Sunday, Someday Remembered by an Absent-minded Penitent

Bright Sunday morning sunshine pouring through the stained class windows of our church. The image of the Christ is backlit in all its glory…HE with HIS hands extended to one and all who come through the door and down the center aisle to pause and kneel before the altar. They are the faithful who come each Sunday, each holy day and some other days besides ..to salute the altar and then to sit in meditation on the meaning of FAITH, to communicate with our GOD on the meaning and responsibilities of life…to beg forgiveness for transgressions from the straight and narrow….to achieve a semblance of peace within each individual soul….

Sunday morning , the most divided day in all our world because each of us seems to believe that his or her house of worship is the only viable entrance to the Afterlife. I personally do not believe that there is a specifically allocated section of the afterlife sat apart for each denomination but I would also admit that I am probably in the minority because of the innate wish of many people to play a childhood game of “one up.” This is the game that leads one person to think that he is “better” than other people. As a child growing up in a tiny mountain community, I would listen on Sunday morning for the bell pealing from either the Methodist church or the Baptist church as the bells called their individual members to service. I have attended services in both churches. Then some new people moved in and built a Holiness church and I have attended services in that church also. As a matter of fact, my aunt, Sister Belle, preached in that same church one week.

My father didn’t go to that particular service because as he would say, “I’m of a different persuasion.” I never did know exactly what “persuasion” that was but attending the service didn‘t matter because the Holiness church had a loudspeaker and the whole hollow had no choice but to hear the service in its entirety unless someone got in a vehicle and went across the river to Vinsontown. My stepmother, who was a Baptist, would rather sneak a drink than go to either one of the churches in our town. Her excuse was that she was a member of the church in Rivertown some 40 miles away by the highway, Matter of act my brother had her buried from that church . I was caught in an icestorm and even though I was on the way didn’t get there until after she was buried but I heard from another source that nobody came to the funeral because none of the members of that Rivertown church remembered her at all – not so surprising since she had moved from Rivertown some thirty years before Daddy’s service, on the other hand, had been quite different. An 84-year-old retired Free Will Baptist preacher from Vinsontown who had fought in the Big War with Daddy spoke over him and most residents of Yatestown, our town, and Vinsontown came.

Mountain people never seemed to much care what church a person went to. If there was a church in town and you felt like going..then you went and that was that. Sometimes people would fall out with either the preacher or somebody else in the church and change churches . Maybe other folks knew why the change took place and maybe they didn’t…neither the change nor the reason was earth shattering and life moved on. Life in those days was so much simpler than it is now. People had an innocence then that cable television and mass media have since damaged. Only occasionally do I hear a person speak with that distinctive manner of speech and the distinct choice of words that identifies them to another hill born person. Speech patterns may have changed but values and social actions are too inherent in our Appalachian culture. My adult children show their mountain heritage in the way they act, in how they choose their friends and in their personal values.

And on Sunday morning, on Holy Day morning, they scatter to whichever church draws their interest. My gospel music playing offspring will happily travel to whichever church calls him and his group to come and play. The group will join hands, Brother Rod will pray for Divine approval of their efforts and a joyful noise will be raised to the heavens. Sister Belle (my aunt) used a loudspeaker to spread the word but in these modern times the brothers of music have replaced the loudspeaker with an amplifier connected to both the electric guitar and the electric piano to make sure all the audience hears. The years have passed and methods have changed but the purpose is still the same. By sunlight, moonlight or starlight. touch the faith, let it shine through, let it be heard from the mountains to the hollows and beyond. Remind all of us of the values taught in our childhood and help us keep to the pathways that bring us into whatever building is dedicated for the personal communication with God that develops and strengthens our Faith, our so that within each soul we find peace and love for all His creatures.

The bells are tolling and we are being called to show our own belief in the right pathway to the whereafter. Please don’t ask me for specific directions because I can not give you a definitive answer. After all, I am the person who stood up and walked out the door of the church where a minister preached that everyone who went to another church across town was going to Hell because they did not come to his church. That particular preacher has slid on into the afterlife but I have not set foot in a building of his particular denomination in nearly forty years and I don’t think I am going back. The memory is a bit too prejudicial to me. In my current home town, I walked out of the church (which I claim) because I got really tired of folk looking at my black skin like I had leprosy or AIDS or some such incurable disease. Nor am I going to drive nearly twenty miles to the black church of the same denomination…where my children used to go to school. In that church I was sniped at and made fun of because of my Appalachian ways. No one there communicated with me until they wanted $5000 to build the new church…then they found my phone number. I , on the other hand, had lost my checkbook that day and couldn’t remember the way to the bank.

What I do find myself remembering is the Irish Catholic priest who came flying down a curvy twisty mountain road seemingly on two wheels of his raggedy station wagon because our house had burned and my oldest son had died…remembering the parish that reached out and took in a relatively new family in the community. That same priest who stopped in mid homily because I was carrying my baby son out of the sanctuary because he was screaming at the top of his lungs Father Rooney said quite forcefully, “Don’t you dare carry that boy out of this church..no matter how loud he gets…. He can cry here anytime he wants…” and Father waited until I sat down again before he continued . and continue he did …with HIS sermon!