soon after my conversation with the man of gin and my prayer exchange with ferrelyn, i was invited to be on the board of spring fragrance. my father had had a name of sorts and i was seen as intelligent because i had some degrees and didn’t say very much. the board was comprised of 12 members plus juan and, in the spirit of the age, women and men were equally represented. gender diversity might even have been extended to race except spring was as white as wonder bread.
one can argue, of course, that religion, in any form we’ve gotten used to at least, is a testosterone phenomenon and that christianity, that most ambitious and corporate of religions, is a peculiar product of the pale-skinned races; thus, by extension, any church worthy of its name should be ruled by white men. While this argument is racist, ridiculous and anachronistic, the church, to survive these two millennia, has had to be a most evolutionary beast, making darwin proud in its squirmy adaptability. when latin, it danced latin; when barbaric, it bled barbaric; when scholastic, scholastic; when pomo, it did pomo. humanity may be conquered by worms and machines but the church shall never fail. oh flexichurch. oh savior of a thousand faces.
ok. but at some point isn’t the church’s founding message of radical unity, stark otherworldliness, and prophetic purity so misaligned with its modern manifestations of diffused tolerance, calamari-munching earthiness, and inter-everything dialogue that, in all authenticity, a breach needs to be declared and christianity, its men and whiteness, either sent to another planet or given a decent wake on earth, as friedrich the prophet wrote in the year he went mad. isn’t it time women put their estrogen on the stove of creation and brewed a new religion beyond men’s dreams? isn’t that what we’re all waiting for in our post-auschwitz despair? wasn’t adolf the end of the line? aren’t we tangled with elastics, fishhooks and bubblegum cards in a sealed pocket of history waiting for a troupe of weird seamstresses to unseal us and show us new garments? perhaps. but i wasn’t about to raise these thoughts at my first board meeting. wait a bit, judas … wait a bit.
like a good ceo, macloo had stamped his easygoing jesus on every division, department, taskforce, subsidiary, and vision statement in spring inc. his easygoing pragmatic jesus. his get-things-done religion-in-a-can jesus. branded, blended, packaged, marketed, lifestyle-friendly, smooth as a mocha frap, database-driven, segment savvy, regular, diet, five new flavors, jesus, jesus, fits right in.
jesus of course has always been a fitting-in sort of guy; the only reason he got crucified by the romans or jews or your father or whomever you want to blame was because he was, as they say in the industry, an early adopter. what did he adopt? well, forgiveness for one. niceness for another. all-around mr. smile, for three. it took the majority two millennia, dammit, to catch on. and still, there are those laggards in the east; we fight them for their own good—to help them skip all those centuries of pain we had to go through and jump right to wireless salvation.
unlike, then, dill pickle united church of christ, which was empty the entire week and emptiest during the sunday morning sermon, spring fragrance was perpetually full. there were monday evening programs for divorcees, tuesday evening programs for children of divorcees, wednesday evening programs for struggling homosexuals, thursday evening programs for christian poets, friday evening programs for youth of all ages, saturday evening programs for the bored and golden, and sunday evening pray-a-longs for all. you could book the church all night for fast-and-farts, play bible trivia any afternoon but tuesdays, or pop in 9-5 m-f for a consultation with a spiritual wellness professional. spring hopped like a may pond full of marital horny toads.
naturally, then, according to the principles of good strategic synergy, the board had representatives from the real estate, telecommunications, financial services, biotechnology, higher education, housewife, government and entertainment sectors. nobody higher than senior vice-president, as the most elevated executives, if they admitted to being churched at all, were episcopalian. nobody lower than assistant manager, as the clerical classes were uniformly pentecostal. i was the token under-30 educated male who looked as if he might have something to say. plus, i was networked with ferrelyn who, while not an obvious political force, exerted vast influence behind the scenes as chief purity officer.
the board of a large professional suburban church is exactly like the board of a large professional anything, except that the members have to pray about all their decisions. this complicates the process, as not only do you require a powerful personality, competent persuasive skills, backroom-dealing savvy, sufficient stature and reasonable looks, but you’ve got to know how to pray without appearing unduly insincere. juan did all of these with an understated accomplishment, in a wysiwyg sort of way. he juggled wife, kids, mortgage, god, board members, mistresses, denominational inquiries, staff, and the devil with such aplomb he belonged in some liturgical circus.
the question that arose in my mind considering all this was whether juan was the messiah. whether he might lead me from myself along the jagged trails of salvation to the empty peaks where night and day lay necking. in the kingdom of hope, all things are possible. i had, of course, not discounted ferrelyn as a candidate, but something in me, being young and tethered to transcendence, wanted a messiah with a penis. a grand penis which i could climb, though it broke me, up its ribbed ever-pointing-upward peak in rare atmospheres to the toadstool on which god’s weary feet rest, and i would sit there at the tip of virility and pedicure until the stool sang the heavenly juices and wept the hymn of men.
how fortunate, then, that juan began taking an interest in me. he’d invite me out to lunch, just like he would the corporate men and the disconsolate women, though i was neither corporate nor disconsolate nor capable of very much other than responding to those who had mainlined god. he’d ask me questions in a juan-friendly way and look at me through a sadness that didn’t seem to entirely belong to him. he’d charge the meals to his ecclesiastical expense account and one day at mama’s pizzeria and risotto bar, he invited me to do two things.
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