Ceremony by Caleb Coomer

Rattling feet and active tongues met the clang and squeal of the drums and choir. The language spoken by the congregation was foreign to me, just a boy then: it sounded like some alien dialect from Star Wars. I noticed the power that language held over the horde of rambling adults. The mushed up words spilled out, filling the sanctuary with a sacred tongue from a cavern of the mind I hated to have witnessed.

We arrived at the red-brick, ranch-style building at 8 a.m. Instead of entering the side door, I remained in step with my parents and walked through the building’s two large white oak doors on an otherwise standard Sunday—late wake-up, Pop-Tarts in the car, sister playing a Christina Aguilera CD—signaling my admission into adult tradition. As we breached the heavy doors, two grinning, pale-skinned men with silver hair held out pamphlets. I took one with confidence and returned the grin in shared courtesy, pretending I belonged. The boom of the music was all I had known of the room before this Sunday. The trembling beat often penetrated my chest from twenty yards away at the kids’ ceremony I usually attended. The sound waves sank into my flesh and swam from my breastbone down over my gut, leaving behind a soft fluttering, and continued down through my groin with a sting, moving on through the soles of my feet, in tremors, to return to the surface of the earth.

‘What happens there?’ I asked an adult who was working at the kids’ ceremony.

‘Worship, just like in here,’ she said.

It was nothing like the bubbly sounds of the kid ceremony I had outgrown years before. The adult room shook with the racket of guitars and drums like the classic rock station my father listened to. I pictured Joe Perry across the hall at the adult ceremony, pouting and rolling his shoulders, a cigarette in the neck of his guitar alongside Steven Tyler spinning and swinging his mic stand, his voice breaching the ionosphere. Rock gods leading worship a hallway away from where I watched some teenagers control lip-syncing puppets. My stomach vibrated with rejection. I imagined the room. I had seen it once: guitars, pianos, and a giant drum set surrounded by standalone plastic barriers meant to control the explosive cadence. I did not remember the speakers, but their power implied that they were gargantuan. I watched in my mind as the adults jumped or clapped, perhaps banging their heads like at the rock concerts on TV.

#

I held the program in my hand. My day had come. The room had three aisles, each containing about twenty rows of peanut brown, dense wooden pews with their backs and legs painted white. I opened the pamphlet and read the schedule of events, reminded of the theater. A leathery-skinned man now stood at a podium, after him was a frail woman, and after her, a middle-aged bald man with a brown goatee and a belly as round as his glistening skull. A few gray-haired men collected money. One man would walk down the aisle, stop at the end of a row of pews, and hand over a large bag attached to a handle. The men always grinned. This offering bag was passed down the entire row until it reached the end where another usher would receive it and the process continued. My mother allowed me to drop an envelope into the burgundy collection sack. I read the outside of the envelope, a checklist of sorts; my mother had checked the box marked “tithe.”

“What’s tithe?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll find out later,” my mom replied.

I insisted.

“It’s an offering, ten percent of our income,” she said.

I realized that “later” might mean much later, when I became an adult by age and not just by admission to this exclusive ceremony. I saw a girl from my usual ceremony across the room and was excited for us to share our experiences with the other children stuck in the kids’ room. Moments later, I saw a boy from the kids’ ceremony, which made me reconsider the reason for my attendance.

“Why am I here?” I asked no one in particular.

“Sunday school is canceled today. Ms. Susan is sick,” my mom said.

Pride abandoned me, a feeling of fraudulence overtook me, and I felt embarrassment at my presence in this precious ceremony and shame at my faux confidence as I had greeted the man at the front. His smile was likely a reaction to the silliness of my mimicry of adult behavior. A jest. Oh, look at the little boy playing adult today. My attendance is a fluke. Chance, not providence, sat me in the cold wooden pew.

The time for praise began, but I was still battling with my doubts and anger. The possibility of rock music no longer excited me, and I remained seated as the band geared up. The choir assembled as guitars were strumming and the drummer wielded his sticks. My father pulled me to my feet. The initial tunes underwhelmed me: slow and thoughtful, more hymns than actual songs. As the music picked up, the adults’ feet started to shuffle, and their raised hands flailed and thrust toward the sky. A clean-shaven old man, the leader, proclaimed into the microphone the arrival of the Holy Spirit. The adults received this information with cries of “Thank you, Lord,” “Praise be to God,” and other hollers and wails. I sat back down and gripped the seat. The rumbling waves of worship shot through me, and I felt like I was descending a steep hill on an uncontrollable bike. Foot stomping turned to jumping, the same song repeated,

“I took back what he stole from me!”

“I took back what he stole from me!”

“I went to the devil’s camp, and I took back what he stole from me!”

I wasn’t allowed to speak of the devil. This song told of a monster quite alive, not an ancient serpent long dead: a palpable villain set on destroying the adults and their property, destroying me. Icy sweat gripped me. I saw adults flailing and running down the aisles, gluttonous in their worship as if indulging in the spirit further fueled their desire. My parents held their arms up, eyes closed. Where is the devil? Was he here?  A woman running around the congregation flung spit from her mouth as she screamed to the ceiling. Sweat and tears filled the faces of the choir. If not for my mother’s and father’s relative calm, I might have hidden under the pew. I sat silently, my stomach a chaotic wreck of knots and bubbles, my face flat, hands damp. A slew of hushed, messy words, almost a whisper, came from my father’s mouth. The leader, without his jacket and tie and the fabric of his shirt being usurped by expanding bodies of sweat, danced over to my father, now standing in the aisle. I dug my nails into the wood of the seat, gripping harder as sweat threatened to release my palm from the safety of the pew, to let go would have been to surrender and fall into a tear in the earth beneath me, a black canyon. At this point, nearly all the adults vibrated with the influence of what the leader had called the “Holy Spirit”.

“I took back what he stole from me!”

“I took back what he stole from me!”

The music droned as my eyes focused on the man grabbing my father. A woman sprinted past and grazed my father’s shoulder. She spun and continued her sprint, with her eyes shut, all while yelling in this scattered language. The words felt quick and harsh and contained too many vowels. I moved toward my father and called to him, but without conviction; my voice was inaudible even to me. My father’s foreign speech grew loud enough for me to hear. The leader stood in front of my father, a head shorter than him, and my father’s hands raised as his head hung down. He shook from top to bottom. I scooted toward him, my nails scratching against the seat. The old, damp leader thrust his palm onto my father’s forehead pushing his head back lack a lever, spewing words I did not understand. My father dropped from a force not of man’s flesh but of the mind. A possession was underway, and I feared it absolutely. In step with his plummet to the floor, the strange words of the raging collective overtook my father’s tongue; his whispers became screams, and his flesh languished in the flood of slithery vowels. Oh la ma lah mi li…I lunged toward my father, but my mother’s arm held me back. Tears came to my eyes with as much determination as the strange tongue came to the mouths of the adults.

“Get up, Dad!” My voice was cracked and shaking. As I saw it, my father lay dying a graphic death, one without dignity. I wondered if the devil had come to steal the life from us, from my father, and I wondered if this war between mankind and hell played out weekly in this heinous ceremony. A woman I didn’t know helped my mother restrain me, as the leader neared me with the power of violent death in his mind, facilitated by his veiny hands that had filled my father with the ugly tongue. I looked at his hands as he stepped into the row, my eyes fixated on their translucence. The skin loose and wrinkled like pale rot, trembled with strength and willingness, hungry for more flesh.

“Death!” I screamed. “Devil!”

Unable to hold my gaze, I plunged my face into my mother’s chest as my father still shook and muttered that repulsive tongue.

#

Several weeks ago, I drove by the old church and stopped. It’s a gym now. I looked inside and walked as close to the location of my father’s fit as possible. A squat rack obstructed the exact spot. I walked to the rack and noted that the ancient musk of the sanctuary persisted through the sweat-stained rubber floor and steel bars. The building was erected in the early twentieth century, but the participants who filled this room sang and danced to conjure something much older. I have spent over twenty years avoiding religious service of any sort, but standing there, I couldn’t prevent the chilled sweat from coming to my palms or the twisting feeling from churning in my stomach. The quiet hiss of shaking tongues seeped out of the ground. I kneeled down and pulled away at the rubber floor until I reached the old planks beneath, all cracked and discolored, with a mosaic of black scuff marks from years of brutal worship. The hiss became a roar. I put my right ear flat against the floor. My brain stung with the noise, and my hands vibrated against a pressure underneath, screaming to be released. I warmed the wood with my tears, my hands frozen to the floor, pierced with the sensation of bones convulsing underneath my skin. Two men removed me from the grip of that horrible entity, but the tremors of a thousand ceremonies reverberated in my mind, the endless tune of messy tongues scattered like dead dandelion petals.

Caleb Coomer

Image – Pixabay.com – brown church pews