It was modest and sweat worthy building. Most probably built in the 70‘s. We had entered it wanting therapy once. Not the exact building of the Church, but some side venues rented out to independent therapists that were associated with it. A side path led through an early spring garden showing tulips, light blue ones, browning from a lack of water, and early spring bugs I knew about that hatch from eggs under the dead leaves.
The therapist was a bearded, one-man-wonder in corduroy. He met us at the top of some stairs and had us sit on the sofa. He had no patience with us. An angry sort that meant well. She was defensive. Angry as well. It went badly.
Yet still she had suggested that we attend a service. We entered the pastor’s quarters to enquire. The smell of must and mold was inside the shoe beaten carpet we walked on. Mustiness seemed to be everywhere, settled upon things, and locked in place. It was earnestly decorated with odds and ends from 20 years before hand. All of it forest green, jaundice yellow, and a panel colored brown. Including the frames of pictures on the wall, displaying articles about a man who was a war hero. And one blur-ally photographed portrait with the man in a tapered jacket and some decorations on his sleeves and breast. Maybe it was the pastor. He wasn’t around.
He eventually came up from someplace he had been downstairs, in the basement. His name was Winston Monga. He was not the war hero in the photographs. That had been his father apparently. He talked about the Church. It was the Church of God or something, a Unitarian kind of thing. I honestly can’t remember. They accepted homosexuals. I kept trying to get some kind of pazz-azz into the conversation. A stray comment about these pictures and their quality. I wondered if he would to talk about Pinchards’s theories in Lux Cantata and the Modern Photon with me, but he offered us ham sandwiches and Dr. Peppers, which he remarked was his favorite for lunch and also his favorite for breakfast, instead of coffee. The sandwiches came out on damp, white-bread. Bad ham. Edible, but as if eating pink, shiny boloney. He told us it was a small, yet active congregation. She felt it would be a good idea. My wife at the time was searching for this kind of group, but I guess eventually settled with some version of Orthodox, from what I know now.
It was my last attempt at fitting in with what could be called a congregation per say. I had my own alchemy. But at the time I was trying to keep the peace. Now I keep glass bottles of water on the sill and let the sun fill them up with light and quartz made rainbows and I drink them, not worrying about stuff that is holy and stuff that is not-holy.
At the time though we went to the Church. It was the last good year. We didn’t always go. Sometimes we took Sunday drives instead. It was healthy. The Church had amazingly long, smooth timbers that gave it a grand, high ceiling. The interior was painted a pallid yellow. There were pews. Behind the pulpit was a baptismal. A big and beautiful one. Everything was mostly just as a Church should be. There was no stained glass. It was a much more modern building. Much like a large Stamm house, an architect that had built in our area. It did have those three long vertical rectangular windows that step upward in a row, so everyone would know it was a Church.
Winston wore a white robe with gold and black sewn into it. He gave sweet and short sermons in the midst of the duties mapped out on the program. Once he gave a sermon about the Lord of the Rings. He believed in the valor of killing a dragon. The vestige of a great hero who defeats evil. Yet they were modest and unassuming sermons mostly. And at times he would touch upon something of a vast emotional nature, and would weep quietly while he preached. As we in the crowd would also weep a little sometimes. Winston was a touching man.
The congregation was very small, some Sundays no more than 15 people in attendance, at best. At times more even. Sometimes a group of philosophy majors from the Great Books College would attend. There were some old ladies and some older couples. Two sisters that sang good, rather complex duets. And a piano player that was a very old-women named Margret who played Liszt and Chopin and Bach sometimes, as her version of the hymns was also pleasurable and head turning-ly facile. There were not many our age. There was a women named Elizabeth who looked as if she had Middle-East, maybe East-Indian descent. She sold artifacts in town and had smooth looking, dark skin. Rich dark eyes. Sometimes in attending I would hope she was there so I could look at her, and wonder why she was always alone, and by herself, while she was so utterly beautiful.
Within the duties of the program there was the calling to the sick. It was the first thing they would do as a congregation each Sunday. All the members would go around and mention those in their lives that were sick and needed prayer, and Pastor Winston would also mention those in the congregation who were ill and not attending. They would then carry on with the rest of the service. Singing. The bread and wine. The Sermon. They would all have cookies and coffee and bug-juice afterwards. What we Easterners called fruit punch.
It had come to the fact that she and I would sell the house we had owned during that we time that we went to the Church. It was the beginning of the end. There were many beginnings to it. We attended, and tried to sanctify something. I spent some time in the Church garden for them, helping them with their queasy and overgrown plants. They were nice people.
I wanted to move them in some way. Churches like this have a way of being very beige. Very un-moved. Not emotionally vacant, but un-moved in a deeper way. A way of aesthetic. A way of acute attention. I remember an odd friend in the city, when I was very first-off in school, once had mentioned that flowers in presbyterian Churches die because there was no magic there. That magic had been outlawed. Annette could have dumped that extra pan of spaghetti in her brain, as it turned out. But I thought of this, one of her many phrases that had stuck with me. Churches like these bashed out personal angles. Not even these exact people, but they meandered through things, and somehow it seems all squares and nothing appears to have much flavor.
Even the sweet music they sung and played could not break through the restraint. My own religious up-bringing had made me if not callous, at least critical of the doctrine. For me the old texts were transposed, or at least uncovered. I had read other texts. I had looked at my own hands in my dreams. It made not any sense, but to me somehow a mind traveled and procured, had become cultivated, cultured. A regular petri dish of options. In these crazy times everything is suspect. Churches such as this had a vital part missing. A Church like this dims light. But I kept the peace through that last year with her.
And it wasn’t really an ego thing. I had had this problem growing up with the strident and the righteous. Once there was a fellow who worked at the deli where I had a job and had cut myself on the slicer, and bloodied a turkey breast. I was expressing to him some kind of doubt. He responded that God would not make me to doubt if I was not meant to. Some triple talk. He had meant well though. He was my friend.
And it was always the same way, as now it was with this congregation, that I felt these people were missing out on some fully desirable ice cream of life. Some kind of freedom to dream that they lacked. Some in-congruency with nature, that rattled around in their noggin like a nitrous oxide buzz. Some stray drawing on a napkin, they didn’t think to notice and look over, or didn’t think to take home and frame for a just second, before throwing it away. Simply missing out on the way life can be discerning. And pleasantly ugly.
Once in a while they had a meal. A pot luck. I would cook exotic things for them. Lobster bisque. Smoked fowl. I yearn for others to enjoy tempered and complex things. So I try.
At this one meal I noticed a sweet old codger of a man who attended. With a scruffy white beard on a thin chin, and a duck hunting cap. He was the Church treasurer. I think his name was Bob. He apparently was a retired scientist for some atomic numbers, semi-secret bomb department in the mountains when he was younger. It appeared he was a numbers person, anyway, from our discussion, during which he had adulterated all his food together in one big pile on his plate. Mixed it all. Mixed up the Thousand Island dressing with the ziti. The meatballs with the cool whip. The cherry jello and the cottage cheese, all churning around on his plate and in his wrinkly mouth, with a blueberry muffin in his hand, that he feverishly dipped into my lobster bisque that he had draped this whole garbage-y mess with.
I asked him why he put all the food together. He replied what difference did it make. That it was all food. So I talked with him about that and watched him crunch down the pile of calories in front of him. 6’s and 10’s and point 5’s getting pushed through his rough and elderly pie-hole, that dripping and chomping told me he liked the soup.
That was the week that a strange women named Nancy stopped coming. She had attended since I was first there. Cloying. She told everyone that she was trying to recover from cancer, and had been unable to eat. That everyone should pray for her. She recommended herself in the calling to the sick even though to everyone she seemed well, and rosy-cheeked. She was overbearing. Quietly put off.
It was ironic that she was shunned, because almost everyone in this Church was gravely ill. So I guess they would have known.
And then this seemingly dire situation made itself known to me, when apparently it had been right there all along. I hadn't noticed. It would have been impossible to immediately figure such a thing. It was the calling of the sick, over and over. The first ritual they performed when the service organ stopped. That is what keyed me in. It was a slow, collecting kind of a realization. I recall I did not see it because I was trying to save my marriage. I may have been consenting, in many ways, not to have seen it.
No one really mentioned the calling of the sick. I was even uncomfortable mentioning it. They did not even call it “the calling of the sick.” I had started calling it that to myself! It wasn’t even a typeset set winky-dink on the program or anything. Maybe it was not very important? Yet everyone seemed unaware. The very first thing they did!
Sometimes, very subtly it seemed as if people wished they could join in. Some even seemed to be waiting on the edge of their pew to get a word in. The man who lived with his mother because his wife had passed suffered from horrible stomach problems. The nice lady who sat next to my friend’s next door neighbor got acute angina. A ladies father had lime disease. Even the Pastor’s wife, Wilma Monga, who shone in some of those panel framed pictures as his teenage bride was un-attending services because of chronic depression.
I decided to experiment and got involved as the preparer of the bread and the wine.
It was a quick task in the morning and at the time my wife was also interested. They of course used grape juice. I made no pleas to use real wine. I knew it wouldn’t fly. But I took the elixir made by Welches home and fortified it with an insignificant amount of drips dripped from the last of a bottle of 74 St. Estephe I had been drinking. I then set up a circum-navigant network of mirrors that bounced sunlight through the house and into the newly fortified Welche's grape juice, hoping the faeries that live in those photons would cure some of the illness I saw running through the Church. Because God sure wasn’t.
I then took a tiny bottle of not-holy mountain valley dew that I had collected the summer before and dumped it in while sweetening the deal with some crystals of a special Himalayan sugar distilled from a sacred red rice that was said to be the food of great prophets, which would do nothing, except help me believe them all into good constitution. It was worth a try, at any rate.
That next morning at the service it was gravely apparent how much help the threadbare assemblage really needed. Margaret the organist was having problems with her hip replacement and there was a fill-in who could hardly play a note except for a clunky rendition of Eleanor Rigby that she played whole heartedly during the beginning, middle and end of the service. And sadly during the calling of the sick it was announced that Bob, the Church treasurer/food-mixer-upper had taken ill from a case of the hungries which had ended badly, with Bob at emergency and then in surgery. A chicken bone had lodged itself in his wind pipe and apparently was threatening to poke through a lung, deepening with each of his gasping breaths. The congregation was asked to pray that the surgery went well.
It figured that when the bread and wine was finally served, I was too depressed to believe anything at all, and absconded myself for stretching things that far in the first place. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him well, even after you put your hand up his butt. Life isn’t like "All Creatures, Wise and Wonderful" all the time.
Then sickness, and who would have doubted, came to the wife. It came in the form of symptoms that were unknowable and conditions the would most likely, and did, precede other more puzzling symptoms. Her hair had started to fall out. She got psoriasis. Her toenails started to curl up so extremely that it looked as if she had brittle, yellow tubes at the end of each toe. Other symptoms. Excessive boogers. Doctors diagnosed everything from her having a thyroid condition, to a multitude of immune deficiencies eventually deciding on a particular, one in a million recessive gene that caused a build up of unwanted minerals in the bloodstream. It would start to effect women, much like osteoporosis, when they reached forty.
I tried to raise up the situation. Sick Church or not we attended once again after being absent for some weeks. In moments after arriving and sitting down the congregation went into the calling of the sick. My wife raised her hand and asked to be prayed for. She looked terrible. One of the attendees, Beth Thompson looked at me funny, as if bringing her here had been my fault. And not having her come sooner had been my fault also. I gave her my own look as if to say I was king of my castle and my wife was certainly king of hers! Winston Monga prayed for my wife and the others who were sick. Another attendee interrupted him as he closed the prayer, awkwardly and quickly mentioning that he shouldn’t forget to pray for Jarrett Moser’s son, whose feet were so bound up with chigger bites he couldn’t pitch for the Saturday game. Winston made a mention. Mrs. Thompson gave me a few extra scathing looks through the rest of the service.
It was apparent I had not done all I could. Watching my wife I felt that some tiny invisible microbes had eaten into her and our household. I didn’t believe it but I couldn’t resist the imagery in my head, that little weavils were digging holes with tiny shovels, putting notches in the very fabric of our lives, and filling them up with some stinky yellow spackle that caused innumerable afflictions upon the good and the faithful. And to be honest the weekly laundry list of maladies I had subjected myself to hearing over the past year and a half had made me callous to my wife’s woes. In a last ditch effort to save my marriage and my wife’s health, I put the greater part of my skeptisism aside and did my best, bringing out every effective and reasonable remedy I knew.
I had her do sweats in the dark, with hot, thousand degree chunks of marble that steamed a healing floral essence when splashed with the spring water I had treated with a dozen rare and essential oils. I packed her ears with silver dust and slathered her down with me own stinky paste, made from the great and powerful durian fruit, and generous drizzles of Liver of Sulphur that could transform her metallic equilibrium to the up and up. In her condition anything was worth a go. She protested but I would not give out, for it was on her behalf. I even tried a slow and intense tai chi like dance that ended with arms reaching up to the very ethers of light, powerfully trying to manipulate and coax the most insignificant and important particles of energy, which quantum physics now says may not even exist.
My wife had started to say that it was my fault she was sick. As I myself was sick with disgust, for there was nothing I could do. Because it was true, that I had no power. All I could do at that point was turn around. Which I did, and left the vanquished behind. A Church that was buttered in blight. A wife who evidently had other fish. (I found she quickly recovered and married an egyptian orthodox priest, an enourmously-bearded luddite that made goat cheese in the country.) I left the drab design, satisfied, yet bored. And the bones of that unreasonable feeling that maybe I had caused this distress. That I had made them sick.
The weeks and months passed. I had heard things. But then again I had forgotten things. A man with loss on his hands tends to-re write the world. Be his own God finally. Or at least act like it.
It was a Tuesday that I saw Winston Monga pushing along a shopping cart. We were both looking for bargains. A candid man he asked about me, and then my wife and I explained the divorce, even a little nitty gritty. He suggested that I attend, and mention that they had all liked us there. I said I was sadly doing other things. And then Winston Monga candidly told me that his wife, Wilma had passed tragically, and he told me the truth, that out of the blue she had commit suicide because of her depression, in the baptismal tub of the Church, slicing herself just enough to bleed out slowly in the sacred place that was behind the pulpit curtain. He said that when he first found her that morning, the light reflecting on the still blood mixed with the water in the pool appeared pink, and he had at first wondered why his wife had fallen asleep quietly and alone in a baptismal full of bug juice. And then I realized that Winston looked positively awful.
I asked him how he was doing. What else could I say. He lowered his head and asked that I pray for him, because not only was he grieving badly, but he was also told that his bladder might have to be removed and it was turning out to be a serious situation. As he said it my eyes followed his head downward, ending up focused on the things in his cart. White bread. Pounds of rubbery ham. And a 24 pack of that old faithful Dr. Pepper, whose secret ingredients not only include prune juice, but also something akin to battery acid that’ll that rot the face off a copper Lincoln in a matter of a week.
I told Winston I would pray for him. I didn’t mention that I had been keeping some company with the women who had attended with rich, dark skin. The east indian beauty that didn’t mind being alone. Winston seemed to be in no mood. When we left each other I felt eerily at peace, in spite of the bad news. I almost felt light. Absolved from any reasonable guilt for the sick. I had extended myself. At least none of it was my fault, and I was able to simply walk away.
