The service is okay up until the sermon. Pastor Carle dons his half glasses and climbs to the pulpit. Within minutes it’s clear that bringing Matt here was a terrible mistake.
“We all make choices in our lives. We all have reckless, material desires and to indulge them would lead us away from the truth we know as God.”
No, no, no. Why did it have to be a sermon like this for my first one back, Matt’s first one here? The weight of it all presses on me.
“Christian faith demands our strength in resisting the lures of this material world. It requires us to dig deep and find the core of our values, maintain contact with that deeper self, in the midst of all the noise, amid all the attractive and shiny baubles that fight for our attention every minute.”
It isn’t a sermon about same-sex desire, not explicitly, but that’s all it sounds like to me. Pastor Carle’s voice is urging me: Resist. Be strong. Pretend the long, lean thigh of the boy sitting next to you isn’t pressing yours gently. Pretend you didn’t sleep with his head on your shoulder. Pretend your every cell isn’t crying out to him even now.
“Sin,” says Pastor Carle, “is separation from God. The longer we sin, the more we indulge our base, wanton humanness, the further we get from His grace. The harder it becomes to see His light, the light of the cross, the solace of a faith community.”
Solace. My eyes skim the backs of the heads filling the congregation. Would they hesitate to stone me if they knew my true heart?
Light. I glare at the pale pinkish yellow light glowing from behind the raised wooden cross above the altar. It’s glaringly artificial in its neon-ness, a rectangle of bright electric bulbs. There’s a knob right there in the pulpit the speaker can twist to make it brighten or dim according to the word of the moment. The glow is not the glow of the cross. It’s theater.
“When we succumb to our sin, this solace escapes us. We fumble around in the darkness, and in the absence of God we suffer death again and again. He grieves us, until the moment we heed His call and see His light once again.”
Solace. Matt’s thigh against mine, keeping me grounded in this place, tethered to a reality I no longer know how to escape. One I can no longer pretend into nonexistence.
Light. The soft glint in the whites of Matt’s eyes as he looks to me. Raising a brow in a way I know means You okay?
I’m not. I’m not okay. Not this minute. The light in me is more of a fire, a blaze catching the wind of the Holy Spirit. It’s much like the can’t-sit-still, my-heart-is-alight-with-something-bigger-than-myself energy that fuels an altar call. If I was faithful I might surge to my feet with my hands pressed up, as if to touch God, crying out words of commitment to His name.
As it is, I leap up and run.