My home church

Fred and Audrey weren't there. As long as I remember, they lived first door west of us and walked to church like we did, coming in through the north door rather than the main entrance to the south. Fred wore a cigar or a cigar butt between his lips, learned to talk with the dumb thing stuck in the corner. Like so many men in our church, he was a builder of some sort. When I-43 came in, linking Milwaukee and Green Bay with four-lanes, that highway changed the village, making us a bedroom community of descendants of the Dutch immigrant people who'd come more than  a century before, the people who started the church, way back when.

This time, we came in through the south entrance--now substantially larger with a kind of coffee room for chatting after worship. We sat 3/4 of the way back, enough for me to see almost immediately how many souls were no longer there. 

Art and Nell weren't there either. They lived just across the alley, where a couple of apple trees graced a back yard that included the biggest garden on the block. Their son and I got caught smoking upstairs in their garage which became thereafter the greatest crisis of my childhood. Art is at the heart of my first novel, or at least a man much like him. But, like I was saying, he and Nel weren't there either. 

The Smieses weren't there either, nor were the Bloks or Uncle Allie and Aunt Dorothy, nor Trudy, their daughter, although she's still a member, I'm told. Turkey Den Hollander wasn't there, nor was Glen, his son, my age, and Glenn's wife Sally, who was always someone my mom proudly referred to as a relative--just exactly how, I don't know.

There were a couple of Gabrielses and Hendrickses and Veldbooms I recognized, some of whom recognized me as a former son of the congregation. Everyone wasn't new. If I'd dream a head of hair on some of those shiny pates, I could make out one or two faces from my childhood, but let me just tell it straight here: a whole lot of people in the Oostburg CRC weren't there. The souls who were--many of them at least--were not people I knew or remembered.

Maybe ten rows of chairs stood up in front of what pews are left in the sanctuary. I suppose those chairs marked some kind of compromise in worship design. The old blonde benches--padded way back when--still marched from the chairs to the back. When I was a kid, someone carved their initials on the arms at the far end. My dad was livid. I had my suspicions about who vandalized them--those benches were new when I was in grade school--but I don't remember if the powers-that-be ever determined the criminal culprit.

So yesterday, by choice, my wife and daughter and I, home on the lakeshore for a family gathering, worshipped in the church of my childhood, which is what it was, and is, and always will be, I guess, even though by all the empty spaces where people I knew and loved should have been, it was perfectly clear that it wasn't home anymore; even though I'll never forget playing in its empty walls, running upstairs to look out over the unfinished sanctuary from two little closets way up high; even though my Grandpa Dirkse was the chair of the building committee when the place was being sculpted; even though the great, looming cross at the front of the sanctuary was donated by Grandma Dirkse, donated after grandpa's heart attack. It was no longer still my home church, even though I still am suspicious about the kid (he's just about 80 today) who carved his initial in a whole row of brand new pews, even though I remember Glenn Den Hollander or Bob De Smith (Bob senior) cracking open those fancy windows on the west side to let the air circulate through a bit (it could get mighty hot back then on the lakeshore. It would take some wrangling before air conditioning.)

It's no longer my home church, but it's still a church, still home to many others, most of whom I didn't know. 

Some years ago, my home church asked me to speak at their birthday celebration--150 years. I did, a little fearfully for I was never a preacher, always a story-teller. I wrote a rambling narrative about the marriage between my own history and the church's story and hoped it would be okay.

I think it was. I felt good about it that night at their birthday celebration. The audience was likely made up of the same people that were, yesterday, to me at least, strangers, but what I'd told them seemed to me to please them.

Maybe I should have gone to church elsewhere yesterday--we could have. Maybe I should have considered that birthday party my last tango in the church where I grew up. 

Maybe. 

We sat in front of a guy a decade younger than I am, a Gabrielse, who appreciatively shook my hand when worship ceased. "How old were you when you baled hay for my dad?" he asked me. 

Baling hay for his dad was a joy. His dad was a wonderful boss, I remembered. So did he.

Then again, maybe it was a good choice. The absences hurt, but our Sunday morning in the church where I grew up wasn't without its moments, like baling hay for John Gabrielse. "I was just a kid," his son, also retired, told me, "but I remember."

You can't believe everything a writer says, of course, but I think it was Thomas Wolff who titled one of his novels with a phrase that's had a much longer after life than the novel itself--"you can't go home again."

Let me just say, after yesterday, "Yes, you can." It may be a little painful, but yes, you can.