the service is not over. the service curls around itself until time loses count and the women’s buttocks bulge with forgiveness. all that has happened is the longest choral foreplay since the world was sung into existence. all that has happened is that rev. weal has preached everyone into a white trance. as he winds down, as this channel of the higher powers gets clogged with mortal limitations, his tongue dries, his french fry legs give way, the people rise to the occasion and assume the responsibility of the show’s climax. group jesus takes over. someone - maybe it’s sister hoom with her knees and elbows, maybe brother blitt with his throat - moves, subtly, gently, as if challenging a lesser by-law of the lower heavens, from seat to aisle, one, perhaps boldly two, hands raised, hips in rhythmic dialogue with the organ, an expectant jesus jesus roused from the collective lips in harmonic grace. it has begun, the final bliss and march to glory.
an hour or two, it doesn’t matter; the people need the floor.
sister hoom steps out. lifts a leg, her skirt sliding to reveal a pallid bony knee. hallelujah, someone shouts, but not too loudly. the lord has arrived in his collectivity. brothers blitt and szerpo close behind. dimpled arms reaching toward the father of all things that die; dimples dimpling, the worries of used metal dim and fading fast.
what’s the magnet that draws the people from their comfortable padded seats into the surging sweaty mob growing in the aisle? sure, it’s the herd instinct - would you be the lone bovine in the thistle field while the other happy cows frolic away to munch on daisies? yes, it’s the depravity of sweat - of juicy limbs oozing, squishing, singing - armpits in their manifold concavity and moisture, the rubbing joy of a wet hip through a damp translucent skirt, the face of a man so given to god he’s oblivious to the dripping eyebrows, the riparian competitions on his cheeks, lips a breath away, lost and fervid and ribald as a bonobo. it’s the altar too, the name given to the stage which holds the pulpit and rev. weal, presently recovering his tumescence, a stage significant in area but not in elevation, rising only six or seven inches above the floor of the common penitents, and the large open surface before and to the sides of the stage, which draws the people now with its promise of freedom and the ancient power of its name.
oh, it’s the herd and the sweat and the altar, yes, it’s the mass and the negation, the fast forgetting of the self, the privilege of being present at the mating of nature and spirit, even being a necessary conduit, the genes and tongues of that mating; all of us, here, many but one, loosened like long hair, taut as lust. but it's also the orgy, this fathomless orgy of god. the people together in their blood, their pulsed confusion, the thickness of their flesh; they are a single phallus and jesus a quivering cunt, the sky split and raining joy. this is spiritual copulation at its finest - if you haven’t done it, you haven’t lived.
penetration, though, has not yet been attempted. all at the beginning is slurps and licking, hints to heaven that today is the lord’s day and on the lord’s day the people go all the way. jesus, like a renewable virgin, needs time to spread himself; the divine precipitation requires considerable effort … but god … it’s worth it. you, my mortgage-laden reader … you know it’s worth it: the sweat, all those words and lunches, that strange negating.
and so the people form lines of deluge, and march around the sanctuary’s perimeter, like joshua’s motley gang around the mighty jericho. what walls tumble now though, in this virtual century? the walls of the soul, my friend, the walls of the soul. as they march, seven times circling, always seven times, brick by brick their souls collapse; their bodies follow, laying exposed and rapt and vulnerable and desolate and beautiful. here, god lies in his thoughts of incarnation. here god lies in terrible unity.
as the post-sermon marching and singing morph into the after-service, the tempo picks up, decibels leap. rev. weal is revived from his word ennui and calls out for the gross and the sinful to give their hearts to jesus and be saved. and who is not gross and sinful? who does not have a heart that might be given to the grand poobah of love? to jesus, jesus, fallen children, to ride the crescendos piling in the silos of heaven. a feast for you, special you, in god’s fat granaries.
the noise and laughter give the spirit freedom to roam more boldly, seeking faithful and faithless alike to slay, like some mephistophelean samurai. people shout and jump on chairs. they bound onto others’ backs and race in circles of abandon. flesh follows spirit’s lead. shoulder straps slip and aren’t replaced. zippers mysteriously relax. a heap of socks and shoes and bras grows at the altar’s right, offerings of emptiness. washroom visits become plentiful and even sister gooch forgets to count. a nipple here, a buttock there, all is god’s.
and half a foot above the others, rev. weal rides jesus like some cosmic cowboy who hasn’t heard the news that the world’s been paved over and the horses slaughtered. and as the end draws nigh, my organist’s dress clinging to her with sweat’s embrace, i would trade my soul to be that clinging cloth. a blur of spiritual abduction, whirling, perfect, purple, wholly aloof and pure … my sweet and holy musician has 98 fingers, 19 feet, 42 eyes, and 10,000 cunts. the organ is the galaxy and she uses every digit and hole to play the stars. oh, she is music, my carnal portal, i the contaminated air.
at the end, when climax hops over climax in some transcendent game of leapfrog, her dress cast aside and she stands naked, dripping with god on the bench of righteousness, her 105 toes dancing out the scales of heaven on the organ of truth, her head tilted back out-laughing hell, eyes leaping like lunatic jack-in-the-boxes, breasts clapping heaven’s exultant rhythms, buttocks round and brazen trumpeting the code of god. the people move, panting, coils of some simian consciousness, clefs of joy and forgetting, effigies of wanton pain. the cars parked outside jake’s weep and cleanse the streets of chocolate bar wrappers and condoms, the parking meters dance and shout praise. god’s thick girls braiding their lechery, forlorn boys of eternal nothingness hoping to climb those braids of truth in the name of whatever name is required. the assembly is one and perfection and i am a goose being fattened for love.
let the skyscrapers rejoice, all things are holy.
let the sewers leap, the world is the lord’s.
the bars and beer belong to the heavens,
let every creature dance and praise the unknown name.
as the spent bacchants and their men leave in post-coital exhaustion, a few spirit-stricken devotees remain, comatose on the mid-afternoon floor. they wait like zombies on mushrooms for the evening service, hard on time’s horizon, to prick their souls, resurrect their flesh, and remind them why this sojourn in this cruel and foreign world.
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