally tell Joshua, in order to prepare him for the next great trial of the nation of Israel and Joshua's role in it?
Simply this.
He gave him his marching orders, adding these words: “I will be with thee; I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”
Not by yourself, Joshua.
Not alone.
And neither are we alone at this time. But, sometimes — like I did — we all forget.
Robert L. Hall is a resident of Marion and has a Bachelor’s Degree in music from the University of Memphis and a Master’s Degree from Florida State University. He is the pianist for Avondale Baptist Church and a writer of fiction.
