Beyond Belief (4 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
Eventually the pastor of the church came in through a side door and rescued us. “Look,” he said, his seminary-trained voice low and soothing, “all you have to do is press on the bar. See?”
We hadn’t realized that the wide metal bars spanning the width of each door would open them. We may not even have seen
them in the dark. He opened the door, and outside a whole bevy of OPs was clucking about how they’d been
trying
to tell us what to do but we’d been so busy carrying on that we couldn’t hear. The pastor shushed them and took Mari and me back in the church, gently insisting that we open the door ourselves, to see how easy it was, so we’d never have to be that scared again.
Seven years later, an American Airlines DC-10 crashed shortly after takeoff at O’Hare, killing that kind pastor and 270 other people on board. I’ve since learned that that bar he showed Mari and me how to use, so common on industrial doors, is called a panic bar.
6. IN WHICH I LEARN THAT CHURCH TRUMPS EVERYTHING, EVEN DEATH
The bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonor; the bodies of the just, by his Spirit, unto honor, and be made conformable to his own glorious body.
—Westminster Confession, XXXII:3
In April of 1973, when I was finishing up third grade, we moved to the East Coast in order to attend a particular Reformed Baptist church, and our church-hopping days ended. But in the months before we left California, my parents more or less settled on one OP church. This congregation convened, of all places, in a mortuary in Cerritos. The building was shaped like a boxy
U
, with the main entrance and a spacious lobby at the bottom of the
U
, the chapel along the right side, and on the left a wing of small rooms, very nicely furnished, that we used for Sunday School classrooms in the morning. The children liked the lobby, which had an indoor koi
pond. We were forbidden to touch the water, but most of us, at some point or other, dipped in a finger or shoe, and a few of the more intrepid kids managed to touch a fish.
The place looked very much like a church, and most of the time we could forget that the building had other uses. But there were occasional reminders, like the evenings we had to wait for a memorial service to conclude in the chapel before we could go in for our evening service. And there was the time one child (I think it was Andy) reported to the wrong classroom for Sunday School and spent some minutes sitting by himself next to an open and occupied casket before one of the adults discovered him.
Then there was the awful smell. This happened rarely—twice, that I specifically recall, both times in the evening. It assaulted us as soon as we entered the lobby. Bitter and cloying, the stench traveled straight up our nostrils and deep into our heads. It corresponded to no previous experience of smell—not to bathroom smells or garbage smells or to any of the industrial odors of Southern California. The nauseating stench of unchanged water in a vase of cut flowers that have died—it was like that, but much, much worse.
“Ew! What is that smell?” the children all asked. One of the mothers said it was a dead fish from the indoor pond, and no one contradicted her. Mari and I knew this wasn’t true. We’d spent the earliest years of our life in Japan. Dead fish did not smell like this. We knew it, and so did all the other children. We knew what the smell was, knew it in an instinctive, olfactory memory of the collective unconscious way. This was the stench of death.
Human
death.
Incredibly, no one would leave. The service would proceed as scheduled. Ladies clapped handkerchiefs to their faces. The men sat upright in pews, manfully inhaling, faces green. The grown-ups instructed us not to complain. I figured out that if I breathed in and
out through my mouth I wouldn’t smell anything, but there was something sickening about this too, as if I were ingesting death. We sat there, enveloped by the stinging perfume of human decay, hissing through the hymns, all of us watching the clock and waiting for deliverance.
The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.
Were we having fun yet?
Why couldn’t these people, who had not the slightest hesitation about telling their children that they would burn forever in hell when they died, be honest about the real-world manifestations of physical death? Here, surely, was the real “end” of man—dead, breaking down into volatile organic compounds, a mortician’s project. Talk about a powerful object lesson. But all we got by way of explanation was dead fish.
I was a logical child, a legalistic child, a self-righteous pain-in-the-ass of a child. So I wondered: If Ananias and Sapphira were struck down dead by God for telling a lie in church, why were all of our parents still alive? But I did not say this aloud. By age nine I already suspected that much of what people said—even Christians, even parents, even Reformed Baptist and Orthodox Presbyterian parents—was not to be relied on. But I also understood that they could not help themselves. They may have been elect of God from before time, but they were still, after all, totally depraved.
T
he oldest of us is Donny. He’s twenty-two, and even though this is only my second time meeting him, I’m already enamored. The first time we met was at church, the one time I visited with Hope a few weeks ago. Donny’s got this black hair styled up in a stray-cat-strut swirl and milky white skin, smooth—and warm, I’ll bet. His eyes are so blue I have to look away when he greets me at the door and says, “Come on in.” His gaze makes me blush. Donny’s roommate, Ted, is beautiful in his own right, with sandy hair and hazel eyes that sparkle when he says your name, but he doesn’t have that edgy, forlorn expression that Donny wears. I’m a sucker for forlorn. It runs in my family.
At only fourteen I’m the youngest in the group. I’m even younger than my best friend, Hope, who is also fourteen but whose birthday is almost a month before mine. There are thirty of us in
all, but I know only Hope and Donny and Ted so far. After Donny invites us in, Hope makes her way around the room greeting everyone. I take a seat in the circle next to a girl with extra-white hair, thick glasses, and eyes that flutter around like she couldn’t hold them still even if she tried. She’s an albino; I can tell because you can practically see right through her skin. She says Hi and It’s nice to meet you and My name is Hedda, what’s your name? I tell her and then we look away from each other and pretend to study the carpet.
Donny and Ted’s place is in the basement of somebody’s house and it’s super ugly. The rug is don’t-look-too-close-or-you’ll-find-gross-stuff-down-there maroon and the walls are paneled with wood. Hanging next to the front door is a velvet picture of Jesus holding an electric guitar. The picture glows in black light. I know this because as soon as everyone is seated, Donny plugs his own guitar into his amp and turns down the lights. Only one lamp stays on and it has this pulsing, buzzing bulb that radiates a purple luminosity—I love that word,
luminosity.
Anyway, the velvet Jesus becomes brilliant and his red guitar shimmers—Donny’s that is, not the guitar in the Jesus picture. Jesus’s guitar disappears when the lights are low and turns into a shepherd’s staff. It’s cool.
Even though the apartment is small and cramped and smells like mold, it’s the only place we can all go out of adult earshot. Since Donny and Ted are the youth pastors at Hope’s church and are considered adults, the main pastor has given his approval for youth group to meet here. I’m glad because if my mom found out I was going to church, she would flip a switch. This way, I can go to church service without lying, exactly.
Donny leads us through about five choruses. I don’t know the words, but I think it’s awesome the way everyone sings like they’re singing love songs, with their eyes closed and swaying. Only, I’m a
little embarrassed when kids start raising their hands in the air like they’re reaching for something they can’t quite get to, even on their tippy toes. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look. They seem like they’re doing something private, like when you touch yourself at night, but they’re doing it here right in front of everyone. I close my eyes, too, so no one catches me watching.
The guitar gets really quiet. Donny picks out a gentle melody, and I open my eyes. He’s got his eyes open too, and he sees me looking at him and winks. I’m totally in love with him even though I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be since he’s the youth pastor. Closing my eyes again, I suddenly hear somebody near me talking quietly in what sounds like a foreign language. Hope told me about this. She says it’s called “tongues” and that it’s a sign that God lives in your heart when He’s given you the ability to talk in a foreign language you’ve never learned. She says it might be an earthly language that somebody can translate or it could be a heavenly language—the language of the angels—so you can pray things to God that you don’t even know you’re praying.
This is why I’ve come tonight: to get the gift of tongues. Hope says I’ll feel better if I have God’s special prayer language. Although I’m skeptical, I could really use a direct line to God because the way I’ve been praying in my own Baptist church isn’t changing anything. In fact, things are getting worse. Two weeks ago, my mom put me on restriction for raising my eyebrows when she accused me of being more interested in my Baptist friends than I was in our family. I only raised my eyebrows because it was such a ridiculous thing to say, but she sent me to my room and told me I was never to go back to that “cultish brood” again. They were making me “contemptuous and disrespectful.” She came up to my room later and saw me reading my Bible, which flew her off the
handle for good. She nabbed it away, right out of my hands, and stalked out of my room, slamming the door behind her.
I’m hoping that if I get God’s special prayer language, my mom will let me go back to church and that maybe she’ll even come with me and get saved herself. That’s why when, after the singing stops, and after Ted reads from the Bible about how “bad company corrupts good morals” and then tells us the story about how he actually
stopped
drinking when he turned twenty-one because God told him to, I start to get nervous. Hope told me it’s always after the “message” that God baptizes people in His Holy Spirit. That’s what you call it when you start to speak in tongues. It comes from the Bible story about how the flames of the Spirit came down from heaven on the heads of all the believers at Antioch and they all started talking in foreign tongues.
I’m sitting next to albino Hedda when Ted finishes speaking and I’m looking around for flames, which I imagine look like holograms, like those cartoon images projected on the mist at the late show in Disneyland. But then Donny goes, “So, like always, we’re prepared to pray for anyone who would like to receive the Holy Spirit tonight.”
And Hope pops up her hand and she’s like, “Oh, Cami wants it, I think. Right, Cami?”
Donny looks at me, and I can hardly even stand how blue his eyes are. “Pull your chair into the center of the circle, Cami.” All twenty-nine pairs of eyes are looking at me and I’m completely mortified of course, because I know that half of them are looking at this gigantic pimple I have nestled beside my right nostril. But I also really want to get the baptism of the Holy Spirit because I need the direct line to God that everyone else in the group has, so I go ahead and pull my chair into the middle of the room.
I don’t really know what to expect, but Hope is next to me
saying, “Don’t worry about anything. This’ll be really great.” Once my chair is settled squarely in the center of the room, everyone stands and circles around like they’re all looking at a cute little puppy or something. It’s pretty weird to have so many people standing that close to me. I have trouble getting a breath. In my family we’re not very touchy-feely, and I’m not sure how it’s going to be to have my whole body covered with hands. But it’s not so bad. Some kids kneel around me and grab my ankles, my shins, my knees. Other kids stand behind me and put a palm up against my back or my shoulder. Pretty soon, most of me is covered. Hope puts her hand on my head and runs her fingers through my hair the way she sometimes does at school during play practice when we’re all sitting backstage giving each other back rubs before Mrs. Doling arrives to get things started.