God's Country
There was a prevailing sentiment at that time that things were just about as bad as they could get. This was in large part because a lot of the old timers in the community had passed on to Glory, and had taken with them the remembrance of a generation that could still speak to the days way back of famine and poverty and violent dissension the likes of which the children today scarcely have the vernacular to describe. These kids with their engorged sense of privilege. Their antiseptic shelters and computer screens. Always looking at themselves, always eaten up with status and whatever trends the wind blows their way. We've raised a fallow crop that could never withstand the breed of adversity that was around back then. Must've been why people felt the way they did. That the world was going to seed and that somehow when they were young it was better. But that wasn't really true, not entirely. It wasn't even true that all the old timers felt different. In fact a lot of them felt exactly the same, even more so, and pined themselves for the country of their youth, hard as it was. They were the ones who had never lost that hardness. The disciplinarians and curmudgeons. Withered, full bellied men on canes, under brimmed hats. Sagging biddies in their coiffed, obviously dyed wisps sowing gossip wherever they could. It was easy to be frustrated by them, easy to see where a certain bitterness had sapped the moisture from their spirit, but it was hard to really harbor contempt for them. You always felt some helping of sympathy in knowing that they wouldn't be around much longer, that their time could be counted by the minute. If they wanted to spend their final measures complaining then so be it. Almost as if they had earned a right to be so sour, living as long as they had. But that ain't really true either. Nobody gets a pass for their entitlement, not in my book anyway, even though you still gotta extend the olive branch. Take care of them as you would a toddler. There's much to be learned, and not much time to learn it.
The old timers knew it better than anybody. This town sat atop tectonic plates belonged to its tribes. I'm not talking about political parties because only one really exists here, and the other one seems about equidistant to it at least in terms of its preponderance for back biting. The elephant and the donkey like rich spoiled heirs. Love hurling names and dirtclots at each other. Can't get enough of it. No, it's not the gulf between the rich and the poor, the munitions of their constant warfare some equivocal slur of justice, power, and their opposite halves. Though close it's not even racial division, the shame which has no equal. The blood seeped way down in this southern soil turned to ruddy mud that even now reverberates atrocities, those fifty years ago and today. No, the tribes we have around here are more cumulative than those. Big and numerous enough to encompass all others. You'd know them by their category. The people of the book. Baptists. Presbyterians. Methodists. Gangs called denominations. Beams of light bifurcated through a stainglass window. Differing threads sourced by the same sun. They have demarcated territories in the town common and in the hearts of its people. Legacies. Traditions entwined within family heritages so integral there might as well be no distinction. The church and the family like a married couple, which I guess is the goal. But these faithful betrothed are far from ideal. And their domestic ruckus has spilled over into the streets and into the lives of others.
For a long time, actually up until recently, it was a given that you'd be conscripted to one faction or another. There were so many, at least a dozen counted, that it was just a matter of averages. The real question was into which one you were drafted, and that had entirely to do with your parents and their parents and so on. It meant it was decided for you, which had the certain advantage of making the deciding a whole lot easier. But it left you good and trapped if you weren't all that ecstatic about the whole thing, and an increasing number of people were not. Or so it seemed. I was skeptical from the outset that anything was demonstrably changed from what I recalled in the years before. I didn't have the mileage of the old timers but I'd been around the block enough revolutions to know a pattern when I saw one, a pattern and the break in it. And I certainly knew what it felt like when I was a kid. Having to wear a tie and buttoned-up shirt and belt. Your hair combed back for you. Sitting on hard wood pews listening to some old fart dither on about stories you already knew the endings to. You didn't see the point of it; you'd rather sleep in.
One time, I was probably five or six, I got slapped after saying I hated it. I hated going. I was regretful, but I meant it. And I was slapped because I meant it. That's how serious it was taken. It was of supreme importance, it was everything. But for a kid anything deemed that serious or important was hardly to be seen as such. It had to be met with distrust and sneer practically on principle. As you grew from childhood into teenagedom that playful mistrust often became sharp and aggressive and transmogrified into a cynicism you were much too young to know what to do with. The sacred and immutable wisdom of a 16-year old. Let us all bow down in his majesty.
So I wasn't surprised nor especially disappointed when the Baker girl, this is the older one, came up to us and declared her apostasy outright. Came out right there in the middle of our meeting with bolted stance and enunciated cadence like the child she was presenting herself and her accomplishments before us. A woman began to weep. It wasn't her mother. Mrs. Baker was fomenting an anger so hot you could feel it radiate three chairs down. Evidently it wasn't the first time she'd heard those words, and had forbade their utterance again. But here her daughter was anyway, bringing shame to her household. When they pressed her, which they did before she was even done talking, she stammered out a series of prepared explanations. Said she couldn't believe in the Good Lord because she couldn't see any of His goodness evidenced in the world, not in the "abject brutality of nature's biosphere" (her words) nor in the human beings who were supposed to bear most His fingerprint. Not enough of it anyway. Its extent only sporadic and the cause tribal and selfish preservation. I sat silent during her testimony. In my way I wanted to grant her the respect that's due from an audience. It took tremendous courage doing what she did. Courage probably matched by stupidity and the self-aggrandizement of a college freshmen. Still, I couldn't much argue with her. Couldn't get a word in edgewise, for one. The sewing circle descended upon her immediately and without mercy. But in truth, I had nothing to say. Nothing to say but what my stoic repose could communicate, neither affirming nor denying her. See, I had been through that gutter before. I had been brought low by the tragedy of life, which is to say, by life itself. That there's purposeless suffering and grief round every corner and you're left to wander about always uncertain if there's anything more to it. Anything beyond death, beyond what you can see and hear and touch. Where was the God of love in that? Why wouldn't He intervene and make Himself known?
When I had spoken of it I was handed the rhetoric of peers who meant well but appeared not to have much depth beneath them. That's a petty generalization to be sure, and Lord have mercy on me for it, but it was as though the thoughts just had never occurred to them, at least not to the degree that they had for me. These were people who'd experienced much of the same things, and some much more, but could offer nothing other than vague bromides on His mysteries and foreordained plans which were somehow meant for my good and the good of others like they were the disciplines of a cruel father. His lashings meant to teach some lesson never explained. His hand that held the knife, that lifted the hedge of protection. He the architect of every disaster.
I thought at the time it just had to be me so I stopped talking about it and didn't speak of it again for a long time. Years, near a decade. And in that time I continued my good and faithful service to my respective tribe. Every Sunday and Wednesdays too arriving early to help prepare for them a tabernacle of mumbled hymnal readings and overtly prompted applause breaks. Vanilla wafers and goldfish handed out for the kids; endless potlucks clogging up arteries. But all the while the thrum of that voice was constant in some small cul de sac in my brain. He is not there. You are a liar and a hypocrite. To speak such a blasphemy out loud was tantamount to social suicide back then, and to secede from one's clan was about as bad. It was fear kept me there more than anything, and I went on with that wavering division in me like a meter ticking between devotion and disbelief. Held it inside. The compass, the talisman. It seemed always in motion and startling in how wide its span could reach. On a given day it could be so definite in its zeal that it would rouse shouts of Pentecostal gibberish and an embarrassment of tears as to obliterate any shadow of doubt. Such pure experiential joy that's buoyant and full. But the cup that runneth over also empties, and empties as though its bottom were cut out. The next day, even a few hours after gone like it was never there. That spirit which inhabited you now reduced to crowd-induced hysteria; something not true, not real beyond dopamine-fueled illusion, and you were resigned to go about your business cold and mundane with the most indifferent agnosticism. Hard to tell where the needle rested most. Hard to know where you stood at any point. It was treading water, trudging always insecure. Nothing was permanent.
The loneliness and seclusion I felt then was the greatest I had ever known. But in those times some part of me was still sober enough to figure that I wasn't really alone, and my prying eye was trained to be able to spot that ticking meter in others. That's one skill easy to develop in a town like this, intrusive busy-bodiness. Getting all up in people's business. Seeing passed their cordial disguises and reading between the things not said. I searched for the pain in everyone, across all partisan lines. Guess it was the old saying misery loves company, but it wasn't quite that. It was a type of awareness that I didn't have before, and its motivation was only to know the strangers around me. To try to relate to them on some deeper level than I had bothered to before. The Anderson family grandmother who told me to find her good Church of Christ granddaughter and settle down. The young heavyset girl working at the Piggly Wiggly who seemed to get pregnant every sixteen months or so. The distinguished Mr. Makins, a member of the Anglican church in a swankier part of town which looked to many of us uncultured folk to bear little distinction to the corporate doctrines of Rome, and that might as well have been a whole other religion unto itself. These were my neighbors. Sacred mysteries at every turn, righteous and broken. I sought after their hearts and I tried to speak to them without barrier. Asking them how they were doing, and I mean really asking. Not taking their terse deflections for an answer and never, under any circumstances, responding with "bless your heart". I think I got somewhere approaching meaningful connection at least a time or two. Course I got plenty of hostility alongwith. But let's be optimistic and say there was more going on than what I could see. It was the seed planted in them that would produce good fruit, even if I wasn't witness to it. What the Good Book called love, and not the kind we usually talk about nowadays. We don't have a word for it, really. The old chosen had several. The one they used for this, they believed, was in and of itself divine. Synonymous with the one called I Am. That God is that love, and is even when His creation doesn't exhibit it. I don't know how that all squares out, I surely don't. I'm not sure if it does at all. But I know I've felt and seen that love, and it sits right beside my undying suspicion.
So I sat in my beige folding chair and let the scene play out with the Baker girl versus the mob of insulated faith mongers. I let her spit every hatred and heresy toward Him freely, because I had thought and spoke them all in the privacy of my heart. This God of vengeance whose warclub crushed the firstborn of Egypt, who demanded the blood of Isaac after gifting him, who struck Ananias even when the debt had been forgiven. They are easy accusations. Nothing that is not uncommon to man. It is a wall you will dash yourself against. Break yourself to pieces that'll be put back together in some other form that may not look anything like the first. Maybe she'll be transfigured anew with the realization I came to: there ain't no running from Him. There's rage and distance but there's no running. You can't turn your face away, not really. Can't escape. In spite of the most bitter disillusion, divorce, rejection He'll always be waiting ahead. Even the absence of belief predicated on the idea of His being, and the idea alone sometimes is enough. Enough to disrupt your life and your conclusions of it. Maybe she'll see that... or maybe she won't. It's not up to me, thank the Lord.
I've often pictured this town having some degree of divine sovereignty unto itself. This land that often seems to act as some sort of living directory of the ills and ingenuity of its greatest occupant. Humanity. The devil's next of kin. A creature that can do just about anything within the rules established. Who has mastery over animals and their dwelling such that they can drive them completely from the earth. Who can warp and shape them emblematic to themselves and desires. The mightiest leviathan of the sea on a spit above their cookfire, ready for the eating. God's power of creation and its counter at home in their fists. That's why I never understood people's assertion that we could never have a real impact on the world's makeup. As though our choices had no bearing on anything but ourselves. The dirt and air and trees suffer our evil as much as our species does. And we've done a good and sufficient job at injuring it. Gone far enough to conceivably do away with the planet altogether with the toss of a handful of our most powerful sticks and stones. These are the means He has given, knowing in full what calamity they would wreak. If I believe in Him at all, I have to believe Him weeping this. He stands above and within it the way this verdant plateau upholds my homestead and the forest steeples provide the means for building and the water and ground from which is yielded the substance of life. This country that I have hated and loved as I have hated and loved Him. But they are not the same, no.
I've heard it said that you can no more hate a thing than love it, which is to say that hate is braided in with love, not as enemies per se so much as reflections where the one, that is hate, cannot exist without the other. It was an exegesis surmising the true foil of love was apathy and that that was the root cause of all reality's woes. It was pontificated with confidence by a pastor who not a few months later was outed an adulterer and left the township exiled from his marriage and ministry which very much appeared before that to be a paragon of faithfulness and its delicate balance. Lotta people were angry after that. Felt betrayed. I wish I felt the same, but I had a misgiving about the man from the beginning. That tried and true cynicism I couldn't shake even then. There was just something about him. The way he carried himself in his fancy blue suits and slick blackened hairdo. His family's collection of automobiles that had not a smudge nor blemish among them. His handshakes were too tight. He kept a plasticine smile on a face like a rubber mask that hid at the edges of the eyes a vacancy or something worse. Small eyes, sunken in. He taught with a bag of props and tricks; with snake oil, personality, and paranoia. A true salesmen equipped himself with an arsenal of rehearsed axioms and vocal inflection used for selling not used cars or door-to-door vacuum cleaners but a dogma of his own persuasion. Good ole pride and patriotism mixed with some feel-good prosperity gospel and seasoned with light elitism and disdain for those aberrant to the strictures of the holy text. He appealed to the tribal, shallow penchants of the townsfolk who wanted a collective other to cast their fears upon and an authority figure to give them permission. His congregation grew quick and corpulent. Within less than a year it was the biggest in town. Friends and family members locked arms, joined in. I wanted to be apart of it, wanted to trust the man. God's honest truth I did. But I remained at arm's length in terse disposition as I sat in his pews and listened to his practiced shouts and whoops which underneath I could discern of their worth little more than emotional manipulation. It was by the grace of God alone that I did not proclaim my superior insight to the whole populace when he was disgraced. He ended up getting caught in the act with a lover young enough to be his child. Hypocrisy once again proven limitless. In him, in them, in me.
His sudden departure was an earthquake in the town. People broke apart and scattered like the fault lines had opened up and they retreated back to their previous corners. Some didn't make it back, lost instead into the void that had cracked agape in the earth. They couldn't climb their way back home, so they made a new one there in the abyss and learned to cherish and eventually favor it over the life above. I knew that place, and it was my cynical soul that had so painfully distanced me from others and from Him that came to save me from it. Just the irony of that. Maybe He knew what would become of it. What am I saying, of course He did. The whole time moving, shaping, intervening in silence, in mystery. His baffling sense of humor.
The chapel that was emptied had been in the town over a hundred years. It was built right before the turn of the century in a partnership between the early settlers and a handful of newcomers who'd migrated down the east coast and across the Atlantic from some faraway European province. Their English was poor but they came bearing King James and wooden crosses and they were welcomed. They built for themselves a house of communion, citizens new and old. Clapboards layered rectangular around window shutters and vaulted roofing like a fortress. Its cruciform spire, towering and thin. A pale countenance beside Easter's vibrant purple, yellow, green. The plaque that was posted to the door interior read: "ERECTED 1892 BY UNITED HANDS OF LIVING STONES". Living stones. They knew it was not the building nor the town nor the countryside itself that was their home, that contained the spirit with which they conferred and celebrated. It was them. Their minds, their bodies. The flame in each of their souls that brought together formed a conflagration brazen in the cold dark of the world. He was among them then and still is somehow, though we seem now more fractured and set against one another than back then. Back in "the good ole days". Lord have mercy. Those days never were. There were inklings of what they represented that had existed, moments of harmony and revelation, but they were surrounded by winds of the evil accustomed to their time. Such as it is now, such as it has always been. A new breed of it born for every generation, stemmed from the same corrupted seed. I see that pattern in the line of my ancestry going back to before this town had even a proper name. The God of my forefathers, of that good old time religion, of this blessed nation. So much misperception and half-truths and fanaticism. Was it He who had done us wrong, or was it ourselves? Whatever history, whatever answer, the foundation remains. The rock solid firmament unchangeable beneath the shifting sands and changing seasons. Love your neighbor as yourself. Its quote can be found in faded marquee letters on the church sign, just above the for sale sticker.
The old timers knew it better than anybody. This town sat atop tectonic plates belonged to its tribes. I'm not talking about political parties because only one really exists here, and the other one seems about equidistant to it at least in terms of its preponderance for back biting. The elephant and the donkey like rich spoiled heirs. Love hurling names and dirtclots at each other. Can't get enough of it. No, it's not the gulf between the rich and the poor, the munitions of their constant warfare some equivocal slur of justice, power, and their opposite halves. Though close it's not even racial division, the shame which has no equal. The blood seeped way down in this southern soil turned to ruddy mud that even now reverberates atrocities, those fifty years ago and today. No, the tribes we have around here are more cumulative than those. Big and numerous enough to encompass all others. You'd know them by their category. The people of the book. Baptists. Presbyterians. Methodists. Gangs called denominations. Beams of light bifurcated through a stainglass window. Differing threads sourced by the same sun. They have demarcated territories in the town common and in the hearts of its people. Legacies. Traditions entwined within family heritages so integral there might as well be no distinction. The church and the family like a married couple, which I guess is the goal. But these faithful betrothed are far from ideal. And their domestic ruckus has spilled over into the streets and into the lives of others.
For a long time, actually up until recently, it was a given that you'd be conscripted to one faction or another. There were so many, at least a dozen counted, that it was just a matter of averages. The real question was into which one you were drafted, and that had entirely to do with your parents and their parents and so on. It meant it was decided for you, which had the certain advantage of making the deciding a whole lot easier. But it left you good and trapped if you weren't all that ecstatic about the whole thing, and an increasing number of people were not. Or so it seemed. I was skeptical from the outset that anything was demonstrably changed from what I recalled in the years before. I didn't have the mileage of the old timers but I'd been around the block enough revolutions to know a pattern when I saw one, a pattern and the break in it. And I certainly knew what it felt like when I was a kid. Having to wear a tie and buttoned-up shirt and belt. Your hair combed back for you. Sitting on hard wood pews listening to some old fart dither on about stories you already knew the endings to. You didn't see the point of it; you'd rather sleep in.
One time, I was probably five or six, I got slapped after saying I hated it. I hated going. I was regretful, but I meant it. And I was slapped because I meant it. That's how serious it was taken. It was of supreme importance, it was everything. But for a kid anything deemed that serious or important was hardly to be seen as such. It had to be met with distrust and sneer practically on principle. As you grew from childhood into teenagedom that playful mistrust often became sharp and aggressive and transmogrified into a cynicism you were much too young to know what to do with. The sacred and immutable wisdom of a 16-year old. Let us all bow down in his majesty.
So I wasn't surprised nor especially disappointed when the Baker girl, this is the older one, came up to us and declared her apostasy outright. Came out right there in the middle of our meeting with bolted stance and enunciated cadence like the child she was presenting herself and her accomplishments before us. A woman began to weep. It wasn't her mother. Mrs. Baker was fomenting an anger so hot you could feel it radiate three chairs down. Evidently it wasn't the first time she'd heard those words, and had forbade their utterance again. But here her daughter was anyway, bringing shame to her household. When they pressed her, which they did before she was even done talking, she stammered out a series of prepared explanations. Said she couldn't believe in the Good Lord because she couldn't see any of His goodness evidenced in the world, not in the "abject brutality of nature's biosphere" (her words) nor in the human beings who were supposed to bear most His fingerprint. Not enough of it anyway. Its extent only sporadic and the cause tribal and selfish preservation. I sat silent during her testimony. In my way I wanted to grant her the respect that's due from an audience. It took tremendous courage doing what she did. Courage probably matched by stupidity and the self-aggrandizement of a college freshmen. Still, I couldn't much argue with her. Couldn't get a word in edgewise, for one. The sewing circle descended upon her immediately and without mercy. But in truth, I had nothing to say. Nothing to say but what my stoic repose could communicate, neither affirming nor denying her. See, I had been through that gutter before. I had been brought low by the tragedy of life, which is to say, by life itself. That there's purposeless suffering and grief round every corner and you're left to wander about always uncertain if there's anything more to it. Anything beyond death, beyond what you can see and hear and touch. Where was the God of love in that? Why wouldn't He intervene and make Himself known?
When I had spoken of it I was handed the rhetoric of peers who meant well but appeared not to have much depth beneath them. That's a petty generalization to be sure, and Lord have mercy on me for it, but it was as though the thoughts just had never occurred to them, at least not to the degree that they had for me. These were people who'd experienced much of the same things, and some much more, but could offer nothing other than vague bromides on His mysteries and foreordained plans which were somehow meant for my good and the good of others like they were the disciplines of a cruel father. His lashings meant to teach some lesson never explained. His hand that held the knife, that lifted the hedge of protection. He the architect of every disaster.
I thought at the time it just had to be me so I stopped talking about it and didn't speak of it again for a long time. Years, near a decade. And in that time I continued my good and faithful service to my respective tribe. Every Sunday and Wednesdays too arriving early to help prepare for them a tabernacle of mumbled hymnal readings and overtly prompted applause breaks. Vanilla wafers and goldfish handed out for the kids; endless potlucks clogging up arteries. But all the while the thrum of that voice was constant in some small cul de sac in my brain. He is not there. You are a liar and a hypocrite. To speak such a blasphemy out loud was tantamount to social suicide back then, and to secede from one's clan was about as bad. It was fear kept me there more than anything, and I went on with that wavering division in me like a meter ticking between devotion and disbelief. Held it inside. The compass, the talisman. It seemed always in motion and startling in how wide its span could reach. On a given day it could be so definite in its zeal that it would rouse shouts of Pentecostal gibberish and an embarrassment of tears as to obliterate any shadow of doubt. Such pure experiential joy that's buoyant and full. But the cup that runneth over also empties, and empties as though its bottom were cut out. The next day, even a few hours after gone like it was never there. That spirit which inhabited you now reduced to crowd-induced hysteria; something not true, not real beyond dopamine-fueled illusion, and you were resigned to go about your business cold and mundane with the most indifferent agnosticism. Hard to tell where the needle rested most. Hard to know where you stood at any point. It was treading water, trudging always insecure. Nothing was permanent.
The loneliness and seclusion I felt then was the greatest I had ever known. But in those times some part of me was still sober enough to figure that I wasn't really alone, and my prying eye was trained to be able to spot that ticking meter in others. That's one skill easy to develop in a town like this, intrusive busy-bodiness. Getting all up in people's business. Seeing passed their cordial disguises and reading between the things not said. I searched for the pain in everyone, across all partisan lines. Guess it was the old saying misery loves company, but it wasn't quite that. It was a type of awareness that I didn't have before, and its motivation was only to know the strangers around me. To try to relate to them on some deeper level than I had bothered to before. The Anderson family grandmother who told me to find her good Church of Christ granddaughter and settle down. The young heavyset girl working at the Piggly Wiggly who seemed to get pregnant every sixteen months or so. The distinguished Mr. Makins, a member of the Anglican church in a swankier part of town which looked to many of us uncultured folk to bear little distinction to the corporate doctrines of Rome, and that might as well have been a whole other religion unto itself. These were my neighbors. Sacred mysteries at every turn, righteous and broken. I sought after their hearts and I tried to speak to them without barrier. Asking them how they were doing, and I mean really asking. Not taking their terse deflections for an answer and never, under any circumstances, responding with "bless your heart". I think I got somewhere approaching meaningful connection at least a time or two. Course I got plenty of hostility alongwith. But let's be optimistic and say there was more going on than what I could see. It was the seed planted in them that would produce good fruit, even if I wasn't witness to it. What the Good Book called love, and not the kind we usually talk about nowadays. We don't have a word for it, really. The old chosen had several. The one they used for this, they believed, was in and of itself divine. Synonymous with the one called I Am. That God is that love, and is even when His creation doesn't exhibit it. I don't know how that all squares out, I surely don't. I'm not sure if it does at all. But I know I've felt and seen that love, and it sits right beside my undying suspicion.
So I sat in my beige folding chair and let the scene play out with the Baker girl versus the mob of insulated faith mongers. I let her spit every hatred and heresy toward Him freely, because I had thought and spoke them all in the privacy of my heart. This God of vengeance whose warclub crushed the firstborn of Egypt, who demanded the blood of Isaac after gifting him, who struck Ananias even when the debt had been forgiven. They are easy accusations. Nothing that is not uncommon to man. It is a wall you will dash yourself against. Break yourself to pieces that'll be put back together in some other form that may not look anything like the first. Maybe she'll be transfigured anew with the realization I came to: there ain't no running from Him. There's rage and distance but there's no running. You can't turn your face away, not really. Can't escape. In spite of the most bitter disillusion, divorce, rejection He'll always be waiting ahead. Even the absence of belief predicated on the idea of His being, and the idea alone sometimes is enough. Enough to disrupt your life and your conclusions of it. Maybe she'll see that... or maybe she won't. It's not up to me, thank the Lord.
I've often pictured this town having some degree of divine sovereignty unto itself. This land that often seems to act as some sort of living directory of the ills and ingenuity of its greatest occupant. Humanity. The devil's next of kin. A creature that can do just about anything within the rules established. Who has mastery over animals and their dwelling such that they can drive them completely from the earth. Who can warp and shape them emblematic to themselves and desires. The mightiest leviathan of the sea on a spit above their cookfire, ready for the eating. God's power of creation and its counter at home in their fists. That's why I never understood people's assertion that we could never have a real impact on the world's makeup. As though our choices had no bearing on anything but ourselves. The dirt and air and trees suffer our evil as much as our species does. And we've done a good and sufficient job at injuring it. Gone far enough to conceivably do away with the planet altogether with the toss of a handful of our most powerful sticks and stones. These are the means He has given, knowing in full what calamity they would wreak. If I believe in Him at all, I have to believe Him weeping this. He stands above and within it the way this verdant plateau upholds my homestead and the forest steeples provide the means for building and the water and ground from which is yielded the substance of life. This country that I have hated and loved as I have hated and loved Him. But they are not the same, no.
I've heard it said that you can no more hate a thing than love it, which is to say that hate is braided in with love, not as enemies per se so much as reflections where the one, that is hate, cannot exist without the other. It was an exegesis surmising the true foil of love was apathy and that that was the root cause of all reality's woes. It was pontificated with confidence by a pastor who not a few months later was outed an adulterer and left the township exiled from his marriage and ministry which very much appeared before that to be a paragon of faithfulness and its delicate balance. Lotta people were angry after that. Felt betrayed. I wish I felt the same, but I had a misgiving about the man from the beginning. That tried and true cynicism I couldn't shake even then. There was just something about him. The way he carried himself in his fancy blue suits and slick blackened hairdo. His family's collection of automobiles that had not a smudge nor blemish among them. His handshakes were too tight. He kept a plasticine smile on a face like a rubber mask that hid at the edges of the eyes a vacancy or something worse. Small eyes, sunken in. He taught with a bag of props and tricks; with snake oil, personality, and paranoia. A true salesmen equipped himself with an arsenal of rehearsed axioms and vocal inflection used for selling not used cars or door-to-door vacuum cleaners but a dogma of his own persuasion. Good ole pride and patriotism mixed with some feel-good prosperity gospel and seasoned with light elitism and disdain for those aberrant to the strictures of the holy text. He appealed to the tribal, shallow penchants of the townsfolk who wanted a collective other to cast their fears upon and an authority figure to give them permission. His congregation grew quick and corpulent. Within less than a year it was the biggest in town. Friends and family members locked arms, joined in. I wanted to be apart of it, wanted to trust the man. God's honest truth I did. But I remained at arm's length in terse disposition as I sat in his pews and listened to his practiced shouts and whoops which underneath I could discern of their worth little more than emotional manipulation. It was by the grace of God alone that I did not proclaim my superior insight to the whole populace when he was disgraced. He ended up getting caught in the act with a lover young enough to be his child. Hypocrisy once again proven limitless. In him, in them, in me.
His sudden departure was an earthquake in the town. People broke apart and scattered like the fault lines had opened up and they retreated back to their previous corners. Some didn't make it back, lost instead into the void that had cracked agape in the earth. They couldn't climb their way back home, so they made a new one there in the abyss and learned to cherish and eventually favor it over the life above. I knew that place, and it was my cynical soul that had so painfully distanced me from others and from Him that came to save me from it. Just the irony of that. Maybe He knew what would become of it. What am I saying, of course He did. The whole time moving, shaping, intervening in silence, in mystery. His baffling sense of humor.
The chapel that was emptied had been in the town over a hundred years. It was built right before the turn of the century in a partnership between the early settlers and a handful of newcomers who'd migrated down the east coast and across the Atlantic from some faraway European province. Their English was poor but they came bearing King James and wooden crosses and they were welcomed. They built for themselves a house of communion, citizens new and old. Clapboards layered rectangular around window shutters and vaulted roofing like a fortress. Its cruciform spire, towering and thin. A pale countenance beside Easter's vibrant purple, yellow, green. The plaque that was posted to the door interior read: "ERECTED 1892 BY UNITED HANDS OF LIVING STONES". Living stones. They knew it was not the building nor the town nor the countryside itself that was their home, that contained the spirit with which they conferred and celebrated. It was them. Their minds, their bodies. The flame in each of their souls that brought together formed a conflagration brazen in the cold dark of the world. He was among them then and still is somehow, though we seem now more fractured and set against one another than back then. Back in "the good ole days". Lord have mercy. Those days never were. There were inklings of what they represented that had existed, moments of harmony and revelation, but they were surrounded by winds of the evil accustomed to their time. Such as it is now, such as it has always been. A new breed of it born for every generation, stemmed from the same corrupted seed. I see that pattern in the line of my ancestry going back to before this town had even a proper name. The God of my forefathers, of that good old time religion, of this blessed nation. So much misperception and half-truths and fanaticism. Was it He who had done us wrong, or was it ourselves? Whatever history, whatever answer, the foundation remains. The rock solid firmament unchangeable beneath the shifting sands and changing seasons. Love your neighbor as yourself. Its quote can be found in faded marquee letters on the church sign, just above the for sale sticker.
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