“God will take care of this, son,” my dad whispered to my younger brother, Tim. The only teenager there with a crew cut, he scuffed his shoes and ran his fingers down the spine of a tattered bible, looking unfamiliar in dress clothes and Oxfords.
As we stood on the sidewalk waiting for the assistant pastor, families poured through the glass doors of the church, elbowing past one another as they grabbed brochures from a plastic table near the entrance. My brother watched them as they walked to their cars, smiling nervously each time my father patted him on the back or cited a reassuring scripture. The two of them had made plans to be baptized as members of the church that morning, and stood slightly apart from me and my mother.
She opened and closed the camera she’d brought with her and asked me, “Do you think I’ll be able to get a good shot of them with the pastor? I hope our seats are close enough.” Forcing a smile, she wound up the strap and pushed the flashbulb down, placing the ancient Minolta in one of the pockets in her purse.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. They probably have a special place for us to sit, since we’re family,” I told her.
Although my father and Tim attended services every Sunday, my mother and I came with them on only Easter and Christmas. The sprawling white brick building, with its two sets of double doors and tiny windows, remained strange to us. In short, we weren’t church material–I was an agnostic student at one of the most liberal minded universities in the country, living at home while I finished school, and my mother attended Buddhist meditations, calling herself “independently spiritual.”
And each time the service began, with its hymns filled with electric guitar solos and the leftover Christmas lights strung across the plywood stage where the pastor preached, all the glitz left a sinking feeling in my stomach. While my brother and dad talked about the ways their lives had changed since finding religion, my mother and I just stood there, silently appraising the congregants, wondering what separated us from them. As men in suits and women with coats pulled over their long dresses brushed passed us, we knew that there might as well be an ocean between ourselves and this place, with its bright posters and an auditorium breaking out into thunderous applause.
* * *
The night before, my father told the three of us what would happen: he and my brother would be led into a small, windowless room and asked a series of questions, after which, the assistant pastor would make a decision regarding their church membership. In preparing my brother for this onslaught, he made sure that Tim knew the exact date, month and time that he became a Christian.
“It was in the spring of 2003, on a Sunday,” my brother said, “The day I decided not to go back to high school for senior year.” He told my father this without flinching or blinking his eyes, looking straight ahead.
“Do you know the exact date? They’ll ask you tomorrow, you know,” my dad told him, arching his eyebrows.
Listening to Tim prepare for his interview as I studied for midterm exams at my college, I noticed his military style buzz cut, button down shirt, and pigeon colored pants, which he would have never worn three years ago, before he and my dad became, as he tells his friends, “Men of God.” Later, my dad and my brother rummaged through the closet in search of Tim’s school records so that they could page through them and be sure of the date that my brother had dropped out. As they threw scarves and board games into the hallway, I sat curled up on the floor with a book of poetry, simply called The Ledger, leaning against the sofa. I read the poems, wondering for the first time if what my dad professed was true. My mother sat alone in the bedroom, watching a small television and knitting a baby blanket for a friend, and at that moment her influence seemed to disappear. I thought of all the times I had tried to read the books that my dad gave me, mostly inspirational stories of people who had found religion later in life, but felt nothing.
The same thing happened when I attended services with them at Christmas and Easter–the dramatic sermon, the brightly colored lights, and the glitter would just wash over me. As I walked out to my parents’ car, I couldn’t visualize myself as a member of their community, mostly because of the strictness of my brother and father’s church. The fire and brimstone, the obligation to preach the message if one accepted it, and the general attitude of intolerance toward people of different faiths and lifestyles seemed like something that wouldn’t allow me to think open-mindedly, a quality in myself that I took pride in. I felt, listening to my dad and my brother, that even if the message was true, that it wasn’t an option for me. I knew, like my brother, I’d become a different person. Turning the pages of my book, I began to doze, the grey-green flicker of the television becoming like the sound of water as I slept.
 |
As my brother and dad were led down a hallway to the small room, questionnaires waiting for them on the table, my mother and I walked into the auditorium, which between services had grown quiet. People talked and paged through the church newsletter, and the whole room seemed to murmur like a tiny lake.
My mother turned to me and said, “You know, it really seems like Tim’s found a purpose with this church.” She kind of grinned, fidgeting with the hem of her black sweater and furrowing her brow a little. I noticed that the whole time we’d been sitting there she didn’t say anything about my dad.
“Yeah...and he’s nicer to other kids, too. I think it’s good for him,” I answered. As both of us watched the stage for them, the pastor ascended the tiny row of stairs near the entrance. I remember thinking that churches shouldn’t have stages, that his suit was too nice, and that the entire building seemed too brand-new for me to be comfortable in it, but I rested my foot on the back of a chair and smiled. I felt like no matter what, I was always smiling.
* * *
I discovered my father’s transformation two years ago after working the night shift at a hospital to pay for school. I’d come home and find strange objects around my house: a drawer full of Gideon bibles, books about the battle of Armageddon, and a tiny cross hanging from a gold necklace. It was always raining that autumn. I’d come home from my job and read poems and novels, listening to bad pop music as everyone else slept. Some nights I’d page through the Bibles I’d find around the house, looking at which passages were underlined. They were often bleak descriptions of people who had faced adversity and lost, and I’d lie in bed thinking about why those stories had struck my father and brother. When my dad sat down to have a talk with me about religion on my day off, I wasn’t surprised. He pulled out a study bible and flipped to passage after passage, citing reasons that I should change my ways, and the sooner, the better.
I kept telling him, “I’ll think about it.” Knowing that becoming a Christian was the only way to make my dad proud of me, that no matter how many good grades I racked up it wouldn’t make any difference, I really did think about it. But I knew that no matter what I did, this rift in my family wasn’t going away.
After coming home from work one night, I opened the bible and started reading. I felt as though I’d been struck by the cold, noiseless air that drifts in through my window. The comfort that my dad and brother said they felt when they were reading, the reassurance, and the joy just weren’t there for me. I left the book on my desk, its pages rustling a little as I climbed into bed. My old radio played on as a moth flew in through the open window.
* * *
The pastor stood at the pulpit, pacing. As he walked from one end of the stage to the next, he threw up his hands and said, “Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven, and He overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew upon the ground. Genesis 19:24-25.” Then, with his hand on his hip, he ran his hand through his head of shaggy hair, furrowing his brow and looking down at the black floorboards of the stage. “And the world today, in many people’s opinion, not just mine, has come to this state. In the news the other day, politicians were debating stem cell research. They were, ladies and gentlemen, actually considering this legislation,” he told us. He looked out at the audience and asked, “How many of you, here in this church, want nothing to do with these consequences, documented in the first book of the bible?” Flashing a wide, bleached white grin, he swept his arm out in a large half-circle, indicating the show of hands that had surfaced as he described the fire and ash in Genesis. My father’s hand, as well as my brother’s, if they were here beside us, would have remained raised long after the question had passed. My mother’s wavered, resting instead on her meticulously styled hair. I sat unmoving in my gold upholstered chair, listening to the musicality of this preacher’s speech, thinking of how carefully he’d structured the sermon to lead us to this one question, to which I knew my answer remained the same.
After those who said “yes” were led to the altar and handed reading materials about the church, a light switched on in a tiny room to the side of the stage. Enclosed within the four sparkling glass walls, a waist-high pool of water glistened behind the assistant pastor. As my mother prepared the flash on our camera, a man in a dark suit led a young blonde woman in grey overalls toward the water. She was smiling. They lowered the blonde woman into the pool, pulling her doused head out again, and my brother emerged near the door, looking backward. He whispered something to the man in the dark suit. I could see my father standing next to Tim, both in grey overalls. As they went under, the lights bore down on me like a heavy rain. I knew, watching them, hands clasped, that I would never be a part of this, and I think my mother knew too. As the flashbulb went off, she looked almost happy, her white teeth sparkling in the colorless light. When she lifted her camera again, brightening the flash, it was a smile like a glass of water.
