In My Father’s House

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We stayed at the same church until I was twelve, and then my parents decided it was time to look for a new ministry.  They began the process of candidating.   I overheard my younger brother describe this process to a friend as “just like running for office.”  And he was right.

Substitute tithing for taxes, Jesus for Abraham Lincoln, and theology for the Republican agenda, and it’s pretty much just like running for office.

At each of the churches he was applying to, dad would preach a sermon, and afterwards our family would stand in a receiving line in the foyer and shake every single congregant’s hand.  When they had all left, we’d stand in the empty foyer and my dad would turn to his self-appointed board of advisors and ask us, “Well, what did you think?”

All the churches seemed to be on the same footing, until we went to one in a small town in southern New Jersey.  At that church, the head elder’s wife took the five of us kids to the mall while my parents toured the church.   She led us into a candy store and told us we could have as much as we wanted.  With our mouths still full of Sour Patch Kids, we rushed back to church and told dad we’d made up our minds.  We wanted this one.

A few months later, we moved from Pennsylvania to a tiny town in New Jersey.  When we began to miss our friends, we promptly forgot the candy, and the fact that we’d lobbied for this church.   My older brother especially hated it.  He’d pose as the Statue of Liberty, and remind us that if the statue was the U.S., his strong, torch-bearing right arm was New York.  And here we were, stuck in New Jersey, the Armpit of America.

What was worse, we lived across the river from the DuPont chemical plant, and most days it smelled like an armpit.  We had moved from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which isn’t exactly metropolitan. But somehow, we thought ourselves very cultured and sophisticated in comparison to these country bumpkins.

Our first week there, my parents took us to Cow Town, a local attraction that was a combination of a farmer’s market, a rodeo, and a flea market.  A three-story metal cow boy, holding a Stetson the size of a Volkswagen Bug, stood in front of the market’s entrance. We pointed to him as evidence that we had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and this country living was just not going to suit us city folk.

We groaned at my dad like the Israelites who blamed Moses for leading them out of Egypt into the wilderness, but he was unmoved.  Out of desperation and loneliness, my siblings and I banded together and determined to make our own way out of the desert.  This usually involved making up games to distract us while we sat through three church services a week, plus occasional weddings and funerals.

At weddings, we competed to see who could count the most tattoos on the bridesmaids.  At funerals, the goal was to stand the longest in front of the casket without losing your nerve.

I’m sure the congregation saw the pastor’s kids clustered around parishoners’ coffins and assumed our intent faces represented pious grief.  They never dreamed we were standing there with our eyes closed, counting, “One-mississippi, Two-mississippi, Three-mississippi, Four…”

My dad performed so many funerals and weddings, we had the messages memorized by the end of the first year.  His favorite wedding text was I Corinthians 13, which one of my brothers nicknamed “The Chapter o’ Love.”

His most commonly-used funeral text was John 14, which begins with, “In my father’s house are many mansions…” and ends with, “…if it were not so, I would have told you.”

When we first arrived in the town, the parishioners were all strangers to me, so at their funerals I needed no more comfort than the knowledge that the Ladies’ Brigade was bringing Kool-Aid and the right kind of potato salad to the post-funeral luncheon.

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