Real Dead Preacher

I just moved halfway across the country. The four cats and I broke our succession of grim days on the road with a visit to my aunt. Visits to her house were the highlight of my childhood, a place of safety, the unfamiliar delights of a small town to a big city child, being special, and having someone my age and gender to play with.

It was a time of church too, which delighted my starved little soul, because Auntie always invited me during Vacation Bible School week. Mother wouldn't take me to church after the minister supported civil rights.

Cousin Ellie and I talked about those childhood visits. She liked to come to our house for the big city delights. We also talked about her older sister Marta, who'd ended a 30-year struggle with manic depression by walking in front of a train a few weeks earlier.

She was 60; she made it longer than her father (1964, age 45), her aunt/my mother (1984, age 58). A number of other relatives further back cured the disease the same way; I'm under the impression they were younger, but drugs are better these days. Her brother didn't draw the curtain himself, but he died before age 40 from AIDS-related pneumonia, not the thing to do in a flaming Baptist family and town. I've pointed out to God that all this really seems a lot for one family to bear.

Ellie's father shot himself when we were both 12, a few weeks before Marta's wedding. I couldn't remember the exact day; Ellie confirmed that it was within a day of Marta's death. Things we'd never talked about poured out, and most of my visit we spent on the edge of tears. I was taken to the cemetery, the fatal spot on the railroad tracks, the estate sale, and all the other memorials of our lives.

Ellie told me about her preacher's suicide just one year before, how it brought back all the other deaths in our family. The man was on the far side of middle age, the early side of elderly, and he apparently had been overwhelmed by the responsibility for some financing in the church expansion. This was a big Baptist church, and for years it had been building up to the level of a Las Vegas hotel. I couldn't help thinking there might be worse things than having to have a second job to support your preaching habit. When I was a performing artist, I was always grabbing at other jobs to support myself and my son, and I can still feel the strain of being pulled in too many directions, of wishing I could concentrate on just one path, even for just one day. But there's sayings about eggs in one basket too, and maybe I should count the blessings that don't look like blessings too.

Ellie and I had been told over the years by kindly church folk that our parents were burning in hell because they'd committed the unforgivable sin of suicide. We each developed our separate theological carapaces against that. She told me something said at the megachurch guy's funeral that reframed the whole situation for her: "God didn't call him home, but he welcomed him home." Yes! Like when your child goes on the first overnight and gets scared and wants to come home--you don't turn him over to Child Welfare for adoption, you go pick up him up and comfort him.

I thought it a shame that the minister felt that his problem was so overwhelming that no one, not even God, could solve it. That he couldn't take the comfort and advice of his community by sharing the issue.

Then Salon's own Real Live Preacher tells us about his friend Tom, fired from his church job a few days after his wife left him. Maybe Rev. Megaman knew what he was doing after all.
10:49:01 AM    

comment []