Every week there is bread on a table in the middle of the room. But this is not a gathering of St. Lydia’s. It’s a rehearsal for a radical marching band I’ve joined. We’re called the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. Every Tuesday night, a collection of tattered activists in thrift store sweaters wheel up on bicycles rigged to carry a trombone or saxophone, backpacks stuffed with sheet music. This is where I learn to be an activist. And, to be honest, a Christian.
My first night I hustle down a flight of stairs into a cramped basement studio and open the door to a clatter of noodled notes and overtones. There are four sections: low brass, woodwinds, trumpets, and percussion, all facing toward each other in a sloppy square. In the middle of the room is a wooden table, and on the table there is always a loaf of bread, pulled from someone’s bike bag. As more people arrive, other offerings of food are set on this slapdash altar.
“You eat dumpster-dived?” someone might ask before handing me a blood orange or a slice of black pepper salami, as if they’re inquiring if I’m vegetarian or gluten free.
“Yup,” I answer, receiving their offering in a cupped hand.
Dumpster diving is illegal, but if you know the right places you can make out like a bandit and feast like a king. Band members bring entire bags of firm grapes, bars of gourmet chocolate, and bags of almonds, all in pristine condition and one day past expiration.
Adjacent to a gaggle of gleaming sousaphones, I sit at the back of the low-brass section with my trombone and survey the room. The players are bearded and scruffy, at ease in their bodies. A clarinetist leans a head on a friend’s shoulder and rubs their back. The group is gorgeously Queer, bypassing gender norms. We go around the circle and introduce ourselves with names and our pronouns, a practice that’s new to me. I’m supposed to manage to memorize both, which feels daunting. From there, band members take turns leading rehearsals. Changes are scribbled down on sheet music that will inevitably be lost in the cavern-like rehearsal space. We spend a good portion of each rehearsal reconstructing what we decided the last time about whether or not we’ll repeat the B section.
A lot of the players live in communal houses, sharing kitchens and bathrooms and making big one-pot meals on rotation for everyone. They live cheap so they can dedicate their lives to activism. Practically off the capitalist grid, they buy almost everything used or trade for it, making and repairing household items. They always have someone to crash with. Their support networks extend across the country and around the world.
It strikes me that their lives look more like what Jesus was talking about than just about anything I’ve ever seen in church. They’re like a secular monastery, living like Christians did in the first few centuries, sharing what they earned and making sure everyone was fed.
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra adopts me, despite my lack of body hair. They’re always reminding me that we already have everything we need to live. That what looks like deficit to the rest of the world is brimming with abundance to them. Being in the band shows me that what others have thrown away might be enough for a feast.
Jesus, too, had a habit of making enough from a little. Some spit on his hand and a scrape of dirt are enough to make a blind man see. That’s all he needs. A few loaves of bread and a couple of fish become a meal for a multitude. When the wine runs low, turns out water can serve in a pinch. The most important thing is that the party keep going. It doesn’t matter how little you’ve got, somehow it’s enough when God’s at the table.
I didn’t join the Rude Mechanical Orchestra to become a better Christian, though. I was hoping to make friends with someone who wasn’t part of my church. Or maybe, just maybe, meet someone who didn’t send me 3:00 A.M. texts that read, “hey wut R U doin U hot baby.”
Things are rough on the dating front. There are some for whom the Pastor Thing is a no-go. Others seem to fetishize my role, or imagine I can heal or redeem them. One, who initially seemed attracted to my sense of power and authority, turned out to be threatened by it. Another had a subconscious notion that dating a woman of the cloth would make him a better person and fetter the rage he carried. These relationships started out with fiery intensity before explosively flaring out in showers of fights and fireworks.
Now I’m in a long dry spell, punctuated by first dates that rarely produce a second. I zip myself into alluring clothes, feeling like a carbon copy of myself, and try to arrange my body into pleasing, nonchalant poses. I’m extraordinarily bad at dating. I have a tendency to ask academic questions that make dates resemble college entrance interviews. Or I go too deep too fast, acting like a pastor instead of a person. “That must have left you feeling really abandoned,” I’ll say, instead of talking about, I don’t know, a movie. I don’t understand how to flirt. I always text back too soon. I always need too much.
Rachel fields a deluge of fretful anxiety concerning my lack of a dating life. She has men trailing her through the aisle when she’s picking up an angled paintbrush, or asking for her number on the R train, and seems to be an expert on all things attraction.
“You’re dressing like a church lady,” she tells me bluntly one day and drags me off to shop. In an effort to up my game, she stuffs me into skinny jeans and a leather jacket and tells me I look cute. I believe her. I can’t even tell how wrong I feel.
They’re afraid you’ll try to convert them, Mieke says.
They assume you don’t have sex, my friend Tim offers.
You just haven’t met the right person, another friend opines. She is, as yet, unjaded.
I get drunk and make out at parties and on street corners. I log on to OkCupid and upload the few pictures of me not at church. I revise my profile, reaching for a voice that doesn’t sound propped up or needy. In return, pictures of strangers’ dicks show up every morning in my inbox. I write people and never hear back. I hear back, then tell them I’m a pastor, and then never hear back. We kiss, but they never call back. Maybe they thought better of it.
It’s funny how deficiency and abundance can live side by side. My life is rich in so many ways. Everything around me is beautiful: tables piled with home-cooked meals and a church full of smart, thoughtful people. There is enough of so much, and more than enough. But pastors experience a strange doubleness. Our relationships with congregants are a one-way street. Our role is a professional one, like a counselor and a teacher rolled into one. I am often vulnerable with the Lydians, but I can’t call them up after a bad day for a good cry. It would muddy the waters of our relationship, make them feel they have to care for me. I created a church because I was lonely, but in the act of leading it, I’ve ended up alone.
A thought won’t stop nagging at me, like a persistent mosquito. Maybe there’s something wrong with you. The only thing in my life that doesn’t feel like enough is me.
The Miracle of 304 Bond Street
The real-estate agent and I stand together inside the empty storefront. Ductwork runs overhead like a network of highway overpasses. The fuse box hangs open. In the back left corner the agent shows me the bathroom: a lone, exposed toilet standing next to a sink hookup.
“Just put up some drywall and you’re done!” he tells me optimistically.
The place is big and the light is good, but it costs eight thousand dollars a month.
“We’ll need proof of your company’s income,” he informs me briskly. “The landlord asks for eighty times the monthly rent.”
Reluctantly, I multiply eight thousand dollars times eighty in my head.
“Sure!” I tell him, brightly. And then, “But we’re not a company. We’re a church?”
“Um-hm,” he counters, pulling out his BlackBerry.
“So our income won’t be meeting those requirements.”
“Well, you can always fill out the application and see what they say,” he says with a half-hearted shrug. He holds out a stack of papers with a corporate logo printed across the top.
“Great. Thanks.”
This is the fourth, maybe fifth storefront I’ve looked at in person, and it’s clear I’ll need to look for a sixth. The strategy, thus far, is this: Ignore the voice in my head screaming “YOU’RE A FRAUD” while real-estate agents rattle off square footage and heating costs. I nod confidently and ask about security deposits, well aware that our bank account balance currently sits at, like, seventeen dollars.
“You guys have the collateral to do this?” one of them asks me.
“We’re running a capital campaign,” I say, smiling confidently. It’s true! Last week, Rachel printed out the mailing labels on our sputtering desktop printer, and the interns spent the afternoon stuffing and stamping. People will definitely send those pledge cards back in. I’m sure of it.
The name of the game right now is “Faking It.” But we’ve got to make it. St. Lydia’s is growing. Each week we stuff people in at the corners of tables or send an intern out for more bread. Finding a place to hold a meeting or a Bible study is a constant struggle in a city where real estate is the most valuable commodity. Our theology circle meets at a bar, where congregants shout about liberation theology over the din.
“WHAT IS CONE SAYING ABOUT OUR THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN LIGHT OF THE WHITE HISTORY OF ECCLESIOLOGY IN AMERICA?” Burke, the facilitator, screams, while everyone else leans in, cupping their hands around their ears.
I’m dreaming about our own space. A place where we don’t have to puzzle-piece our materials for the liturgy into plastic bins after Dinner Church, to be stacked on shelves in a closet. Most important, I want a place where people can see us when they wander by. Where we can hold community gatherings and arts events. Where we can invite someone off the street who hasn’t eaten in a while and heat something up in the microwave.
Rachel and I explain all this to Ezra and Zachary, the interns. They nod, dazed, when they hear the plan.
“It seems really big,” Zachary says.
“Yes, it does,” I say.
“Can we afford something like that?” Ezra asks.
“Good question,” I answer. Very good question. We’ll need a capital campaign. And an architect. And a contractor. I’ve never done anything like this before.
In the end, I find 304 Bond Street, not through a commercial real-estate agent, but on Craigslist. Trolling through listings in bed late one night, I see it. A long, narrow storefront with windows on either end, a patch of a garden out back, and a huge basement. The entrance is on the street. It’s close to multiple subway lines. The storefront sits in a neighborhood that is mixed economically, where anyone who might want to come to our church will feel comfortable. No orphaned toilets. No exposed ductwork. Just a clean, white room for four thousand dollars a month.
I walk the few blocks down Bond Street to see the place on a snowy evening. After fiddling with the lock, the real-estate agent pushes the door open and we step inside the empty, echoing room. The overhead lights haven’t been installed, so we poke around in the dark with a flashlight, which feels sort of sketchy. But the place is neatly drywalled, the huge windows in front will let in lots of light, and the yard in the back (mostly rubble) is waiting for something beautiful to happen.
I ask to see the basement. The agent (who by the way is wearing leopard-print stretch pants and speaks in a thick Russian accent) tells me it’s flooded right now and we can’t go down there. But the landlord is going to pump it out. “No problem,” she tells me.
It’s the best space we’ve seen. There are discussions with congregants and visits from members of our Leadership Table. A week later, I’ve just landed in Los Angeles for a young clergy conference when the property manager calls. “If you want it, you’d better move fast, because someone else is interested.”
This feels like a hoax, but it’s New York, it’s just how things work. Panic ensues. Calls back and forth. Helpless in California, I send Jake over because the basement is still filled with four inches of water. Jake leads our music program these days, playing the djembe and running rehearsals with the song leaders every week. He is the closest thing to an adult at St. Lydia’s. A complete and utter hero, he dons galoshes and ventures down into the basement, ducking under a low beam, then sloshes around taking video.
“Just sent you a video,” he texts me. I press play and squint—the footage is mostly darkness and distressing gargly water sounds. “Ummm…looks like there’s a lot of space down here,” Jake narrates. “About up to my ankles in water…this seems like a load-bearing beam?” It reminds me of the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars. There’s got to be a giant snake down there somewhere.
I call the property manager from baggage claim and feign an authoritative voice. “The basement is still filled with four inches of water and you expect me to sign a lease?” I yell into the phone, feeling very L.A.
In the end, our hand is forced. The place is cheap, and we don’t have better options. They promise the basement will be drained and cleaned by move-in, and they throw in a month’s free rent.
A fevered call to Rachel, and she’s throwing herself in a cab and driving through a freshly arrived blizzard to sign the lease in the basement of a cigar-smoking landlord. I’m not making this up. Documents are faxed back and forth. Edits are made. We have a place.
Against all odds. Something from nothing. Across the country, I take myself out for a drink to celebrate. My hands are trembling.
The Miracle of the Ice Cream
Our architect tells me that liming the walls will be easy.
“So, how does this work?” I ask her.
“You just go to Lowe’s and get some lime, then you mix it up with water and put it in spray bottles. It will turn the brick wall this nice white, which will make the place look bigger. And it’s an antibacterial that keeps away bugs.”
Keeping away bugs seems like a good investment of time and money, considering our ample use of food in a city with more rats than people.
“It will be fun,” she tells me. “For the community!”
“It will be fun!” I repeat later to Julia, our new staff coordinator, who has been on the job exactly one week.
Julia looks skeptical.
Rachel announced her departure a few months ago, to focus on her artwork and recover in the midst of a health crisis in her family. It was a blow. Her mom had been sick for months and Rachel had been just hanging on. For a while, it felt impossible to imagine St. Lydia’s without her. We threw her a big party and I cried a whole lot. She did too.
Then we found Julia, a recent seminary grad obsessed with Harry Styles and, unlike everyone else at St. Lydia’s, oddly well informed when it came to pop culture. She loved to cook and was highly extroverted; the awkwardness of the Lydian tables didn’t faze her. She was perfect.
By this time, we’re still paying rent for both the Brooklyn Zen Center and the new storefront at 304 Bond Street, leaving our bank account chronically endangered. We have a lot on our hands, and liming the walls seems like an unnecessary Martha Stewart moment, if not a potential complete disaster.
But Julia relents. We enlist Clara, a congregant who runs a company making adorable stuffed animals, to spearhead the project. She seems accustomed to crafting on an unwieldy scale. She makes a trip to the hardware store and assembles dust masks, spray bottles, buckets, and a couple thirty-pound bags of lime. I announce at church that one Thursday evening in June, we’ll be liming the walls of the new space, and everyone should come.
When the night in question arrives, I roll up at the storefront on my bike and find Clara crouched in a corner of the empty space, hair pulled back in a bandanna, mixing lime with water and shaking spray bottles.
“It’s working pretty well,” she reports, showing me a section of the brick wall where she’s started spraying. It looks exactly the same as before.
“It seems like it’s still red,” I observe.
“Yeah…” she answers, furrowing her brow. “I think it takes a little time for the lime to take effect.”
A little time is no problem. I pull a portable speaker from my tote bag and get some music going. Congregants begin to filter in, poking their heads through the glass door and marveling at the deliciously open space.
Wendy and Phil arrive—together, I notice. Wendy leads the children’s programs at a big church in Manhattan. She’s a single mom to Peter, a precocious redheaded child who’s not yet in middle school. Phil’s a guy with neatly trimmed steely gray hair, and a more colorful background than you might expect. Kicked out of the house at age fifteen, he ended up in the New York City punk scene, and on crew for the Cramps. Now he serves on the church Leadership Table.
Phil opens the door for Wendy. I raise my eyebrows.
“I brought homemade cookies,” Wendy says, holding up a wicker basket filled with baked goods, and we all cheer.
Soon the Access-A-Ride rolls up, and we all spill out of the door to help as Ula is lowered on the van’s hydraulic lift. The portable ramps haven’t arrived yet, but Ula manages to stand with a congregant on either side of her while someone else lifts her wheelchair the two steps into the storefront. She steps in painstakingly behind it.
Things have worsened for Ula on a few fronts. She had a stroke and somehow landed in a hospital in Connecticut. When she returned to New York, it became clear that her personality had shifted. She was softer and more gregarious, less interested in stirring up trouble. Her barbed comments had been worn down to nubs. She had difficulty moving the right side of her body, and her speech was stilted and slow. James and Charlotte took a shine to her. “She loves drugstore novels and nail polish,” Charlotte told us during announcements at church, encouraging us to visit and send her cards.
Ula still had a litany of complaints, especially about her care wherever she was staying. And who wouldn’t—she was living in nursing homes where the average patient spoke not one word. Together the Lydians and I visited her social workers, amplifying her requests for physical therapy or visits to specialists. She was always in a state of emergency—all her belongings were left at the last hospital, or her phone had gone missing again, or her disability checks had stopped coming. Solve one problem, and another popped up. Our resources always felt paltry in the face of her need.
One weekday afternoon I joined her at Mount Sinai Hospital for a meeting with her neurologist. The three of us sat in his office, peering at pictures of Ula’s brain, illuminated by a light box.
“When will…I be…back…the way I was?” she struggled to say.
“Ula,” he told her. “You’ve been through multiple aneurysms and surgeries. Now a stroke. The fact that you even have speech…well, it’s something of a miracle.”
Ula and I share the same birthday, October 24, only she’s exactly twenty-five years older than I am. We also attended the same college. I sometimes made a point of sharing this fact with newcomers to the church when we met for coffee. They always startled. It startled me too.
Maybe Ula looks at me and sees a reflection of the person she should’ve been. I look at her and see a reflection too: of the person I could be. By some twist of fate, she’s the one in a nursing home.
Tonight, arranged back in her chair safely inside 304 Bond Street, Ula regards us all one by one.
“Hi, hi,” she says, waving with queenly dignity and nodding her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Ula, you don’t have to be sorry!” we chorus.
Clara arms her with a squeeze bottle. She scoots over to a section of wall and begins spraying with her good hand.
The thing is, when you’re liming a wall and the wall doesn’t change colors, it’s hard to tell where you’ve limed and where you haven’t. Our architect had instructed me that we should try to achieve “three even coatings,” a request that seemed reasonable at the time. Now, though, with nine volunteers spraying the walls haphazardly, it’s clear we’ll end up with a wall that looks like it has the measles.
They’re having fun, though. Julia and Wendy perch at the tops of the ladders left by the contractors, spraying along the ceiling line, while another congregant, Dan, takes a more random approach, spritzing indiscriminately as he tells a story. Everyone is bopping around to the music. It’s a warm summer night and we don’t have the benefit of air-conditioning; we work up a sweat.
When the light begins to fade, we decide that we’ve done something equivalent to three coats and float outside to the stoop, sipping bottles of water and chatting. I’m leaning back on a hand pressed into the grit of the sidewalk, about to throw my head back in laughter at a joke Julia just cracked, when an ice cream truck pulls up, sounding its well-worn tune.
“Hey, guys,” says the ice cream man, cutting the music and leaning out the window. “You all want some free ice cream? It’s my last day on the job!”
Apparently, he’s going out with a bang. He plunges his hands into the freezers, pulling out Firecrackers and King Cones and ice cream sandwiches and tossing them toward our waiting, sweaty hands. There is ice cream for everyone. More than we can eat. More than enough, more than we deserve; a grace so easy and wholesome and pure, it falls on us like manna.
Something from nothing.
The Miracle of the Baptism
Zachary’s mom forgot to baptize him. By the time he discovers it, he’s been an intern at St. Lydia’s for half a year, and a seminarian for two. Zachary’s dreamy calm is interrupted by little. But he’s not happy.
“They did my brother,” he tells me at a supervisory meeting, “but then ‘things got busy.’ That’s actually what my mom said!”
“Geez,” I tell him, grimacing. “I’m so sorry.”
Zachary looks up through his lashes. “Do you think you could baptize me?”
I grin.
“Of course we can baptize you!”
We pick a date in July, which turns out to be our second Sunday at 304 Bond Street. Zachary is thrilled, smiling and eagerly planning meetings with his baptismal sponsors. The problem is, our space isn’t ready. And when I say it isn’t ready, I don’t mean that the light fixtures haven’t arrived or something like that. I mean that the wood flooring has not yet been laid. I mean that there is no kitchen to speak of. I mean that there is no source of running water other than the spigot in the basement.
Julia and I draw up a set of crazed arrangements to feed fifty people with no floor and no kitchen, and baptize Zachary in a church with no font and, in fact, no water. We do have a working bathroom with a door. So there’s that. And the limed walls turned out really pretty.
After cooking up an army’s worth of pasta and salad at home, Wendy spoons it all into aluminum trays and loads them into a granny cart, to be transported by Phil to church. This particular granny cart, borrowed from Julia, is rickety, with a tendency to throw a wheel at an unexpected moment. So it is that a portion of Zachary’s baptism dinner is offered to the streets of Brooklyn, always hungry for the detritus of lost objects or, in this case, entire feasts.
Phil flies in the door, breathless and panicked, telling us what happened. We unload the remaining trays of food and send someone down the block for more bread, just as Zachary’s family arrives, en masse from New Mexico, alongside a group of ten corn-fed visitors from a church in Iowa. They are welcomed at the door by Hannah, wearing a long flowery skirt, feet bare and hair hanging down her back. She helps them fill out name tags.
We all wear name tags at St. Lydia’s. It’s something I’m glad for because, until recently, Hannah went by a different name, and I’m still worried I’ll let the old one slip out by accident. After worship one evening she took me aside (though she went by another pronoun at that time) and told me in a soft voice that she was trans, and starting to transition. Over the next few months, her baggy jeans and comic book T-shirts were replaced by skirts and colorful tops, and her shell of shyness fell away, revealing a quirky, clever woman. She started speaking up more in church, and writing hilarious reflections on Facebook. She was blossoming. Now she stands at the door, handing out name tags and markers, her own name pinned to her chest.
“Thank you so much, Hannah!” one of the Iowans says, and I see the corners of Hannah’s mouth lift just slightly, into an imperceptible but delighted smile.
Everyone mills around in our thousand square feet of unfinished storefront, unsure where to put their backpacks or how to help. Julia and a few congregants spread the tablecloths on the floor, as if we’re holding a picnic, and set up an impromptu buffet on a piece of plywood balanced across two sawhorses. Ezra asks someone to keep an eye on the girls, and he and I trudge down to the basement, heave open the sidewalk hatch, and push through the giant, galvanized metal washtub St. Lydia’s employs as a font, which I stick in the middle of the sidewalk. The basement, by the way, is now clean and dry. The contractors laid down new concrete and dug a sloppy trench around the perimeter that slopes down to a sump pump that’s constantly gurgling, siphoning away the water that seeps in through the walls. Sometimes it loses its will to continue and gives up, dark water pooling around it. My relationship to the sump pump seems overly involved, like it’s another member of staff—a problem employee who’s always giving me trouble.
Ezra passes me the hose, and I yell down to him to turn on the water. It sputters and spurts, then runs into the tub in a clear, cold stream.
Charlotte, song leader for the night, begins to sing. “Come, every seeking soul!” and I clamber into place, adjusting my stole.
Our messy crew circles the washtub and begins lighting our candles, passing the flame from one person to the next. Zachary stands next to the tub, barefoot, dressed in loose white clothing. The song ends and our voices die away, leaving a residue of charged electricity. We stand with anticipation, on the edge of this microcosmic body of water, waiting to see someone reborn.
By our baptism into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, I chant, you turn us from the old life of death-dealing ways and make us new.
I take Zachary’s hand and he steps into the frigid water.
“What do you seek?”
“Life in Christ.”
“Do you renounce the evil powers of this world that rebel against God?”
“I renounce them.”
There are more questions. More defiant statements that Zachary and we who witness his baptism are no friends to evil.
I scoop a pitcher full of water from the font and pour it over Zachary’s head, one, two, three times. He shudders compulsively; the water is as a cold as the ocean. Then we wrap him in a towel, and come inside singing to eat dinner cross-legged on the floor.
This is the miracle: that there is never enough, yet always enough. With no kitchen, no floors, and no table, we can feed fifty people and baptize someone along the way. We have nothing but an empty room, a lit candle, a bucket of water, and a loaf of bread, but it’s enough to claim Zachary as a child of God.
Around this time I go on a date. We sit opposite each other, sipping our matching cups of frothy drinks. I really like him. He asks college interview questions just like I do. We talk about performance art and ritual. Then I tell him I’m a pastor, and a door slides closed behind his eyes. The date hadn’t been over, but it is now. We lurch through the rest of the conversation until he can make a half-excusable exit. My cheeks are hot and red.
I know I am too easily crushed. I go home and keep looking at his picture even though I shouldn’t. I hope he’ll write, even though I shouldn’t.
I try telling them before the date. I try telling them after the date. It is never a selling point.
Every unanswered text, every guy who said he’d call and didn’t, is added to a growing folder of evidence in my mind labeled “You’re Completely Undatable.” My clerical garb becomes a symbol for all of it: the formless black uniform, the white collar. Its message: “Do Not Cross.” Freud spoke of the Madonna-whore complex; I’m living it out. Men, it seems, want their God and sex separate.
I remind myself that my worth isn’t based on men who aren’t interested in me. But when you keep getting low scores from strangers, it’s hard not to think of yourself as a low score. Online, I get a message a week from middle-aged couples in Yonkers or White Plains who wonder if I will join them to “explore a new side of their relationship.” (The answer is no.) I get messages from boomers in Greenwich who are clearly married and looking for something on the side.
I blow-dry my hair. I put on eye makeup. I try to care about outfits. I try not to need so much. I wonder why one half of my life is so full and the other half so empty. It starts to feel like maybe God designed it that way. In which case I’m pretty mad at God.
Last week the windows leaked during a rainstorm and soaked all the kids’ artwork on display. As I was sopping up the rainwater with towels, Harrison, a local homeless guy who stops by every four days or so with a long story, always at an inopportune time, burst through the door, smelling of alcohol.
“Harrison, I’ve got a lot on my hands right now,” I told him from the floor, where I crouched on my hands and knees between a pile of towels.
“Oh, I know, I know,” he said, “I know you’re too busy for the likes of me.” He stood at the door, poised like he was ready to leave, laying it on thick. “I never wanted to be an inconvenience, I really didn’t.”
“Harrison, you’re not an inconvenience,” I snapped at him. “Just come and sit down on the benches and I can help you when I’m done.”
Too busy. It’s a phrase I’ve started hearing from more congregants than Harrison, and it breaks my heart every time I hear it. “I know you’re really busy, but do you think we could have coffee sometime?”
Every day I am faced with lack: the needs of our space and my people, the finite quality of time, the disappointing reality of myself. My bad mood can break a new congregant’s heart.
“I got myself into this,” I reason. “I’m the one who decided to try something so ambitious.”
I lock the doors after an evening meeting and am home by 9:30, eating cold takeout. There was always enough, but now I’m not so sure.
We usually think of abundance as having a lot: an overflowing cornucopia on Thanksgiving, a sumptuous wedding feast, maybe cash raining down from a Vegas slot machine. St. Lydia’s showed me abundance is a secret hidden inside of scarcity. It lives, tucked inside not-enoughness, waiting to show you that God does not do math. Abundance is discovering God’s provision right in the middle of your fret and worry. Even when the bank balance has plummeted and the cupboard seems empty, there’s always enough to feed everyone. There are some dry beans and a few carrots in the back of the fridge and we always have bread in the freezer. We can feast on that.
When we first moved into 304 Bond Street, people arrived with bent spoons and wonky forks pillaged from their kitchen drawers. If we could believe that what we need is here in church, maybe we could believe it in all the parts of our lives. Maybe Charlotte could write a one-woman show. Maybe Ezra could make it through his divorce. Maybe we could know our neighbors.
And if we could believe that what we need is here in church, perhaps we could believe it in our lives, or in our nation. God gives us enough for everyone, as long as no one hoards.
One evening after closing up at the storefront I head home, clean up, and put on a fresh set of clothes. I’m meeting someone at a bar—a guy I met through a community meeting a few weeks ago. He seems interested in faith but hasn’t come to church (which would render him absolutely off-limits) and isn’t relating to me like a pastor. One day, he messages me and asks if I want to meet up sometime.
At the bar, we settle in with a couple of beers. The conversation is running along at top speed, we’re both laughing, and I’m leaning in a little closer when a woman opens the door and walks over—long-limbed, easy gait, cascade of glossy hair, glimpse of milky cleavage.
“Hey!” he says to her, wrapping his arm around her slim waist. “Emily, this is my girlfriend.”
“Oh!” I say, a slick of embarrassment flooding my system. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
“You too,” she says, perching on the edge of an open chair and drawing close to him. “He keeps telling me about this amazing pastor.”