The Pastor's Husband

Sunday School from Hell

Feb 052012

We’re told that a couple years back a guy used to come to my wife’s church who was gay. Until they ran him off. They didn’t really run him out on a rail. More like they just implemented a program of systematically ignoring him until he got the message and stopped coming. They’re quite proud that they managed to get rid of him “without having said anything rude to him, or anything.”

During the time that “that man” was coming, one family that had been sending their children to Sunday School at the church stopped sending them. That’s one of the “reasons” given for needing to make that man go away. “Families won’t send their kids to a church where there are gay people, because they might turn the children gay.”

One of those kids is now the same age as our kid (8- and 9-year olds). He’s a total little shit. This morning, after worship, they were running around downstairs. The other kid does some hip gyrations and bends over with his lips puckered up and says, “What’s this?” My kid along with the others shouts, “It’s a gay guy kissing another guy.”

I pulled my kid aside and told him that what he was doing was totally inappropriate and to get ready to go. When we got home, I asked him who had taught him to make fun of gay people. “I don’t know,” my kid said. “Tim was saying all that.”

“Well Tim needs to get his head out of his ass,” I told my kid. “That’s just plain mean and you’re never, ever to say things like that. That’s not even a little bit funny, and if Tim starts talking like that again, you tell him it’s not and he’d better cut it out.” I think my kid got the message. I’m just hoping it sticks.

I’m not sure that I’m ready to take my kid back to Sunday School there. It may be time to start visiting different churches on Sundays – or doing Sunday School at home. My wife says she’ll have a talk with Tim next week about his gay-bashing. I’m glad she’s volunteered to do it. It certainly needs done, and she’ll do it in a more helpful way than I probably would. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stopped coming after that talk, though, which would open a whole other can of worms. Whether we go back is still in the air for me, though.

Of course, our kid is going to pick up these things sooner or later. I wouldn’t doubt that he’s probably seen it in school already. We’d have to be dealing with it one way or another. I’m just saying, he shouldn’t be learning it in church.

Photo credit: Kate Hiscock

A Simple Plan

Jan 292012

Katheryn and Faye are sisters, members of my wife’s church. A third sister, Bessie, who was Catholic, died last week. My wife went to the funeral to be supportive of the sisters in their hour of need.

After the funeral, they went out to the family plot at the cemetery to lay Bessie to rest, and after that they all went back to the family homestead to drink beer and talk about old times. It was at the “reception” that Katheryn and a couple other cousins approached my wife to ask if she might be willing to help them out.

It turns out there was a fourth sibling, a brother, Gene, who died maybe ten or twelve years ago. Gene and Faye never got along. In fact, they were really on the outs with each other. So when Gene died, Faye objected to burying Gene in the family plot. Since the cemetery plots are under Faye’s name, the cemetery association told them that if they wanted to bury Gene in that cemetery, they’d have to buy him his own plot.

Instead of buying another plot, though, Katheryn and few of the cousins took reception of Gene’s body from the hospital morgue determined to do right by Gene one way or another. The night after they got Gene’s body, they went out in the woods behind the old village church and buried him there by moonlight.

The old village church has long since ceased to be a church. It wasn’t even a church at the time they took Gene out in the woods behind it to bury him there. Some forty years ago the building had been sold off to another business that had moved into town. But it was the church they had all grown up in, so to them the woods behind it were still hallowed enough ground to receive their brother, at least temporarily. Gene has been in the woods behind the old village church ever since.

The return to the family cemetery plot to bury their sister, though, had stirred these memories. As they stood around the parlor drinking Bud Light, and with Faye on the other side of the house in the kitchen, they explained that Gene’s wife, Darlene, was going to be up from Florida later this month, and would my wife please go with them one night out behind the old village church to help them dig Gene up and to say some prayers as they re-buried him in the family plot. Nobody would have to know but them, and Faye wouldn’t ever know because she never goes to the cemetery. They even offered to provide the camouflage gear for her.

My wife, flabbergasted by the story, could only bring herself to say she’d think about it and they left it at that. What could she say? It’s not every day that one is invited to a secret nocturnal exhumation and reburial ceremony.

Since then, the opportunity to think about it has raised a few questions in our minds, details that hadn’t occurred to my wife to ask about in that first moment of shock.

Was he in a casket? Or at least in a body bag? Or did they just bury him in one of those hospital smocks that opens in the back?
Did they make any effort to embalm him?
After all these years in an unmarked grave, are they sure they can find him? Sure, they can come within a few feet, but you’d only need to be off by a foot or two to be digging all night.
It’s February in the north country. They buried Gene in the summer, but now the ground is going to be frozen. The professionals dig winter graves through frozen ground with a backhoe. But the camouflage isn’t going to cover a backhoe. How will they dig him up? And how will they get him re-buried at the cemetery without the groundskeepers noticing that there’s a fresh hole they didn’t dig?

Like any simple plan, the devil is in the details. The odds of something going amiss seem fairly high, and she really doesn’t want to end up with a prison ministry. So, as interesting as it would be to see a nocturnal exhumation, my wife’s decided to find a way of telling them she can’t make it that evening.

[Photo based on Shallow by George Foster]

On the Rescue Squad

Jan 222012

It’s Tuesday evening. The phone rings. My wife answers. It’s Brian, from church. He’s not feeling well. He thinks he may be having a heart attack. Can she take him to the emergency room? “And, by the way,” he says, “my mother doesn’t think I need to go to the hospital.” (Brian, age 22, lives with his mother.)

Freeze the frame for a moment. You need some background.

A week ago, Thursday, Brian had called at nine p.m. to say Mrs. Nichols (another unrelated church member) had fallen and had been taken to the hospital. She was ready to come home, and could my wife please go pick her up. Now, Brian, who has his own car, could have gone to pick up Mrs. Nichols. And, as my wife knew very well, Mrs. Nichols has several other people who have offered to pick her up under such circumstances. There never was any question of Mrs. Nichols needing a ride home. Also, as it happened, my wife was home alone with the kid on a school night and couldn’t leave the house pick up Mrs. Nichols. So she told Brian that Mrs. Nichols probably already had a ride, but since he was so concerned, he might just drive over himself.

Sure enough, Mrs. Nichols had already called one of her friends and had been safely delivered home. Brian made a formal complaint, and on Sunday the Personnel Committee called a special meeting to review the case of my wife’s dereliction of pastoral duty.

As it turns out, Brian had already been out that evening when he’d heard that Mrs. Nichols had been taken to the hospital.

He had driven his car over to Mrs. Nichols’s house and had broken in. One of the neighbors had seen something suspicious and had called the police. The state troopers have a barracks three doors down from Mrs. Nichols’s house, so it didn’t take them very long to get there and find Brian red-handed going through Mrs. Nichols’s stuff. They were about to arrest him when he told them he was a member of the volunteer Rescue Squad. He told them that he was there on official rescue squad business to get Mrs. Nichols’s list of medications which had been left behind when they’d taken her to the hospital earlier. The troopers let him off with a summons to appear in court to tell his story to the judge.

The news that Brian was on the rescue squad made us just a little worried, for several reasons. Brian can’t read, has an IQ only a few points above a begonia, and he has a conviction for molesting his cousin (a minor) on the record. We were amazed that someone like Brian could get on the rescue squad without having passed some kind of competency test and a routine background check. We asked his aunt, who confirmed that “Oh, yes, Brian’s been on the rescue squad since last summer.” We resolved that no matter how serious the medical emergency we were going to drive to the emergency room ourselves rather than call 9-1-1.

It was his aunt’s confirmation of the rescue squad story that connects Brian’s call about Mrs. Nichols and his call needing to go to the emergency room on Tuesday. Wednesday morning, his aunt came by to say that it’s probably all the pressure from working on the rescue squad that had him so upset that he needed to go to the ER.

Return again to Tuesday night. My wife is home alone with the kid in bed, after having been put on church trial for dereliction of duty. Brian is on the phone wanting my wife to take him to the ER, and his mother doesn’t want him to go.

“Let me talk to your mother,” she says.

The mother says, “He doesn’t need to go. He’s just having a panic attack.” She puts Brian back on the line, so she can tell him she won’t take him.

My wife says, “Brian, if you really need to go to the hospital, you don’t want me taking you. I’ll never get you there before you’ll die of your heart attack if that’s what you’re having. Call 9-1-1.”

Later that night, we get a call from Brian’s aunt. He’s called 9-1-1 and his mother is furious. He hasn’t had a heart attack. But he got a good doctor at the ER who diagnosed him with some kind of panic disorder and prescribed him some medicine to calm him down. So, while my wife is on trial again this Sunday for upsetting Brian’s mother, at least Brian has the medicine he needs.

One last wrinkle. We found out on Friday from the Rescue Squad Chief, who we run into at the deli down the street (small town), that Brian isn’t on the Rescue Squad. He’s been telling people this since last summer, though, and the Rescue Squad is getting ready to press charges against Brian for impersonating emergency personnel. Quite likely, after Brian’s hearing for breaking and entering at Mrs. Nichols’s house and lying to the state police, my wife will be getting a call for a prison visit.

At least we can call 9-1-1 again.

[Photo credit: Dan Catt.]