Not an auspicious beginning, this morning was.  The kitchen clock, a pendulum Regulator that I bought on a Presidents’ Day sale the year before G and I were married, has presided over our days now for over thirty years.  You can adjust the pendulum by means of a little weight screwed onto the tip.  Which should be a good thing, except that the adjustment requires some ham-fisted effort, and the result pretty much never yields timekeeping that’s anywhere close to standard Greenwich Mean Time.

The photographs in this piece have nothing to do with the text.  They’re for the audience on the floor.  Unless we can work out a sort of sideways association – like: Could this be the Garden of Eden?

For the last many years, the clock has run fast.  It gains five minutes over a period of about two months, and then, two months after that, when we’re always leaving way earlier than we have to, I reset the hands and the whole speeding-up-time starts all over again. In short, while we never trust the time on that clock for the afore mentioned reasons, we do use its friendly face as a relative guide.  But the last time I reset the hands, I also adjusted the weight on the pendulum.  I did it very carefully. I thought I’d moved the thing only by microns.

This morning, dodging out of the house at the very last practical minute (I hate being early for church and having to sit quietly and spiritually and well-behavedly still), I glanced at the clock and figured I had way enough time to start the day calmly, setting up the music stand, chatting a moment with my organist, making sure the hymn number board had the right numbers up.

But no.

As I pulled open the doors to the chapel foyer, I was puzzled by the number of people there already were in the pews.  Nine in the morning is a touch early for church, IMO, under the best of conditions.  Add in families full of small children and you get a chapel that’s deserted till the middle of the opening hymn, when the streams of the faithful finally begin to find their ways through the doors and down the aisles.  I never expect to see more than about thirty people in the chapel when I get there just before meeting.

And then I heard the voice of the First Councilor coming over the PA, and he was past the “Good morning,” stage and moving into the “Opening hymn will be on page . . . “ stage.  Which was not good, since I am supposed to be the engine of that particular car.

Consider the lilies.  Yellow ones.

So I scuttled up the aisle, tossed our stuff into the pew and was sprinting up the stairs to the stand when I pulled up short.  The piano.  The little grand piano that sits stage left of the lectern largely untouched (unless the choir is singing) was OPEN, and somebody was actually sitting there in front of it, at the ready, sheet music in front of her.  For a giddy moment, I was terrified that this was actually the MIDDLE of the meeting, not the beginning, and that I must be standing there in the chapel in nothing but my underwear.  (No, I wasn’t really afraid of that, but it was the same feeling.)

Nobody was sitting at the organ, over stage right.  Which was weird.

I went on up those steps, eventually figuring it out  that the organist was absent and that Kaye, who plays piano but not organ, had been recruited to be the keyboard guy of the day.  I slid in behind the piano, hissed a couple of questions: “Are you playing for me?  Did you put the numbers up?  CAN you slow down enough, you don’t beat me to the finish this time?” adjusted the music stand and—before I could sit down in my usual place, TA DA, the congregation all opened their hymn books and looked up at me expectantly.

So I was in time.  Just.

Kaye couldn’t see me through the open top of the piano.  I was pretty much bellowing out the hymn so she’d know where I was in the darn thing.  And we were fighting over the tempo.  We made it through that first hymn okay, even though I could see Jessie in the second row, one of my Sunday School students, looking up at her mom with hound dog eyes, really squeezing the silly out of the nineteenth century (admittedly sentimental) hymn I’d picked for that morning.

A few moments later, we made it through the sacrament hymn.  There was only a little consternation amongst the deacons when they looked up to find nobody at the organ, and somebody at the piano.  But they rallied.

I was looking at the program after the deacons had gone by, and to my horror, realized that I had chosen for the rest hymn a really beautiful piece that I knew darn well NOBODY in this congregation had ever heard before—one of those hidden hymn gems that never made the greatest hits list.  I had chosen this hymn for this very reason (and its beauty) last January, when I was charting out the whole year, never figuring it would end up on a hurried day with no organ.

The organist knows all the hymns, and that instrument can fill up even the back of the entire building, covering a multitude of musical sins.  But with just the piano, the congregation was going to end up blinking at the hymnbook with their mouths hanging open in dismay.

Dang, I wish I’d remember to check that hymn list every week before I get to church.

What to do?  WHAT TO DO?

Or orange ones.  And also tender mercies in abundance.

I decided to listen to the Tuinie family’s talks (they had just spent two and a half weeks performing in the Nauvoo Pageant) and pick out an alternate hymn that would support the theme of the meeting and go down well with just piano.  I could do that, slip in an alternative.

But as I sat in the pew looking down at the hymn (was it 25 or 35?  Now I can’t remember) and read the attributions on the bottom, I realized that this hymn was PERFECT for this meeting—written by a very early convert to the church and included in the very first hymnal.  Probably sung in Nauvoo.  Certainly relevant.

I was doomed.

As the kids gave their talks, I felt even more the absolute appropriateness of this particular text.  So when they were finished and I made my way back up the steps to the stand, I gave Kaye the “hold on” sign and I appropriated the lectern.  There are Bishops who don’t like it when this happens—I mean generally, they don’t like it when somebody just decides to waltz up and take over the microphone. I also mean specifically, those Bishops knowing they can never be quite sure what’s going to come flying out of my mouth.

Even a sparrow cannot fall—

But there I was, standing in front of the congregation, explaining the whole situation.

“You don’t know this hymn and neither do I.”  But the text—it was full of the wonder and faith of those few early saints, written long before the migrations from New York and then from other states, and then from Europe and the entire world, the building of the first two, doomed, temples, and the terrible persecutions, some of them very murderous, and the terrible hardships of winter and travel.

The people who had first sung this hymn had had no clue what was coming at them, the trials of their faith.  And now way of anticipating the thirteen million people all over the planet who would eventually join them over the course of 150 years or so.

Certainly, they would not have known that we, the two or three hundred people filling our own homely pews this morning, were about to sing the very same words and music so very many years after their travail.

Kaye played struck up the intro.  And we all stumbled through the hymn. It was not slick.  Not beautifully sung.  No theatrical success.  But it was very real, the singing of that text.  We were all thinking about the kind of people who would give their lives for what they believed.  Who would suffer all inconvenience for something they held precious.  For their families, their children.  For love.

When it was over, I sat down with my fam again.  And I got to hold Scooter.  And listen to Ron’s talk (through the Scooter filter).  Ron spoke for a long time and said some pretty wonderful stuff.  Finished up about six minutes before the end of the meeting, just enough time to sing the last hymn and move on to Sunday School.

So I got up and started toward the stand.

But Ron looked down at me and said, “Wait.”  Because his wife, who had also been prepared to speak, but who’d been sitting in the back with the kids, was being summoned to the front by the bishopric.  So she and I passed in the aisle, me on my way back to the pew (all dressed up with nowhere to go).  And she gave a talk that wrung the heart out of me.  She spoke of the end of the pageant when—the story having been told—the actors, all dressed in white with that beautiful building rising behind them, white against the stars, sang “The Spirit of God.”

And, of course, that changed everything.  Now I had to somehow communicate to the bishopric and the pianist that we were NOT going to do the hymn listed in the program, but this mighty anthem instead.  Because we had to.  After what she’s said, we had to sing it.  And as I listened to the end of her remarks, I looked up to see that the pianist was looking at the hymnal index.  She knew exactly what I was going to do.

I went up to the stand, flashing the bishopric the correct page number (thinking they would announce the change – which they didn’t).  I leaned over the pianist and changed her page.  “I thought so,” she said, grinning.  Got to the music stand, held up two fingers (page two – as if the congregation wouldn’t get it, right after the first two notes had rung out) and Kaye put her whole soul into that keyboard.

We sang it.  We filled that chapel with the loveliness, with that strength and rejoicing.  And when we finally got to the last verse, I gave Kaye a sign.  She dropped out.

With the congregation on manual, we did the last verse.  It was just the voices of the people, carrying the force of the hymn.  The sound was amazing.  We sang like we meant it.  They followed me.  They filled the chapel with the anthem.  We slowed down for the end, letting the words slip out slowly as we felt every one single one of them in our hearts.  And Kathy—just back after her own service in Australia—as I knew she would, indeed as I asked her with my hands to do, ended the hymn one full, ringing octave above the score.

Then—silence.

A few moments later, the prayer.

Then we moved on to Sunday School.

For the beauty of the earth –

The day had not gone the way I had supposed it would when I woke up this morning.

Thank heaven.

Later, I was laughing apologetically to Debbie, our ward music coordinator, but she just grinned and said, “I know you. I was already open to that page before you even got up there. “