A Distorted Reality is a Necessity to be Free
(Note: This was done for my creative writing class and I have NO IDEA if it's any good or not, and it certainly is not finished, but this is the version I'm turning in for class and I'd love any feedback you can spare.)
Alden can't stand being here, but he can't just leave either. The service was already in progress when they arrived and they had to pick their way over people to find places to sit among the dozens of rows of wooden folding chairs. Leaving now might be disruptive, plus disrespectful to Patrick who had invited him once he found out that Alden wasn't going to a church of his own any more. The reason that he can't stand being here right now it isn't that he dislikes the church or is bored or angry with it, which sometimes happens, but because for no reason at all he feels like he could fall asleep at any moment and that's making it very hard to concentrate.
The pastor is a middle-aged man with a shaved head and a neatly-trimmed goatee. Patrick had said the pastor's name was Johan. "I've been thinking about healing," Jonah says.
It's evening, and the room-less room is dimly lit. There are candles on the stage around the musicians, as well as rose-colored can lights on the floor by the side walls, giving the faintest neon-pink outline to the silhouettes sitting across the room.
No one is wearing their "Sunday best," although Alden isn't sure if that's even something people do anymore, and anyway, it isn't a Sunday.
"I've never been one to go around laying hands on people, even though I know that God can empower us through his Holy Spirit to do just that, because it's just never been my thing," Jonah is saying. "I know a lot of you in this room are like that. It's something you're scared of or shy away from or just aren't interested in. And there are a lot of you who are all about that kind of ministry. And that's all cool. But tonight I want to try something different."
Alden is vaguely interested. Even though he doesn't hardly believe in miraculous healing, he's curious to see how this Jonah guy will defend it and how he'll explain it works and why it doesn't happen more often. But Alden misses whatever it is that Jonah is explaining.
His mind is drifting, detaching itself, without his consent, leaving the real world, putting nonsense in the mouth of the speaker, inventing abstract movements for the silent band members, leaving this room entirely, cobbling together mental skits from bits of television ads, car trips and half-remembered dreams.
Alden catches himself, but it's too late. The sermon is over, and whatever bits of it he may have caught are indistinguishable now from the bits he knows he involuntarily made up.
"Now I'm going to lead us in a time of prayer," Jonah says. Everyone adjusts themselves slightly, folding hands, bowing heads, leaning forward expectantly. Alden sits up straight and keeps his eyes open.
"Lord, we come before you tonight with broken hearts, broken bodies, broken spirits," Jonah begins.
When Alden was a kid, he'd solemnly close his eyes and see every prayer vividly in his mind as it floated up to the clouds where God loomed huge and attentive. Things that seemed confusing in real life somehow seemed clearer while praying.
Now for some reason he feels that if he closes his eyes, if he relaxes, he'll fall through the looking glass and see everything through a gauze of fantasy. So he hangs all his energy on each of the minister's tender, measured words, trying to stay present for a whole sentence, to keep pace, to just understand this prayer if nothing else. He opens his eyes wide, he leans forward, but his consciousness slips between the cracks, and Alden is suddenly floating beside the prayer, hearing the words but unable to grasp them.
As soon as he realizes this, he pulls himself back up to the surface again. He looks over at Patrick, who rests his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "Where is he?" Alden wonders.
On the stage, the guitar player has started playing slow dreamy notes. It isn't helping.
Alden gets up from his seat and squeezes his way past silent, bowed heads -- perhaps this is disruptive, but it only takes a moment -- then walks to the back of the sanctuary, pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt, folds his arms and stands against the wall. Occasionally people come quietly in and out and brush silently past him, but no one makes eye contact and no one questions him, even though he is the only one standing. Patrick might not even notice that he has moved, and if he does, he'll probably just figure he had to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water.
Jonah has stopped praying and he looks up at the congregation.
"Jimmy and the music ministry are going to lead us in a time of worship and preparation for healing," he says. The band begins to play and the congregation adjusts, leans back in their wooden chairs, gets comfortable.
Alden wonders if Jonah can see him, standing there in the back. Probably it is too dark to see anyone very clearly. But Alden's sweatshirt is white, and he imagines that the pastor can see it dimly, hood pulled around an invisible face, hands hidden, shoved deep in the center pocket, looking like a specter floating ominously behind all those solemn, blurry heads.
Jimmy and the music ministry have begun to play a slow, modern hymn, but there are no words to sing along to yet, so all those heads are quiet. How many were dozing, and how many dreaming?, Alden wonders. How many can't wait to sing and how many will refuse to join in? Who is thinking about dying relatives and who is thinking about car payments, and is the spirit of God really at work in any of them?
Alden never gave up on church because he believed in how he felt when he was younger, when God seemed present to him there. Now, as he watches hundreds of heads sing the words to songs projected on 10-foot screens, he feels very far from all of that.
A few people in the audience are standing now, some holding their hands and arms in the air as they sing as if calling attention to themselves. Alden has never understood that sort of spiritual exuberance, but never before tonight has he suspected that it might simply be a result of people trying not to fall asleep.
"Now we're going to ask those of you who need healing to come forward to the front," Jonah says quietly. "First, those who need God to mend your heart. Maybe your heart is broken from broken relationships, broke homes, broken dreams. Whoever you are, if you need healing in this area, I want to ask you to come to the front, so that we may pray over you."
Slowly people begin to stand up and, one by one, dozens of them make their way to the front of the stage and kneel. A liturgy flashes onto the screen and Jonah leads the congregation as they begin to read aloud:
"Oh Lord, God of grace and peace,
Have mercy on us, on our brothers and sisters.
We need you to heal our lives, our hearts, our spirits.
We need your touch, oh mighty God."
As Alden watches all this he feels detached, like a ghost. If hearts and minds are being healed and lives are being changed, it's like it's happening on a plane of reality where he doesn't exist. He just sees bodies sitting, kneeling, standing, brushing past him on their way to the front of the sanctuary. He doesn't feel anything except relieved to be awake.
Up in the front of the sanctuary a few dozen people with hurting hearts kneel before the alter in various positions of surrender, and Alden would like very much to be able to pray for them.
But when Alden closes his eyes to pray two things happen:
He feels nothing. And his mind is quickly bathed in nonsense.
Alden's eyes snap open then, and he thinks:
"What if I am full of chaos? What if the God who is incarnate in me is not a god who heals, but one who disconnects, One Who Rips Apart?"
Thoughts of demonic forces terrified him when he was little, sometimes kept him wide-eyed awake at night until his mama would sit beside him and rock him to sleep with her prayers. But now he feels unmoved, knees locked and hands deep in his pockets. What if he is no good here? What if he is no good at all? Well, if it was true, it was true.
Jonah says a blessing over those who are kneeling and sends them back to their seats. "Now, those of you who are suffering a sickness of the mind, come forward so that we may pray for you that you may be healed by the Holy Spirit," he says.
Alden has never believed in alter calls. He wonders what he might do if he did. Deep inside him a tiny voice, a single synapse, is screaming "just go just go just go!" Alden shifts his weight and does not move -- the voice doesn't sound that different from the one that will sometimes scream at him to step off of a ledge or drive into oncoming traffic. He ignores it and after a moment it is gone.
Before long the space in front of the alter has filled up again and Alden is left standing in the back. How many of those going up to seek healing of their heads would have moved from their seats if there hadn't been others getting up, too, he wonders, and how much of church is not about God but about maintaining order?
Jimmy leads the congregation in reciting another liturgy projected on the screen.
"Renew our minds, all-knowing God," everyone says, "And bring us in line with Your will"
Alden is mouthing the words, still trying to participate, to feel anything, but he doesn't. The lead pastor takes the pulpit again and calls forward everyone who needs physical healing. There's a large exodus toward the front of the stage. Apparently more people need physical healing than mental or spiritual healing. Alden smirks, thinks of taking a poll: "Where do you need God to intervene in your life?" and mentally checks the last box, box D, all of the above.
"I'd like to ask those of you who are in our prayer ministry team to come up front now as we sing the next song," Jonah says, "They're going to come around and lay hands on you as we pray."
About half a dozen people scattered throughout the congregation stand up and slowly make their way to the front. This is apparently the prayer ministry team. They were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts just like everyone else.
Alden finds himself compelled to follow them, and before he knows it he has taken two steps forward, and once he's started moving he's committed to the follow through.
It's just like sneaking backstage at a concert, he thinks as he walks past the last row of chairs and turns toward the front of the room. His heart is beating fast, the pulse of an accuser.
If they let him, the one who stood in the back, the one who felt nothing, if they let him pray over these people, wouldn't that prove that this is all a hoax? It terrifies Alden, but he has to know. Can someone filled with the spirit of a void be allowed to pray over penitent believers? If it was true, then it would prove there was no spirit here at all. No spirit of God, no true spirit of void, just variations in brain chemicals making him sleepy, making them reverent, just misplaced faith building this willful deception.
As he approaches the front of the room, his vision is flooded by white-pink light from one of the can lights on the floor. He squints, imagines his accusing shadow cast across the room of hundreds of bowed heads. "One way or another, you'll all see now," he thinks.
He turns away from the light and toward the alter, where bodies are kneeling. They come in all shapes -- young girls with long hair falling over their faces, guys his age with foreheads on the ground, palms face up, a man his father's age openly weeping. From where Alden stands it's hard to tell what is wrong with any of them, except for a few people who sit in wheelchairs.
The prayer team is moving carefully between them, crouching down next to some, laying their hands on the backs, shoulders, heads of the afflicted.
And Alden decides he does not need to do this, not really. If he leaves now no one will no or care; he's been invisible up to this point. But a drum, an accusation, is pounding hard in his head and suddenly he can feel the blood coursing through every vein in his body with a frightening immediacy. He wants very much for someone, the pastor, Patrick, God himself -- anyone -- to stop him from taking one, two, three steps forward toward the mess of people he won't be able to help, people he can hardly reach.
But no one does anything, and he marches among them, moving on instinct alone now.
And he finds himself crouching down on his haunches next to a 21-year old boy whose breathing is loud and raspy, and reaching out to place a quivering hand on his back. He leaves it there for a moment, feels the slight movement of the boy's spine beneath his tee-shirt. Alden looks around the room nervously, unable to focus on anything.
"I shouldn't be here," he thinks. "This is no place for me to be."
There are sounds all around him, he realizes. Coughs, breaths, and tiny voices, swirling, swooping, mumbling nonsense, whispering prayers, crying "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." Alden's breath quickens.
Then the boy coughs violently, and Alden quickly presses both his hands to his back, as if to stifle the cough. The boy coughs harder, each one shaking him like a ragdoll. Alden desperately imagines that his fingertips can spread roots of healing through this boy's body. And he cannot stand to stay here, cannot bear to leave.
posted by Aaron at 4:14 PM
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