If you’re new, Chapter One is linked here.
Of course, you know what comes next: church with a big, fat “C.” But not the walnut-wooded, high-ceilinged, stained-glass-windowed church designed to pitch people out of their everyday experience into holiness. This church, God’s house, is a bingo hall in the corner of a stucco, L-shaped strip mall.
Monday through Saturday it’s inhabited by crusty octogenarians that puff cancer sticks while plucking down their chips. Then, come Saturday night, the leaders of Harvest Christian Center move in with industrial-strength fans and open up all the windows to cast the secondhand smoke out. They clean the bathrooms, fold up the tables, and set the chairs in rows that face a movable carpet platform topped with an acrylic pulpit.
Thankfully, my mom’s current husband Karl doesn’t come with us on this day, or really any other that I can recall. He likes to lecture Jake and I about Jesus but not actually go to church. So Mom and I arrive and are greeted at the door by a sweet little church lady who hands us a pamphlet with the order of service. Before Mom can scoot us closer to the front, I plop down in the second to last row with cemented finality. There are about one hundred people here, and looking around I realize my skirt’s too short; everyone is dressed in “Sunday Best” clothes and the women all have pants on or ankle-length skirts. I stare at the brochure but secretly eavesdrop on the adults who greet each other as siblings saying, Hello, Brother Ramon, Good morning, Sister Nancy.
Then a group of men and women make their way to the stage and pick up their instruments, signaling the beginning of worship. A lady standing lower down on the stage picks up a satin flag that is lying on the floor and begins twirling to the music in ecstasy. These people sing for what feels like hours, over and over again with the same chorus lines, “Shout to the Lord, all the earth let us sing! Power and majesty, praise to the King!” It’s an arm-swaying, merry-go-round of adoration, and just when I think it has to be winding down, there’s a reprise. I sit down midway through the set, plumb tuckered out.
To the right of the stage stands a lean man with high cheekbones and a razor’s edge jawline. After the tenth song, he strides up to the pulpit and begins praying over the congregation.
Oh Lord, we adore you. We worship you. Blessed is He who takes refuge in You, he says.
Yesses escape from the mouths of a dozen congregants and the sea of heads bounce with ascent.
Friends, he says, I feel the Holy Spirit moving. Let’s just quiet ourselves before the Lord. But, if you feel the Spirit moving in you, don’t be afraid to speak up.
People sway to and fro, eyelids pressed tightly shut, hands clasped in prayer or lifted to the drop ceiling. Then a woman cries out, Shanda biega, eem bada sea, aya cota leroe. Lord, I glorify you and only you!
Murmurings of praise spill over into joyous shouting and the preacher begins speaking in tongues, too. My social norms are getting drop-kicked and I’m thoroughly freaked out but also kind of fascinated at the same time.
After a few moments, the congregation sits down as if what happened was utterly natural, and I look at Mom with raised eyebrows and mouth, What was that? while the preacher begins to share announcements.
He’s balding but very handsome, and he moves as if he’s got more horsepower in his frame than men that size usually do. His hands are overly large, and on the left hand, his fourth finger has only one phalange. I’ll learn later that the other two joints sheared off years ago when his wedding ring got caught on a chain link fence while his body kept moving.
After the offering bucket goes around he begins preaching, crossing back and forth over the platform with the calf leather Bible in hand, holding it like a treasure and a weapon. His eyes look out at us, deep-set and piercing. He rails against human sin; he weeps at God’s beautiful mercy. He insists we become people who are ‘not of this world.’ Above all else, he wants to save us from a devil’s hell. When he asks if any of us want to ‘rededicate our lives to the Lord’ my mom gently nudges me and I sigh, exasperated, then raise my hand even though I have no idea what he means.
What I want is to feel better about myself and less angry all the time, and if that’s what happens when you respond to an altar call, I’m willing to accept the invite and go forward when he asks me to. I walk to the front with a handful of other folks and murmur the prayer he asks us to repeat. Nothing electric happens, but after the service is over several complete strangers come up and hug me, the looks on their faces suggesting something more significant has happened than I realize. Have I just performed the secret handshake without knowing it?
Mom sits in the back with a pie-eating grin and I slip away from the well-wishers and collect her.
Let’s go, I say stiffly.
Just as she rises, a guy I know from school appears in my peripheral vision: Peter Jordan, my sixth-grade crush. Back in middle school, I thirsted after his almond-colored eyes framed by silky locks of hair, but he was way too cool for me. Later, I heard he’d gotten himself born again, which puzzled me since I was utterly committed to the pursuit of coolness he’d so casually thrown off.
Hey Kathy, he says.
I’m stunned but I try to recover by flipping too much hair to one side. Aware that I’m not modest enough for this venue, I yank my skirt as far down as it’ll go.
He nods at my mom whose eyes suggest something like complicity.
Come join us at Youth Group this Thursday, Peter says with that same smile and effortless self-possession that made my knees buckle back in middle school.
We meet up there (he points to a balcony above the bingo hall) and feed ourselves on the Word. Plus we play some dorky games, he chortles.
Feed yourself on the Word? I think. My mind reels then settles on a Sesame Street-like image of Peter biting down on red, yellow, and blue alphabet magnets. Uhh, I’ll see if I can make it, I stutter. I…just have basketball practice and homework, usually.
Okay, good deal, he replies. I can give you a ride if it works out sometime, he says, and then he smiles at us and shuffles off towards a handful of teenagers I recognize but never say hello to at school.
I turn and ask Mom with a penetrating gaze, Do you know him or something?
I’m friends with his mother, she says, doing her best to look utterly innocent. Are you hungry? she asks. I’m buying lunch.
I roll my eyes and say, Grandma’s buying lunch. Because I know the twenty dollar bill in her wallet came from Barbara, not Karl, and certainly not Mom’s measly bookstore earnings.
***
It’s a pretty slick move to involve Peter in my spiritual formation. (I see that now, Heidi. Fist bumps to you.) Peter’s so radically different from Jeremy or Dave or Chip or any of the boyfriends that pulverized my heart that first year of high school. But he’s just enough of a peer that I can’t disregard him as an outright Jesus Freak. He plays football and rough houses with the guys in the locker room, but he never crosses over the border with them to “drink and drown” in Juarez bars, never makes out with random girls after a few Jello shots on Friday night. He’s in touch with the world that’s left my soul so bruised but he’s free of its abrasiveness.
He takes me to Youth Group a few times before I get my driver’s license and once he talks me into attending a tent revival where he lingers, hands lifted high and singing off tune, long after the worship set is over. His devotion somehow seeps into me, and one Sunday during the music my hands begin to creep up ever so gingerly towards the ceiling for a few seconds, only to quickly come down when I feel naked and foolish for this act.
More and more, I’m peeling off from my party friends even when they heckle me about my new lifestyle. Jake tries convincing me to go out with them, but instead of getting sideways on Friday night I stay in and fall asleep to the Vineyard CD I got from Mom’s bookstore. I wave at Chip when I see him in the halls at school but he only raises his eyebrows and then blows quickly past me.
Besides Peter, no one at church lives in the general vicinity of my social world. So I cling to the last vestige of my former identity and throw myself into sports all the more. I make the varsity basketball team as a sophomore, partly because of my tenacity as a rebounder but mostly because of a change in my attitude (I reason that Jesus would not call the coach lesbian slurs behind her back if she made Him run baselines, so I try saying ‘yes ma’am’ instead).
Then one evening after my homework is done, a sizzle of pain shoots down my left leg. Through the night it turns into a pulsating throb that bites and burns so bad I can’t lay supine. I have to sleep on the floor with my legs bent and propped up on the vanity chair. Advil doesn’t help, and neither does stretching my hamstrings while smoking a Marlboro (bizarrely enough, when I go rummaging in Grandma’s chest of drawers I find an old pack of Reds).
When the pain gets nearly unbearable I go see an orthopedist and discover I’ve got two herniated discs in my lumbar spine. What caused it? Who knows. But what’s clear is that my life as a lady jock is over.
After giving me my diagnosis, the doctor makes an off-handed comment that I better not gain any more weight or the pain will get worse.
He has no idea that with those words he’s fertilized a deep, self-denying seed inside me.
I start with physical therapy, but improve very little. So I sign up for an epidural. On the operating table the doc gives me the sweetest drug I’ve ever experienced, and I spill about all my adventures across the US-Mexico border, along the way recommending the best bars in Juarez for specific cocktails. The sciatica abates a bit, but a few days after the injection I can’t stand up straight without feeling like I’m on a Tilt-O-Whirl. It takes just one doctor’s visit to discover that the epidural needle punctured the sac holding my spinal fluid and it’s causing my brain to lowride in its basket and give me vertigo.
There’s nothing to be done for it but bed rest. So for two weeks I lay at home in bed, sometimes napping, sometimes staring at the cracks on the ceiling like Madeline from Bemelmans’ famous children’s book. My dad and stepmom have to work during the day, and of course, Mom is cloistered away in Karl-land. So our live-in maid, Lucy, checks in on me each day asking, Come te sientes? and lovingly feeds me fresh fruit salad dusted with coconut flakes.
When I finally get out of bed and the horizon stays the horizon, I zip up my jeans and discover they fit much looser than before. I look in the mirror and see the difference, too, which sends a jolt of exhilaration through my veins.
I’ve lost a lot of things recently--an intact family unit, a mom that appeared to have it together, my arroyo buddies, the ability to push my body like a young athlete ought to be able to do. All I have for an identity is Jesus, and now this slight shrinkage of my waistline. So, somewhere deep in my unconscious, I fold the two together: faith and physical diminution.
This moment right here in front of the mirror, it amounts to a calling for me. Moving forward, each pound dropped is a mini resurrection, a vindication for all the events in my young life that have shredded my feelings into hamburger meat. It’s a dangerous and potent combination, one I’ll lean into with all the zealousness of a new convert. And sadly I’ll receive St. Paul’s teachings about crucifying the flesh as fuel for this pursuit, shrinking my body smaller and smaller when what it truly aches for is to be cradled by the God who loved our flesh and bones enough to wear them eternally.
Well that answers a few questions that have nagged at me for 20+ years. Thank you for that vulnerable insight.
It’s a shame that the only 20/20 insight we’re privy to in this physical world comes far after the event in which it would’ve been most useful and could’ve set you on a whole other course.
"His devotion somehow seeps into me, and one Sunday during the music my hands begin to creep up ever so gingerly towards the ceiling for a few seconds, only to quickly come down when I feel naked and foolish for this act." <-- such a good sentence