Chapter 3  

Upon This Rock

We loved that house, but we couldn’t keep it. We went from house to house in those years, thirteen in all, moving whenever the landlord raised the rent or sold out to developers. It didn’t matter though, because throughout all of it there was only one church. Rock Church of Southern Maryland sat in the middle of the county, in a run-down brick building in Broomes Island that used to be the Black elementary school back in the days before the schools were integrated. The church was led by a pastor who believed God could speak to him direct as any man. His name was Jim Cucuzza. He’d never been to divinity school and had no special letters before or after his name. His teeth were yellow and crooked and the three suits he rotated through were polyester, off the rack. In another life he worked construction, but now he was saved. The Bible was his guide and that was the only credential my parents needed. We followed him the way sheep follow a shepherd when the air cools and night is coming.

My parents didn’t look like Holy Rollers. My mother wore jeans and permed her hair, dabbed perfume behind her ears on Sundays, unlike the doe-eyed Pentecostal women we sometimes saw at gas stations, who had long straight hair and ankle-length skirts. My father’s thick black hair was longer than you might expect, and he was known to sip a beer on a hot day and take some chew if the guys at the construction site were offering. But five years before my birth, my mother and my father joined hands in a backyard in Virginia while a bearded preacher walked them through the salvation prayer. The preacher grasped my father’s rough hands and told him that if he meant that prayer with all his heart, then when he rose from his knees he would become part of the kingdom, marked with God’s own invisible mark.

Before that moment my parents felt alone and adrift in the world. My mother’s father had been an alcoholic who died when she was sixteen years old after a lengthy separation from his family, and my father’s father had died of a heart attack when he was only six years old. But when they repeated those words and rose up to standing they were changed. The world that had seemed so harsh and irrational was actually stitched together with love and care by a benevolent Lord who claimed them as a son and daughter. When they learned that it wasn’t biblical to live together before marriage, my father packed his things up and found another place to sleep until they got married a year later. Once they joined the church they were part of a community. On Sundays there was a warm room full of songs and laughter, hearty handshakes and hugs with pats on the back, women who passed baby clothes and canned goods around to each other, men who teamed up to fix each other’s trucks. And now there was this church—the same spirit in a different congregation.

There were dozens of other places to worship in the county, Methodist and Catholic, Baptist and Free Baptist, Bible-believing like us and against abortion and evolution and the homosexual agenda, but Pastor Jim liked to say those churches were dead. Day after day they just ran through the same routine, singing numbered hymns out of a dusty old book, reciting the same repeat-after-me prayer and listening to the same old sermons, and then those people walked out of that church no different than they were when they first walked in.

“You won’t believe this,” Pastor Jim told us one Sunday morning, pacing the edge of the altar in that converted gymnasium, tossing his tie over his shoulder, “but when those Christians get sick or lose their jobs or their marriages fall apart, they view it as a natural thing! Just a part of life!”

From her perch in the first row of folding chairs, Jeannette Camps waved a tambourine in his direction. I listened wide-eyed from a back row, taking notes in my unpracticed cursive handwriting so I could study his words later. Even then I knew better than those lukewarm, so-called Christians. Nothing happened without a reason. If you were beset by trials and tribulations, then you were a victim of spiritual warfare. Maybe the Devil himself edged up to God and said, This Christian of yours is only faithful because things are going pretty well. I say we test her. And the ever-patient Lord shrugged and said, Okay, test her then. But she’ll stick by me. And the Devil sniggered and threw everything he had at that poor Christian. Disease and poverty, persecution. But if the Christian kept praising God and thanking him, even for the trials, then the Lord would reward her. Maybe on earth, and maybe in heaven.

“That’s a promise,” Pastor Jim said. “A promise you can cash in. Your reward might come here in this life or it might come later, but I’ll tell you now, there are blessings in store for you, beyond anything you’ve ever known.”

The men who sat in those folding chairs listening to the pastor were men like my father. They wore beards and often came to church with concrete-flecked hands and mud-caked boots. The women were like my mother, tender and shy, with out-of-fashion haircuts and thrift-store styles. They believed a woman’s place was in the home, obeying her husband and guiding her children toward the truth. They struggled daily to put food on the table and when they felt scared or alone it was God they cried out to, not some charity. Definitely not the government. Like my parents, they clapped their hands over their children’s ears when the six o’clock news came on, with its stories of the crack epidemic that raged in Washington, DC, and some New Yorker who dared to submerge a photograph of a crucifix in urine and call it art. If these people felt left out of a world that was changing faster than they could blink, with its shifting economy and super-computers and the first whispers about the World Wide Web, they could remind themselves that this world was always falling short of its creator. That was why they chose this church, because Pastor Jim preached that in a world that seemed empty and cold and unfeeling, promises had been made, promises that would be kept. Those who mourned on earth would be comforted later, in heaven. Eventually the meek would inherit the earth. People like us, who were persecuted and judged because of our faith, would gain admittance to the kingdom, and those out in the world, who soaked up its sinful culture and accepted the Devil’s false promises, would be doomed to hellfire.

Pastor Jim and his wife and three daughters had been sent to southern Maryland by Bishop John Gimenez, the head of Rock Christian Fellowship. The bishop grew up in Spanish Harlem and overcame drug addiction and sin, following the unspoken Pentecostal maxim that a man of God could only rise as high in the spiritual kingdom as the depths that he had fallen to before he took God into his heart. Before he came to the county, Pastor Jim was Bishop Gimenez’s right-hand man. Almost ten years before, in 1980, they had worked with Pat Robertson to put on Washington for Jesus, a rally in which three hundred thousand Christians united on the National Mall to pray that God would have mercy on our sinful nation. Pastor Jim was the communications man for the event, laying power lines and coordinating with the media. After the rally was over he and the other deputies were given orders to go forth from the bishop’s church in Virginia Beach, south and east and in every other direction. Pastor Jim and his family went out on prayer to seed the Rock Church of Southern Maryland, which meant they had thrown themselves on the mercy of God and had no guarantee of a salary or a roof over their heads. I think that’s what my father liked most about Pastor Jim. He wasn’t building a church where you reported to a board of directors or followed manmade regulations about how to behave. Instead he listened for the voice of the Lord to come barreling through, and he followed it wherever it led.

Sunday after Sunday in that dingy gymnasium-turned-sanctuary, I squirmed beside my parents watching big-eyed as our pastor paced the edge of the threadbare stage. He preached about a time when the Lord cleaved close to men and walked among them, speaking to them in their own language, often rattling them up a bit before they could hear him. A burning bush. A staff softening into a snake. A fleece wet by morning on the dry ground. A dead man walking. But then the centuries rolled by and the voice of the Lord seemed to fade.

Pastor Jim stopped at the edge of the altar, gripping his microphone and cocking his head at one of the elders. “Was God just tired of talking?” he asked. “Had the Lord said enough?

“No, brothers and sisters,” he answered in a quiet voice, pulling his eyeglasses off and blotting his forehead with a stained handkerchief. “The Lord had plenty to say. But we stopped listening and fell to sin instead. We had eyes but we did not see; we had ears but we did not hear.”

Our pastor paged through his Bible and called out scriptures, arguing that we were in the season of Pentecost, close to the great and terrible end. He read from the Book of Revelation of the hidden manna and the white garments and the new names, the lake of fire and the solitary eagle, the locusts and the bottomless pit. He said that just before the coming trials and tribulations, before the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood, the righteous would be carried up into the air. And then he reminded us that no one knew the day or hour of the Lord’s return. We could only know the end was coming from the signs we were given. Nation would rise up against nation and there would be war and rumors of war. Pastor Jim counseled us to follow the example of the five wise virgins from the book of Matthew, who keep their lamps full of oil because the bridegroom might return at any moment. If our lamps flickered out and we forgot the Lord’s commandments, we’d be barred from the wedding feast. We were sure we didn’t have long to wait. All the signs were there—plagues were spreading in the northern cities, earthquakes rattled Central America and Asia, the United Nations was gaining power, and rumor had it a red heifer had been born in Jerusalem. The Lord was already equipping his faithful for the last days. Young men were seeing visions, old men were dreaming dreams, and God himself was blessing his people with the gift of strange tongues.

One Sunday, Pastor Jim told us a story about a dream he had just before the Washington for Jesus rally. In the dream, he followed three men up a hill on a snowy day, and they were all dressed in the same clothing the soldiers wore during the Revolutionary War. The one in the front held an American flag, and at one point he turned to Pastor Jim and said, “This is your Valley Forge.”

Pastor Jim spread his arms wide to encompass the whole sanctuary. He said that right now we were in our own Valley Forge. We were in the midst of a long winter. We suffered, and some went hungry. Some doubted. But it would all be worth it. We would triumph at last. We would fight as one people against the spirit of greed, which blossomed in the middle of our government like a cancerous tumor, and the spirit of poverty, which kept us poor and ashamed. We would trust the Lord and crush the spirits of fear under our feet. We would build a new church on a hill, where everyone could see it, a church that would stand fast against the gates of hell.

We sat at the edge of our seats and looked around. We saw, as if for the first time, the yellowed walls, the cracks in the linoleum, the stains on the brown carpet in the tiny fellowship hall, the rusty folding chairs we sat in twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday nights. We opened our minds and for the first time tried to imagine a building truly worthy of our Lord. A church bigger than the county courthouse or the Catholic parish up the street, sitting tall and proud on a hill. It would have a baptismal font, a playground, and a fresh carpet that wasn’t stained from school children’s accidents or Sunday afternoon potlucks.

It turned out Pastor Jim already had a site in mind, a plot of land on a hill in Saint Leonard, at the intersection of Ball Road and Route 4. Even before the title was signed, one of the elders took the enormous rock that sat outside our old church in Broomes Island and borrowed a bulldozer to lift it up and transport it to its new home on the hill. On Easter morning we held a sunrise service out there beside it, trussed up in flannels and wools, the wind whipping our faces, Pastor Jim shouting the sermon from the top of a hay bale. He told us the story of how Jesus’s friends came to find him after his crucifixion, to anoint his dead body with oils and fragrant herbs. But then they found that the gravestone had been rolled away.

Pastor Jim stepped down off the hay bale and walked around to each one of us. He said in a soft voice, “That stone was rolled away for you. And you, and you, and you. That stone was rolled away so you could live a life of freedom. So you would be saved from eternal hellfire. It was out of mercy that Christ died for you.”

We stood there on that Easter morning with the sun rising at our backs and the wind whistling onto our red cheeks and consecrated that land. Christ died for us and the least we could do was build him a church that would bring the whole county to Jesus. It was Pastor Jim who first gave us the seed of the idea, but we watered it and weeded it and prepared the soil. Over the next three years we gave every dollar we had, then gave our Saturdays to dig and pave and trim and work that land into something that could serve as a solid foundation. In that congregation were plumbers and roofers and tile men and bricklayers like my father, and every Saturday they laced their still-damp work boots up and headed to the land. The wives formed committees to serve up sandwiches and paint walls, and even my brothers and I pitched in, digging the parking lot and cleaning up trash. And when all of it was done we gave a dozen more Saturdays and built Pastor Jim and his family a house on that same plot of land.

When the church was finally done, it was the newest thing my brothers and I had ever seen. The night we dedicated it, Bishop John Gimenez himself drove up from Virginia Beach with his wife, Anne, a slim brunette with a Texas twang and a singing voice like someone from the radio. He was a thick man with a ready smile, and he and Sister Anne sat in plush, high-backed chairs during the worship service. When it was time for the sermon, Pastor Jim told stories of the bishop’s exploits by way of an introduction—the church he built in Virginia Beach with only the hand of the Lord helping him, the way he and Pat Robertson packed the National Mall with hundreds of thousands of Christians, the churches he’d planted in far-off Africa and Asia and everywhere in between.

But when the bishop rose to speak, he walked past Pastor Jim and stood silent in the middle of that long, pink-carpeted altar, quiet for nearly thirty seconds. Through his dark aviator-style glasses he gazed at the skylights, the deep mauve of the carpet of the sanctuary, the textured wallpaper, the overflow room off the sanctuary. He even turned around and sized up the baptismal font with its blue-tinged chlorinated water and the stones lining the wall behind it, rose-colored stones from a quarry in Virginia that my father cut to fit and laid by hand. For as long as we could bear the bishop just stood there. My father peered around and shrugged when he caught Elder Knoll’s eye, but then the bishop dropped to his knees and raised his arms to that forty-foot tall ceiling, and shouted in his tremendous voice, “Hallelujah, Jesus!” The praise and worship team put a trill into the keyboard and hit the chimes and played a long, low trumpet note, and just like that everyone in that enormous sanctuary cried out and praised the Lord in the highest timbres their voices could reach. My brothers and I looked on wide-eyed as Betty Sams danced a jig and Elder Shenberger reached for his wife’s hand and skipped down the aisle.

My father raised his hands to the sky and rocked back and forth on his toes. My mother prayed in her quiet way, her hands on my brother’s shoulders as she sang sweetly in tongues under her breath. That whole place shook for hours that night, and Bishop Gimenez didn’t get to preaching until nine o’clock or so. When he did he spit fire from his mouth as he blessed the church and poured oil over every bit of the altar. He told us of the seven evil spirits that afflicted America, that were here somewhere in this town, here in this room with us even—the persecution of Christians, homosexuality, abortion, racism, addiction, the occult, and HIV/AIDS. He said when you put those letters together they spelled PHARAOH, and that meant the Devil was triumphing in America today just as he had once before in ancient Egypt.

The way he talked it sounded like what Pastor Jim told us was true. There was a war going on, and we were on the front lines. The cars that pulsed across Route 4 downhill from the sanctuary held people who were just going about their business, buying groceries, visiting grandchildren, heading to the movies. Seeking sensation. In their deepest heart of hearts they burned to know the Lord, but they remained strangers to him. No Christian had ever told them about what God could do for them. And that made them vulnerable to the Enemy. Even as he spoke the Devil was laying a trap and luring them, by way of alcohol or greed or lust, and off they went into his waiting hands. God wanted to save them, but he needed us to be his helpers. It was up to us to speak out and tell them another way. To witness.

Bishop Gimenez asked us if we thought we could get over ourselves, move past fear and embarrassment and just use plain, simple words to tell them about another way, to tell them about the work God did in each and every one of us, the way he took the old and scraped it out and let it fall away, the way he made us clean again, white as snow. We told him we would.

By the time the night was over, the bishop had told so many stories of spirits crushed and conquered and had given so many prophecies that I couldn’t quite figure out which spirits were already bound up and which battles were still ahead of us. Toward eleven o’clock, my brothers fell asleep, Obere on the floor, wrapped in my father’s suit jacket, and Sam with his head in my mother’s lap. I sat next to my father, listening and taking notes, scribbling furiously just like my mother with a ballpoint pen, recording all the promises and blessings. The bishop prayed over Pastor Jim, that he would be a good and mighty man, and then prayed over all the leadership, and then of course there was an altar call, with a few souls saved.

When the time came for rededicating our lives to the Lord we all poured down to the altar. The bishop came around to anoint each one of us, his thumbs dabbing our foreheads with oil, shaking and pressing the Lord into our temples and cursing the demons who could take our peace away. When he lifted his broad hands from my head I could still feel his thumbprints, and when I rubbed my forehead with my palm I could see the sheen of that holy oil. I squared my shoulders and followed my mother back to our seats.

It was midnight when the dedication service was over. Sam drooped over my father’s broad shoulders and Obere tottered hand in hand with my mother, my father’s suit jacket shrouding him like a lank-limbed child ghost. My father laid his heavy palm on the back of my neck as we walked toward the car. All around us engines rumbled to life, the exhaust smoke shimmering in the chilly November air. My father packed us into the hatchback and rolled his window down to clasp hands with one of the deacons before we left. When we turned onto Route 4, I craned my neck around to take one more look at that big church on the hill. Someone had set up spotlights on the letters that adorned the side of the church, letters bearing the inscription, “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” I watched the glow fade into the night as we made our way down the dark highway.