In My Father’s House
Essays, Featured — By Sarah Thebarge on December 1, 2009 at 12:00 am
Part of the allure of moving to this church was that they provided a parsonage, a free house next to the church. It seemed a quaint and romantic idea at first. But it grew old after, oh, a day or two. “It’s like we live in a fishbowl,” I complained to my brothers at one of our late night pow-wows.
Like everything else, we tried to make a game out of this disappointment. On Wednesday evenings, as we were finishing dinner and the first parishioners were arriving for prayer meeting, my brothers and I would stage silent shows at the bay windows that overlooked the parking lot.
One evening I pretended to be drowning, my body sinking deeper and deeper into the floor before my head disappeared below the window sill. My older brother grabbed one of mom’s antique jugs and pretended to be drunk. On another evening, he drew the white curtains in front of the windows and his silhouetted form, holding the shadow of a meat cleaver, beheaded my younger sister’s doll.
We heard women shrieking from the parking lot. My brother dropped down under the window sill next to me and whispered triumphantly, “Well, that one got their attention.”
That one also almost got my dad fired, and he quickly put an end to our dining room theater.
Our first winter there, New Jersey experienced an ice storm, and most of the church missed the annual Christmas pageant. Since we lived next door, my brothers and I filled in for the missing characters. I was the Virgin Mary, my older brother was Joseph, and the youth pastor’s infant daughter was Baby Jesus. My little sister was the archangel, and my two younger brothers played the parts of both the shepherds and the wise men, the only difference being that the wise men had slightly nicer bath robes. And terrycloth turbans.
The following Christmas, Mary was out with hemorrhoids. My dad thrust the script towards me just before the pageant started. “Please,” he pleaded. I yanked it away from him in disgust. “Okay, I’ll be Mary,” I said. “But I’m skipping the Magnificat.”
It was probably the first pageant ever where Mary, after being informed of the Immaculate Conception, uttered, “This blows.”
2 Comments
I grew up in small congregation churches, not as a PK, but as a member of a family that lived close in the life of both churches. My parents wisely left the one small church when they realized that our extended family made up too much of the congregation– There was a Shallenberger/Short voting-block that would have broken the spine of any pastor.
We joined another small congregation on the other side of town and grew up all the politics you wrote of, but from a safer vantage point.
Somehow, in spite of the parochial games, the Robert’s Rules of Order, the infighting, and the smallness of it all, God manages to work.
Sarah,
This was absolutley beautiful. Thank you for sharing your experiences.