I don’t care much for church goin’.
Mom likes to go but the church she likes to go to is in town which she would
have to drive to and would cost gas money she doesn’t want to spend and,
besides, there’s lots to do on the farm so she doesn’t really have time. Mostly
I like that she doesn’t go because she usually cooks a big dinner on Sundays.
She took me to the church in town
Easter. It’s a nice church with big stained glass windows. Mom said it was
stained glass but I can’t figure out how you can stain glass and it was all
different colors and shapes making up pictures of people in the Bible I guess.
In front of where we were sitting
were a whole bunch of gold pipes standing on end, all different sizes some of
them as big around as our toilet vent pipe and different lengths, too. Mom said
they were organ pipes and that I’d hear the sound come out of them when the
music started and, boy, did I! That music felt like it was inside of me
vibrating my pipes and then a bunch of people came in and lined up right in
front of the pipes and they waited a little while and then they let out a whoop
and started singing. It sounded nice and then everybody stood up and started
singing the same song from books that were right in front of us. I took out a
book and mom handed me the one she was singing from and pointed to the place
where the words were but I didn’t really get into it.
The minister got up and read from
the Bible about Jesus getting killed and how his mother went to the grave
and…no, wait, it wasn’t his mother; it was another woman named Mary. I guess
that was a pretty common name back then and anyway he was gone from the grave.
It was a pretty interesting story. Then they found him walking around though
they didn’t recognize him at first and I wondered what he was wearing since the
stuff he had been buried in was still in the grave and later when Thomas, who
said he wouldn’t believe it until he saw it did see Jesus and he put his hand
in the hole that had been poked in his side and blood and guts had poured out.
Anyway after he read this story he sat down and the organ played and some men
passed around trays with little glasses of grape juice and other men passed
around trays with little squares of white bread and Mom told me to hold the
bread and juice. Then when everybody had some the preacher got up again and
told us the grape juice was Jesus’s blood and the bread was his body and we
were supposed to drink his blood and eat his body which I thought was pretty
yucky but I did it. Then there was some more singing and then the preacher got
up and gave a speech about Jesus and going to heaven and that Jesus was sitting
on the right hand of God and that we could all go to heaven because Jesus had
showed us the way. Tell you the truth I was pretty glad to get out of there.
On the way home Mom asked me how I
liked it and I said it was OK. I didn’t really like it except for the windows
and girls and women dressed up in dresses and stocking and their hair all done
up pretty. What I didn’t like was that I had to get dressed up in a suit and
tie. My grandma gave me the suit for my birthday and said it was my birthday
suit which got everybody laughing and so it’s always called my birthday suit
which is a joke because everybody says I’m in my birthday suit when I’m naked
‘cause that’s the way I was born. I think my other grandma started that back
before I can remember.
Dad asked what I thought of church
and I told him the windows were awful pretty and I described the organ pipes
but I thought the rest was pretty boring. I told him I wasn’t too happy about
drinking Jesus’ blood after Thomas had stuck his finger in it which made him
laugh. It seemed like he already knew the story. I asked him what he thought of
heaven and he said he didn’t think much of it. He said he was busy enough
worrying about this life to get involved with another one which made sense to
me.
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