My friend J called me a few weeks ago. "I want to go to church," she said. Far be it from me to discourage the moralization of any of my friends--we need all the help we can get--so I congratulated her piousness. Of course her statement was really a shrouded request of I don't want to go to church by myself and no one else will go, so you need to go with me. Okay.
But there was more to it: "I want to go to a black church," she said. She thought the celebration for Martin Luther King Jr. Day would be big, mixed in with a little bit of the Barack Obamaness.
She had perused the internet for an hour or two, skipping church web sites that featured racial diversity in their photos, and settled on a church called New Birth?...I think it was New Birth Baptist. So she told me to look nice and she'd pick me up early, she didn't want to miss a minute of it.
J pulled up to my house wearing her traditional body-clinging mini dress, heels, and dark lipstick, this time all topped off with a huge black hat wrapped in a brightly-printed scarf. "There's no point in going to a black Baptist church if you're not going to wear a hat," she reasoned. And really, where else would she get away with wearing the thing? Nowhere.
The bishop at New Birth is also a famed gospel singer, so their congregation is huge. The pews were packed with a crowd where women outnumbered men about 2 to 1, and many of the women had kids with them. Although it should be noted that there were only three of the women wearing hats. What a letdown. J didn't take hers off, she didn't care.
As a Catholic, my church-going years were filled with morose, earnest services where the priest would recite lines and the congregation would recite responses and sing a line or two accompanied by an organ. Stand, sit, kneel, recite, feel guilt. Repeat. There was no smiling, there was no clapping. I eventually joined the choir, just to give myself something to do during the services, and I never adjusted to the lack of applause after we "performed" a song. I didn't think Jesus, Mary or Joseph would have minded the audience showing us a little gratitude for all the work we were doing. But no.
Cut to New Birth: thousands, literally thousands, of people danced in the pews, and clapped, whooped and hollered. The choir swayed in unison, pumping their arms to accentuate certain beats. They had interpretative dancers (?!?) swathed in blue satin sashes, improvising to the rhythms of the songs, running up and down the ailles with their arms stretched to the heavens while flashing full jazz-hands, which added a little glamour. Camera crews ran around the floor, filming especially jubilant people and displaying the images on screens against the front wall.
...and then we walked into the pews. Two rows up, two rows down, the singing stopped.
"Everyone is looking at us," J muttered through clenched teeth. "And I don't think it's because of my hat."
"Is this your first time here?" asked the woman next to me. She had a nice smile, and she put her hand on my arm; she had two kids next to her, looking up at us quietly but confidently with sparkly eyes. I nodded and said yes. She welcomed me there, and went back to singing, enunciating all the words of the song as she looked at me with raised eyebrows. Clearly she was helping me out. So I picked up what I could, and sang along. J just stuck to the words she already knew. "JEEEEEESUS!" she wailed. "...hmm hmm hmmmm LORRRRRD JEEEEEESUS!" And we clapped, clapped, clapped.
As if we didn't know it was coming, the camera crew ran up to our section of pews and plunked down the camera on the tripod. And WHOOM, up on the screen went the two white people, awkwardly clapping along to the music. It wasn't so much that they wanted to show us off; we just stuck out, with me towering over the rows of single mothers and J howling the music beneath her technicolor hat. At the sight of myself on the screen, I froze.The nice lady next to me leaned over and continued feeding me words, lest I not sing while I was on the Jumbotron behind the pulpit and humiliate myself and the entire church by not singing.
The service itself was pretty funny, with the bishop cracking jokes and telling stories. He praised Barack Obama, and the church clapped. He quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., reminding everyone that his "dream" was that someday, things would get better than their current difficult life. The message to his congregation, who scraped together a dollar or two to donate when the baskets were passed, still carries weight today. Will things get better? He couldn't promise that. But sometimes, they can. Everyone nodded, hugged their kids.
And when the singing started, you could feel it.
J had to take a phone call--the service was 2 1/2 hours long, and she had people waiting for her--so when she stepped out, the nice woman next to me look concerned. "Where did she go?" she asked. I explained she would be right back.
"She's very pretty," she said. I agreed, yes she is. I pointed out she was especially proud of her hat.
"Is she your girlfriend?" she asked, after checking my hand for a wedding ring. Deciding to respectfully cast no illusions about my religious worthiness, I smiled as I shook my head. "No."
At this point she took a good look at me, noticed my cute little haircut, my trendy glasses, my clothes. She paused, and understood. She nodded. "Well," she said, "we're all God's children." And she grabbed my arm and squeezed.
We bought 5 boxes of Girls Scout cookies from the table outside when we left.
I'm totally going back.
