I didn’t want to be seen. I was the sprite in the Nikon, invisible behind the lens.
I set myself the goal of photographing all 114 churches in our rural county. GPS was a mere toddler then, prone to unorthodox directions. I found myself in swamps or surrounded by white ducks in search of mythological congregations. The entire enterprise affirmed the Wild Goose’s sense of humor.
Seventy churches in, not a soul had come out to greet me. I was relieved every time I shot undetected. Scandalously churchless, I was Jesus’s good girl whose seminary degree had short-circuited. The Pentecostals said I had a Jezebel spirit. The Presbyterians did things “decently and in order” and found me radioactive. The church that hired me as a youth pastor worried that I spoke too freely about the love of God.
Stuck deep in the country, without a congregation, I contemplated a PhD in ethics. I contemplated the incense curtain of the Orthodox. I laughed at my master of divinity, a degree better suited to She-Ra cartoons than my world of feathers and bones. I contented myself with a job at a cat sanctuary, Sunday morning crossword puzzles, and a peculiar photography project.
I would delight in all the denominations. I would capture their steeples and leave them to their secrets. I would avoid inquisition, freestyling hymns with new lyrics in empty parking lots.
I would attract the attention of exactly one pastor.
He came beaming down the steps of the storybook church, a vision in weathered white. He looked like Chris Christie on the warmer side of resurrection. He had neither a jot nor a tittle of suspicion.
“If you get any good shots, email them to me!” He meant it. “Our website hasn’t been updated since 1993.” He waited for me to smile. “I’m Pastor Joe.”
“I’m Angie.” I usually introduce myself as Angela and wait for people to naturally soften my name.
“Pleasure to meet you. If ever you’d like to join us, we gather at 11 a.m. on Sundays.”
“Thank you!” I shook his hand. I took a few more shots. I emailed him pictures of the steeple, earnest against the ether. I forgot that my signature line included a Bible verse.
“That’s one of the most reassuring verses in all of Scripture,” Pastor Joe responded. “Praise the Lord.”
I had a tight schedule of churches to photograph, mapped like Risk conquests. But Cherrybrook Baptist was only four minutes from home, and I found myself driving past it as though I were planning a heist. The parking lot overflowed on Wednesday nights. A Spanish congregation shared the space every Saturday. I nearly drove off the road when I spotted another congregation on the porch of the manse.
Pastor Joe had five Siamese cats. No proverb had ever been so clear in its direction. Nothing in Revelation had ever struck me as so phantasmagorical.
I was going to be a bleeding-heart, Democrat, feminist, heretic, Jesus freak, moon-howling Baptist.
With that wrinkled master of divinity in my back pocket, I knew a bit about church demographics. I would have bet my last veggie burger that there would be a massive American flag beside the altar and confident itineraries of the end times. If I emptied my backpack, they might find me unhinged or unsaved or under the spell of dark cats.
Or they might speak freely about the love of God. And I might be out my last veggie burger.
Pastor Joe, all homegrown tomatoes and alfalfa, electrified when I slipped in at 11:10. He smiled several psalms in my direction, then gave a sermon that would stop me from ever describing anyone as all anything again.
I cried as though inebriated. I wanted to confess that I’d never drunk a beer or been with a man. I wanted to convince them that hell is a scare tactic. I wanted to warn them that I thought of Jesus as a Pokémon master who would ultimately catch ’em all. I wanted to introduce them to my witchy Buddhist skeptical grizzled friends who walk in grace.
I sang full-strength, my insufferable vibrato unmixed with the wine of caution.
I was welcomed like a stray with dignity. “Young lady, that voice belongs in the choir of angels.” An old man in aquamarine sparkled at me. “I’m Cliff, and this is Millie, and this is Biscuit the Baptist Dog.” A comatose Labrador groaned in my direction.
“He’s not too old to be dangerous.” A streusel muffin of a man rose from the next pew. “I’m Floyd.”
I did not tell him he smelled of cinnamon. “I’m Angie. Goodness, this place seems special.” God was casting my pause into the ocean. I was being parted from my prudence, as far as the east from the west. It was happening all over again.
“It is. But this guy—” Floyd poked Cliff “—you just watch out for this guy.”
Biscuit belched. Millie hugged me. Pastor Joe fluoresced. “Angie! It’s a joy to see you.”
“It’s—” I was confused in all directions. “It’s really good to be here.”
I’d not had a church family since leaving The Town Without Pity, my mother’s name for my youth pastor post. The pillars had hissed about my tenderness. I was too sweet and too salty, a liberal conservative mess. The rebel elderly had conspired to cast me as the archangel in the Christmas play, casting their vote for my crumb cake. The consistory had inexplicably asked me to stay. I left for the cat sanctuary. I left churches. I photographed churches.
Today I was captured again. But the door was open. The old men were hilarious. The Wild Goose was honking hymns from my childhood.
I was all in.
I joined the choir of two sopranos, two altos, one female tenor, and four basses, three of whom stayed awake all the way through rehearsal. Our director, Lyle, was an Anglophile crypto-Catholic educated in medieval hymnody. He challenged us to sing “O Magnum Mysterium” and “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” only to surrender to “Power in the Blood” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
Lyle was perpetually exasperated, but the moment his wry grin cracked, his grandmother, B. T., would summon seraphs. “Calm down, K! This is Cherrybrook Baptist, not Carnegie Hall.”
Lyle rewound to Sunday school at B. T.’s booming. “Sorry, B. T. I just know you have greatness within.”
“We’re plenty great! Let us be our kinda great!”
Pastor Joe would pinch-hit for missing basses, his voice as bold as five Siamese cats.
“You can really sing,” I marveled.
“You’re kind. I prefer to let our brothers and sisters shine. I’m just here when you need me.”
He printed his cell phone number in the weekly bulletin and signed emails “your loving brother in Christ.” I learned that he’d come into ministry at forty-nine, a high school history teacher who turned around when Jesus tapped his shoulder. His cats corresponded to teenage sons, berry-cheeked doppelgängers who sat behind me and still listened to their father’s words.
It was six months before Pastor Joe asked questions. I was tangled up in my polyester choir robe, a Smithsonian artifact in asparagus green, when he approached. “Angie, you’ve quickly become beloved here.”
I had my head stuck in my arm hole. “Goodness, you’ll make me blush. Well, this is an extremely loving place.”
“That’s for certain, praise the Lord. But you have brought something special.”
“Don’t make me teary.” He would know by now how easy that could be.
“All right. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d meet with the deacons and me. We’d love to hear more of your story. We’d love if you might consider becoming a member.”
I poked around my infernal robe looking for an escape route to Narnia. “Um. OK.”
It was happening all over again. I’d been too careless with my epiphanies, too exuberant with my knowledge of Elijah and Elisha and the syncopation of the Synoptic Gospels. I had said too much, sung too loud, spoken too freely of the love of God. I’d been seen. Now I would be studied.
I might be surprised by gentleness.
All they asked was whether I’d been “baptized by immersion.” The accurate answer was “yes, and I regret it immensely,” but I edited this for the audience. I had been baptized as an earnest six-year-old, fully aware of what I was signing up for. I had renounced Satan and all his works. I had asked Jesus to love through me nearly every day since 1987. But when I fell among Pentecostals in my early twenties, and they heard that I had been sprinkled but not submerged, I agreed to Baptism II.
By the time I came to Cherrybrook, I knew that both baths “counted,” and that holiness would hose me down a hundred times more before the year was over.
Pastor Joe was enchanted but unsurprised by my MDiv. Not a deacon twitched at my ecclesiastical mystery tour. Safety made me unshuttupable.
“I love Jesus,” I babbled. “I don’t remember a time I didn’t. My parents made it natural to believe in a loving God. I went to seminary to serve God, but I had no idea what that might mean. I have even less of an idea now. My theology has huge patches on its knees. Every denomination makes me squirm.”
“Denominations are dialects,” tiny Heather offered. “We just speak with an American Baptist accent here.”
Some Sundays, the words rubbed me with all the wrong spices. I did not agree with all that poured from the pulpit, much less the “seven-by-eleven” hymns that made Lyle convulse. “Same seven words, eleven times in a row. God save me from senility,” he’d say. We were coconspirators in loathing these praise choruses, and his tortured grimaces saved me many mornings.
But the words dropped berries that no language can bear. Cherrybrook cherished in all directions. Sturdy men in suspenders advocated for Pastor Armando’s congregation in the newspaper. County fair queens arrived with blueberry pies and baby socks when teenagers became mothers. Old women told each other they looked “lovely as Audrey Hepburn today.” B. T. put her head on my shoulder and declared me her newest granddaughter. The man with the mean face changed my tire. The treasurer mailed me cat stickers. The head elder took me aside to say I was “brave.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re a single woman, in the demographic that churches can’t keep, and you show up here alone.” Kathi rarely spoke, which sanctified her sentences.
“I’m not alone.” It was happening again. I was surprising myself. “I’ve been enfolded. I’m a sparrow in a palm here.”
“You should write that down.” She studied my face in that way that makes you more, not less, comfortable. “You bring a lot to this place, you know.”
I looked away. “You guys don’t know me that well.”
“We know enough to know. And we want to know everything.”
“I don’t think I want to know everything.” I looked for an escape route over her shoulder, trying to spot a Siamese cat or three in the parking lot.
“If you stay here as long as those guys—” Kathi pointed at Floyd and Cliff, who were smacking each other in the chest repeatedly “—it will all come out. Isn’t that what church is for?”
“I want to believe that.”
“Give us a chance.”
It was happening for the first time.