Chapter 27 #2
And maybe God does, because the next twenty minutes of the service pass mostly painlessly. Everybody sings, and in the dark, I can feel like one more nameless face in the crowd. Maybe this can be a sanctuary of mercy. A respite in the storm.
And then Pastor Sean takes the pulpit and reads the verse he’s preaching on.
“This is from the New Living Translation.” He clears his throat and holds the large Bible high as he begins to read: “My son, pay attention to my wisdom: For the lips of an immoral woman are as sweet as honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But in the end she is as bitter as poison… Her feet go down to death… For she cares nothing about the path to life. She staggers down a crooked trail and doesn’t realize it. ”
“Stay away from her!” Pastor Sean pounds the pulpit with a closed fist as he continues reading the Proverb.
Everybody jumps in their pews, and then leans in, further rapt.
“Don’t go near the door of her house! If you do, you will lose your honor and will lose to merciless people all you have achieved. ”
He closes the Bible dramatically and sets it on the altar, then steeples his fingers as he walks back and forth on the stage.
“We have such a dangerous woman among us.”
Gasps sound across the church. Heads swivel in my direction, and then back to the stage, like a tennis match. Jake sits taller, but I can feel his secondhand embarrassment.
“Our brother, like Hosea and in the image of God the Father, has decided to welcome back the whore begging for scraps at his door, as is his right to do. Because he is a holy and righteous man.”
Pastor Sean swings around dramatically. “Beware the Jezebel spirit among you, for see, it crept into even the marriage of the strongest among us!”
I sink lower in my seat. Please, God, if you are merciful, let me disappear right where I sit. Whenever people talked about which superpower they’d want if they could choose, I always knew it was invisibility I longed for most. I’ve never longed for it harder than now.
I’ve been around long enough, and had been through so much worse pain than this to know that God doesn’t work like a wishing well.
Compared to those body-deep sorrows… what really, is this?
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
It’s a lie told to children, but I try to take a desperate refuge in it now.
And at least, I begin to float a little outside my body. The pastor’s voice becomes slightly distant, as does my body in the pew beside the man who clasps my forearm tightly, right where the Medusa has only barely healed over.
As if by covering the Medusa’s eyes with the cardigan and the strength of his hand, he saps my Medusa, and me, of our power. We can turn no one to stone except ourselves, I guess, with our gaze covered to turn inward.
A tear slips out of my eye, and when I go to wipe it away, Jake snatches my other wrist. “Let them see your tears of repentance,” he hisses. “So they know you mean it.”
So I leave it untouched but he still doesn’t let me go, his hands now like shackles on both my wrists.
And then, the spotlight still on the pastor, the guitarist starts to play lightly behind him, a moving, haunting, soulful melody.
“And now I invite all who repent,” Pastor Sean says, eyes focused directly on me.
“Get up there,” Jake says, standing and dragging me with him to the aisle. A spotlight cuts through the dim sanctuary to land on me.
Which is when I realize this production has been staged for this very moment.
Jake finally lets go of me, moving to stand beside me, but out of the spotlight.
I’ve known for a while that I’d grown more and more uncomfortable in this church as it begged offerings for this larger building with the stage lights and the higher production quality that Pastor Sean, fresh off his internship with a megachurch in Chicago, assured us would spread the gospel of the Lord to more people worldwide from our small little suburb of Austin, Tx…
And now they’ve made me part of the show.
I gulp, wanting to turn and flee to the parking lot. And then keep running and running as far and as fast from this farce.
I’m not sure there will be anything left of my faith after this. Even though there’s a small, bell-like voice singing tremulously at the corner of my mind: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
I try to focus on it as, step by step, I walk forward down the aisle to a triumphant-looking Pastor Sean, who when I get there, looks me straight in the eye. I’m trembling head to toe, and tears of humiliation pour down my cheeks.
“On. Your. Knees.” His voice in the small mic at his collar echoes throughout the auditorium. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my face reflected on the big screen. The cameraman has zoomed in on my tears. “Repent of your Jezebel spirit. In front of me, your husband and this congregation.”
I notice he left out God this time. A small mercy.
I fall to my knees, bow my head, and sob.
Performing the humiliation ritual they all demand.
Dozens of hands come to my back and I shudder at the touches of all these strangers, as they pray and “Hallelujah!”s break out among the crowd as the praise song starts in earnest behind us.
Pastor Sean uses the emotion whipped up by the moment with me to urge others in the Altar Call.
And I mentally nope right on out of my body and all those strangers touching me, enemies to my true well-being, and land somewhere near the ceiling, the children’s song my only tether. Jesus loves me, this I know…