Reverenda Rosa: Bible Study Gone Astray

There were 10 of us last night. We've been working on Acts since June, slowly. After our meal, we decided we'd rehearse a piece that we will be performing at a celebratory Eucharist at the end of the month.

We agreed: just one quick song. Then it's time to get back to our study. But it had been a hard day. Several of the Mexican men share one room in a duplex up the street from the Centro. Last week, the owner rented the other room to a young American couple who either fight or have sex in the kitchen, in the living room, in all the common spaces of the small duplex with no regard for their house-mates. They regularly steal the food the Mexican men buy. Like my brothers can afford that. Another participant who thought she was on the verge of getting her residency documents has suffered a very major setback. She's scared. Yet another one got some bad news about a process of certification she's been going through and spent a lot of time and energy towards. The list goes on but I get depressed just writing these few bits down.

So we rehearsed the piece, one person playing the guitar, everybody else singing, quite a few voices not quite on key. It sounded so good we practiced again, and then one more time. Someone asked that we sing another hymn. Then another. And we kept going. Light of my Life, who was with us since school has not started yet and she can stay up late, was radiant. Some of the hymns we sang had that undertone of eschatological yearning that makes me want to cry. But mostly, they were hymns of praise and joy. Our little worship space is in a bay of a larger building. We share the building with a Pentecostal faith community that has a lot more members and makes a very loud and joyful noise unto the Lord sometimes driving us to distraction. At one point someone in our small space said, "they're going to knock on our door at any moment and ask if we've converted!" We dissolved into laughter. And then sang some more. We stopped singing when we started getting hoarse. We never made it back to the Good Book. We had, however, found a voice to sing the Lord's song in a foreign land.