Writing

WEST VIRGINIA PRESBYTERIAN (1952)

The tired old Presbyterian Church at the top of the dirt road is the only church here. A girl of four, neat as a pin, sets off from her house at the opposite end of the road to walk the 200 yards or so to the church. Her mother stands in the middle of the road watching her, until she is greeted on the porch steps by an elderly woman. The mother feels that, since the priest comes only once every two months to say Mass, it’s all right to send her daughter to Presbyterian Sunday School. God is God, after all.

The girl listens with rapt attention to the Bible stories. She gets along well with the other children and likes seeing them because she doesn’t usually get to play with them. Mama won’t let her run barefoot, or wade in the coal mine run-off creek, or catch insects and pull their wings off. And she isn't allowed to say words like "piss" and "shit," which are everyday words to the other kids.

At the end of the lesson today, the minister comes in. They have been learning the Lord's Prayer, and he wants to check on their progress. The children stand up and all recite together: "Our Father, which art in heaven..."

The little girl knows it by heart already; she learned it long before she began coming to this Sunday school. "... but deliver us from evil. Amen," she finishes. But the other kids say more.

The minister glares at her and says, "Why didn't you learn it, like you were told?"

"Oh," she says. "I already learned it."

"But, you didn't learn it all."

"Oh, yes," she smiles. "I know the whole thing." She repeats it.

"No, that's wrong," the minister insists, "you must say the whole prayer. Now, say it the right way."

She says the prayer again, exactly as she was taught it by her Catholic parents.

The minister raises his right hand all the way back, above his head, and slaps the child hard on the left side of her face. "Now," he says, "say it again, the right way."

"I don't know the way they say it." She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of her tears, and she won’t be pushed by any means to say something she doesn’t think is right.

“Daddy says some people say extra words that people added a long time after Jesus said it first. I know it the way Mama and Daddy taught me. I know 'Hail Mary,' too,” she added proudly, “And 'Angel of God, my guardian dear'."

The minister begins to mutter words she doesn’t understand. He closes his huge hands around her upper arms and plucks her out of the group of children. Still muttering, he drops her on the church steps. "Go on, get yourself home," he thunders.

"Mama said to wait for her to come and get me. Ten o’clock she said. I have to wait for her." By now she is not only in pain; she is getting mad, very mad, at the minister. But she controls herself. She knows Mama will fix it.

As soon as the man slams the door, the girl allows herself to cry. She sees blood drops on her front and cries harder because this is a new dress.

Her mother, walking up the road to get her, sees tears and blood and breaks into a run.

The girl is bleeding from her mouth, because the blow forced her teeth into the inside cheek. Her eye will swell shut by the end of the day. She has marks on her face and her arms which will finally fade after two days, to be replaced by bruises in the shape of the minister's fingers.

As the girl sobs broken sentences into her shoulder, Mama gets madder and madder. The girl has seen Mama like this before, when things happened to her or her brother. Mama always says, "Ignorance never excuses brutality." The girl doesn't know exactly what the words mean, but she does know they mean Mama's gonna do something about it.

The service is going on, but Mama doesn't care. She takes the girl’s hand and marches right up the middle aisle to the minister, who, astonished, stops his speech mid-sentence.

She turns the girl around to face the congregation, bloody rivulet down her chin, welts rising on her face and arms.

Mama is brief: "That man did this to my daughter.” She stops for breath. “And you call him a Christian."

Mama whispers to her, “Stand up straight.”

Embarrassed coughs and shuffles follow them as they walk away.

Mama never sent me to Sunday School again.

Religion and Me

(autobiographical)

More

come

DEALING WITH DEATH THE CHRISTIAN WAY

In the late 1980s and early 1990s a group of friends and acquaintances gathered annually on Christmas Eve. We decorated a tree, ate a fabulous feast, caught up –some of us saw each other only at this gathering– and told stories. Late in the evening, when the house was uncomfortably warm from all the bodies in activity, we stopped. We quietened. We gathered around a round table with a candle in the middle. Each of us lit a candle from the one on the table. Each of us remembered a friend who was not with us that night. Some of us spoke several names, others only one. But each person there had seen someone die that year. The last year I attended, our group had shrunk from 14 or 15 to eight.

In that time, when AIDS was still a pandemic killer, I knew dozens of people –young and old and middle aged– who died of it. I saw so many die, said good-bye to so many, that I came to terms with death because I had to in order to survive in some sort emotionally capable state. I learned the power of mourning through the various stages of grief, and of allowing grief to consume me for a brief time, to emerge from it able to move forward. None of these are easy lessons, and I think many of us never allow ourselves to let go and wallow in grief when we need to do it. But with literally dozens of people I knew dying around me, I had to learn to deal with death.

So this year, when we had to deal with three family deaths in rapid succession, I was able to cope with the aftershock.

I have always, even with the deaths of my parents, found repugnant and a bit stomach-turning the common rituals after the event, with the expense and ostentation and superficiality of the typical church funeral. So as a rule I do not go to funerals. A memorial gathering in a theatre, with shared memories and readings from plays or a few songs was about as far as I would go. My husband knows that I want no fuss and no expense when I go, just cremation and scattering the ashes around the rose bushes or wherever. I’ve said he might go as far as a Memorial Meeting for Worship, if he thinks people need it, but I’ll get back to him on that closer to the event.

Even so, I hold in compassion and patience people who do believe in that sort of thing. There’s no denying that the pomp and religiosity of a typical funeral allows many people to grieve in a way they would not permit themselves to do under any other circumstances.

My husband’s sister died early in May. She had cancer for five years, and had gone through all the various treatments to extend her life. She had planned a full production number of a funeral, complete with matched black horses drawing a Victorian carriage with her polished coffin inside it, songs she selected (including, I thought slightly perversely, Leaving on a Jet Plane), huge limousine for the family, an official mourner in Victorian costume and reception afterward with good eats. She took care of every detail. And as her brother’s wife, I attended the performance. Everything went off without a hitch; Sister would have been very pleased with the way her plans went off like clockwork.

I did not know Sister well. I’d been married to her brother for only six years, and I saw her perhaps four to six times a year, for lunch with the family. We were acquaintances who had been at family gatherings and shared pleasant conversations, enjoyed laughing together and exchanged gifts neither of us really wanted. We liked each other, but never had a meaningful conversation that lasted longer than three minutes. We were so very different we would probably never even have met had I not been married to her brother.

But I watched her journey with more than a little admiration, as she pushed through the powerlessness, anger, frustration, struggle and fear, to acceptance. She ran a huge emotional and psychological gamut, with her good days and her bad days. But she lived well right up to the end, and she left people with fond memories and loving good-byes.

The only bone I would pick with her is over my husband’s children. There was a history there, in that my husband’s first wife had a habit of sending vile letters to people; and Sister did not want the children to know of her illness because she did not want to deal with any nastiness from her former sister-in-law. I understood this completely, having read some of the calumnies and threats that Ex-wife produced in other contexts. But I felt strongly that the children had a right to know that their aunt was ill, and that they had a right to say good-bye to her.

My husband talked to his sister about the children’s visiting her many times during her illness and treatment, but she did not want to make herself vulnerable to unpleasant letters from the children’s mother. So my husband felt that he had to honour Sister’s wishes. Finally, when she knew that she had little time left, Sister wanted to see the children. My husband tried to arrange it, but Sister died before Ex-wife would allow any visit.

My husband’s dad, his only surviving parent, was gratified to see so many people in the church. So was my husband. The place was packed with people, hundreds of them, who knew Sister and needed to say good-bye to her. Her step-children and her husband were devastated, of course, and allowed themselves deep, wrenching weeping which would not be acceptable in any other context. I think that’s the most you can expect from a funeral.

Oddly enough, the reception afterward gave me a chance to meet family members I hadn’t met before, and to talk with some whom I’d met only a year ago at Sister’s 50th birthday party. The reception had a lightness about it that Sister would have enjoyed, and virtually everyone commented that everything had been as she wanted it.

Driving home, I thought again how sad it was that the children did not get to say good-bye to their aunt, but I didn’t say anything about it. It had, in fact, been a pretty glorious day, all things considered.