In This Church

by Harrison Kim

This church is a spire tipped rocket ship hurtling through space and time, all the beliefs and stained glass held within.  We take it on faith that there’s a direction, as we step inside.  I step to the entrance travelling 1000 miles per second.  That’s how fast I, this church and the earth that supports it are moving across the Universe. At this speed, is it any wonder we forget most of what happens?  If I were as old as I remember, I’d still be a child.  Perhaps that’s why I remain a believer in stories and miracles.  Everything is hurtling on, faster than we can imagine.  So why not imagine, we’ll never catch up to reality.  Enter the church.

As a child the sound of the organ moved me, its levers and the pedals, and the candles lit at altar, smoke disappearing to the ceiling.  The singing together, everyone strong in harmony, so much taller and louder than I.  They must be in control, I thought.  They know what they are doing.  I didn’t understand the sermons but heard their tone, rising and falling, always silence following.  Then another hymn. Afterwards, families chatted outside under the huge trees drinking cups of tea as the kids yelled and played hide and seek. I remember the huge lady with the moustache touching her husband’s hand, purple with giant blue veins.  My parents stood over a baby carriage.  Was that me inside?  I looked down upon myself and hoped everything would go well.

It’s evening now and the stars will soon appear. Tonight is the ascension, the night to wing towards heaven in song and celebration.  I’ve walked here from out of the sea, in a dream of five hundred million years advancing forth, along the edges of oak forests, my fins turning to legs and my gills to lungs.  My slithers turned to steps and my swim to striding. 

Since this morning, I’ve moved with my blue blanket draped around me, rising from out of the park where I slept by standing beds of waving red poppies.  I stepped from there into this world of Oz without the rose-coloured glasses, weaving through the traffic that I guide like a video game, depending on my movements and their brakes.   I look up at the bank buildings, so high and mighty like that tower of Babel long ago, but these structures are complete. Victors piercing the sky.  Everyone speaking the same language.

The churches were once taller than the banks, but steel has surpassed brick and mortar.  This Ascension Church in the middle of the city existed since before I can remember, or maybe just from this morning..  It depends on how far back you go.   The country church I sang inside as a kid was deconsecrated, and stayed creaky in the wind, abandoned to the snow and sun.  I wonder how many congregants will attend this Ascension service today.

In the church where my wife Tammy and I were married, refugees slept on the pews.

She didn’t want these people to leave, “This is your sanctuary,” she told them.

They sat in the back rows, creating an audience for the ceremony, which included we two our parents and the minister.  It was what we could afford.

I believed in “I do”, because we stood on holy ground.  Tammy and I travelled one thousand miles per second, and I placed a ring on her finger.  The finger wearing the only jewel I’ve ever noticed.  We stepped outside, through the wedding portal, marriage completed. The whole world changed, even down to the alarm that alerts the bus driver to let you off at the next stop, and the wail of ambulance sirens.  We were together now.

I lift my head and view the lofty spire jutting out, a single yellow flower a little way up growing between the bricks.  Could it be a dandelion?  The church door opens, and the sound of the rumbling organ spills forth.  On the steps leading up, a young woman lies on her back, holding up a mirror and applying makeup.

There are those who do not believe, and some will lie on the steps and paint their faces.

That paint will always wear off.  It’s a never-ending process of re-application.

“Do you have a cigarette?” the woman asks, as I move on by, for I’m travelling too fast to stop now, and she already smells smoky. 

An enormous lady in a wheelchair, covered in a huge white quilt, laughs from her resting place under the fire escape, clutching her phone as close to her lips as a lover.  Then a man with a face half black and half pale, split down the middle like a yin-yang, beseeches me for five dollars and I give it.  He thanks me profusely, and I carry that thanks as I walk up the stairs.

“There’s nothing wrong with any of this,” I tell myself. “It is but part of the material and the temporal, and I am but travelling through.”

My wife Tammy passed away some years ago, I can’t talk about the reasons. They’re all sudden and suicidal, captured in a past reality,  passed forever, in either case there’s no going back.  My heart beats and breaks into the future, as I wrap my shoulders and head in my blue blanket and proceed through the church doors.

As I walk the cloisters, I am surrounded by spirit space ,and at the edges, the stained glass green and red, yellow and silver, the saints with their miracles, Jesus ascended.  In the chancel, the red and white robed choir sings, the organ flares around their harmony cascade.  Mouths open and sound breaks forth, fingers press keys and vibrations roll, all part of the toss and turn of the ship, music fuel for belief as I hear the rise and fall of singing power.

There are few in the congregation, very old people with skulls visible through wispy white hair, canes laying on the pew beside them. single middle-aged women alone, either very thin or very large, a man with a half-burned face.  We’ve all known what it’s like to pass through time, whether it be seventy years or seventy million.  However long it takes. 

We’re hurtled forward by the music taking us up to the vaults and beams and the holy figures of the stained glass.  Then it stops.

The pastor takes the stand.  He says the poor are heroes because they have no money, food, or place to stay.  To him, poverty appears to be a prerequisite for virtue.  It’s up to those who have, to provide for those who have not.  As one who just gave his last five dollars away, I can agree.  The pastor has trouble too, as do we all. I suspect stomach issues. 

I walk behind the pews, covering my head with my blue blanket.  I feel better viewing only the straight ahead.  I lie in one pew on my back, like the girl outside the church, except without makeup. I stare at the vault across the ceiling and let the pastor’s words drift in and out.  The organ rises and falls.  People seem to move around me, and I let them come and go.

“Are you okay?” asks a woman’s voice.  Her masked face and thin neck arch over me, and

her hair hangs down.  I notice white vestments. 

“Indeed I am,” I tell her.  “Just waiting here for the end of the world, or the service, whichever comes first.”

“The service has ended,” she said.  “And it is time to go.”

“I had a friend,” I tell her.  “That friend thought he was God and all the stained glass in his church was an abomination for it did not honor him.  He ran into the place with a pitchfork and began smashing all the beauty out.”  I push myself to a seated position.  “His imagination took him down the wrong road.”

“Where is your imagination at?” she asks me.

I see the lines across her forehead and her blue veined hands jutting from her white vestment.

“I understand myself as a refugee,” I tell her.  “And this is my home.”

She asks where I am from, and I tell her the outside world. 

“Now the service is over, I will step through that church door, into a different place and time,” I explain.  “During these rituals and ceremonies, and the singing and the music, we travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres across the universe.  All positions have changed.”

“I hope it is a better place now” she tells me.  “Then it was when you arrived.”

I think of that beginning scene again, when I first became aware outside that long-ago country church, as I gazed down at myself in the baby buggy, my mother holding the pram handles, her hands rocking me up and down, my father in his brown suit smiling in conversation under the newly leafed trees.  It must have been spring, where I grew up.  I walked upon the earth, and as time passed became tall and strong. I thought my parents were in control, and that I would be protected.  I was mistaken.  They provided, but they could not keep me safe. Yet I come back here, to the service inside, the holy place of harmony.

“Do you believe in evolution or creation?” I ask the masked woman. “When living life, which direction is correct?”

“There could be both,” she says, and that’s exactly the right answer.

I am glad and grateful that she has been gentle, and shown me mercy.

I pace up and down the aisles once again, with the woman and a few others watching. It takes time to launch.  I wave my arms up and down like wings, raising and lowering my blue blanket, and propel my body out the big front door.  Silver glints off passing cars, the light brighter now, the sky clearer.  I feel an ascension, perhaps a bit closer to heaven. As I walk down the church steps the same panhandler from many thousands of kilometres ago repeats his request for money.  Some things never change, I tell him, throwing off my blanket and holding it forward. I still have something to give.

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Harrison Kim lives and writes out of Victoria, Canada. His stories have been published in the U. S., U. K., Canada and Ireland. His blogspot re: publications and music videos, can be found here: https://harrisonkim1.blogspot.com/