From Pathetic Life #20
Thursday, January 18, 1996
In a dream, I was at the church my family & I attended as I was growing up. My mom still goes to that church, and so do my buddies Bruno and Leon and Stu.
Attendance has been dwindling for years, though, as the old folks die off, and the young folks move away. The sanctuary seats about 600, and another couple of hundred could squeeze into the balcony, but there’s only a few dozen people most Sundays.
The church has been at that corner since the late 1800s, when the neighborhood was of quite a different hue, but the area has gotten blakcer and blacker over the years, while the church remains white. Black people do attend now and again, for a few weeks or months. The congregation isn’t openly racist — hands are shaken and I think they’re sincerely welcoming — but like a lot of old white people, the church’s elders are uncomfortable around the ‘coloreds’, and I imagine blacks folks can sense it, so they drift away.
It’s a wonderful old building, though, full of cavernous, rarely-used rooms, enormous exedrae, musty memories, and forgotten back hallways where months might go by with nobody walking. When I was a kid, sometimes I climbed into a hidden loft above the sanctuary, where I could make unseen faces at the preacher and nobody’d see me.
In my dream, the now-adult me decided to explore those neglected parts of the building, but the layout kept changing. There was a new, twisting passageway in the back of the sanctuary, where the nursery used to be, and I sorta got lost back there.
A staircase leads down to the kitchen, and I thought I’d go downstairs and raid the fridge, but instead of a kitchen I walked into a belly dance class, taught by Mrs Amos. She was a particularly fuddy-duddy seventy-something spinster who thought pre-marital kissing was a sin, and who, in the real world, died twenty years ago.
Suddenly a bell rang, like the bell between classes at school, and people came pouring into the hallways — people I remembered from eighteen years of going to church there. These were people I haven’t seen or even thought about in years — an old friend of my father’s, an ex-pastor’s cute daughter, and a grumpy old cuss who’d always hollered at me for running in the foyer, even when I wasn’t running. And a hundred others, and oh Christ, there’s my mother!
I knew she’d nag at me for not calling, so I quickly ducked into the belly dancing room, hoping she hadn’t seen me. Though the church blueprints would prove it’s impossible, the door behind the belly dancers opened directly onto the raised stage in the sanctuary, so now I was behind the pulpit.
The pastor came over and took me by the hand, led me to the microphone, and introduced me as the guest speaker. Every pew was filled (which at this church never happens, not even on Easter and Christmas), and I was supposed to preach a sermon, but had nothing prepared.
Unlike the typical dream, there was no stage fright. Hell, no. This was an opportunity that could only come in a dream — to speak the truth in a place where the truth can never be spoken. I leaned into the microphone, coughed for clarity, and ad-libbed, “There is no God and it’s all bullshit!” My voice echoed back to me, as the congregation sat open-mouthed and shocked, so I continued: “Jesus, your Lord and Savior? He died 2,000 years ago! Give it a few days of mourning and get on with your lives, because he’s dead and he’s not coming back!”
The multitudes rose as one to smite me, so I quickly exited stage left, down a hallway to a back door that opened on the parking lot, and the 7-Eleven behind the church, because I desperately needed a Big Gulp.
But again, the architecture was all wrong. Instead of the parking lot, the hallway led only to more hallways, and with every turn I was more and more lost in a building that seemed much larger and more confusing than the church I grew up in.
Things got crazier and more confused, and I think I got shot in the face by the church’s gun- and Bible-toting security guard, who after shooting me said he’d pray for me.
Sorry I can’t remember much about how the dream ended, but that’s the nature of dreams. When I woke up I touched my face, happy to find it was still there and unshot, unbloodied. Still wanted a Big Gulp, but they cost money so I settled for a tall glass of vaguely rusted tap water, as I typed up everything I could remember from the dream.
And now I’m sitting here, thinking about that old church and the people who went there. I’m not a believer any more if I ever was, but it was a decent church, full of decent people. It was never one of those Republican hellholes of hate.
And what a great building, too. If I had a million bucks or whatever, it’s been an occasional daydream to buy that old castle of Christ, hold a big clearance sale on crosses and hymnals, turn the Sunday School rooms into a homeless shelter, give the giant kitchen and dining room to Food Not Bombs, and maybe turn the sanctuary and balcony into an old-style movie palace.
Our first booking would be The Last Temptation of Christ, since it angered the pastor so. And also, sign me up for those belly dance classes in the basement.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
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