The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “No, thanks,” I said, pointing to my head. “Pornographic memory.”

  What was I doing? It was a good question. I would have asked myself it, if I could only catch my brain, but that impulsive mess had gotten ahead of me again. The girl smiled primly. She looked like a Renaissance Madonna, a beautiful girl child patiently holding on to the squalling, horrifically ugly babe that would save the world by developing a talent for sustaining puncture wounds before Criss Angel dominated the scene.

  “Bad joke,” I said. “First time here. Thought I should try to be edgier, verge-ier, you know.” I was puttering worse than a do-it-yourselfer in a Home Depot. “Just ignore me.”

  The other girl touched my elbow lightly and laughed like the remark’s off-color meaning had just come to her. “We can take a joke here. We’re not that kind of place.” Her directness and game-show announcer’s rounded syllables surprised me. She knew I was new, too. That I was a potential mark on her celestial scorecard. I mumbled thanks and moved into the dimly lit, cavernous space of the Verge.

  As upon entering a cathedral, I was aware of the capacity of the space—but the comparisons ended there. The room was very large and very dark. The ceiling was twenty feet above me, all exposed air-conditioning vents and black spray paint. The floor was slick concrete. The stage at front, lit by a baroquely professional lighting rig attached to the ceiling, bustled with musicians plugging in cables, trying to look casual, telling jokes, rubbing shoulders. There were about two hundred folding chairs set up and maybe half that number of people chatting aimlessly. They were loud. It felt like a large dive bar. There was moody, melody-deficient background music. At the rear of the room a bearded guy did Reiki over a mixing board the size of a dining room table. Like the sign outside, the walls had been painted to look like brick and were covered in graffiti with X-TIAN and 4 YHWH, which I nearly mistook for a freeway designation. I got the impression they were about to stage a low-budget high-school rendition of Rent with all the homosexuality expurgated, which meant doing a staged reading of half the credits and then bowing.

  I took a seat in the back row, as far over as I could. I thought I’d be able to keep a few seats empty around me. Soon, though, every chair was full, and helpers from the shadows had set up another fifteen rows behind me. In the end, there were people standing in the aisles, fumbling with the tough choices one is faced with when trying to hold a Bible, a coffee, and a donut in only two hands. I read the program over and over again until the service began, intent on avoiding any conversation. To read about it, the place didn’t sound so bad. There were outreach and after-school programs, a building project in Tijuana, some poor kid with leukemia who didn’t have insurance, a letter from her mother expressing gratitude. On paper, I could deal with a church like this.

  Soon enough the lights dimmed and I looked up. I hoped the trailers before the feature film would be good. While I laughed about this in my head, a perfectly well-edited trailer for a women’s retreat in the style of Bridget Jones’s Diary played for three minutes on the screen that dropped down above the stage. Then there was one for a men’s retreat in the desert that featured bros on four-wheelers holding rifles, and a behind-the-scenes featurette on a nutrition outreach program that served one of the poor Latino communities nearby. They had the structure right, the buoyant and sentimental ways commercials spoke to a certain set of stereotyped ideas: women needed gossipy companionship, men needed brotherly adventure, brown people needed charity. It told me something about how these people imagined themselves.

  The videos ended. The screen rose and the stage lights came up. A woman with short, unnaturally red hair stepped onto the stage with a microphone. “Hello, and welcome!” she shouted. A cheer rose up from the crowd. It’s an aw-shucks way to describe it, but it’s the only way to describe that kind of reaction. Crowd noises are usually a mix of sounds—joy and aggression in a football stadium, hope and anger at a political rally, pleasure and rebellion at a concert, satisfaction and greed and desperation on Oprah—but this cheer was all cheer.

  “We’ve got a great sermon for you today,” the host said, “and the Verge band has some kick-butt music, as usual. But first, a few announcements.” She filled us in on the establishment of a seed church by some of their missionaries in St. Petersburg—all those cold Russkies and their cold, red orthodoxy, unfamiliar with a God who was relevant and interested in their lives but surely used to the feel of an invisible eye upon them at all times. One of their local contacts had fallen ill and I thought she was going to ask for money, but instead she asked for prayers. I saw pens moving around me, and a glance at the nearest person’s program confirmed it: people were making a note to do so. Not everyone, but a good chunk of them. Then there were a few upcoming events to plug, a couple deprecating jokes about her husband (she was pregnant, and he was struggling with the emasculation of cleaning the litter box, vacuuming, etc.), and an invitation to put our hands together for the Verge band.

  The background music we’d been listening to was an echoing chord strummed by one of the two gender-indeterminate guitarists with long hair and tight black pants, and now the chord was struck harder and the music came on fast and loud and polished: drums played by a man who was my age and wore a faded tie-dye shirt, bass plucked by a boy grazing the peach-fuzzy lip of puberty, and synth sounds from a young woman with a strong nose and a modesty panel under her V-neck. Everyone in the room stood up, so I did, too.

  The singer wandered out slowly, carried by the warm, polished crescendo of this semi-rock-and-roll. She was thin and blonde, wearing white capris and a tight Ely shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the pearlescent buttons catching all the colored lights. Her eyes appeared to be closed, but she was able to step over cables and the legs of stands, so she must have been squinting. One hand was raised in adulation and the other grasped a tambourine. She just wandered for about twenty seconds or so, building drama, avoiding a stumble. Then she found the microphone, mumbled something unintelligible, and half the room lifted their hands up into the air. This I couldn’t do. It was bad enough inhaling so many warring deodorant scents. If I lifted my arms, I might pass out cold.

  Lyrics were projected on a screen behind the band. The singer called out the first couple words to each verse before she sang them. So I would read “Light of the World, You stepped down into darkness,” and then she would say breathlessly into the microphone, “Light of the world,” before belting the line out. It made for a staccato, neurotic effect. Most of the people around me sang along. Some swayed, reaching up. Nearby, a group of teenage girls sung gaudy harmonies around the melody. When the singer wasn’t singing, she played her tambourine like it was a Stradivarius. Every time it made contact with her other palm, she raised her eyes in praise of the miracle of its jingle-jangle.

  The chorus described God as “lovely,” which seemed like calling Vladimir Putin a sweetie pie. Later the song sputtered in circles for a solid two minutes—including an extended a cappella break—of everyone chanting, “I’ll never know how much it cost to see my sin upon that cross.” Despite myself, there was something stirring when the instruments and amplifiers died away and we were awash in the mistuned, arrhythmic singing of three hundred strangers. The voices moved in a sloppy unison, like the surface of a choppy sea. The sound called out some sympathetic response through my nervous system—the sound moved me.

  Of course it did. The music was a kind of tumbled-and-polished rock that was either bursting out in a manipulatively cathartic chorus or was swelling toward one. It was graduation-day rock, greeting-card rock. The music was stirring people up, sure, and I couldn’t be entirely immune. It was the same kind of music that got them emotional during a Volkswagen commercial. They were moved and ready to make a purchase. I tried moving my mouth along, just to fit in, but it felt too silly to stomach.

  I tried to imagine Emily here. Had she been one of those vain, harmonizing girls? Didn’t seem likely, but I couldn’t say it was impossible. She sounded like she�
�d been a true believer, though. How had she gone from that to the person standing on the street near Angelo’s? She’d said she began to see through the bullshit. It was hard to see how she could have missed it in the first place. But something must have precipitated the realization for her.

  The song ended, and then the band played a couple more. The singer jutted her hips forward and rocked them side to side with the music. Above her low jeans and below the hem of her shirt a band of skin glowed blue in the stage lights. Her calves were toned where they emerged from her pant legs. She did quick, strange dances, and her breasts moved under her plaid shirt. I had a series of unclean thoughts. I wondered how many prayer requests went through this machine that asked for forgiveness over what they’d imagined doing to the bandleader.

  At some point the lyric of choice became “I am captivated by Your love.” The kind of love that holds a person captive is an abusive one, and it made me think of Sammy. Was Emily there against her will, or had she chosen to go back? Maybe it was just for the drugs. Or had he taken her back, was she important to what he was doing? It seemed possible, too. Shaw’s story still loomed in the back of my mind.

  My nearmost neighbors were hollering their hearts out, wanting a love that subjugates. That’s a need that doesn’t always lead to God. I could almost remember what it felt like to be young and credulous, happily obedient to God’s will. But God’s will, it turned out, was other people’s will, traced through the traditions I was a part of, my church, my culture, my parents, my friends. I was obedient to my idea of God, which was still obedience to myself. And my self was stupid. Still is, but was especially so then. I’d learned to distrust every desire and impulse for that reason. But there was some vestige, something lingering on the edge of memory, of how good it felt to believe everything I did was for the imagined pleasure of someone else.

  Finally, the music ended. The crowd took their seats again. The projector showing the last set of lyrics flickered and was replaced by a video of a man walking around. He was making incidental comments to the crowd. The stage was bright and airy, dominated by a massive white cross flanked by potted plants. The man was late fifties, early sixties, gray bearded, but his hair was longish and combed back like a Brylcreemed surfer from the early 1960s. He wore a pale blue Hawaiian shirt and off-white slacks. At the bottom of the screen, in a five o’clock news-style ticker, his name was spelled out: PASTOR EDDIE.

  “. . . that’s what you would think, but only time will tell,” he was saying to someone in the front rows of the sanctuary. Then he looked up at the crowd: “Welcome, everyone, on this glorious morning. It’s good to be here with you, whether you’re right here with me or you’re joining us at one of our video venues. Today we’re digging further into our series ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It,’ but before we begin, join me in asking the Lord—and not Tina Turner—to guide us through this teaching.”

  He led a short prayer. Then the sermon was off. Pastor Eddie could speak. His tone was casual, approachable. He illustrated tricky bits of verse with long, contemporary narratives. Miriam’s envy of Aaron was like some characters from a reality show I didn’t watch that ended in a lucrative, short-term marriage. In his telling, the speech of biblical characters usually began with “So God says, ‘Dude, what are you thinking?’” and “Pharaoh says, ‘Hey, that’s not cool.’” Occasionally he girded a point with a discussion of a word’s translation and original meaning, the clinch move for intellectual high ground. Everything was so damn explicable, which was most of the problem. There wasn’t anything his baritone voice couldn’t clarify, no mystery it couldn’t plumb like sonar in the black depths of the deep sea. It strained into the saccharine when he made direct appeals, which seemed to fall in three categories: be kind, be more responsible for yourself, support the church.

  Envy and pride were the themes of the day, solvable with a four-point plan. I plugged my ears and Eddie looked like he could be leading a “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” seminar through The Learning Annex. The goal was inverted, but the methods were identical and offered a path as similarly simple and within anyone’s control. Eddie beamed the radiant, healthful benevolence of someone with a foolproof investment plan to share.

  Every time the story involved a warning against sin, he rattled off a list of possibilities like a sommelier offering the wine selection. These lists were never off the cuff. His list focused heavily on sexual immorality, pride, and obedience. Shame came from the first two, a salve for self-hatred from the third, and seats would fill through the combination. No one got through a week without at least an unchaste thought, if not some unchaste action, so it always made sense to lead with that. It got everyone thinking about their lustful, untrustworthy bodies—it was never “them,” always “their bodies,” that fallen, fleshy host for the “real me.” It was a little like the guy who hits his wife every six weeks and spends the other forty-one days promising her he doesn’t even know who that violent person is. It’s how we preserve our best view of ourselves: good, but occasionally possessed by demons or the flesh or some other impurity from the outside.

  That was before Eddie turned toward the camera and made a ten-minute direct appeal to those who were new, those who had not yet committed to Christ. He encouraged us to give God the steering wheel of our lives. I felt a pang of conviction in the projected eyes of this man speaking directly to me, even though I knew his street magic. I could only imagine what someone a little more receptive, a little more vulnerable, felt. Relinquishing control, abdicating responsibility, trusting someone else’s plan or even believing that there was a plan—who wouldn’t want that? And it was all as much for the regular churchgoer, too: a reminder that at any moment, any person may need only a slight nudge to commit themselves to Christ—and it could be you who does it, or your support of this church, and then you pass go, you collect $200.

  Eddie asked us to join him in a prayer. It hit all the sappy beats about realizing you’re a fuckup, wanting to trust Him with your fucked-up life and put it to His inscrutable, fucked-up purposes, but with less hot sauce on the language. Pastor Eddie’s tone was modulated carefully. His pacing was perfect. It was freighted like a well-rehearsed poetry reading but conveyed wide-eyed admiration and the joyful release of responsibility for oneself. He’d done this prayer before, that much was clear, though to an unpracticed ear it could almost sound spontaneous—which was good, because those unpracticed ears were supposed to be repeating the words with their unpracticed mouths like they were the outpouring of spontaneous devotion—not just an extension of the worship service, another well-orchestrated choral event.

  When he was done, he slipped in a footnote to the main thrust of the sermon, something about how nobody likes to talk about giving money but that’s how the church survives, it’s part of being an obedient believer. There it was again. Obedience. It made me want to stand up and shout out a swear word, chew gum and walk at the same time, look only one way when crossing a street. Something.

  Eddie ended the sermon by saying goodbye to the people in the various video venues. “As usual,” he said, “let the folks in Jitters get a five-minute head start to their cars, since they’re going to be a little untrustworthy behind the wheel—unlike all the fine folks here in the sanctuary. And you wackos in the Verge, try not to frighten our friends in Heritage Hall on your way out, okay? No headbanging in communal areas, am I right? I kid, I kid. Have a blessed weekend, all. Thank you for coming.”

  The layers of projection, literal as well as social and emotional; the false subcultures of each venue; the superficial sense of belonging a person gained from one or the other. I thought back to the girl at the door and her clever response to my idiotic joke. Even it had the ring of rehearsal. You had to be careful, I remembered, when He is watching. But also she is watching, and her husband, and their kids, and your old youth pastor, and the AV guy, and the woman making the rounds, and the leaders of the Bible study teams, and the teenagers who seemed to be everywhere. It was a network, a fu
nnel. All churches do it to some degree, but this was a higher order of scale, a more strictly formulated process. After an hour here, my soul felt as if it’d been under a tremendous torque. It wasn’t God turning the ratchet. It was this immense social machine. That’s what Hannah Trout, the small-group leader from my old church, knew when I’d confronted her, at a higher torsion by virtue of being a woman in a place that considered women equal but different, subject to scripture’s ideas of order and the “complementarity” of the genders.

  One of those androgynous guitar players struck a sudden chord, and I almost ducked. The worship music kicked into gear again.

  But this is how I could see Emily here. The different versions I’d seen or heard about—the rough street kid, the decent person in need of a break, the knowing seductress, the cynic, the con, the ingenue, the believer and the ex-believer—they made sense in a person coming from a place like this, where everyone was watching and personality was a venue. That didn’t leave enough room for a person to be or become, instead of act—no room to allow for deficiencies, fallibility, picking up and moving on with that awful, fallen self everyone is left with.

  After more music and a prayer that I mouthed along to by doing cunnilingual ABCs, everyone wished each other peace and the show wrapped up. A young man held up a sign for men’s retreat sign-ups. I headed toward the stage. The blonde with the tambourine was looping a length of microphone cable around her elbow. I said hello and told her she was a talented performer.

  She said, “Thanks. I give it up to God, or at least I try to.”

  I tried not to think about her giving it up to anyone. Instead, I plied the first-timer angle again. “I’m new,” I said, “and I was hoping there was some way I could introduce myself to Pastor Eddie. What a speaker. I enjoyed the living heck out of that service.” I felt like I’d slipped out of time, wearing a suit and saying “heck”—a Ward Cleaver chatting up Monica and Chandler.