Two Holy Limericks by Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor
Facebook, August 5, 2018
· I wept in church this morning, sat in my pew and wept big tears, breaking several decades of dry-eyed Christianity. And in an Episcopal church! It was a healing service and after the sermon, the clergy and deacons stood in a line across the front of the church and people were invited to come forward for prayers of healing. Some old, some young, came up to a clergyperson and the two of them joined hands and the supplicant leaned forward and whispered and the clergyperson prayed for him or her. These encounters took several minutes, there was no hurry. It was so moving, the visible Body of Christ offering prayerful attention to individuals who needed it, and I wept so I couldn't even sing the healing hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." A steady stream of people. And then I joined them and I went to a black lady deacon who took my hands and I whispered that I have too much anger about a wrong done to me and I feel crippled by anger, and she prayed in a soft Caribbean voice, a long prayer, as I stood there, trembling. And then the hymn, "It Is Well With My Soul," which I love, and another, with the chorus, "He will raise them up, He will raise them up, in the last day" and all around me, Episcopalians, white, black, gay, straight, holding their hands in the air for faith in the blessed Resurrection. Anglicans, being charismatic. I grew up in a cold fundamentalist sect in which doctrinal purity was the whole emphasis, there was no laying on of hands, only wary sidelong glances. This is a miraculous church, St. Michael's on 99th and Amsterdam. I would move to New York just to attend there. And besides all of that, I wrote four limericks during the sermon, which was inaudible.


Have mercy upon me, O Lord. I am weak and willful and bored.
I've abandoned Your Ways
But I kneel in Your praise,
Bless my pen and my laptop, my sword.

I say the prayer of contrition
And see my pernicious condition,
And then in an inst-
Ant am cleansed, at least rinsed,
A sinner but a newer edition.