Church

Craving a lull in our ongoing church hunt, M and I have decided to attend for the remaining few months until we move one of the three churches within comfortable walking distance of our apartment. We’ve enjoyed the sermons, the music, the friends we already know, the many people we meet if only because they adore N, the airy sanctuary, and this past Sunday’s potluck, at which I had a very large piece of fried chicken, two pieces of cake, and lots of other samplings.

As some might perceive of me as an occasional spokesperson for antiestablishmentarianism when it comes to formalized, pious, and showy religious order, our selection of an institution that I continue to dub as our denomination’s “high church” in this town may be surprising. The pipe organ and grand piano; the broad pulpit on the broader stage; the weekly (very gray and well suited) attendance of 329; the huge parking lot; the denominational university’s current and past presidents, professors, and intellectual products; the radio broadcast studio and online sermon video production–all make for an expensive and refined religious experience.

This excerpt from a John Updike quote noted by Garrison Keillor on this weekend’s A Prairie Home Companion fits how I feel about attending our current religious haunt:

“Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for use one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give—surely in all democracy there is nothing like it.”

On the first Sunday that M and I walked through its surroundings of neatly kept ranch houses in tidy lawns to join the democracy attending the “venerable and lavishly scaled building,” we passed the neighborhood’s sole less appealing house, the one with busted-out windows, decrepit roof, scraggly lawn, and sorry cars parked around it.

It was a cold morning–N was bundled and wrapped in blankets and strapped into the jogging stroller–and just as we approached this dump of a house, an upstairs window scraped open and a young, bare arm shot out, flinging the yellow liquid contents of an old metal Folgers coffee can over the lawn–and down upon the bicycle leaning against the building just below–and then wholly receding with a shuddered slam.

“Oh my word,” I turned to M. “Did you just see that? At least that bike has a nice set of fenders.”

This Sunday after church we again packed N into the stroller and set out through the balmy afternoon sunlight to trek home. As we approached the eyesore of a house again, I heard a creaking and clink and a “Good afternoon” as a white-haired man carrying a metal crutch against his handlebars rode past us on none other than the nicely fendered, previously doused bike.

I recognized him and his stiff suit and tie, his yellow-white hair rigid over thick glasses, his somehow rattletrap demeanor; he’d attended the same Sunday school class as us, the one in which a renowned church scholar had presented a heady impersonation of St. Augustine.

We watched as he slowly coasted (meandered, really) off the street, leaned the bike against a tree–thankfully not directly under any window–and hobbled on his crutch up the ailing wooden steps and into the house.