Nick Rees Gardner
The year would end with terrorist attacks, murders, hurricanes, and wildfires. Thousands dead or injured followed by a quiet static, a constant shiver, a breath on your neck.
But before we had an inkling of the end of the world, we watched Pastor Robert squirm. It was awkward to witness, real psychic turmoil. The first service after his divorce, he stepped down from the pulpit in tears and Alderman Nick had to fumble through a generic take on John 3:16. We got out early and the following few weeks were a wave of guest speakers. By mid Spring, though, Pastor Robert was back behind the lectern passionately diatribing on Angelology and by the benediction he’d taken a deep dive into Ezekiel’s dreams.
The “wheel within a wheel,” He clicked the remote for the projector and a flying saucer replaced the holy host on the screen. “What else could that be?”
Pews creaked. Someone coughed.
“Okay, okay,” He said. “It’s a stretch. But we’re talking about an all-powerful God who created, well, darn near everything. So why not other, you know, sentient planets. And the writers of The Bible, what do they do when they encounter something they’ve never seen before? They cower in fear.”
The congregation whispered.
Pastor Robert had already sweated through his shirt. He begged us to understand. He clicked through to an artist rendering of Seraphim, six-winged angels with insect eyes.
“I mean come on, guys! Really? Like, they’re totally aliens.”
Beings with four faces. The tower of Babel.
His wife took everything in the split. That’s what our parents discussed as we chowed on double decker tacos at the purple table outside Taco Bell. Wrappers strewn over bird shit. This was our post-service ritual. The Gardners sometimes joined us. The Eastons. Splotches of Brethren Church’s community gathered over fast food. Later, when we were Juniors and Seniors and could drive ourselves we’d carpool with Frankenstein and the Webbers or Crisco and Dell and Leanna to the same T-Bell, leaving our folks to lunch on their own. We’d use the loose cash we collected subbing paper routes for friends in the city. We were country people, too educated to be bumpkins, not poor enough for trailer trash, but somewhere in-between, somewhere on the safe edge of comfort. But Pastor Robert was living out of his car. His wife ran off with another man, a heathen psychologist, mom called him, and we imagined a bespectacled and lab-coated villain with a sharp chin and brainwash waves emanating from his body. Which was close to the truth, or what we imagined was truth. Christianity bore with it a sense of wonder, of possible magic, the unexplained: Possession, Angelic Intervention.
At the end of July Pastor Robert spoke about modern medicine in a lecture that split the church. He referenced The Flood in Genesis, the culling of an evil earth and the recent Crow Flu epidemic in the South that was beginning to run rampant. “New viruses,” He said, “Introduced to this Earth. And the flood! Why do waters rise if not from increased gravity, a celestial event.”
While we rolled our eyes at these references to intergalactic invaders, the post-church T-Bell meetup turned heated. The Gardners, for example, saw epidemiologists as students of a complex Earth that God created while the Anthonys twisted Pastor Robert’s claims to infer that Crow Flu was the hand of God culling the sinners. The Anthony’s decided that meant medication, vaccinations, surgeries and the like would interfere with the Lord’s terrible and awesome hand. The debate roiled on for months.
In the E-Newsletter, Pastor Robert tried to clear the air: “We are all worried about the same things,” He wanted us to know, “we just land on different results. But the point is that we can’t focus solely on the Earth, on these terrestrial bodies, because there is more out there, more that we are only beginning to understand. So, please, do not bicker about the will of God. Don’t forget the cosmic due to infighting about the mundane.”
Was he talking about his wife? His ex-wife? Was this their argument?
We were teenagers by then, many of us boys falling in love with youth group girls who were impossible to understand but were also falling in love with youth group boys. We’d sleepover at one another’s houses and listen to the indie Christian bands on Tooth and Nail. The girls would pull up Instant Messenger and collaborate perfect flirtations and the boys would blush at the screen. We’d dream. It was silly stuff. Kid shit, we’d one day realize, and it was what our lives revolved around. But Pastor Robert’s decline was also a subject worthy of our time. What the shit was he talking about in today’s sermon? One of us boys would type into the internet. The collective of girls would respond, Right? More aliens? Then, OMG Please don’t send cuss words on here, my parents might read it lol.
The sermons became painful, pleading, but we were old enough to know you could block out entire mornings from the rest of your life. We discovered a thousand things that summer. Frankenstein fed us from a multiplied supply of pipe tobacco he could buy underage from a certain downtown proprietor and there was a field behind the church, bordered by glacial boulders we could lean against with our smokeshop corncob pipes and puff and cough on embers. Traffic sounds in the distance. Nothing but longing in our hearts. Crisco and Leanna hooked up on one of those boulders. Just handholding, shoulder to shoulder, maybe a kiss. Those chaste days when we learned what city kids learned in seventh grade, when we laid on our backs and traced constellations in the sky. Were we alone in this infinity? We asked. But it was difficult, at that time of life, to see much beyond ourselves. We were horny kids. Our universes expanded, confounded, and we grasped at any shred we thought might help us figure it out.
When we hiked down from the field, we sometimes saw Pastor Robert’s car parked at the edge of the church lot, a dome light dim inside, and we’d feel awkward and dumb again. We didn’t know anything about life. We didn’t know anything about pain.
***
It was mid June when Pastor Robert lost the congregation. His sermon that Sunday was about the fourth day of creation, when God spoke into being the “stars” and the “cosmos.”
“I believe it was C. S. Lewis who said,” Pastor Robert coughed, “that alien life should only fortify our belief in an All-Powerful God.”
He was pale, wan. His hand shook so he gripped the lectern.
“And Lewis went on to wonder whether there could be life out there that wasn’t, like us, fallen. Could there be, for example, an unmarred Eden? And if not humans or Hominids, what about animals? And do animals have souls? That’s another question for next week.”
Most of us sat through the benediction, but the room was stuffy with fear, anger, dread. And the following Sunday, the pews were specked with only a few weirdos, the several of us asking just enough questions to stay.
His car no longer ran, our parents mumbled. The Gardners dropped a bag of leftover chili cheese burritos on its hood and the bag disappeared overnight. The elders planned a meeting, we heard, to end Pastor’s downward spiral, to offer him a retreat or fund a hotel and counseling, really anything to end his wayward cycle and reform the church. But Pastor Robert never showed. That night, when we wandered out of Youth Group, through the parking lot and up to the field, we noticed his car was empty, the door left ajar with trash spilled out.
It was a big moon night and, with no light pollution, we could see everything, the faint mist of Milky Way, Orion’s Belt. We laid on our backs, five of us to a rock, and Frankenstein drew an elephant and Elise traced a beer bottle which was risqué enough to make all of us laugh. We smoked on our pipes, ripe tobacco, and Crisco and Leanna made out on a rock all to themselves.
The world was enormous and there was more beyond it and beyond the universe, other universes and inside those universes, there were other things too large to understand, like the internet, magic, holy spirits, the mind. We weren’t even smoking weed that night and everything was still too big.
But then Leanna gasped and Crisco pointed. Out in the field, corn not yet knee high and among it, a figure, lanky and tall, hands raised to the sky. We knew, without proof, that it was Pastor Robert. We knew because of faith. A low moan in the air, a hollow drone just below the highway traffic shush, and Pastor Robert somehow spotlit there, in the center of a rise, praising the sky.
The moan crescendoed and Frankenstein pointed up where a light faded in, grew too bright. We could see, up in the heavens, a wheel within a wheel, but not reminiscent of the artist’s rendering Pastor Robert showed us before. It was, as we’re sure Ezekiel experienced, impossible to explain. Celestial beings hovering in the light. Terrible to behold. Light so bright we had to look away.
And we believed and didn’t believe. We were filled with wonder, struck down in awe. Pastor Robert vanished in that beam and, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon us, and the glory of the Lord shone round about us: and we were sore afraid.
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Nick Rees Gardner is a teacher, a critic, a wine and beer monger, and the author of the linked story collection, Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts. He owns a boutique wine and beer store outside of Washington, DC, but his fiction is often about his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio.