I’m Not from Here. Will Willimon

gave thanks when the central door gave way. As he stepped blindly into a darkened entrance hall, an elderly woman’s high voice called, “You are new, I take it. Heard you rattling the side door. It’s always shut to protect from wetness.”

      “Thank you,” he responded awkwardly. “I’m from Salisbury.”

      Her expression did not change.

      “Near Charlotte,” he explained.

      “Yes, well, there you have it,” she declared as she shoved a folded piece of paper at him, opened the sanctuary door, and gestured him into the main body of the church. “Our large organ from Ohio is susceptible to wetness.”

      At fifteen minutes before the churching hour the room was empty except for a couple of shuffling members of the choir in the loft behind the pulpit.

      “I’m not really going through Galilee,” Felix said in an attempt to prolong their conversation. “I’m a new resident, having just moved here to begin work in communications technology.”

      “One would think, as hot and dry as this summer has been, wetness wouldn’t be a problem,” she continued. Then, shoving him into the empty sanctuary, the woman laughed, shaking her head in amusement. “No, you are just passing through.”

      * * *

      Plopped on an empty pew, he stared at a sprawl of gladioli on the altar table. A minute or two before eleven, Felix heard a church bell clang, as if someone were beating a bucket with a hammer. Then slamming doors and muffled voices. People shuffled in, murmuring as they took their habitual seats. The organ gurgled a prelude. An aged choir (four older women, two ancient men) chirped a tremulous call to worship, “Here We Are,” sung with resignation.

      The pastor appeared from a side door next to the choir loft and then disappeared in a chair behind the pulpit. All that could be seen of him was his spouting hair. Then a couple of hymns that Felix remembered from his childhood at Beulah Baptist in Salisbury. An offering was collected and Felix, noting dollar bills in the plate, discreetly crumpled in his ten-dollar bill, smiling at an elderly woman down the pew. As he did so he spotted his landlady across the aisle and toward the back. Mrs. Swanson appeared to be whispering to the woman seated next to her. Both looked toward Felix. He smiled at them over his shoulder. They looked away.

      When an usher thrust the attendance pad at him, Felix dutifully signed with the blunt golf pencil that had been provided. He included his new address and checked “Desire a Visit,” because there was no category for newcomers. On the “Prayer Concerns” line, he wrote, “‘You are the way and the wayfarers’—The Prophet.” He smiled as he stretched to his left to pass the pad to his sole companion in the pew, an older woman who glared at him as she received the pad, jerking it from his hand.

      Felix perked up when the service at last made it to the sermon, about 11:30, according to a quick glance at his muted Gotcha Dragon.

      The pastor seemed as little interested in the subject of his sermon as the passive congregation. His text was from one of the gospels, wherever Jesus says to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The preacher announced, “This is what Christianity is all about. The whole point of Jesus, in case any of you were wondering.”

      Felix smiled. He saw himself as on a pilgrimage in search of the point of it all. He had ventured forth on an assignment that took him away from the narrow, negative, judgmental Christianity of Beulah Baptist, upwards into some new but as yet indistinct, graciously vague, neighborly spirituality. The preacher’s declaration that the point was “love your neighbor as yourself” sounded like The Prophet.

      Witzkopf’s interest in his subject quickened. His voice rose as he pronounced that most people don’t notice that Jesus stressed “as yourself” as the key to Christianity. “So ‘love your neighbor’ isn’t the mush you people think it is.”

      “Self-love is the basis for all true love,” claimed the preacher. “If you can’t love yourself, lots of luck loving anybody else. Schopenhauer said that love does not let itself be forced. So there. I say unto you that love, like faith, isn’t forced. No means no.”

      Witzkopf gave a giggle that was unreturned by the congregation.

      Felix scarcely had time to turn over these arresting thoughts before the preacher sneered, “As my mentor, the great Schopenhauer, put so well, ‘If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.’ Get it?”

      Holding his Dragon near his crotch, Felix surreptitiously Googled Schopenhauer. A German philosopher, he was surprised to learn. The preacher had a mentor, a philosopher. Felix also had a dead mentor. He liked a preacher who cited great people. He was trying to memorize quotes too, even though most people had forgotten Gibran.

      The preacher mentioned “the insidious myth of altruism,” and some other things, then carefully read, spitting the words, “Again, Schopenhauer: ‘Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her. . . . She is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.’” A couple of older women toward the front turned toward one another and frowned.

      Felix had encountered a co-intellectual. “Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her . . .” Though Gibran probably would not put it that way, Felix liked the quote. He saved “truth is no harlot” to the notepad on his Dragon, thinking, “That sums it all up.”

      At the end of the service Felix followed the pastor and an adolescent acolyte out the door of the sanctuary and into the entrance hall. A few loitered and chatted. The Prophet’s maxim, “Your daily life is your temple and your religion,” confirmed.

      “Passing through?” Witzkopf asked as he shook Felix’s hand. The man’s coiffure sprouted in various directions, though in the noontide heat some of his hair was now plastered to his forehead. He wore a clerical collar and scuffed, brown shoes, neither of which Felix had seen on preachers back home.

      “Actually, I’ve just moved to Galilee,” Felix responded.

      “What in God’s name for?”

      “Communications. Trinity Communications,” said Felix.

      “Really? Odd. Don’t get newcomers. Just about none your age. In a way, you and I are in the same profession. Are you a Methodist? Must not be, what with your invocation of the Trinity.”

      “I grew up Baptist. Actually, I’m a seeker, a searcher, sort of,” Felix replied. He felt the aggravation of the older couple behind him, displeased at this extended conversation in violation of post-service custom. “Maybe we could talk sometime next week. I agree that truth is no harlot.”

      “I’d like that,” said the pastor as he passed Felix on down the steps. “I’d really like that. As you see,” he said under his breath, “this bunch of dolts isn’t much into searching or seeking. I can tell you.”

      At the foot of the steps a jovial older man offered Felix an outstretched hand. “Well hello and welcome to Galilee, son!” he called. “George Grimes here. By the prodding of the pastor, head usher; by the will of the people, public servant. Saw you made it to our attendance pad.” Felix brightened and shook his hand eagerly. “I take it you are just passing through. Nobody ever uses those attendance pads. What brings you by our fair city?”

      “Communications, sir,” answered Felix. “Trinity Communications.”

      “And just what did you want to communicate?” Grimes asked with a grin. An older woman, very thin, stood just behind Grimes, looking at Felix through large, pink sunglasses. Felix assumed that she was Mrs. Grimes. She smiled at Felix with brightly painted red lips.

      “Uh, Trinity is only the how of communication, not the what. We aren’t even the why. We’re the means, not the substance,” Felix said, quoting verbatim from Quattlebaum’s sales manual. “We help keep folks on the same page.”

      Grimes shook off