Lookaway, Lookaway (25 page)

You poor dead Presbyterians,
he wrote them.
God has come calling and you will not answer; you have closed your hearts to the true revelation. You imagine yourselves shielded against His power with your purses and wallets, your small affordable charities, which avail you of nothing. I must go where I can preach Christ Jesus, active, enflaming, alive in the hearts of believers, not just on Sunday for a few diverting hours before the auto race or NFL game.
And it went on like that, and he decamped to True Vine and some members of the church went with him, including two deacons.

So that was Part One of the schism; Part Two was when the synod decided, after these Baptist antics, that an old-line interim minister was just what Stallings needed.

“Brother Bo, that was before my time of service here,” Zephora said, her lips pursed. “I would never have sent Fire ’n’ Brimstone Brenner to Stallings, no sir.”

Dr. Brenner was some of that ol’-time religion, John Knox back from the grave. His sermons were strong, forceful, absolutely not up for discussion in any way, shape, or form because he was right, and he was insuperably right because he had God and Scripture on his side. Then it came out that the effeminate organist (who everyone thought was a closeted gay man with a bad silver toupee) was having a thing with a married soprano. Aside from the improbable visual of lovely Mrs. Hinton having an affair with Mr. Todd, there was a sense that something had to be said or done. The old unexcitable faction (who had not liked the speaking in tongues of Dr. Frankling) felt the adulterous couple should be informed that the congregation knew their secret, told to quit it, told to get counseling. The elders were determined that “in all things love,” that a Christian, gentle solution might be found to patch up her marriage and return things to normal.

But Dr. Brenner had other plans and one Sunday called them out before the
entire
late-service congregation, which, of course, may have been in keeping with practices in the early church (as were sackcloth and ashes), but it had the effect of a stoning. He declared that they renounce each other and their sin on the spot, or leave the church never to return. They left. The organist sued for breach of contract, since there was no morals clause in his contract, as in the minister’s and choir director’s contracts. Half the congregation thought Dr. Brenner was wrong to do it; a quarter thought he was wrong to do it publicly but was right otherwise; and a quarter saw Dr. Brenner as the righteous branch that would spring forth to execute justice and righteousness in the land.

And then Stallings Prez started fighting over every little thing. Some younger members in the congregation wanted newer music as long as they were hiring a new organist. Synthesizers, guitars, miked singing—something the other churches were doing (well, the ones on TV), not that dreary old dirgey classical music all the time. They fought about who got to teach Sunday school. Lucille Gerster had given the kids nightmares with all her talk of hell to the second graders, but to remove her would mean World War III. (She had been in the tongues-speaking camp, and was still seething over Dr. Frankling’s exile.) The church fought over their decade-long support of the Five Churches Soup Kitchen—didn’t it seem they were paying the lion’s share? And besides, is it really Christian to let these broken men get dependent on these handouts? And then one Sunday when Dr. Brenner asked if there were any concerns or requests for prayers in the congregation, Hedda and Leroy Hargett stood up and said that two blocks from their house, there was a Planned Parenthood family center going up and the staff would be counseling, if not actually performing, abortions there.

The church, on this one, could not agree to disagree: this was baby-murder right in their midst. Each controversy took its toll and people too liberal for the Neanderthal element in the church and people too conservative for this socialist bleeding-heart outpost began to find other congregations. The ones who stayed behind weren’t going anywhere. They were committed to the fight for the life and soul of Stallings Presbyterian. But Bo had longed for service, and this was truly service. To save a schismatic, polarized church which had lost its Christian fellowship.

“And don’t forget,” concluded Zephora Hainey. “You’ve got another secret weapon.”

Bo quickly self-scanned his known and unknown qualities.

“Kate,” Zephora said, before he guessed something embarrassing. “Everyone likes Kate, and most anyone with any sense will love her.”

And that prediction, Bo had much time to reflect, proved that even the great Zephora Hainey could be wrong and underestimate the malice of Stallings Presbyterian. His wife had her fans but she was as much a target for their fractured, malcontent church as he was. No, honestly, she was more so because she had never once, never once, thought to withhold her opinion on anything.

“You got yourself a Hillary Clinton there,” old Jim Harker kept telling him, feeling Bo needed to hear it every week after service, pointedly not shaking hands at the door, not touching the minister as if he were a leper. Oh nothing was worse than having a Hillary Clinton as a wife. “What do you propose I do, Jim?” Bo unwisely asked him one week, when he was just testy enough to challenge the old coot. “Chain her up in the basement, put a gag in her mouth?”

“Women should be silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, says Corinthians,” he answered back without looking.

Kate thought there was nothing lower than a politician. But Bo really felt for them, understood them. Like a presidential candidate, everything Bo ever said, every stray absent comment, every mild loss of temper, every aside to a trusted congregant, was
known,
passed around, pored over, analyzed by the whole church—and often wildly misquoted and misinterpreted, too. “A church this rich,” he once said at a planning session, “has to make an answer to God why it is spending so much money on retreats and playground equipment when there are people in need of food within two miles of this church across the city line in Charlotte.” That spread around the church winning him shaken heads, disgusted comments, a there-they-go-again look. “You wanna go preach at a black church, be my guest,” said Hettie Bessemer, one of his chief detractors.

To want to feed the poor as Jesus commanded, to Hettie meant “wanting to do something for the blacks and Mexicans,” which meant you had no business at a white church, particularly a white church which threw a set amount of money to a consortium of churches’ charities which no doubt, surely, ended up doing some good for all those blacks who insist on being poor and undereducated and living in bad neighborhoods.

And if the all-white congregation wasn’t an emblem of something amiss in the church, the fierce, unthinking, blind homosexual-hatred was dazzling, breathtaking in its breadth and completeness. As Katie noted, “It’s not like there’s any shortage of old gay bachelors, lesbian spinsters, and gay kids galore in that church.”

“Yes,” Bo said, “but some of them are old homosexuals who denied themselves all their lives, and they figure if they could fight off the demon and go through life without a single moment of sexual fulfillment then these kids can, too.”

Bo and Kate knew about the kids. They came to talk about being gay, or thinking they were gay, or knowing they were gay having done something, something shameful, something with an adult in the church, a time or two. Bo saw the glory of Christ’s taking a stick and writing the sins before the condemners among the people who would execute the woman taken in adultery. He wished at times he could borrow Jesus’s gift, to show this congregation to itself, what lists of damnable offenses he could sketch out in front of some of the pious. No wonder so much of the Bible centers around inconvenient prophets or begrudging emissaries speaking truth to power, revealing the sins of the ones who would throw the stones—and no wonder they’re driven mad by it all.

Which reminded Bo of the second thing the minister has in common with the politician, that nothing surrounding his life was secret.

“I know you got a gay under your roof, Reverend,” said Ray Crutchfeld, even patting him aggressively on the shoulder, poor thing, to have
a gay
in your own family—imagine! “But that don’t permit you to go all soft on the Bible now, do it? Sin is sin, remember that.”

Bo’s heart skipped a beat. Crutchfield couldn’t know about … No, it had to be Joshua who he meant. Katie, when she was in the Peace Corps in Honduras, working in a remote village with one other woman, did have a loving and committed lesbian affair with her coworker. Once back in the States, the other woman reverted to heterosexuality, indeed, seemed to shun and resent Kate for their affair. Kate had hoped to launch an inner-city women’s shelter with this woman, but that was long ago, and there was no way Ray could find any of that out. No, Bo supposed that Joshua’s being gay was somehow public knowledge.

“You have some nerve speaking to me this way, Ray,” he said quietly. The impertinence of being told “sin is sin,” from Ray Crutchfeld of all people, on his third wife.
Christ said of marriage what God has brought together let no man put asunder, so we know what he thinks of divorce but he doesn’t say a word about homosexuality, Ray, so little it concerns him
— But of course he didn’t say that. “Sin is sin, Ray,” Bo said, after faltering a moment. “And we’re all sinners, with God finding no one sinner worse than another, but loving us all anyway and extending redemption through Christ Jesus. You believe that, don’t you?”

“Well, yes—”

“Are you in the judgment business, Ray? Jesus doesn’t say one thing about gays but I can give you a dozen quotes about judging and condemning and presuming to speak for God. Are you gonna be one of those with judgment and condemnation in your heart or will you have Christ’s love in your heart?”

Ray met his gaze without a blink. “Ain’t no fags in heaven, Reverend. And you and I both know that.”

Bo knew that this exchange would be replayed and wrongly interpreted throughout the church, too. More evidence for the Katie-is-a-lesbian rumor (maybe she and Hillary Clinton…), more demerits which would lead inevitably to them leaving this church, being asked to leave at some meeting of the elders, some whispered-about humiliation that the whole church would know and support before it would be presented to him and Kate as an irreversible fait accompli.

Babies, teenagers, old white men, black people. But there was one more subset of humans that the Reverend Beauregard Johnston did not and could not particularly come to terms with: his own family.

His decision to be a minister was not exactly embraced. He could see it in his mother’s eyes, a pall, a loss of some kind, a small distinguished settling for a lesser calling than law, business, politics. His father was always warmly supportive but even here too there was an effort behind his soft smile. “I’m sure you’ll be the best minister you can be,” he said, clasping his son’s shoulder. God, almost any profession might be substituted in that statement (“I’m sure you’ll be the best street juggler that you can be…”); it reeked of disappointment.

Did they think he took up the vocation lightly, as a lark, something to major in at Duke University, like Geography? He was sitting in the beautiful Duke Chapel, feeling tired but not despairing, not broken in some way, although the prospect of law school did not enliven him. And suddenly there was this bright light. He looked around in a panic to see its source, but it was all around him and nowhere else and this strange calm then suffused him, this immense peace and resolution welled up that made him wonder if his heart had stopped and that this were, unexpectedly, his death. If this were death, he remembered thinking, then let it come; he had no fear. And then a voice:
You are mine. You have always been mine.
And then gradually the gloom of the chapel returned and he was breathless, again looking around him for some source of it all. Okay, if he had been weeping or on the ropes, suicidal or despairing about life, yes, you might have thought it was a trick of the mind. But it was a Tuesday, for Christ’s sake! He staggered from the chapel, into the daylight, deciding to think about it later, even deciding to ignore it … but he couldn’t, and didn’t. And soon he knew, after a bit more prayer, what was expected of him.

Annie was savage. “You can’t possibly really want to peddle that claptrap about the Mean Old Man in the Sky, who created this world fifteen billion years ago so we could evolve over the last million, so that a percentage of the planet could know Jesus Christ for the last two thousand years as our personal savior and know that our every wayward orgasm and lustful thought is being tabulated by His Father who is prepared to send His imperfect children to a Hell which will last for fifteen times fifteen times fifteen billion years to the zillionth power because … He loves us.”

“Please Annie, just save it.” She had cornered him at a Sunday dinner and was stalking him as he walked steadily to his car and eventual escape.

“Here’s the thing, big brother. You’re gonna wake up in a few years and not believe it yourself, but by then you’ll be stuck, flogging these myths and fairy tales to all the pathetic death-fearing childlike people who long to have their bigotries in common so they can go through the pearly gates while the others go to the fiery lake. You’re going to resent them for needing
you
to believe it, for needing your complicity in the scam.”

“It’s not a scam.”

“Good, then don’t take a salary. Let God find a way to provide for you.”

“I’m not ashamed to say I believe in something.”

“No, it is I who believe in
things,
material things, corporeal demonstrable empirical
things,
and many ideals—art, clean politics, a generous social state, hatred of war. I am full to the brim with beliefs. You are the one hiding behind some two-millennia-old road show that has only recently stopped burning witches and wiping out Jews and leading crusades and inquisitions. And believe me, if the North Carolina rednecks you’ll be preaching to had their way, there’d be inquisitions all over again. Having failed to keep their slaves and the black men from dating the white women in the name of Jesus, they’ve turned their attention to hounding knocked-up teenagers and persecuting suicide-prone gay kids. And the Moslems of course—there’s an old chestnut. Do you think you’re anointed, called by God to keep company with yokels?”