The Third Book of the Knight Shamans

From the front parking lot, he stepped out of his Dodge pickup and looked at the building. He had helped build it while still attending high school. They had kept the wood siding natural looking with a dark, almost walnut stain. The parishioners had renewed the finish recently, and the building stood out in contrast to the trailer park that had grown up behind it. The church and the trailer park were on land that had once been timberland. Timber that Justin had spent a summer between junior and senior year logging with the landowner. Just before the owner donated the lower lot to the church.

He looked at the huge stained-glass window over the entry doors. The lights from inside shone through the bright colors. A sunset behind three crosses. Splaying out around the center pole, giving a glowing nimbus to the man nailed to the crosspiece there. Jesus’ head was lifted, and a dove was speeding away. “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” he could almost hear him crying out.

Exactly as he felt each time he returned to this edifice. “Oh, my church, why have you forsaken us?”

He walked up to the double-door entry and paused, remembering holding the leftmost of the pair steady as the carpenters pinned it. There had been a little celebration when the then-pastor had ceremoniously opened the doors to the church’s first visitors.

Hesitantly, he reached out and pressed the latch and pulled the handle to swing the right-side door open. He wondered if it was his imagination that gave a slight burning sensation to his palm as he pulled the handle. He centered himself and banished the thoughts he was experiencing.

Stepping in, Lloyd, the older brother of his high school lover, waited to greet parishioners. Lloyd had started life out on the wild side, being part of a motorcycle gang long before there were Hell’s Angels. He made up for it in his enthusiasm after conversion, though.

“Did it burn when you touched the handle?” Lloyd asked.

Justin had been “out” as a gay man for a long time at that point, and it didn’t surprise him that Lloyd knew. Idly, he wondered if he knew it was his younger brother by fifteen years with whom he first discovered his sexuality. And if that younger brother had told the elder about their four-year-long relationship. Throughout high school, they had been together many times in the hidden places of the community. The lover had left Justin for a woman. He had several children with her before dying of AIDS-related complications. Justin had never asked if the woman, who he never married, ended up infected as well.

That lover joined four others of his high school class who had succumbed to the virus. Two had contracted it decades after the initial outbreak.

Justin looked Lloyd in the eye. “It only burned for a little,” he answered. “But then I reached deep down inside of me where God lives and put aside the demon who lives in this place.”
Lloyd grimaced and turned away from Justin, stalking off into the side corridor, leaving the entry untended.

Justin knew the demon would return. This congregation would invite it back before even the conclusion of this day’s sermon.

He pushed through the double doors into the nave with a heavy heart. Justin remembered he had preached a baccalaureate sermon here for his high school graduation. He couldn’t recall even a single word from that presentation as he looked forward to the pulpit. That was back when he was allowing them to believe he would become a minister. He always knew, though, that he was gay. And that the Assembly of God leadership would never allow him to serve as pastor honorably. Openly. Openly gay. He had to pretend though, to get through high school and find his escape.

This occasion was Mother’s Day. His mom had invited all of them to church to be with her on her special day. No other women had made such invitations. That became obvious when the pews remained alarmingly empty even as the organist started a slow song to gather folks in. Justin looked to the far left wall to see the row of pews he and all his friends had always chosen when attending services. It was completely empty. There was just one small family of four in the entire middle set of pews. Then there were a scattered few along the right side, where all the oldsters had used to gather.

“I’ll have you sit there,” his mother pointed to a pew three rows back on the far-right side. She then moved up to the second row and had the other siblings sit there with her. Justin saw that there had been room for him to sit in the same row. He also knew that she would only tolerate so much closeness from the gay son. He stifled his resentment and sat where she directed. This was only to be a onetime event, and he could afford to let her have her way.

He resolutely looked forward at the carved letters behind the communion bench just in front of the choir loft. “This Do in Remembrance of Me,” the letters spelled out. He heard a couple of folks sliding in behind him.

“It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” he heard Lloyd’s voice boom out, such that the entire nave echoed with it.

“Brother Lloyd,” he heard another voice from the left aisle, “we ask that you forbear insulting our visitors.” The man owning that voice continued up to the pulpit. This would be the pastor Justin had only heard of through his mother.

“Well, it’s true,” Lloyd muttered from behind him.

“Shush,” Justin heard Lloyd’s wife whisper. Loud enough for everyone within three rows to hear.

Folks here didn’t seem big on discretion.

No wonder his mother didn’t want him in the same row. Maybe she had expected him to refuse, and she would have been left proudly displaying her other five offspring in the absence of the Black Sheep.

They had a guest speaker that day. It was August 2012, and there was an election on the horizon. The speaker spent close to an hour berating and belittling President Obama. There was no evil Obama hadn’t committed. No sin he hadn’t contemplated according to this firebrand.

At about twenty minutes in, Justin saw a couple stand from the front row of the middle section. They stepped to the aisle his pew was on and walked arm-in-arm back through the nave. It was James and Geraldine Wooley. He had once been an usher and then a deacon in the church. Justin’s mom had told him that the pastor had demoted Jim when he came in. Jim had refused to submit to the new guidelines coming down from the church’s corporate headquarters.

Justin wanted to cheer as the old couple walked with solemn dignity out the front door and left. He wondered whether they would return.

The guest speaker continued his rant, extolling the virtues of Mitt Romney. The candidate for the Republican Party.

When he finally quit his haranguing, the pastor called for a collection to help cover his travel expenses to visit this small congregation. Small indeed, Justin thought to himself. In a room built to hold over 300, there were maybe a scant twenty-five gathered. Absent his mother'D offspring, they wouldn’t even have gone over twenty.

“This Do in Remembrance of Me,” Justin read the inscription once again as he stood to leave after the sermon.

“This Do in Remembrance of Me.”