“Robbie went home sick because his head split open in gym class. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw his brain. So, he had to go home.” I was giving my mother the latest updates from kindergarten at Genesis Baptist School. She’d picked me up from the school bus, as usual, and we were riding in our car the five remaining blocks home. I stared out the window, working my way down the mental checklist of mottled brown buildings, painted brick row houses, and yellowed storefronts we always passed. Nothing much of note ever happened at school: Bible verse memorization, naps, recess, music class, learning words. Slow news days. Except the one time my best friend, Robbie, had run into a cinderblock wall and his entire head had split open. Like a hard-boiled egg.
We’d been playing Marco Polo in gym, a game I’d never heard of nor truly understood. The gym teacher, a trim woman with frizzy Meg Ryan–in–When Harry Met Sally hair and a permanent uniform of a pale blue sweat suit, had explained it to us with the same air of utter resignation with which she approached everything. Sis was over it.
Meg Ryan, like many of the teachers at Genesis Baptist School, seemed to have found herself standing in front of a dark multipurpose room full of kindergartners as a result of her lifelong devotion to Christ. Most of the staff at Genesis were also members of the affiliated church and found themselves employed as an act of service. We knew this because teachers were constantly going on sabbatical to work on mission trips and because we prayed before everything. I hadn’t been in any school before—save for a brief period in which my mother tried to homeschool me and we decided we were better as friends—so I just took it as natural that all instructors were kindly white people who didn’t dance and had read the Bible cover to cover and would sometimes get teary-eyed when talking about “the situation in Africa.” All that being said, it was clear to us and to the gym teacher that instructing young Christians on the finer points of physical activity was not one of her spiritual gifts. She also played the guitar in chapel. Maybe that was more her speed. The evidence was inconclusive.
In gym class, she sighed through directions as if leading a breathwork instructional video. “You put the blindfold on and then everyone has to chase you,” she wheezed, the world’s most ambivalent kidnapper. We all rushed forward to obediently blindfold ourselves. For fitness and, ostensibly, for Christ.
“No,” she moaned. “Only one of you. Robbie. Robbie? Robbie, right? You’ll put the blindfold on and everyone else will chase you. Wait, no, you’ll chase everyone else. That’s it. It’s like tag.”
We all stared at each other quizzically. Help her, Jesus. Robbie, a round-faced, red-cheeked boy, dutifully stepped forward and tied a strip of cloth around his face. Meg Ryan stepped back against the wall and then jumped forward suddenly. “Oh! You have to say ‘Marco.’ ”
“Marco!” we all replied in unison.
“No! Robbie says ‘Marco’ and you say ‘Polo.’ ” By that point, we were all fairly soured on the idea of global exploration in general. The gym teacher blew her whistle. Robbie’s head swiveled blindly. “Marco?” he called out warily. “Polo?” we replied suspiciously. “Run!” the gym teacher called. So we all scattered and Robbie spun around in a circle and then ran full-speed, headfirst into the wall. Seeing my nearly decapitated friend, Meg Ryan sprang into action. And by sprang, I mean she sighed heavily and pushed herself away from the wall.
It struck me as odd that someone so lethargic would dedicate her life to physical activity, but I was five; what did I know of the motivations of adults? I was not then, nor have I ever been, a particularly physically engaged person. A lot of writers talk about their bodies as being cars that drive their brains around, but I never felt like that (I’m special!); I always felt like my body was a turtleneck that was too small and a pair of corduroy pants that was a little too big. I felt like my body was always tripping me up, squeezing me in; itchy and noisy, too hot and too leaden and too hard to move. All this is to say, I was an anxious, awkward kid but I had not yet discovered that some of those feelings could be alleviated by eschewing gym and all forms of movement beyond typing and talking.
Seeing Robbie’s brain immediately come popping out of the gash in his forehead, however, was the first hint that movement was not necessarily something I should be incorporating into my life going forward.
“Anyway,” I said to my mother as we pulled up outside our house, “we had to stop the game.”
At this my mother interrupted my laconic retelling. “His whole brain? Are you sure?”
Obviously, I was sure. It was red and fleshy, what else could it have been?
“Are you sure he didn’t just cut his head?”
I grew huffy; if I had known I was going to be treated like a hostile witness, I wouldn’t have told this story at all. Besides, all of this happened last week. This was prologue.
“Why are you like this?” my mother asked.
I knew it was Robbie’s brain because I saw it and he got sent home and I couldn’t imagine anything less drastic. He was back the next day with a Band-Aid holding in his frontal lobe. “But,” I told my mother, “the point of all of it is that today in chapel we didn’t have anyone to play the guitar and they announced that the gym teacher was on a missionary trip to Africa! Isn’t that suspicious?!”
My mother seemed less than convinced by my conspiracy theory, but I’d seen it. They shipped Meg Ryan to Africa to keep her from sending the rest of us careening into cement walls. The wages of sin is death and the wages of causing a five-year-old’s brain to come falling out of his forehead is having to go tell people in Ghana about the everlasting love of Christ. Amen.
Cinderblocks aren’t the best thing to build a gym’s walls out of, but we didn’t know that; it was the past! What kind of dangerous hellscapes did you grow up in?
My neck hates turtlenecks. Or perhaps turtlenecks hate my neck. Either way, I’m no turtle. What kind of clothing makes you want to burn your entire closet to the ground?
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the missionary trip to Africa was both the gym teacher’s higher calling in service of the Lord and also a tool of punishment. What instruments of our devotion are also used to make us suffer?
We were in a season of meetings. In the mid-1990s, I was a preteen, and our Sunday morning church services were expanded to include frequent congregational meetings about church business. These meetings were never joyful, they were never good news, and they were never short. As an adult, I’ve decided I can’t sit in a meeting longer than an hour; I become antsy and argumentative. I’m sort of a nightmare, to be honest. Count me out of any Constitutional Congress, I guess. I discovered this about myself in church.
Time moved like molasses in those days. The stretch between summers was an endless, dry expanse, birthdays and holidays were mirages that were perpetually out of reach, and every Sunday we spent an eternity at church. The normal service included Sunday school, an 11 A.M. service that lasted two or three hours (depending on the Movement of the Spirit), and sometimes dinner. The meetings tacked on another hour, at least. In service, an eternity of church was characterized as a good thing; that’s what heaven was supposed to be like. I was unconvinced. I was twelve and I had discovered skepticism.
I wasn’t skeptical about Christianity, per se. I was too obedient for heresy. Jesus was born of a virgin, attended a trade school to learn carpentry, quit his job to start a small faith-based nonprofit with some friends, did a couple of well-received TED Talks, and then was persecuted, crucified, and rose again. But a lot of the conversation around the whole worship concept gave me pause. So, the goal of this whole “Life” thing was eventually to get to heaven, where there were streets of gold and everyone got a mansion and we’d worship God forever? Was it mostly singing or was there also a very long sermon? Because, if we’re being frank here, the latter seemed a little less than ideal. See my earlier note about meetings. Were there breaks for food or would you not need food anymore? What if you just wanted food?
I had a lot of questions. For instance, these mansions: So we each have a mansion on a street that’s made of gold? Who is polishing the gold? Will I live in the same neighborhood as my family? Will we recognize each other? My brother Stephen and I were bickering a lot during this period; would he be across the street from me, teasing me for eternity? Could I put in a request to the neighborhood association?
And circling back to the sermons on Sundays: is it heretical to say sometimes they were boring? Women never gave sermons; I found that odd. I began to notice that we seemed to always be talking about suffering. The suffering of our forebearers, the suffering of the saints in the Bible, our own suffering. It seemed, sometimes, like the message was that we deserved it, that we were bad, and that that was the point of life. But soon, we’d be in heaven, where a preacher would helpfully remind us that once we were bad, but Jesus loved us, so now we had a mansion full of shiny surfaces covered with fingerprints.
Also! When were we supposed to be at home in our mansions if we were worshipping God all day? Was heaven like those churches you can stream live online while you feed your baby or vacuum or whatever people do? I just needed some clarification around the logistics of heaven. Not to be critical; it just seemed like the plan wasn’t fleshed out. Perhaps we should call a meeting. Under an hour, please. With snacks.
On Earth, pre–Second Coming, our church congregation was completely black, and, while I couldn’t prove it, I began to suspect that this also informed our experience and the way we talked about life, destiny, sin, and suffering. I tried to discern a connection between the all-white worship leaders at Genesis Baptist School, their tears over the situation in Africa, our one-room church full of lower- and middle-income black people in a poor black neighborhood, and the kingdom of heaven with its streets of gold and high real estate values, but I couldn’t figure it out. Fortunately, church was very long and I had a lot of time to think.
One night, on the ride home from church, I asked my father, “Why does God give us free will if He’s just going to punish us for doing bad things?” My father answered that free will gave us the opportunity to make choices and, in so doing, to show our devotion. “Yeah, but why?” I responded. My father patiently reiterated his point. He quoted Scripture. He gave his theories. I responded, “Okay, I see what you’re saying but also why?” This went on for quite a while. We arrived at home and walked up the stairs and somehow never got past the landing at the top. There we stood, for an hour or more, as the sun went down and the darkness crept in, and he gave me a spiritual education—one that was kind and thoughtful and questioning in and of itself—and I asked over and over again, “Sure, sure, I see your point. But why?” It was the best meeting I ever had and the best church service.
The meetings at church were also about sin but there wasn’t time for discussion. Something had taken ahold of our congregation—some in leadership might say it was evil, others might say it was a natural development based on social and socioeconomic conditions. Either way, like the town of River City, Iowa, in The Music Man, we had trouble. Young women in the church kept getting pregnant, magic-like. Or at least it seemed like magic to me, because at every meeting a girl I’d grown up with was forced to stand in front of the church and tearfully read a letter confessing what she’d done. Sometimes she’d be alone; sometimes her parents would stand gravely behind her. Every once in a while a boy would stand with her. Perhaps this is the magician, I’d think.
The meetings were meant to confront sin, to call it out, and to provide a venue for the girls to ask for forgiveness from the community. As far as agendas go, it wasn’t the most boring I’d ever encountered, but it was troubling nonetheless. I saw what they were trying to do, yet I couldn’t help but ask, over and over again, “But why?”
The meetings seemed to escalate. Once, there was no pregnant girl at the front of the church, only the leadership, looking ashen, telling the congregation that we had to vote on the serious matter of excommunicating the music minister. He’d served in the church for years, but I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen him in a few weeks. There was no discussion about why he was being excommunicated, which fascinated me in the moment. It was a meeting about something everyone already knew, to perform a task that had already been decided. The people around me wept as they raised their hands to vote yes. And I never saw him again.
I was too young to vote and it wasn’t until years later that I thought to ask what he’d done to warrant such a strict punishment. None of the girls had been excommunicated; no one else, to my knowledge, ever had. Perhaps you already know this tune, but it was my first time hearing it. He’d struggled with his sexuality for years, the answer came. He’d even gotten married to a woman, thinking that could solve his problem. But something in him had broken. He annulled his marriage, he confessed to the pastor that he was gay, and he’d been sent away. They hadn’t even needed to count the votes.
The last meeting I attended was in the summer. The church was full and warm; the air-conditioning units at their limits, the humidity pushing in through every crevice. There was no girl up front, once again, but no grave church leadership either. I shifted uncomfortably, like a suspect in a murder mystery trying to figure out why the detective has called us all here. The problem was itself a mystery, as the pastor relayed it. He stood in front of the congregation and told us that we needed to make a decision. People who had AIDS were trying to join the church, he said. How many remains a mystery. Was there a mass migration? Did we, a one-room church with a music ministry that was markedly less joyful, seem a beacon for those with HIV/AIDS? I didn’t know. In any case, the question had come up and the pastor was putting it in front of us. How did we want to proceed?
You are reading this in the future and so debating this seems wrong to you. I assure you, in the past it was also disturbing. I listened intently as members of the congregation expressed the sorts of fears about AIDS that come from the intersection of a lack of sexual health education and a pervasive paranoia that has come to define Reagan-era America and the years thereafter. People wanted potential congregants with AIDS to identify themselves before joining; they wanted to take steps to ensure the safety of our social gatherings and dinners. One person suggested that we discourage people with AIDS from joining because there were children in the church. I, a child, wondered what I was being protected from.
The consensus seemed to be that letting them join was a dangerous idea. “But why?” I murmured under my breath. I never spoke at church meetings. I was a child and therefore not a voting member. Besides, this level of conversation was rare. The pregnant girls never had to endure a Q&A. Something had gotten out of hand in the congregation. We’d lost church. I raised my hand and felt my face get hot before I even got called on to speak. The pastor pointed to me. “I don’t understand what we’re talking about,” I said. “I don’t understand why we have to know anything about anyone. It’s not like they’re going to bleed into our macaroni and cheese at church dinners,” I said.
After church, the pastor pulled me aside. “You have to understand that people need time to come around to some ideas, son.” I nodded. I said nothing. I was not his son. My father was the man who puzzled through questions with me for hours, whose house had open doors and open arms inside, and who welcomed the doubt that is necessary for true belief.
Who are you most looking forward to seeing in heaven? Who are you trying to avoid?
In church, God is our father and Jesus is our brother. Who are our cousins? Does heaven have an eccentric aunt? Do you have an eccentric aunt? I hope you do.
The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?
David was freaking out. It was ten minutes till eleven on Easter Sunday and he was running around the big-steepled Presbyterian church at which he was serving as a pastoral associate. He’d spent weeks—honestly weeks—planning the Easter egg hunt and it had suddenly and dramatically all fallen apart. He’d stuffed hundreds of plastic Easter eggs with candy the night before and then lugged them all to work, leaving them in the church’s parlor so that he could come back and set them up in the morning. He had carefully worked out a plan for hiding them that ensured that every child would receive an equal number of eggs. It was meticulous. But a church volunteer had arrived before us and, not knowing about his plan, had hidden over half the eggs randomly, and started dismantling what she thought were extras. Suddenly what was supposed to be a measured game with enough prizes for everyone looked to be a mad dash with no guarantees. David was melting down.
“I worked so hard,” he lamented after the volunteer left to take care of other duties.
“It’s just Easter eggs,” I said, realizing almost immediately how unhelpful this was. His plan for the hunt was a reflection of his abilities, his labor of love and of sacred service. It was, perhaps most important, the difference between a morning full of happy new childhood memories and a lackluster event that probably ended in tears. As he furrowed his brow and tried to think through a solution, the full picture of the competing interests revealed itself in my head. He was dealing with an age-old church tradition—that most precise and fickle of things, one of those things about which everyone has an opinion. He was also dealing with a daycare issue—parents were entrusting their children to his care and expecting that when they emerged from service, they’d be able to pull out their iPhones, collect their offspring, and capture the unbridled joy that can only come from finding a plastic egg under a bush. Lastly, he was also dealing with a justice issue—behind the candy-crazed pursuit by hordes of pastel-clad children was a metaphor for access and inequity. The children were to be presented with what they were told was a level playing field—there are enough eggs for everyone, we’d say—and David was facing the possibility that that premise would be a lie. The children might never have known it, but we’d know it. Worse, we’d be the architects of this debacle. I may not understand Easter eggs, but I wasn’t about to let my husband become the villain of Easter.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “It’ll be fine. Some kids will get more eggs than others and that sucks, but it’ll be okay.” Having successfully talked him down, I was now ready to re-escalate the crisis. There was a metaphor at stake.
“Not on my watch,” I declared, still unhelpful but determined. “You go take care of the kids. I’ll sort out this egg imbroglio.” The organ in the church began to play in the distance; I had exactly forty-five minutes to bring justice into the world on Easter Sunday. White church is very prompt.
I surveyed the ruin of the parlor, the empty plastic bags, the basket of surplus eggs, and the pile of mini chocolate candies. I unwrapped a Krackel and ate it as I tried to figure out how to go about righting this wrong and also what a Krackel is and why there are no full-size versions of it. This is an entire candy brand that exclusively exists in miniature; what’s the business plan here? Deal with this later, I scolded myself. We have a holiday to save.
We never had Easter egg hunts in church growing up. We were Baptists and that bunny didn’t die on the cross, did it? No, it did not! Our Easter baskets had chocolate crosses nestled in fake grass; I haven’t done the math, but I think from a square-inches perspective you get more chocolate from a cross than a bunny. So chalk one up for crucifixion, I guess. To be fair, I do recall my mother hiding Easter eggs around our house when we were little, but there were just three of us doing the searching and so there wasn’t a complex system of organization. David had plotted a hunt that happened in two shifts; there was a set change involved! The eccentric in me delighted; the logistician despaired.
Here’s what I knew: the littlest children were to do the hunt first. In his plan, they’d each be assigned a color and told to pick up only those eggs. Parents would help; joy would break out. After they were done, we’d collect any unfound eggs, then grab the second batch of eggs and hide those for the older kids, who also would be assigned a color. Maybe this makes sense to you, but this was my first white Easter, so I marveled at the intricacy. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered how anyone managed to plan a hunt without a strict set of rules and regulations, and possibly a clipboard. To celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, we hide treasure and then release children of varying developmental levels and abilities in a desperate, clamoring pursuit. Remarkable! It’s The Hunger Games in pastel. It’s a Black Friday sale at Walmart. The last biscuit at Golden Corral. We don’t expect other humans to act sanely or with any sort of grace when they perceive scarcity, so it’s foolish to expect kids to. Perhaps this is where they learn it. Perhaps the yearly tradition of American children tearing across the White House lawn, dodging and diving over their peers, trying to snatch up as much as they can, is a metaphor itself. Or a precursor.
I’m just saying, everybody wants candy.
I walked out to the yard to take stock of what had already been hidden. These eggs were just sitting everywhere in plain sight. This was a shock, as well. Apparently, you don’t actually want to hide the eggs. You just put them where the kids will find them and pick them up so that the process isn’t unnecessarily impeded. My mind was blown.
The first step, as I saw it, was to take an inventory. I rummaged through the parlor until I found an actual clipboard. Years as a bar manager taught me that it was a fool’s errand to try to do this kind of work without one. Clipboard: essential. There was probably a clipboard at the tomb when Jesus rose, to be honest. He emerged, filled out some forms, and went about his day. (Literally his day. Because it was a Sunday.)
I went outside to count the eggs that were out there so I could figure out how to adjust the inventory to achieve equity. Just a man in a suit standing in the dirt, counting Easter eggs by color like a middle-management toddler. David had bought a lot of different colors so that he could ensure every child got one. I realized I needed to list each color as I came across it and tally them. I may have spent far too long ruminating on what exactly each shade was, but honestly, if you’re not going to be thorough about this sort of thing, it displeases the Lord.
Twenty minutes later, I had an inventory. There were 176 eggs and the counts were all over the place. I was sweating. I had way too few “grass green with stickers,” “daffodil yellow with stickers,” “cerulean,” and both turquoises—“turquoise prime” and “turquoise cheeky.” I had way too many neon greens, whites, and sky blues. Honestly, I considered running into the church and shouting, “Easter is postponed due to issues on the factory floor!” But I’d made David a promise.
The best way to level the playing field was to take the color category with the lowest count and then remove eggs from the other categories until they all matched. (Perhaps this is a metaphor for taxation, but don’t ask me. I’m just a middle-management toddler.)
I realized that to do that, I then had to go on another Easter egg hunt. I had to find the same damn eggs I had just found. Call Jesus and tell him to hit the snooze button; I have to go digging around some underbrush for a cotton-candy-pink egg.
As I went through, I realized there were some categories that I’d just called even. The orange had eleven instead of twelve but it was close enough for government work. The grape had fourteen. I had a basket full of extra eggs and I’d perspired through my jacket, but from the sounds of the church service inside I knew I still had about fifteen minutes. I could make it absolutely even. I grabbed some extras from inside and I embarked on my third Easter egg hunt of the day.
Finally, it was done. Every single category had a dozen eggs, like God intended. Finding myself with a little time left, I went back outside and shook every egg to make sure there was candy. This is also a metaphor for justice work, I’m sure, but mostly I have food insecurity and my worst fear is for someone to not have chocolate when they want chocolate.
David came cautiously down the ramp. “How’d it go?” he asked, eyeing my drenched shirt and my clipboard.
I smiled at him and gestured dramatically to the garden littered with very poorly hidden eggs in a truly stunning variety of colors. All had been made right. All had been made whole. Heaven was at hand.
Does Easter have a villain? Is it Pontius Pilate? Is it Barabbas? Is it Death?
What’s the deal with Krackel? Seriously. Please email me about this.
Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?