Lay By and Store
“The Lord has commanded us to lay by and store.” That’s what Orville Hall would always say on Sunday just ahead of passing round the collection plate at church. His words were, ever and always, just this and just the same. I was but a child then and puzzled at why God’s wanting us to lay by and store should be remarked right as we were about to give up some of what we’d laid by to the church. It seemed to me that if we took this command seriously, we might want to give away less. But apart from what the words did mean, I never could decide if the tone he used was solemn and grave or just sheepish. The latter seemed more likely, as Mr. Hall was one of those men at church who seemed ill at ease with saying anything in public, his overalls unnaturally clean because it was Sunday and himself looking ready to have everyone’s attention steered anywhere but toward himself. That reluctance to have all eyes on him might explain why this was the most he ever said before sending the plate around, the bare fact of the Lord’s command being enough to tell us that here was the part where we would part ourselves from some of what we’d stored. As I’ve seen the church now pass beyond the keeping of men like Mr. Hall, I am tempted to other explanations, or at least to rue what somewhere got lost.
Mr. Hall was one of the many men of my grandfather’s generation who led the church of my childhood, men who were at once quiet but also presumably in charge. They were not like the preachers or church leader types more common today, those eager to long hold forth and hang on to people’s attention, those wont to turn a prayer into a sermon as if spiritual gravity measures heaviest where more words are used. This newer type seems more motivated by want than by duty. But I’m not certain what exactly they do want. Perhaps they are but what prior generations would, in their ever-reliable economy of words, have called “stiff-necked Pharisees,” ones who need not just to be upright, but to perform their uprightness in sight of others. I would like to think instead that their prolonged recitations and tendency to lay down doctrine at every verbal turn bespeak anxiety about getting things right. Saying something out loud to an audience of others will tend toward firming up one’s own commitments. It would indeed be nice to imagine them so awash in doubt that when they are obliged to pray out loud before others, the compulsion to piously proclaim doctrine comes on them in some too prolific desperation to want something to be true. But I can’t really believe this. The new sorts don’t speak doubtfully but with conviction, and they are too often almost arrogant with it. I worry they fashion themselves as specially blessed shepherds, all too ready to corral the rest of us into truths they never do in fact doubt. I worry they’re trying to save our mortal souls. I wish that they would stop. But since they won’t, I just long ago stopped going to church.
Here could commence a full litany of all the reasons I quit church, and the reasons are many. They all reduce neatly, though, to not believing the things that I would be required to believe. Given all that I cannot believe, it might seem natural to find not going to church a great relief, but it has not been so. To be sure, I did in young adulthood find it a revelation of human freedom to have Sunday mornings to myself. Yoked from the cradle to the chafing harness of cleaning up, dressing up, and then sitting through it all, I initially found it a radically pleasant expansion of mortal time just to freely idle my way through Sunday mornings. I want none of the homilies now called prayer and will never find my way to shouldering the leaden doctrine that sits so heavy on the place. But I sorely do miss the confusion that did once prevail, a confusion now as decisively absent as those earnest old souls who didn’t really welcome the eyes of the congregation upon them, those compelled to speak by no more than duty – someone, after all, did need to get that tin plate circulating. Since a child will naturally but dimly understand the intellectual or spiritual structures of the church even when she stands inside them, perhaps what I miss is a bafflement that only childhood itself affords.
Recollections of my childhood in church are tricky business, for memory tangles and sometimes fuses how things then felt with how things may now feature in retrospect to one grown older. Unexamined nostalgia is one hazard, for once age has done its work and burdened one with complexity, the simplicity of a child’s understanding can be mistaken for a simplicity belonging to the world itself. One thinks the world was better in some “back then,” but that’s only because a child’s sight can’t pick out the knotted convolutions and rough patches that would temper any judgments of “better.” So too, what gets offered a child in church is not what gets offered an adult. Sunday school is for stories – for parting the Red Sea with a staff, turning ladies into salt, and smoting enemies – a storehouse of phantasmagorical wonder and, I will admit, things to try at home. I never did part the creek with a stick, but the raw marvel of Sunday school’s stories left me utterly uninterested in attending to the prayers and sermons that followed. These were duller by degrees and largely induced a stupor only lunch would fix. Where doctrine would most flow in childhood, I had already drifted away into daydreaming about what would come next. So perhaps the gloomy tones of certain orthodoxy was ever on the place and only when increasing age attuned my ear did I hear it. Still, the church has indubitably changed. It has indoor plumbing now.
***
Sometime in the 1980s the church put in a bathroom. Before this, it had but an outhouse, though one well-made and better than most. Its bench seat had two holes rather than the more typical single, one marked for boys and one for girls. I wasn’t of course privy to any of the conversations that would have settled on using some of what the church had laid by to buy indoor plumbing, but I did later hear that there was considerable generational friction about whether and when to tear the outhouse down. The church’s older members, those who had suffered through and outlasted the Great Depression, wanted not to waste a decent outhouse – after all, it would be useful if the indoor works broke down – while the younger members saw it as now surplus to requirements, perhaps even a bit of blight. The older sorts prevailed for a time, but only for a time, and the outhouse did eventually go the way of all things, which is to say that the spot it once occupied is now given over to more parking.
I’m not sure just where I’d place myself in the great outhouse debate. I never did like using the outhouse because no one could, nor does it seem necessary to me to store this particular bit of God’s blessings. One can guard too much against the day when a thing might prove useful and an inability to discard things now replaced can work like an affliction – such can be the logic that hoarding is made of. But even as the purposive reasons for keeping the outhouse exercise little appeal, I can’t help but wonder if the thing became symbolic, if readiness to part with this bit of the old church betrayed a cast of mind that had the old sorts worried. Perhaps getting rid of it just didn’t make good sense to them and registered not just as imprudence but as spiritual hubris. It takes a kind of confidence to let go a resource before it is exhausted, to have done with a thing before the thing has been used up. I expect my own cast of mind is far too fanciful, but I am tempted to a theological account of plumbing. If you will let go a perfectly good outhouse, you must trust that good things endure, or at least trust that you can keep things in the shape you’ve made for them, a shape that includes indoor plumbing. This is reasoning about the world, about the material provisions of human existence. And it is in confidence about the world that I discern a shift from what the church once was, or at least what it once was to me.
There can come with faith an expectation that “the Lord will provide,” but this belief, the philosopher in me finds, is wanting in precision. There is in it no remark on God’s timing and for we finite, mortal sorts, the timing would indeed seem to matter. Accepting the claim as a comment on life as we experience it, a life beset by need and desire, means developing a high trust in the world itself or, if that really can’t be on offer, in one’s own ability to accept that what gets provided is still for the best. The Lord will either keep us in the funds broken plumbing takes if it will be repaired, or He will have left us with no toilet for some good reason and any suffering induced by this we can, still and all, happily endure, secure in the trust that He has provisioned us with what we really need. In either case, the broken material world essentially gets fixed – in meaning if not in fact. I suppose what stays with me most about the old church, with its taciturn and hesitant men, is that they didn’t seem to have this kind of trust. Theirs was not a world to trust and they didn’t seem to trust themselves in it. Things might well not work out for best or you might not be able to summon up a way to think they do.
When I was a child, church seemed more about what people did than what they believed, or more about what people tried for than anything they would ever claim as done. And what they most plainly seemed to try for was just to hang in there, to suffer the bewildering stuff of human life with what shared dignity they could together manage. The Sundays spent in my grandparents’ tiny rural church seemed to me a time for mustering, not a marshaling of truth against uncertainty, or of faith in good when things seem bad, but of people – people who could abide a little better if they sometimes did it together. We assembled, I thought, not to solve but to share life’s vexing travails, to join up in gnawing humility for a weekly collective recitation of how nothing really makes any sense. Some things that break – not just toilets, but also bodies and hearts – resist all fixing, in both fact and meaning, and this makes the world entire a place of trepidation and uncertainty. While steady, focused doctrine can lay like lead upon the soul, carrying confusion is harder still. So if you will give yourself over to confusion’s weight, it’s best done with others lest one be entirely bowed by it. That’s what church was for. No one ever told me this was what we were doing. It was nothing announced directly or out loud, but as I try to trace my memories to their source, I find that we did sing it.
***
The hymns of the church were mostly sung testament to hopes simple and plain, and therefore most profound. Mostly early 20th century American standards, the songs confessed a longing that things may someday, somehow, just work out better than they ever seem to now. They were, I belatedly recognize, songs written in and about poverty. We’d sing of having a “home prepared” and it wouldn’t be just any home, but a “mansion just over the hilltop” where we’d “walk on streets that are purest gold.” We’d live where “no storm clouds rise” and in a whole “city made of gold.” Gold seemed to feature a lot in what we sang and this seemed only fitting given that the want of gold was literally posted on the church wall. At the front was hung a sign that listed not just the day’s attendance and offering, but the record attendance and record offering, a public pronouncement of the best the church had ever done. I don’t believe the record attendance was ever above 70 or so back then and the record offering was correspondingly small, a few hundred dollars. So our songs of mansions were sung as we faced these numbers in all their modesty, an indirect confession of how we yet neither constituted a city of any good size nor were we so flush we’d walk on gold. But material poverty was only the bruised symbolic skin stretched over bone deep aches not for money but for sense – the longing to make some sense of why life is so often so damnably hard.
Few of the songs, at least those that stick most with me, did make sense. Instead, they ever only hoped for it – we did not sing sense but about its perennial postponement. There were lots of “somedays” and “far aways” in our songs – someday and far away marking that time hence when things might start to make sense. Meanwhile, we’d remark not just that so distant time, but the right now too, and right now was all for troubles. Our songs were all about contrasts – what we’d someday get was understood in light of what we had. To sing that “some day yonder we’d never more wander” or that “darkest night would turn to day” seemed to me a way to register hope alongside the far more fundamental admission that for now we were stumbling around lost and lightless. We’d together long to end up where “all is love,” but for now we mostly only had “sad farewells” and “tear-dimmed eyes,” with “all our sins and griefs to bear.” One of my favorites put it all most baldly:
Tempted and tried we’re oft made to wonder why it should be thus all the day long, while there are others living about us, never molested though in the wrong. Farther along, we’ll know all about it. Farther along, we’ll understand why. Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine, we’ll understand it all by and by.
That’s a song one can whimper in some comfort, even as the hymn is all about the want of any substantial comfort. The world it describes not only doesn’t make sense, it defies sense. And its defiance is no casual or occasional resistance, no episodic opposition to what we’d prefer and want. Instead, it’s just the way of things, “all the day long,” as the world arranges itself to favor the mean, the wrong, the people who seem always and ever to have it easier even as they need not earn their ease. We do the best we can, we seemed to sing, we really are trying, but the world entire was never made to yield to this, or to us. We would thus raise a joyful noise unto the Lord, but really only to tell Him that we together have concluded that we will not figure this thing out. Ultimately, for me at least, the Lord was a little like that outhouse, surplus to requirements.
The songs of hope and longing that we sang always put off and postponed any resolution of substantial human confusions. They worked as exhortations to endure, to summon up the stuff to live in a world that doesn’t make sense, but because we sang not as one but as a tattered, bedraggled company of the confused, they managed still to do something rather than nothing. I suppose that’s why I like the raw honesty of “Farther Along” best, for even as it forthrightly says nothing makes sense, it also wants us all to cheer up about it. It mentions a mansion in some later verse we never sang, but mostly says to take what you can get - sunshine and the companionship of the likewise confused. Notably, both of these are free. And exhorting each other to “cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine” is, I find, both the worst and the best advice, both hard to do and the only thing one can do. Whatever confidence in the world it offers is the frailest human sort, the kind that leaves all the confusions intact but suggests there might be some good yet if we gather them together. This is why I so dislike doctrine, I suppose.
The newer church, with its stiff-necked Pharisees and their leaden doctrines, denies me my confusion. To be sure, the doctrine is all inflected toward hope. Indeed, it often features as a way to lock down hope, to make hope the thing one earns where one but thinks aright. “The Lord will provide” and you will know and trust this where your soul aligns as it should with the tedious articulations of correct belief. No more for you any irresolution about tearing down outhouses against the day when the plumbing should fail, for whatever comes of that indoor plumbing, it will have a logic doctrine can discern. The hope one here might find seems forced. Worse still, it seems to miss the most essential thing about the hardest kind of hope, the hope that has itself as target. One can hope for hope, and one hopes most for this where sense is in the shortest supply. Hope too is not a thing one has, but a thing one wants.
I don’t know where one can now go with one’s confusion and find a company really of one’s kind. I long to ritualize my own confusion, to sacralize it with some others. Perhaps to sing of it and how it will abide. The need becomes more pressing as I age because confusions do accumulate. I have so many and they do grow heavy. I have well heeded the command and they all are laid by and stored. What I need is not more of this but that part where I can part with some of them, where I can add them to the sum with others likewise toting theirs around. We could together, I am sure, make a record offering.
