(warning: my apologies, but this is an unnecessarily long and boring story. perhaps you should just wait until we talk...)
i finally went to church today, my first time since december. p and i had talked about going for a while, but then i went to spokane, and then i worked, and then i broke up with v.--in short, things didn't quite work out until today. i can't decide what spurred me exactly, because i had plenty of excuses to justify an absence (perhaps, not to be obvious or anything, the fact that i still have not let go of atheism?). but today, dad officially became a deacon (one of fewer than ten) at Bethlehem, and perhaps i felt it would be fitting to attend church here since i couldn't make it home to see him.
maybe i'm lying. perhaps what really spurred me was waking up from a nightmare at dawn today, one that stained my thoughts and prevented me from doing anything useful until i gave in and drove to church. in my dream, oks., tam., you, and i were sitting in a pew at Bethlehem (although it seemed larger--longer, and much darker) and there were several men walking slowly down the aisle towards the back, in our direction. they wore traditional catholic robes (and they weren't russian--Bethlehem wasn't quite itself) and people kept rising from their pews and walking over to them, and having urgent conversations that we couldn't hear.
we soon realized that the robed men were calling the "unsaved" to action--the people rising from their pews were confessing their belief in god/jesus/etc, and then were baptized on the spot. the men, we noticed, were rolling salon-like chairs with headrests that tipped back into an attached basin of water, a sort of portable baptism device.
when the men approached our pew, oks. and then tam. got up and did it immediately (in the dream, they weren't baptized already) and my heart started racing because i haven't been baptized yet and i started thinking like those fire-insurance christians--maybe i don't really believe in this, but what's the harm in pretending, just in case? when the girls returned i walked over, and then saw that the man was one of our regulars at the cafe, a short mid-fifties catholic priest who always makes me squirmy--he has a full beard that's squared at the bottom, and his eyes are rat-like in their distaste for human contact, and he never smiles (and never tips).
so i started feeling uncomfortable, but since i was already there, i sat down. i noticed immediately that the chair was not like those you'd see in a salon--instead, it seemed pulled from a horror film, that chair to which the insane antagonist fastens his victims before he tortures them. there were metal cuffs for the wrists, and ankles, and neck, and i felt my spine prickle. until then, everything had seemed (relatively) normal--i didn't sense evil until it was my turn. i saw that the man was writing something in a notepad--a tally, i realized, of the people he had baptized so far. he finished, turned to me, and began his pitch about accepting jesus.
instantly, i understood that he was trying to reach a quota of some kind, and that the ceremony was a fraud. i started to get up (he hadn't snapped the cuffs around me), but he frowned and shoved me down, then started speaking more forcibly. at this point, everything becomes jumbled--the dream started fading, but the man still wrestled to get me to declare my faith, and started pushing my head into the basin. and like most men in my nightmares, he was stronger--much stronger--than i was, and i strained to nudge his forearms out of my way so that i could leave the chair and run. the rest of the church had disappeared, and he was gaining strength as i weakened. "just say that you believe and it will all be over!" he shrieked, and i woke up.
i don't subscribe to the assumption that dreams hold any meaning, but something like this (i've failed to describe my terror adequately, i'm sure, but the dream was unquestionably real as it unfolded) takes time to dissolve into non-memory. lately i've been writing with an unprecedented frequency, but today (i wanted to dedicate several straight hours to editing) i couldn't think clearly, and after spending most of an absent-minded afternoon starting and abandoning russian and statistics homework, i changed tactics, left home, and went to evening service.
i figured that experiencing a typical, nonthreatening version of church would distance me from the nightmare and reset my acquired neutrality towards religion. i'm not sure that it did either, but i gleaned some inspiration from the sermon and my tension (in response to it? in response to just attending church?) for a future poem or story, so i suppose not all was lost.
and, afterwards i went to powell's and picked up a copy of iowa's literary journal, which i've been meaning to do forever, and then i hung out with molly for a couple hours, and now i'm home and i have half-finished russian homework, and half-finished (honestly, only one-quarter-finished) stats homework, and it's past my bedtime... and really, i can't think of feeling any more normal than this.
No comments:
Post a Comment