Fire and Brimstone Tent Revival

It’s a mixed bag, religious practice, but somehow we pick and proceed, each of us with our own sort of universal sincerity.

Last night our friends A&P&C came over. They brought us supper: fresh corn on the cob picked by A’s parents, veggies, new potatoes, tea; M and I had made a peach tart for dessert, with peaches picked by a local farmer. After eating, they whipped out their toothbrushes to spruce up while I cleared the table and M fed N. N takes forever to nurse, so we had to catch up with A&P&C later.

“Just look for the big tent with lots of cars,” they said. And the “Tent Meeting” and “Tent Revival” signs. He would be leading the hymns before the preacher, a former New York City Puerto Rican gangbanger turned conservative pastoral counselor, would take the stage for the sixth of ten straight nights of preaching.

The breeze wafted through the tent and fluttered the drapes marking off the women’s and men’s prayer rooms and silently permeated all with the smell of the sawdust aisles and invitation area before the platform. “The service will end with an invitation, probably,” A had told us.

“I’m going to pick on someone tonight,” began the preacher, at almost exactly the same moment that he similarly dealt with his wedgie. “What did I preach about on Tuesday?” (Nobody remembered; it was “sin.”) “What did I preach about on Wednesday?” (Nobody remembered; it was “salvation.”) “Alright, who was the 16th president of the United States?” (A guy with a dark beard answered.) “Alright, how old am I?” (Lots of people knew; the previous night he’d told his life story.)

“Our ability to remember is a marvelous thing,” he said, and thenceforth followed the account of Lot, or rather Mrs. Lot, since it was her example, of turning back to the past and therefore into a pillar of salt, that we were to tuck away in our hearts, and other conveyances of whatever the Spirit laid on the preacher’s heart (“Speaking off the cuff,” M called it later) made imperative by loud vocalization and emotional appeal.

It’s odd to go to such a tent meeting among cape dresses, coverings, buttoned-up white shirts, to sing along with the hushed “Just As I Am” during the altar call (no one came forward). It felt like time travel, going back to our parents’ childhoods, back to a black and white era of strict boundaries of separation. Somehow I feel a common bond with these people, but I don’t know if that sense is reciprocated. Instead, maybe I fit into the preacher’s category of “wannabes,” people who want to be Christian but also want to be of the world. I probably don’t yet qualify as a hypocrite, since you have to be “in” before you can be inconsistent.

This feeling of historical visitation or my perhaps certain–in their book of judgment–eternal uncertainty remains unbroached with our super-conservative friends. I’ve had consciously to decide not to take personally or become personally offended by anything religious that I could construe as exclusionary and instead to perceive it as but a sincere attempt to do what is right. After all, as the elder’s sermon (delivered before the preacher’s sermon) last night suggested, it’s not where we’ve been but where we’re going that matters.

And for this week’s visitation, we’ve picked a Lutheran church.