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THE PARKING LOT OF New Beginnings Chapel was crammed with supersized, lifted pickup trucks. New Beginnings, it seemed, did not draw an upmarket crowd. My initial impression was confirmed once we were inside. The pews were packed with neck and hand tattoos (the kind our university’s career services office calls the “unemployables”), exposed bra straps, and everywhere, that heartbreaking obstacle to career opportunity: poor dental care.
The interior of New Beginnings Chapel was vast, about four times the size of the largest theater in the Mahina Mall’s cinema multiplex. I estimated the ceiling to be three or four stories high. The seating was stadium-style, something I had never seen in a Catholic church. The expansive stage featured a podium in the center and potted palms on either side. Toward the rear, on the right, a band was setting up. High up on the wall behind the stage, where one might expect to see a crucifix (this being a church and all) was a gigantic television screen displaying a “New Beginnings Chapel” logo against a royal blue background.
New Beginnings Chapel should have a dental ministry, I thought. It sure looked like they had enough money to pull it off. As a child, I couldn’t understand why my parents thought my teeth were so important.
“You’re going to have your teeth for the rest of your life,” they’d say as they dragged me to the dentist or denied me a second helping of dessert. Worst of all were the braces, constantly poking the inside of my cheeks and wearing away little sore spots. I dreaded going in to have my braces tightened; my entire skull would pulsate with pain for days afterward.
Now I felt grateful and a little bit guilty about all of the resistance I’d put up at the time.
“You okay, Molly?” Donnie asked. The front rows were already filled, and we had to climb up the aisle toward the back.
“Of course I am.” I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth as if to reassure myself everything was still intact. I told myself to get a grip and imagine what Iker Legazpi, my gentle and saintly colleague in the accounting department, might say in this situation. Iker had once told me church should be thought of as a hospital, not a country club, its purpose to heal the broken rather than to comfort the fortunate. He had gone on to quote the Book of James and some things from the Old Testament. Iker was Catholic, like me, but for some reason, he seemed to know a lot of Bible verses.
Davison turned to enter a pew with enough space in the middle for all three of us (barely). Donnie and I followed him in, scooting past a young man in a long-sleeved fluorescent green t-shirt with Konishi Construction printed in black down one sleeve. A toddler lay half-asleep in the man’s lap. The child stirred and opened his mouth to fuss, displaying silver stubs where his baby teeth should have been. The father produced a bottle full of red fruit punch and popped it into the kid’s mouth.
If the church is a hospital, New Beginnings Chapel must be the free clinic.
“Is this good, Molly?” Donnie asked.
“Yes. Wonderful.” I settled onto the cushioned pew, ending up wedged between my husband and my stepson. I picked up a paperback hymnal from the rack in front of me. All of the songs seemed to date from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Down on the distant stage, the praise band played a few chords by way of tuning up, confirming my worst suspicions about the kind of music we were in for. They launched into a repeating three-chord progression, the same one-four-five we’d beaten to death when I was in that punk band back in grad school. I preferred our version.
Davison nudged me.
“Eh Molly, you like go down there an’ play?” He was grinning. Of course, Davison found it hilarious that I used to play bass for an all-female band called Phallus in Wonderland. (The name was Melanie Polewski’s idea, by the way, not mine. She’d been into Lacan at the time.)
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Not your kine music, ah?”
“This isn’t about what kind of music we prefer. Being here is an act of worship and sacrifice.”
In my opinion, sacred music had gone downhill right after the American Civil War, when it started to sound more suitable for a barbershop quartet than for a church choir.
“Time to stand up,” Donnie whispered. I was the only one still sitting. I saw the lyrics projected on the big screen, so I tucked the hymnal back into the rack. Out of curiosity, I pulled out the pew Bible. It was a Protestant translation, what the church of my childhood would have called a “heretic” version. I opened it to a random page in the New Testament.
For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, “You sit here in a good place,” and say to the poor man, “You stand there,” or, “Sit here at my footstool,” have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
“What’s that?” Donnie glanced over.
“Um, the Book of James.” I closed the Bible, slid it back into the pew pocket, and started moving my lips along with the lyrics on screen.
People unfamiliar with the Catholic order of worship have told me they found it hard to follow, but the New Beginnings service was downright baffling. The program indicated when we were to stand and sit, but there was also apparently some secret signal to tell the worshippers when to lift their hands and start swaying, or clap along to the music. Once in a while, someone would shout, “Amen,” but such improvisation seemed to be optional, and restricted to the most advanced worshippers.
When the music ended, we sat down for the spoken part of the service. I realized the purpose of the giant monitor mounted behind the podium: it gave the faithful in the nosebleed seats a view of the events on stage. Without the close-up, I’d have had trouble picking the charismatic Pastor Skip Lewis out of a lineup. But on the high-definition Jumbotron, I could see tiny beads of sweat breaking out near Pastor Skip’s hairline where the hot stage lights were hitting him, a ring of sweat forming on the collar of his aloha shirt, and orange-toned makeup collecting in the creases under his eyes.
As this was the first Sunday in November, the theme of the sermon was “Being Thankful.” Pastor Skip offered as an example his own wife, whom he apparently counted as one of his life’s foremost blessings because (a) she hadn’t gained weight after they got married, and (b) she knew when to shut her yap and let him watch the game. The sermon was more standup routine than homily, with the humor of a “take my wife, please” variety.
Donnie leaned over and whispered, “You got mad at me when I said happy wife, happy life. He just said the same thing.”
“I did not get mad at you. And don’t blame me for what that guy says. I’m not the one who picked this church.” I glared at Davison, who had dragged us all up here in the first place, but he was busy with his cell phone.
“A boy comes home from school and tells his mother he has a part in the play.” Pastor Skip was teeing up another one. “She asks, "What part is it?" The boy says, "I play the part of the husband." "The mother says, "Go back and tell the teacher you want a speaking part."
Of course, the Catholic Church wasn’t much better in this respect, but at least you had hundreds of years of history and tradition to let you know what you were getting into. And the Catholic homily wasn’t packed with groaners straight out of a vaudeville-era Catskills routine.
It was an hour and a half before the service let out. The fluorescent-shirted young man with the toddler stood up. Instead of standing back to let us out of the pew, he approached Donnie, still holding the kid’s hand. The boy took the opportunity to suspend his full body weight and allow his toes to drag on the ground, swinging his bottle with his free hand.
“Mister Gonsalves?” The young man addressed Donnie. “Thought it was you guys. Eh Davison, long time, man.”
“Eh, Curtis. Didn’t recognize you. Howzit?”
The two younger men did a fist bump, Davison wandered off to talk to someone else he recognized, and Curtis got down to business.
“Mister Gonsalves, we found one wooden box in your house when we was doing the repair.” The man was oblivious to the fact that his toddler had turned his juice bottle upside-down and was shaking it. Red droplets appeared briefly on the surface of the green carpet before soaking in. “Was in one cupboard that got painted over a long time ago. Probably you never even seen it. When the tree fell, it broke the wall. Anyway, we cannot be responsible for the box. You gotta come pick it up.”
“Are you talking about my house?” I interrupted. “What was inside the wall?”
Curtis looked to Donnie as if seeking his permission to address me directly.
“It’s my wife’s house,” Donnie confirmed.
“Oh, sorry, missus. Was one old box. We didn’t open it or nothing. Mister Konishi’s in the office today. He got it there. He wants you to come get it when you can.”
I felt a cold liquid spattering the top of my foot and looked down to see the little boy’s silver-toothed grin.
“Da-da-da-da-da.” He waved his bottle gleefully. Then he released it. As it rolled downhill, the boy pulled the hymnals out of the pew one by one, dropping them onto the punch-soaked carpet.
“I can go get the box when we leave here.” I stepped back out of the toddler’s radius of destruction.
“Glad I seen you, Mister Gonsalves. You guys staying for the pancake breakfast?”
“Not today.” Donnie shook his head. “I have to get to work.”
“Yeah, Tessa got scheduled to work today. They don’t let her know until the night before sometimes. Kinda humbug. Eh, no grumble you. Come on, we go get pancakes. Aw, shoot.” Rage clouded the young father’s face as he caught sight of the punch-spattered hymnbooks on the floor. “Stupid. What you did? Where you put your juice?”
“No worries, Curtis,” Donnie said. “I got it. Say hello to Tessa for us.” He bent down to retrieve the soggy hymnals, and I found a tissue pack in my purse. Donnie and I got the hymn books wiped off and put away in the pew rack as Curtis dragged the flailing toddler off in the direction of the Social Hall.