God's House

I hadn’t really expected the old church to be open on a weekday afternoon, but inside it was cool, cavernous, starkly quiet and completely empty. Behind me, the heavy oaken door swung shut with barely a whisper. The sanctuary smelled like furniture polish and floor wax mixed with flowers and the residue of candle smoke. Above the altar, a monumentally huge and contemporary cross hung in mid-air, suspended with invisible wires and looking eerily like a 3D image against the muted stained glass windows. Very New Wave, I heard my inner voice – the one that doesn’t believe – say clearly and I felt an immediate rush of guilt for the thought. Don’t be sacrilegious! my mother would’ve no doubt hissed at me and probably delivered a cuff that would’ve left my ears ringing.

How little it’s changed, I found myself thinking as I walked slowly down the procession aisle and slid into one of the front benches to kneel in the shadow of the surreal cross.  My church going years are more than fifty years behind me - I turned my back on organized religion decades ago, believing that God’s true house has no walls and that too many of His followers are a little too organized - but the reverence for holy things is still within me, private as it may be. I stray, as do we all, but hopefully not so far that I can’t be redeemed.  If, of course, that inner voice reminds me, you believe in that sort of thing.

I sensed rather than saw or heard the priest come in and when I raised my head, he was watching me from a few steps away, hands in his pocket and half smiling. He was thin and slightly built, somewhere in his sixties, I imagined, with a well- worn face and a mix of kindness and mischief in his eyes.  He was wearing his day off clothes – black trousers with a neat crease, grey button down shirt with a turned around white collar and a dark cardigan sweater that had seen better days - his mostly silver hair was longish to the point of shaggy and reached almost to his shoulders. You’d have to have been blind not to see how good looking he’d been in his younger days.  Still was in a Woodstock-ish kind of way.

Hello, cher, he said quietly, Is there anything I can help you with?  There was gentleness but no recognition in those eyes, I was glad to see.

I shook my head but couldn’t help return the smile at the suggestion of creole in his words.  There’s a certain lilt to a French Canadian accent, an authenticity that can’t ever quite be imitated. It reminds me of the French Quarter and music that makes your heart want to dance.

No, Father, I said, Thank you, but I just needed a break and a few minutes to think.

Stay as long as you want, he nodded, Everyone’s welcome in God’s house.

I watched him make his way toward the altar, still favoring his right leg, I noticed - the one that had been so cruelly crushed under a wagon wheel when he was twelve - there’d been no doctor in Church Point back then and it was a rugged and rough three hour drive to Halifax.  I remembered that no one was sure he’d even survive the trip so his care fell to the local midwife and while the leg eventually healed, the bones knitted crookedly, just enough to give him a slight but lifelong limp.

Easily correctable, the surgeon had said a few months later.

An extravagance we can ill afford, his family had responded, surely a mild limp is no great hardship.

And so he had been sent to relatives in The Valley for the duration of his recovery - as luck would have it, to a family my daddy knew well - and it was there I’d met him.  I’d had a fierce crush on him for all of one summer but even then, he was a far-away kind of boy, a dreamer who liked Bible stories better than Andy Hardy, a boy grateful to have survived when I was sure I’d have burned with resentment at the unfairness of it all.  When I heard he’d been called to the priesthood, I remember feeling dense and foolish that I’d not seen it sooner.  With or without the accident, I somehow realized, he’d been born to it.  We spent at least a part of every day that summer together and when my mother and grandmother came to collect me at the end of August, they said we had no time to stop and tell him goodbye.  I was convinced my pre-teen heart would break.

And so, some forty years later when I found myself passing through Evangeline country, I stopped at the old church and discovered its doors open.

I sat for a little while longer, listening to the ceiling fans whirring and remembering back to that long ago summer. When I left and pushed through the heavy doors into the sunlight, I wasn’t surprised to see him waiting but it took my breath away when I heard him say my name.

It’s good to see you again, cher, he said, You’re looking well.

And you, I managed to say, Religious life has been kind to you.

 

He smiled and nodded and right there on the steps of God’s house, leaned forward and kissed my cheek.

Safe travel, cher, he said and smiled, Peace be with you.

And with you, Father, I answered as I’d been taught.

It was one of those rare bittersweet moments when for about half a heartbeat everything falls into place and you have just enough time to back up a few decades and put something right.  Such moments are random and hard to find - tiny miracles, if you will – and I was grateful to have stumbled on one in God’s house.

If, of course, you believe in that kind of thing.