MY OLD FEAR of being pilloried by the congregation swept over me in the Fellowship Hall, where we gathered after Eben’s sermon for the covered-dish lunch. This was a fine big room at the back of the church, with tables along one wall, and smaller school-sized tables and chairs scattered about, a piano for when the Sunday School classes met here to sing or put on pageants together. A nice sunny room which looked out into the primary play yard with its two large willow trees.

For a moment, as the crowd closed around me, I was back in Eben’s first church in Austin, being embraced by Mrs. Dr. Croft and her mother-in-law and her friends, in awe of their powers to see into my uncertain soul. Now, fifteen years later, I still had not been brought over, turned around, converted as the church said. To which I had added yet another transgression: adultery. (Which, in an earlier day, would surely have been a lesser sin compared to lack of faith.)

The congregation here, much the same as that earlier one, were mostly in their late sixties and seventies, all old-line Presbyterians descended from old-line Presbyterians back three hundred years, all trim, neat, nicely bred, and sober. Light on their feet, with youthful voices, they looked like students (as they once were) hosteling abroad, rucksacks on their backs, seeking their fortunes and those of the world. Students dedicated to the YM-YWCA, the Experiment in International Living, the American Friends Service Committee.

Eben was robust in their midst, the sort of pastor that such thin-chested, narrow-nosed parishioners elect to serve them. Clergy, men and now women, too, with the general look of athletes who have heard the call on the road to their own Damascus. Clergy like the young Scot running for God in Chariots of Fire. Surrounding Eben, the congregation resembled schoolchildren who had not yet got their growth, eleven-year-olds longing to cross the finish line to adolescence. The church, I thought, had not been so much a family as I had hoped; rather, it functioned more like a scout troop—a leader surrounded by eager tenderfeet. And I was not quite either.

As always, everyone was in good spirits at the sight of the long plank tables heaped with food: rice and beans, rice fritters, rice cakes, stir-fried rice, rice molds, my potato bake, fried chicken, sliced turkey, hams baked with pineapple and cloves, yams, Jell-O salads heavy with Bing cherries, sweet carrot cakes, peach pies, peach turnovers, peach cobblers crusted with cinnamon sugar.

The talk buzzed around the newly arrived hymnals which we had used for the first time that morning. Adopted by the national church, they came to us a blue-bound multilingual surprise. Languages by the dozen were represented. The waltz “Amazing Grace” appeared not only in English but also in Kiowa, Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee and Navaho. Here—firm arms held out hardback royal blue copies to friends—was “Holy Night, Blessed Night” as “Sheng Ye Qing, Sheng Ye Jing” in Chinese; “Silent Night” as “Stille Nacht” in German; “Christo Vive,” an Argentinean version of “Christ Is Risen”; “De Tierra Lejana Venimos,” a Puerto Rican version of “From a Distant Home.” Transliterated Korean songs such as “Whak Shil Hahn Nah Eh Kahn Jeung” (an old favorite, this one, “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine”); the African “Kum ba Yah”; the Israeli “Shalom, Chaverim”; the Filipino “Awit Sa Dapit Hapon”; the Hispanic “A La Ru”; the Japanese “Hitsuji Wa” and many many more.

Gray heads with tanned clear faces nodded in astonishment, read aloud phonetically—here a verse in Dakota dialect, there a Latin American folk hymn. All sharing the beaming faces of lifelong believers raised on the old hymn that promised: “Red yellow brown black or white, we are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

But what transfixed, amazed them most, one and all alike, was seeing that in the front of the hymnal even the Order of Worship appeared in three languages. So that, for example, we could all say together the Lord’s Prayer in English, “Our Father who art in heaven,” or Spanish, “Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos,” or in Korean, “Ha neul eh geh shin oo ree ah buh jee,” as the Spirit moved us.

“Well, my dear, what do you think?” Lila Beth stood at my elbow, in soft gray, looking, with her deep weathered cheeks, as she always did, not only like a gardener, which she was, but like a rancher. The sight of her, Drew’s mother, made me start, happy but uneasy. I was grateful to have her near and pressed my face to hers. Don’t you, I longed to say, don’t you turn on me. They may all hurl stones when they learn the news, but not you. To you my heart is vulnerable.

“About the hymnal?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not the food, which is too sweet for my taste, as always.”

“It gives a new meaning to ‘speaking in tongues,’ doesn’t it?” I smiled at her. I’d noticed that all of Willie Nelson’s gospel songs that I played at home were gone from the new songbook: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” But on the whole it was cheering to see this congregation of Calvinists trying to pronounce their faith in the strange utterances of other voices.

“It’s often the case, isn’t it,” she answered, “that the language precedes and in some sense creates the situation. I’m thinking of the courts, certainly, but here, too. You’ll see, even here in time it will be one world.”

Eben, talking with a group of other elders, beckoned to her then, and she touched my arm and left. His face revealed nothing of our last night’s talk, but a slight chill swept over me. These were his people, the sheep of his flock, and under his eyes I felt myself shut out of communion with them already.