This morning, beginning an assignment for my course in Comparative Religions, I've been listening to Moses (well, Charleton Heston) read about Saint Augustine, something worthy of its own blog (!!!). (Must remember to look up "I am who is" as well as the society that Augustin of Hippo (Algeria/Tunisia) belonged to before returning to and affecting Catholocism.) But since I copied and pasted a hymn yesterday, I'd like to talk about Mom in the context of religion and nostalgia and religion as nostalgia--and religion and nostalgia as performance of long-term memory. Yesterday I got a call from Sandy Ellington Kirkeley Lipkovich, a close friend from seventh grade through high school, and I was touched that in spite of being a really religious person, she left me a message that could console a person without religious beliefs. I'm not always that nice about my beliefs in vegetarianism. (Just this past Friday, I expressed horror to Beth and Shehla that the lamb they were eating was halal or whatever the word is for kosher--killed in a way that causes a lot of suffering to the animal.) I'm obnoxious. Sandy isn't. She also sent me a sweet e-mail, also drawing on our commonalities and not Baptist beliefs and rhetoric. Still, I want to consider the possibility that Mom was like me: Not an atheist because that would be presumptuous. How can anyone know what isn't? But an agnostic with both a spiritual leaning and a love of ritual through years of our lives--in spite of not going to church or any other place of worship in recent years. Mom was definitely talking about God and prayer at Aegis. Of course, she was talking about devils, too. Even during the transition place between her home of 45 years and Aegis, one of the dark days had her telling us who among the hospital staff were demons. But even before she started showing signs of dementia, she liked to sing both patriotic songs ("This Is My Country," "God Bless America"), in spite of being critical of our foreign policy, and hymns--probably ones going back to her years at her parents' Methodist church as well as the Anglican hymnal from the Episcopal Churches we went to in Idaho and in South Carolina. "Onward Christian Soldiers" was one. I'm not sure what the others were. But one of the hymns I remember best is "Oh, God, Our Help in Ages Past." Years after we'd moved from South Carolina and Mom was no longer going to church, I asked her what it was that she was thinking while sitting in church. While other people just recited the liturgy, Mom cried. What was she crying about?
"I was thinking that if it weren't for God, I'd be a divorced woman." By the time she told me this, she was a divorced woman, so I'm not sure just how she would feel about the words "Oh, God, our help in ages past." Did God's help keep her married too long? But I've chosen the hymn for the last words: "And our eternal home." Mom wanted to go home for her 90th birthday. She and I were the only ones who thought that was a good idea. When I found out that Jonathan agreed with Kathy and Suzy, not with me, I started trying to familiarize Mom with the dining room at Aegis. I took a picture for her invitation, and I kept showing it to her so she would feel confident enough to go around the corner to celebrate her 90th there. (At Aegis, she no longer spoke of going to Berkeley Square in London for her 90th.) Maybe Mom never gave up her dream of going home. Maybe that's where she is now. Not here, this untouched place of beauty with a table setting never touched.
But a home she'll never have to leave. What do you think, Saint Augustin of Hippo?
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