Church: When Settings are Characters in Your Story
And What Happens When it's Gone
Church buildings have always been home. The rainbow patterns on high-traffic carpeting through stained glass blood of the lamb, violently soothing. Brass finials in the shape of a cross. I often lay down on the red velvet pew cushions as a child; lulled to sleep by the sweating Baptist pastor’s pulpit pounding. A steady, rhythmic heartbeat of fire and brimstone. Bare wood beams with an ancient string-of-pearls spider web and dust too high to reach with a broom swayed, though there was never any breeze. There was never any air.
Church kitchens always smell like soup, mothballs, and dollar-store dish detergent- hot pink liquid that reeked of almonds and was never free of residue, refilled in old Dawn bottles. There were rust rings and mouse-droppings in forgotten floor cabinets until the next year’s pancake breakfast or spaghetti dinner- cabinet paper peeling up at the corners, leaving all doors slightly ajar.
A church kitchen was my first kitchen as a married woman- the back door to the sanctuary, my first door with a key.
Church buildings were where I was raised. Where I grew up. Where I became an adult. No matter how often some wax philosophical about how life is not about the place but the people- church was more than a setting in my narrative. It was its own character. Church was a pronoun- a nonbinary qualifier.
It remains the haunting, unreliable narrator in my story.
I missed church this week in the way I assume amputees miss limbs. A deep, phantom loss. I missed the smell of the olivewood pulpit shined with Murphy’s oil- the sticky grape juice baptism, the metallic tang of pennies in offering plates. The mildew dots like stars in the corners of ancient, red-backed hymnals.
I missed when my hope was built on nothing less.
I don’t miss the blood or the righteousness, though.
I missed the passing of peace between palms, paper-thin and wire-framed- milky blue eyes misting over in prayer. The voices in unison, the feeble and frail, the tiny and mousey, the strong and mighty. I missed when I hoarded the same lines- a collective trove of poetry lovers. Every Sunday, an unlikely book club. A passage to hold up against the stained glass and ask- “What could it mean?”
No one ever knew. Not really. Faith and certainty are arch-enemies, you know. But for a time- for a moment when we all played polite- it was fun to guess.
This week I missed church in the way an old woman misses when her children were young. She does not want to return to the fear or the work or the long days and longer nights. She doesn’t long for the time her hair smelled like rotten milk, her bra covered in blended oatmeal and blueberries. She just wants to hear them laugh as littles one more time. Feel a sloppy toddler kiss on her cheek. Witness the joy of the discovery of ordinary and delightful things.
She just wants to remember the good when she is not so tired or broken.
Remember when?
I missed church this week in a bone-deep ache that made me pull over into parking lots and sit in outdoor gardens, hand pressed to my irregular heartbeat and wonder why people even bother to gather in places they still call “sanctuaries” when so few are safe in the pews.
Whoever God is, we know a building cannot contain them. Whoever God is- we know they are waiting in traffic- shushing abandoned babies in police stations, palming dandelions willing them to grow.
Whoever God is, we know they are not a place.
But then again.
What if they are?
R and I always dreamed of opening an European-inspired cafe. One that offered one or two beers on tap, a shiny brass espresso machine. A place where we could serve a pastry or a sandwich or a salad to someone who could afford to buy it- and someone who couldn’t.
Every time we see a for sale sign in front of a church, we slow down. Take pictures.
Wouldn’t it be something if it could be there?
Wouldn’t it be something if we could serve people in a sanctuary- a sanctuary where they would actually be fed?
Wouldn’t it be something if people said, “Let’s go to church” and they came to us?
If they meant our table?
I missed church this week. Like a phantom limb. Like a memory just skirting the edges of gone.
It’s a character who can’t die- so it is unlikely to leave my story alone.