Church

Every Sunday morning my mom went into a buzz of dressing up and hurrying. She loved going to church, the Northwest Church of Christ, a twenty-minute drive across the North Side. We drove past the ornate Angel Guardian Church on the way. A tall brick tower with white stone trim and a steeple, a long building with stained-glass windows, a fancy doorway — I knew how much my mom loved stained glass. From the back seat, I stared up at the tower gargoyles that seemed to revolve against the blue sky. I felt a little queasy. But this church was so much more beautiful than our plain one.

“Can’t we go to that church? It’s so pretty! And we wouldn’t even have to drive.”

“Fran, that’s a Catholic church,” said my mom. “Maybe some of your friends go to church here. It is a beautiful building.”

“Can’t we be Catholic?”

My dad laughed. A few years later, I learned he’d been raised Catholic.

“No, Fran, we go to a Christian church,” said my mom.

This no-frills religion, the Church of Christ, takes the Bible literally. If the Bible doesn’t mention it, this church doesn’t do it. They have plain church buildings, no crosses or beads, no saints, and no flowery memorized prayers. Just the Bible and a preacher. It seemed everyone we knew in the Ozarks went to the Church of Christ. It’s a southern religion. My mom said we were God’s chosen, the only ones who would go to Heaven — or at least, I think that’s what she said. But I was from Chicago, and as far as I knew, everyone in the neighborhood was either Catholic or Jewish or from another country. Surely they were not all going to Hell.  

Like most children under ten, I usually didn’t go to the worship service. I went to Sunday school in a classroom in the basement. We colored pictures of Bible characters, read Bible stories aloud, or put on short skits about Jesus. It felt like busywork and a waste of time, but my main problem was that I froze when called on to recite the weekly Bible verse. My mom was obviously happy and at home at church, talking to her friends afterward. For me, it was a chore that took up half of Sunday and involved wearing a dress. Yuck. I read the weekly Bible verse when the teacher wrote it on the chalkboard, then forgot about it until time to leave for church the following Sunday. 

“You’re such a good reader — it would be so easy for you to memorize one or two little lines,” my mom said. “We’ll work on it in the car.” Sometimes this helped. I knew by heart some of Harriet the Spy’s journal entries, and even some of the quotations of Harriet’s wise governess (“To thine own self be true,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”). But Bible verses weren’t part of an electrifying story like Harriet’s. 

When a baptism was on the schedule, Sunday school was cancelled. The kids and the Sunday school teachers went to the church service instead. I was glad to sit with my parents, although during church my mom seemed stiff and more distant than usual. Her lipstick made her look so different. I could lean on her, and she’d put her arm around me, but we weren’t supposed to talk. 

A curtain was opened “on stage,” revealing a waist-deep tub with flowers around it. The preacher and the baptizee were in the water wearing some kind of gowns. The preacher must have recited a Bible passage or maybe delivered a mini-sermon — but what I recall was that he bent the person over at the waist, face-first into the water. A full-grown adult, dunked.

One day, the baptizee was a thirteen-year-old girl. My mom sighed as the proceedings began, leaned away from me, and murmured something to my dad. I sat on my hands and swung my legs. I was glad I wasn’t up there being baptized, especially if my mom was shaking her head over it.

From the back seat of the car afterward, I asked, “Mom! Am I going to be baptized?”

“Someday,” she said. “Not until you’re an adult.”

I tried to imagine myself as an adult, and saw myself as my mom, only for a split second.  

“I don’t know why this girl’s parents would let her be baptized today,” my mom went on. “Thirteen is too little. She’s not responsible for herself yet.” I couldn’t latch onto a picture of myself at thirteen, either. I would be so big by then.

“She’s not responsible for herself?” I parroted.

“Not really. She’s not a little child, but thirteen is nowhere near an adult.”

Again I pondered “thirteen” and “adult” and saw myself as two versions of my mom, with her wide face, wide shoulders, and short dark hair. In real life I looked nothing like her.

“Why do you have to be an adult to be baptized?” I asked.

“You have to be able to understand what it means.”

I understood that it meant your sins wouldn’t matter as much afterward, and I understood that your sins matter when you die. So I asked, “What if I die before I get baptized?”

My mom glanced back at me. “Fran, you won’t, but anyway you wouldn’t have any sins. Kids can’t sin.”

“Kids can’t sin?” This was new. Usually she told me not to make excuses for things I did wrong, like when I lied about stopping to pick up pretty white rocks from a building’s flowerbed on the way home from school. She wouldn’t stop talking to me and frowning at me until I admitted I had done it and had lied.

“Fran, God wouldn’t punish a child because kids don’t have the understanding an adult has. You don’t know what’s wrong until you learn. Me and Daddy are responsible for you. So no, you can do things that are wrong, but they’re not sins. It would be our sin, not yours.”

My mom was so wise. She knew everything, I thought. I wasn’t sure what “responsible for me” meant, exactly, but I understood that my job was just to be myself, and that I was good. I didn’t forget it. A few years later, when my mom was gone and I felt I could not do anything right, I heard her voice — “a child can’t sin” — and knew that although I wasn’t perfect, I was without sin, and was good.