“Yes, that’s… who I mean. And you know that.”
“What about her son? Is he here?”
“No. I don’t see him either.”
After a beat she asked, “Do you think they blame the church?”
“I hear she’s absolutely destroyed,” Dolores said, jumping into our conversation. “Which is no surprise, Reverend Hessel was so marvelous.”
“Yes, he was,” Nana Cole said.
“Such a charismatic speaker,” Dolores added. The two times I’d met him I hadn’t seen any indication of that.
“Did either of you hear,” she went on. “They’re investigating Reverend Hessel’s death as a hate crime.”
“What?!” I said, a little too loud. People turned around. I lowered my voice and asked, “Why would they do that? He wasn’t a minority.”
“They think he was killed because he was Christian,” she said.
“That’s stupid,” I said. My grandmother swatted my arm. “Who’s they?”
“They,” repeated Dolores.
“The sheriff?”
“No. He’s just a pawn of the governor,” she said.
That was even stupider. What did the governor have to do with it? And, to be honest, I didn’t even know who the governor of Michigan was. Then, a middle-aged woman in a floral print dress got up from a few pews down and came over to us. Dolores quieted down.
Crouching, the middle-aged woman said to my grandmother, “Emma, it’s so nice to see you’re back.”
“Thank you, Sheila. It’s nice to be back.”
Before they could say anything else, the organ music grew louder and the choir shuffled in. Sheila crouch-walked back to her pew. The choir began singing. It was hard to understand the words.
I studied the congregation, trying to determine if any of them might be meth heads. I mean, it seemed a much more likely possibility than a Christian hate crime. The average age of the congregation seemed to be about fifty—which is not to say that fifty-year-old church ladies can’t also be meth heads, it just seemed unlikely.
Before anything even happened, my eyes began to slowly shut. I could tell I was going to have a lot of trouble staying awake. I did not consider it my fault. Yes, I’d taken an Oxy before we left, but still…
In my opinion a topic like eternal salvation is dull as dishwater. I mean, seriously, if there is a God, he put us here with sex and television and magazines and fun drugs and art and all sorts of other wonderful things. And then he wants us to think about the hereafter? I mean, what was wrong with staying here? Shouldn’t the reward for good behavior be another seventy-five years? Seriously, if eternity turns out to be anything like church I plan to take a pass.
As soon as the song was over, Reverend Wilkie walked out. He was in his early seventies, trim, standing tall with a ramrod straight back. Even though he was clearly very old, he didn’t look like someone who’d needed to retire. Especially from a job that probably took a solid four to six hours a week.
Under one arm, he’d tucked what looked like his personal Bible—old and scuffed with a sprung binding. He opened it on the lectern, glanced down, and began, “Today we turn to Proverbs 12:22, and I quote: ‘Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal faithfully are his delight.’
That seems rather straightforward, doesn’t it? If you lie, God hates you. If you tell the truth, God loves you. A simple message, but one that so many of us—no, all of us—have not truly heard. Think back to the last time you lied. Was it this morning? Last night? Yesterday? If you’re telling yourself that you can’t remember the last time you lied because it was so long ago—well, then that’s a lie.
“My grandson, who is nine, would interrupt me here and ask, ‘What about white lies, grandpa?’ And I would tell him that a white lie is still a lie. That God does not say it’s wrong to liemost of the time, he says it’s wrong to lie all of the time. Lying is always wrong. So, white lies are wrong.
“There is always a way to tell the truth. If you quiet yourself and ask God, he’ll show you the way.”
Hmmmm, I thought being in the closet was sort of a lie. Did God want me to come out to my grandmother? Is that how I should interpret this? Did this mean if I came out to her again and she had a second stroke and died, that it’s what God wanted? Maybe God did want her dead. Though I couldn’t say why. If I were God, I’d keep her down here as long as possible. She was that annoying.
Reverend Wilkie continued, though I had trouble paying attention to the rest of it. I kept drifting off. Twice Nana Cole elbowed me. The second time would leave a bruise.
He kept on talking about lying. I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, I got it right off the bat. Lying was wrong. Not a challenging concept. He was basically repeating himself.
When he finally stopped, the choir sang another hymn. This one was numbered, hymn 183, and we picked up the songbooks kept in a rack on the back of the pew in front of us, flipped to the right page, and sang along.
