Snuff-spittin’ Jack stood 5′10″ and weighed in at a dainty dozen pounds over 350, with the requisite several chins and greasy black hair. He would occasionally join our circle in the seminary coffee lounge, lumbering through the maze of tables there in The Diet, as it was cleverly and appropriately called, to collapse breathlessly onto a screaming chair. When he got his wind back he’d invariably launch into an impromptu lecture on, usually, the history of Haugeian pietism as if it mattered beyond the classroom. The topic itself wasn’t so bad–it’s good to know the family story, as it were. But the presentation was another matter altogether. It was this that created the moniker, for when he got really jacked up about the topic the shit-brown juices of his snuff sucking squeezed through his teeth and drooled down the corners of his mouth; that is, those that hadn’t already taken a flying spray in the direction of his oratory, causing even me to cover my coffee cup. As a matter of fact, when snuff-spittin’ Jack was around I kept my eyes glued on it, terrified that I might accidentally grab his cup <em>cum</em> spittoon instead, or he might grab mine.
Jack planned on being a missionary to the Dark Continent, and I wondered how Haugeianer history would play among the bushmen of sub-Sahara Africa: ‘today’s sermon is about Hans Nielsen Hauge, who fucked with the Norwegian Lutheran church, and that’s why a particular tribe in the Upper Midwest of the U.S. doesn’t drink booze’, drool, dribble. Upon graduation he spent 6500 in today’s bucks on liturgical garments and accouterments including beyond the normal alb, stoles, chasubles, and home communion kit–crosses, copes, capes, beanies, censors, and vials. Weird shit from my perspective, found only in the back of liturgical arts catalogues. I imagined him decked out in his ecclesiastical finery there in the steaming jungle and flashed on Kurtz in the movie “Apocalypse Now” (and/or Joe Conrad’s literary tale <em>Heart of Darkness</em>) and thought ‘the horror; the horror.’
I heard, though, that he ended up in North Dakota, where there are, in fact, Haugueian Norwegians, and wondered how old Sven and Ole farming out there next to the missile silos enjoyed the display at worship and heard the classic indirection of people who know they’re stuck living together, ‘Vell I’m tinkin’ da floor of da pulpit needs reinforcin’.' ‘Ya. And da steps, too.’
‘Course, I’ve never been known as a fashion plate either on the street or at the altar. The darling tried desperately over the years to keep me looking decent and up to date; she used to buy me ‘outfits’. I don’t do ‘outfits.’ I once bought about a dozen black clerical shirts because I was sick of having to determine my ‘outfit’ for the day. I haven’t bought a suit during this century, my preferred style being khakis and a shirt or, better, shorts and a t-shirt. And even though I know that worship is also a visual art, this attitude carries into my liturgical haberdashery. I’ve been wearing robes in church since I was in the ‘cherub choir’ and we also wore big bows our mothers tied, so decking out for worship isn’t exactly a new and ecstatic experience. Besides, put me in an alb and I look like the pillsbury doughboy. Beyond replacing yellowed and stained albs, the garments I wear are those given me–some handmade–by family and friends when I was first ordained. When I don them it is like being surrounded by this cloud of witnesses; all of them bear as well smudges from the bodies of however many have come through the end o’ worship greeting line over the years.
It’s Tuesday of Holy Week for my tribe of Western Christianity, and The Church is decking itself out in all its liturgical finery to tell the story of a Palestinian peasant who was executed by the state. And then–ta-da–resurrected, whatever that means. (I used to think I knew, but not so much anymore. I suppose that’s why they call it faith; just gotta trust.) They’re doing the whole shebang over in B’mont–Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, Easter Sunday–with choirs and robes and instrumentalists and parades and palms and–get this–quilts. Beautiful quilts made by the half-dozen ancients who still do that and sent off through Lutheran World Relief to provide not only warmth, but sometimes a tent for a home.
This past Sunday we gathered in the narthex to hear the story and begin the Palm Sunday parade. We enetered the sanctuary singing ‘All glory, laud, and honor’ and waving palm branches. Well, okay, those who weren’t pushing walkers or carrying oxygen bottles waved them; the rest just tottered to their seats. Over the pews lay the quilts. We sat against them for worship and blessed them with our touch before they were sent off to perhaps a Palestinian refugee camp. In the name of a Palestinian peasant we care for a Palestinian–or some other–refugee. Those quilts are the liturgical garments of this worship.
I watch our Palm Sunday parade hobble in and hear Flannery O’Connor behind the music singing of the “Revelation” of Ruby Turpin, a hard-scrabble farmer of the Deep South. She’s standing by the hog pen as the sun sets, praying:
A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”
The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.
She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.
A tiny truck, Claud’s, appeared on the highway, heading rapidly out of sight. Its gears scraped thinly. It looked like a child’s toy. . . .
Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faced that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
Larry
