The Profile of a Bad Man

The first time that my church split was the ugliest. I was an 11-year-old witness to the shameful, twisted monster that my church became and, like the city folk left alive after each attack in those Godzilla movies, I was left to pick up the pieces and deal with the aftermath.

Sure. It's just church, and one of many, many others. I've never had to suffer the loss of economic or familial security, the death of a close friend, or even the uncertainty of health. Sometimes, even now, when people explain to me their grievances I find myself only able to listen with a, somewhat, detached sympathy because the lack of shared experience. Since I have never known those kind of losses, I can only relate so deeply. Often times I wonder if my pains with the church are even comparable with some of the losses that friends and family have confided in me; I wonder if maybe I haven't blown the situation with my church back then up and out of proportion. Sometimes I say to myself, 'Maybe it really wasn't that bad...'

Then I'll meet with old friends from that church and I see the monster's footprint in their eyes. It was in the way they're eyes would go to the ground as we danced around the subject of church.

Godzilla had been there, there was no denying that.

I never knew the name or face of the man who'd started everything. I don't know if he was the one who'd started the rumors about the senior pastor stealing money from the treasury but I've been chalking it up to his doing for the past 10 years. I don't know exactly why the police showed up at our church one Sunday afternoon; people were outside, linking arms and forming a barricade with their bodies and I always imagine that it's against that man. That man.

Maybe he wore a gray suit. In my mind I always imagined him to be a man in his 40's with slightly graying hair because my parents were about that age. I recalled the cold, disgusted look that one of the old grandmothers had given me when I bowed in greeting to her. As a child I was not keeping track of who was on what side (because there eventually were two sides to the church), but clearly she had. I took the hardened look on what should have been a kindly face and added it to the profile of an imaginary real man that I, in my childish mind, ascribed all the causes of the church's problems.

(to be continued)