An Active Congregation

On the windowsill I will lay shells. One I gathered, a fractal curve, the other half a bivalve handed over by a child participating in the game of lean down and pick up. She got the theme. I will also place the leaves and flowers of the frangipani whose sap, I've only just learned, is terrible for the eyes; you must wash your hands strongly (Strongly!) Dripping white like milk...milk of the frangipani. It should be good for something, with a name like that.

The flowers smell like lemonade. One of my favorite flower scents. Close to the flowers of the magnolia, another scent I love, but only up close. From far away it overwhelms, as if of two natures, the one for intimacy, the one for exclusion.

Mapulele. Flowers.

Church a choice in the morning. When a Catholic nun you love is ill, it seems appropriate to go, to offer presence in the way that she would also choose. So went we did. Stained glass windows, a white-washed space of warehouse size. Tin roofs that must have cost a fortune. The choir and the altar boys in uniform, or matching outfits. The choir with their calabashes and a man who hit a zylophone for rhythm and for music. Two ladies dancing in the aisle to motivate the crowd. A big one. A white priest - Polish, we are told - in green cassock. Hard to know what thoughts to think. Everything in the language of Kiluba, and that makes sense.

An active congregation. A sub-priest - what are they called? - Congolese, and so is everyone else. Dancing round the altar, though the word does not make sense. A shuffling line rhythm of the altar boys: a one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, turn, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, turn: alternating angles: beautiful.

Really beautiful. That rhythm must be written elsewhere for the nature of how much it appeals. Clapping on the half beats. Something I would not hear and even with my years of dancing fight still, internal rhythm. Cannot quite bring my hands together fast enough each time. Clapping, swaying, but a subdued crowd still. You say 'singing!' and 'dancing!' and it sounds like Baptist, but this wasn't. Incense, proper, bells. A high pitched ai yai yaiiiiiiiiiiii held long, after each ring of that tradition. Strange for me, but why should it be so? A cry to heaven, to the heavens. We've done this for the ages over, past and onward. Oh, God, hear me.

The offering the best part. I never like the parading forward with the money but afterwards the best part, another parade, but this with baskets of food: cassava in all its fresh and soaked and pounded, floured forms. Now that was lovely.

A parade of food and singing, swaying, must also be a rhythm written basic for the way it felt; a sudden relief and sense of abundance, even though I was not hungry, even though it was not going to be given to my own body for its nourishment. Still, with the music, with the food, with the feeling of abundance we could all breathe in and sigh out, and breathe easier on the inhale.

A part of the community for the moment, and this is also good. To come where people go when they are not with you. To be reminded of your place. To be the worst dressed person in a crowd of hundreds.

To all be equal before eyes that you believe in sometimes, sometimes not, but whom the rest do and so you must acknowledge the power here. Which is why, I guess, the tears spring outwards at the offering. The concentration of intention, the power of desire, the fact that all are praying and all are asking and all are needing and in this triangle is a center of hope, and what we share. Something as fundamental as an empty stomach. As graceful and arcing as the pouring out of sound from throats that must say something: the making of a joyful noise.