In My Father’s House

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When my dad turned eighteen, he was not thinking of becoming a husband, a father, or a pastor; he was planning to become a priest.

He was raised in a Catholic New England family, and when he announced an interest in the priesthood, my grandparents were elated. The fall after his high school graduation, they bought him a bus ticket, and he traveled from rural Maine to Baltimore to begin seminary.

But their dreams were short-lived.  My dad had a front row seat to the scandals in the church that wouldn’t be public knowledge for a few more decades. It shook his faith, and he dropped out of seminary after three semesters. He was stranded in a big city hundreds of miles from home, which for his generation and his budget might as well have been half way around the world. He took the only job he could find, managing a Pizza Hut.

Cue mom, who was hired straight out of high school to be the restaurant’s assistant manager. As Providence would have it, it fell to my dad to train her.  They fell in love over the dough machine, and at the end of her first shift, as they were balancing the register, dad asked her out.

They were married a few months later, and the following year my older brother was born.  Dad was still interested in going into the ministry, but he found that Protestantism resonated with him more than Catholicism.  He enrolled in a Bible college in Pennsylvania, where my other siblings and I were born.   Dad finished his theological training when I was three, and took his first position at a church when I was four.

It seems that all children are fascinated with their parents’ profession, and we were no exception. When my brothers and I wanted to amuse ourselves, we didn’t play Cowboys and Indians or Cops-n-Robbers or even Hide and Seek; we played church.

My older brother Lenny was always the pastor. I was always the soloist, and our younger brother Matthew was our first congregant.  (We added my youngest brother and sister to the congregation when they arrived in our family a few years later.)

We’d set up our chairs facing the piano in the living room.  I’d wear mom’s heels and borrow one of her purses, and Lenny would sport dad’s shoes and a poorly-knotted neck tie.  He would stand on the piano bench and deliver a fiery sermon.  When he was all out of thunder, he’d jump down and take a seat at the piano.  “Now, won’t you come, Sister Sarah, and sing the special music?”

He’d wink at me, and I’d trip up to the piano in my high heels and belt out all the verses of “Jesus Loves Me” at the top of my lungs.  When I finished, Lenny would say, “Thank you, Sister Sarah, for that blessing.”  I’d nod a solemn acknowledgement, and trip back to my seat.  Then Lenny would strike slow, minor chords on the piano and in an earnest voice, he’d begin the altar call.  While keeping his hands on the keys, he’d turn his head over his shoulder and wail, “Sinners, won’t you come to Jesus?  Won’t you please come?”

This was my cue to round up my little brother Matthew, who was usually roaming about the living room in his walker.  Some days he was Arminian, responding to the altar call of his own accord.  Other times, he was stubbornly Calvinistic, and it took a strong working of the Holy Spirit (which was me, minus my heels) to get him to the altar.

Once Matthew arrived, Lenny would lead him in a convincing Sinner’s Prayer.  And then, while all the angels in heaven were rejoicing, mom would call us for lunch, which was usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served with lemonade.

We preferred to call it “Communion.”

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.

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.”

There were more Christmases with missing characters.  There were five-hour heated elder board meetings. There were church-wide arguments about whether to paint the sanctuary baby blue or moss green.  There were lots of marriages, and births, and deaths.  My dad continued to pastor the church, and our family continued to be frustrated and inconvenienced and overly-scrutinized.  Nothing changed, really, but somehow we stopped minding so much.  The undercurrents swirling around us became familiar, even comforting.

After one disastrous board meeting, my dad was sitting on the back step cooling down when my five-year-old brother joined him. “I should go, shouldn’t I?” my dad said, putting his head in his hands. “I’ve put you kids and your mom through too much.  I should just go.”

My brother shook his head, and put his hand on my dad’s knee.  “I think you should stay, daddy,” he said quietly.  “They’re like lost sheep, and you’re their shepherd.”

And so we stayed — for a few more years, anyway.

The year before we left, one of my favorite men in the church was diagnosed with brain cancer.  His name was Vern, and he was a hog farmer.  A few weeks after his diagnosis, he died on a makeshift bed in the kitchen of his farmhouse, with my dad holding his hand, singing him Home.

I lost the contest in front of his casket, because it made me sick to see his vacant, ashen face.  My brothers and I sat side-by-side in the pew with my mom, on our best behavior as we listened to my dad deliver the message of hope from John 14.  I missed this man who had become a familiar family friend, and for the first time in my life, I cried in church.

And that’s how it was, growing up in my father’s house.  If it were not so…

…I would have told you.

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