“He spoke with a tenderness he wasn’t even aware of anymore, that you could read if you knew how, like reading the bottom of a river from its pools and flows .. His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.”
That quote is from Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, and it describes the “old man” pastor who would eventually become the titular character’s husband. It’s also the passage that, for me, forcefully evoked an expansive set of memories: a particular posture of attention, staring up at the pulpit, and an overarching sense of warmth, listening to words that, as a young child, I understood only intermittently. I was deep in the dinge of the 23rd Street subway station, waiting for the F train, but in my mind, I was a 7-year-old kid, legs dangling from the pew, so excited for the service to end and coffee hour, with its cornucopia of cheap, stale cookies, to begin.
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