Gale Zona
Neighborhood Stories
He smiled at that. “They have a good many burdens to bear,” he says, patient. “But – ”
“But,” I says, “don’t it seem wicked to ask a man to set and listen to everybody’s troubles for one hundred and fourteen calls a month, and expect him to feel he’s doing the Lord’s work?”
“The office of comforter – ” he began.
“When,” says I, “was complaints ever lessened by dwelling on ’em – tell me that? Oh,” I says, “it ain’t you I’m blaming, nor the other ministers either. I’m blaming us, that calls a minister to come and help us reveal the word of God to ourselves, and then expect a social call a month, or more, off’n him, once around the congregation – or else be uppish and mebbe leave the church.”
“The office of spiritual adviser always demands – ” he started in, and concluded it as might have been expected.
“How much religion really, really, do they let you talk on these calls?” I ask’ him. “Don’t it seem kind of bad taste if you say much about it? And as a matter of fact, don’t ministers pride themselves nowdays on being all-around men who can talk about everything, from concerts to motion pictures, and this here city gollif? Of course they do. That is, if folks keep off their complaints long enough to leave you prove how really broad your interests are.”
“Yes, I know – well,” he says patient, “they expect the calls. What,” he adds, “had you thought of for the order of the four Sunday services?”
“I thought,” I says, “for the first fifteen minutes or so, we might sing together.”
“A short praise service,” says he, comprehending. “Well – that’s a little out of the order for the Sunday morning service, but it might be indulged.”
“Yes,” I says, dry. “Praise ought not to offend most people. And then I thought of it for what it does to people to sing together for a while. It makes real things seem sort of possible, I always think. After the Doxology, we might start in with ‘America,’ and – ”
“America?” says he.
I waited. I thought the next observation belonged to him.
“We’ve sung ‘America’ at Sunday evening mass meetings,” he says, “but for the opening hymn of the regular morning worship – still, of course it’s in the hymnal. I suppose there is really no objection.”
“That,” says I, “was how I looked at it. There’s no objection. Then the Lord’s prayer – all of us together. And the reading – something read from one heart right to another, wouldn’t it be? And then we might sing again – ‘Love For Every Unloved Creature,’ or something of that sort. I think,” I says, “we’d ought to be very careful what hymns we pick out, for these Sundays. Take just the religious ones, why don’t you?”
“I beg your pardon,” said our minister. “What did you say then?”
“Well, for instance,” I says…
“ ‘The Son of God goes forth to war
A kingly crown to gain.
His blood-red banner streams afar.
Who follows in his train?’
“I call a good deal of that hymn immoral. Think of that gentle soul caring to gain a kingly crown. Think of his having a blood-red banner. Think of him going forth to war. It’s a wicked hymn, some of it.”
“Oh, well,” said our minister, “those things are just figurative. You mustn’t take them too literally, Miss Marsh.”
I looked over at him, across my cherries.
“We’re saying that pretty often these days,” I said. “Sometimes it’s glorious true and sometimes it’s stupid false.”
“Well,” he says, “that needn’t enter into the services for these Sundays. We might of course do well to pick out the hymns with care. What else had you thought of?”
“I thought,” I said, “of having the Sunday School come in then and march down the aisle, singing – not ‘We Are Little Soldiers,’ or anything like that, but ‘I Think When I Read That Sweet Story of Old,’ say. And then have them repeat something – well,” I says, “I found a little verse the other day. I never saw it before – mebbe you have. I’ve been meaning to ask the superintendent how it would be to have the children learn to say that.”
I said it for him:
“ ‘The year’s at the Spring,
The day’s at the morn,
Morning’s at seven,
The hill-side’s dew-pearled.
The lark’s on the wing,
The snail’s on the thorn,
God’s in his heaven,
All’s right with the world.’
“And then,” I says, “have them add: ‘And oh God, help the last line to get to be true for everybody, and help me to help make it true. Amen,’ That,” I says, “might do for one day. Then you talk to ’em for five minutes. And then dismiss them.”
“Dismiss them?” he said. “Not have them remain to the service?”
“Why, no,” I says, “not unless you can interest and occupy them. Which no sermons do for little children.”
“Where would the mothers that are in church send their children to?” says he.
“We ought to have the rooms downstairs open,” I says, “and have somebody in charge, and have quiet exercises and story-telling and pictures for them.”
“My dear Miss Marsh,” he says, “that would be a revolution.”
“True,” says I, serene. “Ain’t life odd?” I adds. “One minute we’re saying, shocked: ‘But that would be a revolution.’ And the next minute we’re harping away on keeping alive the revolutionary spirit. I wonder which of the two we really mean?”
“Well, then, what else?” says he, pacific.
“Then,” I says, “I wish we could have five minutes of silent prayer. And then right off, the sermon – and no hymn after that at all, but let the sermon end with the benediction – a real cry to God to be with us and to live in us. That’s all.”
I had to go out in the kitchen then to empty a bowl of my pitted fruit, and when I come back the minister stood there, smiling.
“Ah, Miss Marsh,” he said, “you’ve forgotten a very important thing. You’ve forgotten the collection.”
“No,” says I. “No, I haven’t. Except on the days when it’s a real offering for some work for God. I’d take a collection then. The rest of the time I’d have the minister’s salary and the fuel and the kerosene paid for by checks, private.”
After he’d gone, I set there going over, miserable, the things I’d said to him about the services that it was his job to do. And though I was miserable enough – I honestly couldn’t be sorry. You know the difference in them two?
I was to engage Lavvy Whitmore to lead our singing for the four Sundays, and I went over to see her the next afternoon. She was cleaning the lamps when I stepped up to the kitchen door, so I went right in and sat down at the end of the table, and helped her with the chimneys. She was a pretty little thing – little, but with black eyes that mentioned her thoughts before ever any of the rest of her agreed to announce ’em. And plenty of thoughts, too, Lavvy had. She wasn’t one of the girls that is turned out by the thousands, that wouldn’t recognize their own minds if they was to meet ’em unbeknownst; but one that her mind was cut out, careful, by a pattern part of her own selecting, and not a pattern just laid on to it, haphazard, by the folks that she lived neighbor to, and went with when she went.
“Lavvy,” I says, “we want to speak for you to sing to our church the four Sundays in September, when we have special services to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and go too. Can we? Will you?”
“I’ve been spoke for,” says she, “by the White Frame church for the four September Sundays. For the same reason.”
“Go on!” I says. “Do you mean to tell me that they’re going to have a competition revival?”
“Well,” she says, “they’re going to make an extra effort to get folks out for the four Sundays.”
“Copied it off’n us,” I says thoughtful. “Well, I guess the four Sundays can’t be regularly copyrighted by us, can they? But I thought their minister didn’t like revivals?” I says.
“Oh, he don’t – Elbert Kinsman don’t,” says Lavvy. “It’s the rest of ’em wants it. He told me he thought it was a mistake.”
“That young Elbert Kinsman,” I says, “he loves folks. I saw it in his face long ago.”
Lavvy went on trimming wicks.
“And then the Red Brick church,” says she, “they’ve spoke for me to sing for them for the four Sundays in September too.”
“Land of life,” I says, “they haven’t! What on earth have they done that for?”
“Oh,” says Lavvy, “to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and – ”
“Don’t, Lavvy,” I says. “That makes me feel kind of sick.”
“So it done to me,” she says. “And I’ll tell you the same as I told them: No, I won’t sing those four Sundays. I ain’t going to be here. I don’t know yet where I’m going, but I’ll go off somewheres – where things are better – if I have to go blackberrying in Shepherd’s Grove.”
“My land,” I says, “I’ve a great good notion to get my pail and go along with you.”
We talked about it quite a while that afternoon, Lavvy and me. And though all along I’d been feeling sort of sore and sick over the whole idea – and I might have known that I was, by the chip-shouldered way I had talked to our minister – still, it wasn’t till there by the lamps that I come to a realization of myself, and of some other things just as foolish, and that I faced around and begun to ask myself, plain, what in the world was what.
For it was as true as possible: As soon as it got out around that our church was laying plans for a revival – not an evangelist revival, but a home-made one – it had happened just as might have been expected. The other two churches was afraid we’d get their folks away from them, and they says they’d make an extra effort to get folks out, as well. They fell into the same hope – to “fill up” the churches, and see if we couldn’t get folks started attending regular. Somebody suggested having a month’s union services in each of the three churches, but they voted that three months of this would get monotonous, while the novelty of the other way would “get folks out.”
No sooner had we all settled on that, then we slipped, by the gradualest degrees, into the next step, that was as inevitable as two coming after one. We begun being secret about what we meant to have, not telling what the order of exercises was going to be, or what special music we was getting up. And then come along the next thing, as regular as three coming after two – we begun sort of running one another to see who could get the most folks. At first we sent out printed invitations addressed to likely spots; then we took to calling to houses by committees, and delivering invitations in person. Now and then rival visiting committees would accidentally meet to the same house and each try to out-set the other. And from this, one or two things developed, as things will, that made a little uppishness here and there. For out of certain situations, uppishness does seem to arise, same as cream out of milk, or dust out of furniture.
One afternoon I looked out my window, and I see the three Sunday school superintendents come marching up my brick walk – ain’t it funny how, when men goes out with a proposition for raising pew-rent, or buying a new furnace for the manse, or helping along the town, they always go two or three strong? If you notice, they do.
“Come right in, gentlemen,” I says. “If it’s money, I can’t give you a cent. If it’s work, I’m drove to death as it is. But if it’s advice, I do enjoy myself giving that.”
It was our own superintendent that spoke, as being the least foreign to me, I s’pose, – though it happened that I was better acquainted with both the other two.
“It’s neither, Miss Marsh,” he says, “it’s some ideas we want off’n you. We’ve got,” says he, “a plan.”
Then he unrolled it, assisted by the other two.
“We thought,” he says, “that in all this added interest in church attendance which we are hoping to stimulate, the three churches had ought to pull together a little.”
At that my heart jumped up. It was what I had been longing for, and grieving because it didn’t come true.
“We thought we’d ought to have a little more community effort,” says the White Frame superintendent, clearing his throat. I guess he knew how that word “community” always gets me. I’d rather read that one word than half the whole books on the market.
“Oh, yes,” I says. “Yes! I think so too.”
“We thought we’d ought to make the experience one of particular blessing and fellowship,” says the Red Brick superintendent, fairly beaming.
And me, the simple soul, I beamed back.
“Count on me,” says I, fervent, “to do anything in the world to help on a thing like that!”
“We were sure of it,” said our superintendent, “and that is why we have come to you. Now,” says he, “the idea is this: We thought we’d each take a color – give each church a color, you know.”
“A color?” says I.
“Exactly,” says he. “The White Frames white. The Red Bricks red. And us blue. Then on each of the four Sundays the number present in the three churches will be kept track of and totaled at the end of the month. And, at the end of the month, the church having had the largest attendance for the whole time shall be given a banquet by the other two. What do you say to that?”
What did I say to that? Somehow I got them out of the house, telling them I’d send them word later. When I feel as deep as I did then, I know I can’t do justice, by just thoughts or just words, to what I mean inside. So I let the men go off the best I could. And then I went back into my sitting room, with the August sun pouring in all acrost the air like some kind of glory that we didn’t understand; and I set down in it, and thought. And the thing that come to me was them early days, them first days when the first Christians were trying to plan ways that they could meet, and hoping and longing to be together, and finding caves and wild places where they could gather in safety and talk about their wonderful new knowledge of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and the divine experience of the spirit, here and after. And then I thought of this red, white and blue denominational banquet. Oh, what a travesty it was even on the union that the three colors stand for. And I thought of our talk about “getting people out,” and “filling up the churches,” and I thought of the one hundred and fourteen or more social calls that we require a month from our pastors. And I says to myself:
“Oh, Calliope Marsh, has it come to this —has it? Is it like this only in Friendship Village? Or is it like this out in the world too? And, either way, what are we going to do about it?”
There was one thing I could do about it. I went to see our minister and his wife, and I told ’em firm that I couldn’t have anything more to do about the extra September services, and that they would have to get somebody else to play the organ for all four Sundays. They was both grieved – and I hated to hurt them. That’s the worst about being true to something you believe – it so often hurts somebody else. But there wasn’t any other way to do.
“But Miss Marsh,” says our minister, “don’t you see that it is going to be a time of awakening if we all stand by each other and support the meetings?”
“Support the meetings!” I wondered how many times, in those first days, they had to argue that. But I didn’t say anything – I just sat still and ached.
“But Miss Marsh,” said the minister’s wife, “we have so depended on you. And your influence – what about that?”
“I can’t help it,” I says – and couldn’t say no more.
Mis’ Postmaster Sykes was there, and she piped up:
“But it’s so dignified, Calliope,” she says. “No soliciting, no pledging people to be present, no money-begging for expenses. No anything except giving people to understand that not attending ain’t real respectable.”
It was them words that give me the strength to get up and go home without breaking down. And all the way up Daphne Street I went saying it over: “No anything except giving people to understand not attending ain’t real respectable. No, not anything only just that.”
Near my own gate I come on young Elbert Kinsman, minister of the White Frame church, going along alone.
“Oh, Mr. Kinsman,” I burst out unbeknownst, “can you imagine Jesus of Nazareth belonging to a denomination?”
All of a sudden, that young minister reached out and took my hand.
“He loved men,” he said only, “and he was very patient with them.”
And then I went into my dark house, with some other words ringing in my ears: “Lighten mine eyes – lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of the dead.”
But oh, that first September Sabbath morning. It was one of them days that is still all deep Summer, but with just a little light mantel of Autumn – more like a lace boa than a mantel, though – thrown round over things. It was Summer by the leaves, by the air it was Summer, by the gay gardens and the face of the sky; and yet somewhere, hiding inside, was a little hint of yellow, a look of brown, a smell in the wind maybe – that let you know it was something else besides. It wasn’t that the time was any less Summer. It was just that it was Summer and a little Autumn too. But I always say that you can’t think Autumn without thinking Winter; and you can’t think Winter without thinking Spring; and Spring and Summer are not really two, but just one. And so there you have the whole year made one and nothing divided… What if God were intelligence and spirit harmonized and made one? What if all that is the matter with us is just that we intelligences and spirits have not yet been harmonized and made one?
I’ve got a little old piano that the keys rattle, and Sunday mornings, for years now, I always go to that after breakfast, and sit down in my apron, and play some anthems that I remember: “As Pants the Hart,” and “Glory Be to God in the Highest,” and like that. I did it that first Autumn Sunday morning, with my windows open and the muslin curtains blowing and the sun slanting in, and a little smell of wild mint from the bed by the gate. And I knew all over me that it was Sunday morning – I’d have known it no matter if I hadn’t known.
For all I took as long as I could doing my dishes and brushing up the floor and making my bed and feeding my chickens, it was only half past nine when I was all through. Then I got my vegetables ready for dinner, and made me a little dessert, and still it was not quite ten o’clock. So then I give it up and went in, and sat down where I could see them go past to church. I had wanted to keep busy till after half past ten, when they’d all be in their pews.
Already they were going by, folks from up the street and round the corner: some that didn’t usually go and that I couldn’t tell which of the churches they’d be going to, and I wondered how they could tell themselves; and then some that sat near me in church, and that I usually walked along with.
“No,” I thought, “no such nonsense as this for me. Ever. Nor no red, white and blue banquet, either.”
Then, all of a sudden, the first bells began to ring. All the little churches in the village have bells and steeples – they were in debt for them for years. But the bells … all my life long I’d been hearing them rung Sunday morning. All my life I had answered to them – to our special one because, as I said, my father had been janitor there, and he had rung the bell; but just the same, I had answered, always. The bells had meant something to me. They meant something now. I loved to hear them. Pretty soon they stopped, and there was just the tramp of feet on the board walk. I sat there where I was, without moving, the quarter of an hour until the bells began again. And when the bells began again it seemed as if they rang right there in the room with me, but soft and distant too, – from a long way off where I wasn’t any more. Always it had been then, at the second bell, that mother had stood in the hall and asked me if I was ready… I sat there where I was, the quarter of an hour until the bells began again, and I knew this was the last bell, that would end in the five strokes – rung slow, and that when they stopped, all the organs would begin together. And then I could have cried aloud the thing that had been going in me and through me since the first bell had begun to ring:
“Oh, God. It’s the invisible church of the living God – it’s the place that has grown out of the relation of men to you, out of the striving of men to find you, and out of their longing to draw together in search of you. It is our invisible church from the old time. Why then – when men read things into the visible church that never belonged there, when there has crept into and clung there much that is false, why is it that we who know this must be the ones to withdraw? It is your church and the church of all those who try to know you. What shall we do to make it whole?”
Before I knew what I was doing, I was slipping my long cloak on over my work-dress, and then I was out on the street. And I remember that as I went, the thing that kept pouring through my mind was that I wasn’t the only one. But that all over, in other towns at that very hour, there were those whose hearts were aching as mine had ached, and who had nowhere to go. I don’t know yet what I meant to do; but over and over in my head the words kept going:
“What shall we do to make it whole?”
The last bell had stopped when I came to the little grassy triangle where the three churches faced. And usually, on Sunday mornings, by the time the last bell has rung, the triangle is still except for a few hurrying late-comers. But now, when I turned the corner and faced it, I saw people everywhere. Before each little church the steps, the side-walk, and out in the street, were thronged with people, and people were flowing out into the open spaces. And in a minute I sensed it: There wasn’t room. There wasn’t room – for there were fifteen hundred people living in Friendship Village, and all the little churches of the town together wouldn’t hold that many, nor even as many of them as were assembled there that day. But instead of thinking what to do, and how not to waste the time when so many had got together, all that kept going through my head was those same words that I had been saying:
“What shall we do to make it whole?”
And yet those words were what made me think what to do. On the steps of our church I saw our superintendent, looking wild and worried, and I ran right up to him, and I said two words. And in a minute those two words went round, and they spoke them in the crowd, and they announced them inside our church, and somebody went with those words to the other churches. And then we were all moving out and along together to where the two words pointed us: Shepherd’s Grove.
There’s a rough old bandstand in Shepherd’s Grove where once, long ago, the German band used to give evening concerts. The bandstand had nearly fallen to pieces, but it was large enough. The three ministers went up there together, and round the base of the bandstand came gathering the three choirs, and in a minute or two there we all were under the trees of the Grove, the common trees, that made a home for us all, on the common earth, under the common sky.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow” came first, because it said the thing that was in the hearts of us all. And then we wondered what would be, because of the three separate sermons up there before us, all prepared, careful, by three separate ministers, in three separate manses, for three separate congregations. But the thing seemed to settle itself. For it was young Elbert Kinsman who rose, and he didn’t have any prepared sermon in his hands. His hands were empty when he stretched them out toward us. And he said:
“My friends and fellow-lovers of God, and seekers for his law in our common life, this is for me an end and a beginning. As I live, it is for me the end of the thing that long has irked me, that irks us all, that we are clinging to nobody can tell why, or of whose will. I mean the division of unreason in the household of love. For me the folly and the waste and the loss of efficiency of denominationalism have forever ceased. In this hour begins for me a new day: The day when I stand with all men who strive to know God, and call myself by no name save the name which we all bear: Children of the Father, and brothers to Man.”
I don’t know what else he said – I heard, but I heard it in something that wasn’t words, but that was nearer, and closer up to, and clearer in my ears than any words. And I knew that what he was saying had been sounding in my heart for long; and that I had heard it trying to speak from the hearts of others; and that it wasn’t only in Friendship Village, but it was all over the world that people are ready and waiting for the coming of the way that had been shown to us that day. Who knows how it will come at last, – or what form it will take? But we do know that the breaking down of the meaningless barriers must come first.
When the young minister had finished, we stood for a moment in silent prayer. You can not stand still in the woods and empty out your own will, without prayer being there instead, quiet, like love.
Then all together, and as if a good many of us had thought of it first, we began to sing:
“There’s a wideness in God’s loving
Like the wideness of the sea…”
No sooner had we begun than deep in the wood, clear and sweet above the other singing, there came a voice that we all knew. It was Lavvy – I stood where I could see her coming. She was in a cotton dress, and she had done as she had said – gone into the wood – “where better things are.” And there we had come to find them too. She came down the green aisles, singing; and we were all singing – I wish I might have been where I could hear that singing mount. But I was, and we all were, where we could look into one another’s hearts and read there the common longing to draw near unto God. And the great common God was in our midst.
