Choir Loft

The Habit

Chapter 55: Choir Loft

Mt. Olive's children's Christmas program was held on a Sunday evening in December and had all the structural confidence of a folding table set on carpet.

This was not criticism. It was liturgy.

Lila had one speaking line, two songs, and an angel costume whose wings listed slightly to the left as if divine announcement had caught a crosswind.

"Do not tell me if they look crooked," she said to Noel in the fellowship hall before the program. "I am doing my best with circumstances."

"Understood."

Renee was helping pin costumes because one of the regular volunteers had influenza and the shortage had turned every adult with fingers into provisional staff. Edna was directing traffic among the younger children with the hard mercy of a woman who believed chaos could be disciplined if addressed in the correct scriptural register. Bishop Ellis moved through the room promising calm and mostly redistributing panic at lower temperatures.

Noel had come to watch.

Five minutes later he was in the choir loft holding a stack of lyric packets because Brother Ellis needed one more adult up front to hand materials to the children and nobody else present looked sufficiently unamused by the assignment.

From the loft the sanctuary looked different. Less symbolic. More assembled. Wreaths near the windows. Red bows trying to impose coherence on old wood. Darren's youngest picking at his dress shoes in the third pew. Leon and Mae's old seat still occupied by Leon alone, his tie clipped aggressively at the collar as if formalwear had offended first.

When the program began, everything happened too fast and not fast enough.

A shepherd lost his crook. One of the wise men cried before finding stage confidence again in the vicinity of myrrh. The sound system whistled once and then repented. Lila delivered her line into the microphone with so much solemn force that three people in the back laughed out loud and then looked guilty for having enjoyed the Incarnation in public.

Noel stood at the side rail of the loft and passed lyric sheets down as needed, watching the room take the load.

Renee in the third row with her phone lowered more often than raised.

Edna near the aisle with a safety pin in one hand and one eye on the preschool angels.

Bishop Ellis conducting the closing hymn with a level of optimism the choir did not entirely endorse.

Lila, after the final song, scanning the room for known faces with the frank urgency of a child who has done a brave thing and now requires witnesses to confirm the fact.

When she found Noel in the loft, she grinned so hard the wings slipped another inch off axis.

Afterward, in the fellowship hall under fluorescent lights unkind to theology and frosting alike, she came straight for him.

"You were up there."

"Apparently."

"That means you were official."

He looked over her head toward the sanctuary doors, where the last of the children in costume were being disentangled from halos and snack expectations.

"Maybe temporary official."

"Still counts."

Renee reached them with a paper cup of punch and that tired, bright expression parents get after a child has performed competently in public and the nervous system has not yet believed the danger is over.

"Thank you for loft duty," she said.

"I was conscripted."

"That is how all ministry begins."

On the way home Noel thought about the word expected.

Not requested in crisis. Not invited as exception. Expected.

At Linden the porch boards gave their familiar winter note under his boots, and the front room lamp warmed the window from within. He stood in the hall a minute before taking his coat off, listening to the house hold itself around quiet that did not feel vacant.

Then he opened the second notebook.

Lila delivered one line into the sanctuary microphone tonight as if the salvation of the county depended on diction, and somehow I ended up in the choir loft handing out lyric sheets like an understaffed deacon. From up there I could see the whole room doing what rooms like that do best: carrying other people's nerves until the hymn ends and the children find the right faces in the crowd. Being expected in a place is a different sensation than being summoned, and I am still learning the exact weight of that difference.