House of Prayer No. 2 (28 page)

No one looks at you funny during a hymn; everyone else is standing and clapping and singing, you remain seated in your pew. The constant up-and-down is hard on your back and knees. There is no hymnal, and you only know a couple of them by heart anyway. Sometimes during the singing you sing, sometimes you sit and pray, and sometimes you are just sitting there looking at your watch, computing rental car return and security time because, with your metal hips, you will always have to be patted down at the terminal. The services at House of Prayer No. 2 usually run more than three hours, the nearest airport is an hour away in Norfolk, and often you have a Sunday night flight back to California.

When you stand and give your testimony during the time to testify, everyone probably knows what you are going to say; you are grateful for the prayers Pastor Ricks and the congregation send to you and your family in California, especially the prayers they send to help your eldest son with his physical condition, you are grateful for your prayer-warrior mother, and you are grateful for your relationship with Pastor Ricks, with whom you share your faith walk over long distance, the Holy Spirit a function on your cell phone, some days you can almost count down
three, two, one
when the phone will ring and it will be Pastor Ricks calling. When you tell him about your stumbling faith walk, Pastor Ricks listens and doesn't offer platitudes, he offers narratives, and it comforts you, even in his first words as he begins,
Well, you know, when Joseph was perplexed …

ON THIS DAY YOU SIT
on a hard pew and you are cold, and when you try to pray, your mind wanders to back taxes and sex, hardly the smoky burnt offering of prayer rising pleasant to the nostrils of God.

You had recently made one last run at the seminary, had asked for and received from Ben and from Will letters of recommendation, and had been narrowly accepted. There was a problem with your thirty-year-old college transcripts, and it was hard to explain to an admissions office person in Pasadena why you failed Sculpture 101. The woman teaching the sculpture course with the two little dachshunds that pissed everywhere in the studio had wanted a spike driven through a perfect ball of clay, and you had turned in Nat Turner hiding in a tree-root cave with his sword and the head of a child in a burlap sack, historically unsubstantiated.

On the eve of your first day of classes at the seminary, your wife had gone into labor and delivered naturally, without drugs, as she had with your other two sons, and the ten-and-a-half-pound third son's cannonball-sized head had split her pelvis. Shuffling through the house in a tightly cinched orthopedic corset, she, as well as your new son and your other two sons, was dependent upon you, and seminary would have to wait for at least two more years according to the cycle of when Hebrew 101 was being offered, a prerequisite.

You had returned to television writing and sought out a spiritual community in Hollywood, though the people you had met so far were more interested in television shows and movies in
which people of faith protected souls by fighting teen idol agents of Satan, fire-breathing dragons, Muslim hordes, and supersecret cells within the government. The problem for you is that, like your favorite writer, Flannery O'Connor, you believe the biggest threat to your soul is
you
.

When you can, you come home to Virginia; you still think there is an untold story in the story of Nat Turner, whose skin you had once touched nailed upon the board in fifth grade. Lately in your town there has been renewed interest in Old Nat. The black community is talking about raising a monument to him as a counterbalance to the concrete Confederate memorial in the park. The white folks have answered, Are you kidding? The guy was a mass murderer.

One Sunday you are sitting in the church of Pastor Ricks, a man who, like Nat, is considered by his congregation to be a prophet. Like Nat, he has had visions in the clouds at night. In one vision, Nat saw black and white spirits in struggle. Pastor Ricks says he has seen a figure of Jesus so tall that the moon was a small white disk on His shoulder. In his vision, the heavens open, and all people on the earth are revealed to be worshipping this Christ, and in a dream Pastor Ricks has seen all people of all races and colors watching a movie, and he says he hopes one day it is a movie you will write.

On one Sunday afternoon, Pastor Ricks's sermon is from Genesis. Some Baptists you have known don't usually dwell in the Old Testament; they prefer the good news in the New Testament. You have found plenty of good news in the Old Testament in the stories and the people God has chosen to work His Mysterious
Ways: Moses,
murderer;
Rahab,
whore;
Abraham,
wife pimp;
David,
adulterer and murderer;
Elisha,
slayer of children
. It is hard for you to place Nat's theology, though it must have been rooted in the Old Testament somewhere. In your research you have located his sword and the rope from which he hung before he was decapitated, skinned, boiled into fat, and cut into pieces. You have discovered that Nat and his confederates killed fifty-six white people in two days with mostly axes and hand tools, at one point slaughtering ten schoolchildren and their teacher and stacking their bodies in one pile and their dismembered limbs and heads in another. This may be a story that needs retelling, but it is not a movie that will ever be made in Hollywood, even with the slavery backstory and the third-act slaughter of innocent blacks in the bloody, retributive aftermath.

This Sunday you are sitting in a hard cold pew, and you wish you had the passion for Christ of the people around you. They are poor, and in their testimonies you hear of lives that are often dire. They are singing and clapping, and you are cold.

The sermon begins in Genesis, because this is a Pentecostal church and God resides in the Word. The Word that morning is Genesis 28:16 concerning Jacob—
father deceiver, brother betrayer
. You've always had a fondness for Jacob with his bad hip, have always had an ear out for what it might mean to you. You're familiar with his story—Jacob is the guy who stole his brother Esau's birthright by covering himself with lambskin to fool his blind father, Isaac. His mother put him up to it. When she saw that Esau was probably going to kill Jacob, she told him to flee and he did so, taking only his stick. Just before crossing
the Jordan, he slept with a rock pillow, and God showed him the famous ladder to heaven, though it was probably terraced steps. And Jacob awoke out of his sleep, and he said,
Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew
it
not
. A great negotiator, Jacob cuts a deal with God. Jacob promises to tithe ten percent of all he has if God will bless him on his journey to save his skin, being spun back at home as a wife hunt. And Pastor Ricks ties it in with Genesis 31:13, when the angel of God tells Jacob it's time to go home.

Pastor Ricks's sermon is about Jacob's spiritual beginnings, and how the world will try to erase your spiritual beginnings, and how sometimes it is necessary to go back to where one's spiritual journey began.

Pastor works the theme until he is certain the saints are understanding. When Pastor Ricks dwells on the message, massaging it just so, he says,
Let my coals burn in the fire a little longer, somebody tell me one thing
, and somebody usually says,
Tell it, Pastor Ricks
.

At the gathering of the offerings, a small wooden table is brought out, and pew by pew you file up with your money, and you see that most of the bills are dollar bills with an occasional five or twenty, and there is also plenty of change. Your mother says on the ride home how refreshed she feels, but that day your cold bones felt the time tick past. You remark to her from your small heart that you think you'll start tithing again so at least House of Prayer No. 2 can buy a decent space heater.

WHILE YOU ARE HOME
, Pastor Ricks tells you about some land he's got his eye on that he's heard is selling for cheap, a possible tract to buy for a new church someday. He's been out looking for land like this for a while, and the bargains he sees listed are bargains for a reason. Some of the acreage is wetlands and some is in the floodplain. Your town has just had a five-hundred-year flood, water rising in the middle of town at six inches an hour when a hurricane stalled over the swamps to the north and west and the rivers full of rain and snakes spilled their banks so that downtown was under twelve feet of water.

You ride around with Pastor Ricks looking at land and see a sign for some riverfront acreage that is freshly bulldozed from the buildings the flood had ruined. You can probably get that land cheap; the owner is a man who is rich and has been known as benevolent in land giving in the past. It turns out that you can get the land cheap, though when you gently hint through back channels wouldn't it make a nice donation since a church will be built there, the price remains the same. City hall says you can build there, but you'd have to build a structure on pilings with a floodgate beneath. There's some property across the street from the church, but its backside runs down to the river as well.

You don't really see the need for a big new church. Some of the Sundays you've been at House of Prayer No. 2 there have only been a handful of people. A new church is a good idea for the future, a dream, a vision. When you get back to California, you begin to send your little trickle of ten-percent tithes to the place, hoping it will go toward getting the toilet fixed or that new space heater.

ONE NIGHT PASTOR RICKS GIVES TWO MEN
a ride out in the county, and one of them tells him of a church being built by convicts, so Pastor Ricks goes out there the next day, and, sure enough, inmates from a local prison in orange jumpsuits are building a church. Pastor Ricks finds out it's a new program for trustees with building skills—brick masons, carpenters, electricians, construction workers—to work off some time in exchange for their labor. All you have to provide are the building materials.

God honors faith, and even though he has no land on which to build or money for materials, Pastor Ricks puts his name on the prison's building list and hires an architect to draw up plans for a new church.

None of this makes sense to you when you talk to Pastor Ricks about it long-distance. When you call him and ask him how he's doing, he always says,
We're still believing in God and continue to look to the Lord for greater things
, except there's a new excitement in his voice when he says it now. You're a little worried. Pastor Ricks is an honest, godly man, and you personally know some of the men who own some of the land he's been looking at, and these men are worldly businessmen who would not flinch at selling a pastor a piece of swampland for the price of prime. But Pastor Ricks's faith is far greater than your own. When he sees marshy vegetation on one tract of land, he calls the Army Corps of Engineers, who come and take a soil sample and say he's right, this land is prone to flooding according to the geologic record.