Mother's Playlist

Waking up to Mother singing, "Just a closer walk with Thee;  Grant it, Jesus, if You please, Daily walking close with Thee, Let it be, dear Lord, let it be," alerted me to the "Hymn du jour." It also presaged the tone of the day.  I didn't realize, then, that Mother already enjoyed a relationship that "churched" and "unchurched" people search for today.  

When I was growing up, "religion" was the maxim associated with God. The rituals churchgoers practiced began with weekly Sunday School and 11 A.M. church services.  Wednesday mid-week meetings refreshed soul and spirit, and sometimes Friday night "Tarry Service," capped off the week.  God was a remote, impersonal entity that "Sat high and looked low," as He dictated behaviors, found in the Holy Bible, and interpreted and monitored by the pastor/preacher, deacons, and often, visiting evangelists.

Original sin and "fire and brimstone" prophecies accounted for the stringent rules and regulations that church officers enforced.  For a kid whose imagination ran at  70-plus miles per hour, religion presented a scary picture, frightening the bejeesus or disobedience or hell out of me.  I couldn't understand how my parents, many relatives, and some neighbors could obey, much less embrace the dogma.  

Perhaps that explained singing, "There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul." Maybe that sufficed.  That and the fellowship of fellow parishioners, I guess.

Creative as she had to be with staples of beans, vegetables, and starches (now "carbs"). Mother excelled in making appetizing meals through her unique rotation of the basic, and I mean basic, food groups.  They were delicious, which kept complaints to a minimum.  Now through time-conditioned analysis, I jokingly say we were unsuspecting vegetarians who only ate meat on Sundays!

Winter breakfast fare consisted of oatmeal, toast cooked in the oven, and "sweet"(cow's) milk.  Grits or Malt o Meal constituted Saturday treats.  To say Mother used inventiveness with elan understates her culinary skills.  As "poor as church mice," my parents' door and kitchen table opened to anyone in need, whether or not they were strangers or faint acquaintances.  

Like most Southerners who had driven  "Route 66 from hardscrabble living to the "promised land," nomadic relatives always had a place to sleep and eat.  First,  second, or third cousins and friends of friends stayed with us until they could "get on their feet."  That's just the way it was.  Sociologists from a prestigious Chicago university studied us relentlessly.  They published "Papers" we neither read nor were invited to read.  Who are those people, we probably would've asked if we had been on the investigators' mailing lists.

I learned to hope, to "Be still and know that I am God, through the songs, Mother sang.  I Trust in God, I Know He Cares for Me; I Come to the Garden Alone; Take My Hand, Precious Lord; I Surrender All; What a Friend We Have in Jesus; Guide Me, O, Thou Great Jehovah; Come, Ye Disconsolate; Alas, and Did my Saviour Bleed; Get Right with God; touch only the tip of the "Old One Hundred" iceberg.  

Mother's songs carried more power than the daily evening news.  Or Sunday sermons, for that matter.   Relationships.  I am so grateful to have evolved from religion to a relationship with my Savior who is "as close as the next breath," that I know exactly what to do.  Keep moving "Just a closer walk with Thee.  Grant it, Jesus, if you please, Daily walking close with Thee, Let it be, dear Lor, let it be."