For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

  Ezra passes me the hose, and I yell down to him to turn on the water. It sputters and spurts, then runs into the tub in a clear, cold stream.

  Charlotte, song leader for the night, begins to sing. “Come, every seeking soul!” and I clamber into place, adjusting my stole.

  Our messy crew circles the washtub and begins lighting our candles, passing the flame from one person to the next. Zachary stands next to the tub, barefoot, dressed in loose white clothing. The song ends and our voices die away, leaving a residue of charged electricity. We stand with anticipation, on the edge of this microcosmic body of water, waiting to see someone reborn.

  By our baptism into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, I chant, you turn us from the old life of death-dealing ways and make us new.

  I take Zachary’s hand and he steps into the frigid water.

  “What do you seek?”

  “Life in Christ.”

  “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world that rebel against God?”

  “I renounce them.”

  There are more questions. More defiant statements that Zachary and we who witness his baptism are no friends to evil.

  I scoop a pitcher full of water from the font and pour it over Zachary’s head, one, two, three times. He shudders compulsively; the water is as a cold as the ocean. Then we wrap him in a towel, and come inside singing to eat dinner cross-legged on the floor.

  * * *

  —

  This is the miracle: that there is never enough, yet always enough. With no kitchen, no floors, and no table, we can feed fifty people and baptize someone along the way. We have nothing but an empty room, a lit candle, a bucket of water, and a loaf of bread, but it’s enough to claim Zachary as a child of God.

  * * *

  Around this time I go on a date. We sit opposite each other, sipping our matching cups of frothy drinks. I really like him. He asks college interview questions just like I do. We talk about performance art and ritual. Then I tell him I’m a pastor, and a door slides closed behind his eyes. The date hadn’t been over, but it is now. We lurch through the rest of the conversation until he can make a half-excusable exit. My cheeks are hot and red.

  I know I am too easily crushed. I go home and keep looking at his picture even though I shouldn’t. I hope he’ll write, even though I shouldn’t.

  I try telling them before the date. I try telling them after the date. It is never a selling point.

  Every unanswered text, every guy who said he’d call and didn’t, is added to a growing folder of evidence in my mind labeled “You’re Completely Undatable.” My clerical garb becomes a symbol for all of it: the formless black uniform, the white collar. Its message: “Do Not Cross.” Freud spoke of the Madonna-whore complex; I’m living it out. Men, it seems, want their God and sex separate.

  I remind myself that my worth isn’t based on men who aren’t interested in me. But when you keep getting low scores from strangers, it’s hard not to think of yourself as a low score. Online, I get a message a week from middle-aged couples in Yonkers or White Plains who wonder if I will join them to “explore a new side of their relationship.” (The answer is no.) I get messages from boomers in Greenwich who are clearly married and looking for something on the side.

  I blow-dry my hair. I put on eye makeup. I try to care about outfits. I try not to need so much. I wonder why one half of my life is so full and the other half so empty. It starts to feel like maybe God designed it that way. In which case I’m pretty mad at God.

  * * *

  —

  Last week the windows leaked during a rainstorm and soaked all the kids’ artwork on display. As I was sopping up the rainwater with towels, Harrison, a local homeless guy who stops by every four days or so with a long story, always at an inopportune time, burst through the door, smelling of alcohol.

  “Harrison, I’ve got a lot on my hands right now,” I told him from the floor, where I crouched on my hands and knees between a pile of towels.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” he said, “I know you’re too busy for the likes of me.” He stood at the door, poised like he was ready to leave, laying it on thick. “I never wanted to be an inconvenience, I really didn’t.”

  “Harrison, you’re not an inconvenience,” I snapped at him. “Just come and sit down on the benches and I can help you when I’m done.”

  Too busy. It’s a phrase I’ve started hearing from more congregants than Harrison, and it breaks my heart every time I hear it. “I know you’re really busy, but do you think we could have coffee sometime?”

  Every day I am faced with lack: the needs of our space and my people, the finite quality of time, the disappointing reality of myself. My bad mood can break a new congregant’s heart.

  “I got myself into this,” I reason. “I’m the one who decided to try something so ambitious.”

  I lock the doors after an evening meeting and am home by 9:30, eating cold takeout. There was always enough, but now I’m not so sure.

  * * *

  We usually think of abundance as having a lot: an overflowing cornucopia on Thanksgiving, a sumptuous wedding feast, maybe cash raining down from a Vegas slot machine. St. Lydia’s showed me abundance is a secret hidden inside of scarcity. It lives, tucked inside not-enoughness, waiting to show you that God does not do math. Abundance is discovering God’s provision right in the middle of your fret and worry. Even when the bank balance has plummeted and the cupboard seems empty, there’s always enough to feed everyone. There are some dry beans and a few carrots in the back of the fridge and we always have bread in the freezer. We can feast on that.

  When we first moved into 304 Bond Street, people arrived with bent spoons and wonky forks pillaged from their kitchen drawers. If we could believe that what we need is here in church, maybe we could believe it in all the parts of our lives. Maybe Charlotte could write a one-woman show. Maybe Ezra could make it through his divorce. Maybe we could know our neighbors.

  And if we could believe that what we need is here in church, perhaps we could believe it in our lives, or in our nation. God gives us enough for everyone, as long as no one hoards.

  * * *

  One evening after closing up at the storefront I head home, clean up, and put on a fresh set of clothes. I’m meeting someone at a bar—a guy I met through a community meeting a few weeks ago. He seems interested in faith but hasn’t come to church (which would render him absolutely off-limits) and isn’t relating to me like a pastor. One day, he messages me and asks if I want to meet up sometime.

  At the bar, we settle in with a couple of beers. The conversation is running along at top speed, we’re both laughing, and I’m leaning in a little closer when a woman opens the door and walks over—long-limbed, easy gait, cascade of glossy hair, glimpse of milky cleavage.

  “Hey!” he says to her, wrapping his arm around her slim waist. “Emily, this is my girlfriend.”

  “Oh!” I say, a slick of embarrassment flooding my system. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  “You too,” she says, perching on the edge of an open chair and drawing close to him. “He keeps telling me about this amazing pastor.”

  On my thirty-fourth birthday, my mother gives me a gift: a ring that belonged to my great-grandmother. Mom stows it in her purse on the flight from Seattle. Sitting on the couch in my apartment, she presents it to me in a small cardboard jewelry box. Inside, nestled in cotton, is a slim gold band set with a delicate sapphire flanked by two tiny pearls. It’s tiny, fitting only on my pinkie finger. Also included is a photograph of my long-dead ancestor in an oval frame. Gazing out from sepia in a high-collared Victorian gown, she bears an unmistakable resemblance to both my mother and me. Something about the angle of her jaw and the look in her eyes.

  I love this ring. The thought that it has traveled through three generations
of hands and ended up in mine seems almost supernatural. I put it on my finger, imagining that I’m connecting back through space and time to this woman I have never seen or met.

  “Is it tight enough on your finger?” my mom asks.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “It’s perfect.”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, the ring shining on my hand, I’m sitting in the windowsill at 304 Bond Street churning through emails when a young woman with bright lipstick rides up on her bike and peers in the window, her helmet tapping on the glass. I get up, set my laptop down, and hang my head out the door.

  “Hey!” I say. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, hey!” she answers, chagrined that she’s been caught peering. She unclips her helmet and pulls it off, a mess of short, dark curls tumbling out. “Can I ask you a weird question?”

  The woman, whose name is Melina, spills out a harrowing story that would evoke immediate sympathy from anyone who’s ever been a performer. She’s the house manager of a performance piece called The Dreary Coast, taking place on the canal; just last night, they were booted out of their staging space. They’re desperate for another location where they can store costumes and hold warm-ups before the outdoor show. Melina has hit the end of her resources. In desperation, she is riding around the neighborhood looking for a place that might host them, Mary and Joseph style. My inner innkeeper is activated.

  “Well, when do you need it?” I ask her.

  “Tonight?” she says, cringing.

  She’s up shit creek, it seems, literally and figuratively.

  I’ve heard about The Dreary Coast. It’s notable for three reasons. One, the show retells the story of the Greek mythological figure Charon, the ferryman who carries souls across the river Styx to the underworld. The audience sits on a boat that sails down the Gowanus as the actors play their scenes on the waterway’s industrial banks. Two, the boat was designed by a street artist named Swoon, whose recent show at the Brooklyn Museum entranced me. And three, the writer and director of this piece is a guy named Jeff, with whom I went on an Internet date years ago. Jeff, like so many others, politely withdrew from our date when he unearthed my religious tendencies, stirring a by-now-familiar cocktail of emotions that included dull hopelessness, disappointed rejection, and unshakable certainty that I would die alone in the traditional manner—my entrails consumed by my cat, clergy collar banded round my neck.

  Melina stands no chance of being eaten by anyone’s cat, least of all her own. She is beautiful and breathless, her enthusiasm for her work contagious, and her desperation unexpectedly appealing. I want to help. And really, it’s hilarious to imagine a play about hell, written by an avowed atheist who once rejected me, being housed in my church. I tell Melina that we need the main space for worship, but if she thinks the basement will work for them, they can move in tonight.

  Within hours, a crew rolls up in a truck piled with costumes. The metal doors of the sidewalk hatch are propped open, and the stage crew marches down to the basement, loading in intricate masks and headdresses perched atop Styrofoam heads. Hades’s cape is made of some kind of coarse animal fur, and the mask of Cerberus, ferocious with three snarling dog heads, is placed in the shadows. Twenty actors cram themselves inside our moist, mushroomed basement that night, the sump pump spasmodically slurping up the toxic waters of the canal. Upstairs in our main space, Lydian worshippers assemble. We sing “Jesus, We Are Gathered” in four-part harmony while the demons of the underworld lurk below.

  Early on in our church experiment, I noticed that a more than usual number of our congregants had lost a parent too young. In their teens or twenties, the one thing that should never disappear, did. Our congregants have no tolerance for bullshit—they won’t accept lacquered platitudes in church. So perhaps it is right that, in this season, a shadowed presence lurks beneath our floorboards. They already know it’s there.

  * * *

  —

  One thing our basement lacks (in addition to fresh air and natural daylight) is a bathroom, and so, before Charon, Persephone, Hades, and their attending demons head out to the plutonian banks of the Gowanus for the performance, they emerge one by one from downstairs and silently wait to use the toilet. They do so smack in the middle of communion. The actors do their best to be discreet, but, in full costume and makeup, it proves difficult. That first night, as I sing our Eucharistic Prayer, basket of bread in my hands, I look up to see a demon, face painted in terrifying shades of red and black and wearing a set of giant ram horns atop his head, waiting outside the bathroom door. He looks on with curiosity, hands clasped politely in front of him.

  “He took a loaf of bread,” I sing, “and after blessing it, he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take, this is my body.’ ” My eyes meet those of the nameless demon, and I find myself, as I so often do while singing our prayers, with a catch in my throat. His countenance is fearsome, but his eyes hold a tender curiosity. I often glimpse this look in people’s eyes as I preside, singing a two-thousand-year-old story of a God who finds us in something as ordinary as bread.

  Who knows what the demon thought of our bread or our singing? Maybe he saw the same beauty I so often do. Maybe he was perplexed by our devotion to a story he’d never much cared for. Or maybe he just really needed to pee.

  * * *

  —

  The days tick toward Halloween, and the Lydians develop a friendly rapport with the cast. On cold nights they return just as we’re closing up from Dinner Church. We ladle leftover soup into bowls and heat it up for them, or find a few beers in the back of the fridge and crack them open. They’ve caught sight of our world, and I have the chance to catch sight of theirs when, as a thank-you for hosting the show, Melina sets aside a ticket for me. I clamber aboard Charon’s boat and sail, with twenty or so other lost souls, down the waters of the canal. An underworldly oarsman navigates our neighborhood river, which seems, from this new perspective on the water, an entirely alien place.

  The Greeks imagined the underworld encompassed by five rivers. From the banks of the river Styx, Charon ferried souls from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. Every soul who travels to the underworld should drink from the river Lethe—the river of forgetfulness and oblivion. When you drink, you forget your life in the world above. Floating on the Gowanus, we’re each presented with a tiny silver tumbler. Hoping that they’re not really filled with river water, we hold up our glasses and toast each other, drinking away our memories of the world above. Charon begins to row, and we sink deeper into the shadows of the canal. The abandoned cement factory looms before us, fugitive goat lurking within.

  We pause along the way, and Persephone boards. Her face looks hollow; she’s being ferried straight to Hades, her abductor. He duped her into eating a single pomegranate seed, and now she’s bound to stay with him here half the year. The world above goes cold and frozen when she’s gone.1

  * * *

  —

  I lost my great-grandmother’s ring.

  It happened the very first day I wore it. Somewhere between brunch with my parents, moving around pumpkins for St. Lydia’s Fall Fair, and finding extra toilet paper for the Dreary Coast cast in the basement, it slipped off my pinkie finger. No amount of searching with flashlights on hands and knees, posting flyers, or calling the police precinct could bring it back.

  “This ring has been passed down through three generations,” I told a bewildered cast member late that night as I rummaged through a plastic bin in the basement with my cellphone flashlight, “and I lost it after forty-eight hours.” All night, I feel physically sick. I dream about it for days afterward, seeing it fall through the rungs of a gutter toward the oblivion of the canal. Some things we lose are gone forever.

  * * *

  —

  It’s a lesson we learn young. I remember visiting a Barnes & Noble with my dear fri
end Nancy’s daughter, Maggie, to see if the staff had found her Love You, a tiny stuffed rabbit she carried everywhere with her, until she’d lost it the weekend before. We explained to three-year-old Maggie before the visit that Love You might not be at the store, but when the manager told us that the lost-and-found box did not contain a stuffed rabbit, her despair was violent and unmitigated.

  “Why won’t you give it to me?” she wailed as I carried her from the store.

  “Maggie, I don’t have it,” I told her desperately. “We don’t know where it is.” Later, buckled into her car seat, her cry pivoted from personal accusation to existential anguish.

  “Why won’t THEY give it to me?”

  And later, rage spent and staring dully out the car window, tears still spattered on her cheeks, she asked simply, “Who will take care of Love You?”

  A worn stuffed bunny. A delicate gold ring. Retail value may vary, but these objects are rich with symbolic meaning, and symbols are real. The stuffed bunny rabbit means you’re safe. A great-grandmother’s ring means you’re part of a family. We cling to these objects because they’re a kind of shorthand notation that tells us who we are. Without them, we’re not so sure.

  It was a loss of memory my mom described when she spoke of the death of her own mother. Who would she turn to when she needed to remember the stories? She couldn’t recall the twists and turns of her parents’ courtship or that funny thing Chrissy said that day of the picnic at Boardman Park. Without Grandma, the stories were gone.