god was indeed present, for the freemans were front row, left, with an unobstructed view of the organist’s legs. i was placed between them - the freemans, not her legs - happily corpulent laborers, happily oblivious of their middling place in the assembly’s hierarchy. they came to sway their meat, and sway they did, with me between. pits and lashes, flab and glories, flails. i was the freemans’ charge, their abuse, the extension and union of their joy. when they moved, i moved; when they sang, i sang; when they flailed, i was bruised; when they spoke in tongues, i listened; when they were slain in the spirit, i sat and watched the organist, hoping by my gaze to break her from her sacred keyboard trance and draw a thread from eye to eye in desire’s kingdom.
i have learned over time that all society’s forms - no matter how chaotic they might appear - follow their own internal logic and thus are equally ritualistic and reasonable. each institution judges the other according to its own mores and finds the other wanting in reason, passion, and power. each is utterly right and each is utterly wrong. so is the world diverse and one.
and so the assembly’s effusions of worship followed a code born in the hearts of the people and made and remade incarnate in their daily struggles. the humiliations born in love and assembly line, the degradation of children, these scorns spewed and transcended in that holy place of flight. conform to them and be holy; deviate and be damned. for these laws and transgressions were the chains that held the members above the pit of madness; break them … only night and falling.
though wild to my uptight eyes, the 40 minutes preceding the official onset of the visitation of jesus were tame compared to what followed. if the innumerable hours of song and dancing, word and abandon, were translated to classical score, beethoven’s entire ninth might emerge. pasture and storm, storm and pasture, pasture storm storm; gabriel and apollyon dancing on a field of d minor.
the pre-service was foreplay, backseat petting by those sufficiently experienced to know how to prolong release, for whom the car was just an appetizer in a five-stage extravaganza leading to that divine union that forms the speed bumps of history.
singing, humming, whistling, warbling, they bounced from wesleyan hymn to campfire chorus with the ease of musical chameleons. their favorites were the bars forged in the 1970s. it only takes a spark. kum-by-yah, my lord. god is good, he’s so good, he’s so good to me. we are climbing jacob’s ladder, soldiers of the cross. shine jesus shine. how beautiful are the feet of them who bring good news, good news. and on and on like tv reruns until i thought there could be no more, yet there is more, and the people never tire, and the shape of the service is a circle traversing the sweet swamps of the heart.
this is just the beginning. including the pre-service, they’d sing for never less than 90 minutes, roaming among their favorite 20 choruses like choral cows chewing the cud of familiarity. during this first exuberance, bodies were free but not unbound, volume hopeful but restrained; eyes still showed vestiges of civilization and modesty was the rule.
in the west’s sophisticated culture of inbred irony, where was irony in this house of god? i pictured it in the sweat running from the bodies, evaporating, rising above jake’s and the assembly into the polluted air, condensing into clouds, raining fat drops on university campuses across the west. this is why they sang—in order to defeat modernity, in order to believe. i have never before or since experienced such unity of voice. the choral perfections of the world’s grand music halls seem tainted by the scatological excesses of cash, the crisp symphonic unities of the studio too mediated by technology’s metallic hand. here, abandon. here, belief as it must have been at the beginning of the world.
and always the organist of legs and breasts and everything holy, one with the pedals and keys, one with herself and the people, moving from song to song with the ease of orpheus’ nightingales. in geography class, she was just another pretty, mediocre student, distinctly lower than i on the crass heap of grades. but here, flying like an eagle on the ocean of notes, i was nothing in her sight and she was god’s winged tool.
when the first marathon of song was complete, she sat still on her bench for a minute, as if to give the gods time to rise to their difficult unbroken homes. hands resting demurely on her lap, drained of what drove them. dress damp and disordered. her horrible routine return to humanity. as the organ’s oracle, she had a permanent chair reserved for her, at the back, among the raw divinities. the chairs had metal frames, with spongy plastic black seats and backs, chained to each other in rows so that the people in their lesser moments didn’t steal them. in the spirit of flesh’s democracy, the same chairs were given to all—from the most mediocre sinner to the organist to the heights of rev. weal and sister gooch. so my lyric love placed her divine buttocks on democracy’s plastic, depossessed and still, and i was forced to wait for her return.
i wait, and you will wait with me, for the reader must suffer the writer’s pains, even if at a great distance. did you not know this is why we write - to share our suffering with you? and while we wait, the two old priests intrude with their insinuating discourse.
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