…for many people, a day dedicated to worship and prayer. For many more, a day dedicated to relaxing and preparing for the workweek ahead. If you arrived here via my Serenity In The City blog, you will have seen the various pictures of churches.  This is not to imply in any way that church worship is superior to any other type of worship.  Those buildings caught my attention, I took the photos, it’s Sunday…there you go!

A day dedicated to worship and prayer…after writing that, I thought: what does that mean? My small still voice prodded: write your own experience. So, here goes…

I was raised in the Russian Orthodox traditions, in a predominantly Catholic country. My first experiences of church, worship, and prayer came through these vehicles.  Services in the Russian Orthodox church are interminable to a little girl…especially in the very traditional churches we attended which had no pews to sit on.  On the plus side, these churches were usually surrounded by lovely gardens with (thank you, God!) benches! No one was expected to stay inside the church, filled with the heavy scent of incense and the magnificent cadences of the choir, for the full three hours of the service.  You’d go in, light some candles, say some prayers, go out and chat with friends and family, go back in, come back out, and like that until the service ended and you went home to a gargantuan meal because you were starving!

At one point I was enrolled in a Catholic school, so I attended Catholic church.  Meh… Not as grand a mass as in the Russian Orthodox church, but MUCH shorter and less incense!  Their priests’ costumes weren’t as ornate or the choir as impressive as in my church.  God seemed to live in their house, too.  I was cool with that.

When we moved to the U.S., I learned that Russian Orthodox and Catholic were not the only religions out there.  I found out from the kids in school that there was something called Protestant. I liked the sound of that.  What were they protesting? As the protesting child in my family (why do I have to do that?  Why doesn’t HE [my brother] have to?), I found that whole concept very intriguing…until I went to a protestant service and it was so…plain! Where were the icons? Where was the pageantry?  For heaven’s sake, where was the BLING?! No incense was good, but you had to do your own singing.  What the heck was the choir there for? Why would God want to live in such a ho-hum place?  With a house like that, I’d rather be in Heaven, too! Of course, I never said anything out loud.  I was taught to be a polite child. Besides, I’d learned that too much protesting brought out my grandmother’ wooden spoon – and it wasn’t to stir the stew!

When I was 15, my uncle died in a car accident half a hemisphere away. My grandmother was inconsolable in her grief: he was the first of her sons to die.  Of course, we had to arrange a service at our church for the nine-day-, twenty-one-day-, forty-day-, three-month-, six-month-, and one-year-commemoration of his death.  In our tradition, a special ceremony is held to light the way for the deceased’s soul and support it on its transition.  We all gathered in the church following a Sunday service, held candles (oops, is that my hair burning…again?) which we placed near the altar when we finished, and everyone had a bite from the sweet wheatberry cake my grandmother made for these occasions, so the soul wouldn’t go hungry.  It was comforting to those of us left behind to feel that we were somehow helping our loved one ascend to Heaven.  When one of my cousins, my contemporary, died tragically a few years later, the family decided to dispense with all the commemorative services in order to spare my grandmother yet more grief.

What the…? I was confused. How was my cousin any less valuable than my uncle? Because she was young and hadn’t walked this Earth as long?  Because we didn’t spend as much time with her or her immediate family? Because her other grandparents didn’t like us? Because we didn’t like her other grandparents? It made no sense to me.  So, I resolved to hold my own commemorative ritual for her.  For six weeks I showed up in church, lit candles for her, stayed for the whole service, remembered the times we’d shared.  At the end of the sixth service, I heard an internal Thank you! Goodbye. I knew she was gone and my work was done. Or, actually, just beginning since that was the first time my small still voice made itself heard so clearly.

When I married the first time, a couple of years later, my husband was Jewish.  Back then, inter-faith marriages were not very common and were, in fact, frowned upon.  It was regarded as a dilution of the blood-line…whatever.  We found a nice rabbi who performed the ceremony one Sunday afternoon so very many years ago.  During the time of this marriage, I was very diligent about observing my husband’s beliefs and customs since we lived close to his family and mine was hundreds of miles away.  I dragged him to temple for the high holy days.  I hosted Passover dinners to help my mother-in-law with that observance.  We had some kind of evergreen decorations and a Menorah at the appropriate time of year.  I liked the orthodox services more than the reform ones that my husband and his family favored. I took the classes for conversion even though I had no intention to convert.  Convert from what? I wasn’t learning anything about Judaism that was so different from what I already knew to be True…

In time we divorced. Amicably went our separate ways. I moved to that den of iniquity, a.k.a. New York City, and he went…somewhere.

I liked living in New York City.  I worked. I went out with friends. I had a half-share in a ski house in Vermont and learned to ski. I took Club Med vacations. I learned to play bridge. I had relationships…somehow, I never got the knack of dating. In due course, I gave birth to my daughter and did all the young mom things.  By the time she was two years old, I was burned out, worn down to a mere stump of my former self.  I needed help.

One of my friends suggested I try meditation.  She showed up to babysit and sent me off to the ashram down the street a bit.  And thus began my formal experience of meditation and Self understanding.  No, my life didn’t magically get all better…this is not “I Dream Of Jeannie”! I did begin appreciating the effect  that abiding in silence had on me, my life, my relationships, my understanding and view of the world. And there was enough pageantry and bling in the Hindu practices at the ashram to please my Russian Orthodox roots!

It’s another Sunday in my life.   I no longer believe that worship and prayer are a limited once weekly practice.  For me, remembering that I am a perfect expression of the Divine is a constant practice. These are some of my reminders:

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