![]() ![]() When I was little, there were always two folding chairs in that office for the tellers who counted the offering and a tiny footstool for children like me who liked to sit while their parents sorted checks and stacked cash and added all the figures on an adding machine if we were lucky, there were loose coins to be sorted into envelopes, or, if we were really lucky, enough for a paper roll. When you walk through that crooked doorway into the fellowship hall, you find a sacristy and bathrooms and a kitchen and Sunday-school rooms and a small office. A wonderful thing about the recent renovation of our more-than-hundred-year-old church is that they chose not to right the door, so that even today during worship, I find myself staring at it, although now the pulpit is on its lefthand side. I rarely enter another sanctuary that I don’t first think of that door. Some of my earliest memories are of that doorway: stumbling through it with a me-size stuffed donkey for the pageant one Christmas Eve when I was seven crying as I crossed its threshold toward my godmother’s casket that sat open before the altar ducking through it as acolyte to light candles in the hopeful silence of the congregation. Whenever I walked through, I dragged my fingers up and down its slanted frame eventually, I was tall enough to touch its crooked corners. For a long time, it was right behind the pulpit, so I would watch it during the entire sermon, waiting expectantly for a similar miracle, for the right corner to rise to meet the left or for the left to fall to meet the right. I looked at that door every week during worship. Pitched high on the left and low on the right, the door is uneven, a fact I’ve loved ever since someone told me an apocryphal story about Christ the carpenter helping his father, Joseph, correct a crooked doorframe. I must have found this shocking-not only her decision but the willingness of our parents to abide-though I can’t really summon a memory of how I felt before worship because of what happened after.īack then, the sanctuary of our little country church was divided from the fellowship hall by a single doorway. In fact, she was the opposite of sick: recently confirmed, she had simply decided to exercise one of the rights she understood to be hers through confirmation, namely staying home for no reason other than that she wanted to do so. I come from a churchgoing family, but one Sunday my sister did not go to worship, even though the rest of us did. Here is a story I wasn’t sure my sister would ever let me tell. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |