My step-mother spoke in tongues. Not always, and never with the howling fervor that overtook some members of our congregation, but quietly, under her breath, with her eyes closed and her hands lifted in open-palmed reverence unto the heavens. It was a regular enough occurrence that I grew used to seeing her at it, to the whispered cadence of foreign syllables rolling from her mouth in a vaguely familiar rhythm.
“It’s the language of the angels,” she told me once. Mystified, I asked her how she learned it.
She explained that it was divine knowledge, sacred speech delivered by God straight into the mouths of His most devout believers, so that they might communicate their prayers to Him without need of translation. “It’s a gift,” she explained, “like prophecy, or healing. The Holy Spirit fills you and blesses you with it.”
I had never been blessed, as far as I knew. Certainly not with the ability to speak a language from beyond this earthly realm. I asked my father if it was expected of us, worried that I might never earn the Lord’s favor, and he told me that I should only do it if it felt right, and that nobody would judge me if it never happened.
I tried at the next service anyway, just a word or two, so much garbled nonsense muttered to myself as the band segued between songs. I felt foolish, and was struck with the sudden surety that if I kept on in that manner someone would hear me, know that I was faking, and announce my sin to the congregation. It was a shame I thought might kill me, so I turned my attention back to worship and sang along with the hymns in a language I already spoke.
Harmonizing to the music in church is the closest I’ve ever really gotten to speaking in tongues, or any of the Lord’s divine gifts, though I felt unaccountably blessed the time that Miss Susan, the leader of the church choir, saw fit to give me one half of a duet in the Christmas musical. The other little girl who’d been cast was the pastor’s grand-daughter, which, my father explained to me through a buoyant cresting of pride, was nepotism. Nepotism, he continued, meant that my triumph in the matter was greater and more worthy of celebration than hers.
It was not a blessing by God’s grace, but rather by that of Miss Susan the Choir Director. Still, I hoped it was a step in the right direction, and that I would soon begin to reap the fruits of devotion that had imbued so many of our congregation.
It wasn’t until high school, when I joined a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes for a brief, doomed stint during my freshman year, that I realized not every house of worship saw such an abundance of blessings.
There were a variety of Christian backgrounds represented, but I was the lone Pentecostal Charismatic amongst mostly Baptists and Evangelicals. I didn’t really understand what that meant until someone characterized my church as “the one where people yell and fall down and stuff.” In retrospect, it seems a fair, if oversimplified, description of how Valley Haven Church operated, but at the time I was desperate to make friends at a new school and being singled out as the weirdest of the religious weirdoes was not the foot I had hoped to start out on.
One girl asked if it was true that members of our congregation regularly fainted.
“Yes,” I told her, surprised that she was asking. I had assumed it happened everywhere.
“What about snakes?” a boy piped up. “I heard you keep a box of them in the pulpit.” Somebody else wanted to know if we exclusively employed rattlers in our faith healing, seeing as they were abundant here in Arizona, or if we ordered our snakes in from other states.
“No!” I felt hot out to my earlobes and my stomach started working itself into a Gordian knot. “My dad says any church that uses snakes is as good as inviting Satan in the front door.”
I have since revised my opinion on snakes, thanks in large part to a ball python called Bella I met several years later. She belonged to my cousin’s high school boyfriend, Jordan, and was about as long as my arm, with forest-dark banding along her emerald body and sweet black eyes and surprisingly kittenish features. I would wear her around at house parties when Jordan was hosting them, her body coiled around my throat and extending down the collar of my shirt, tucked into the heat of my chest. She would curl her tail around my sleeve, like a child afraid to be lost at the supermarket, and occasionally poke her head up to flick her thin pink tongue into the air.
I was seventeen, then, and fairly confident that God couldn’t hear me regardless of what language I was speaking, so there didn’t seem to be much harm in fraternizing with one of Satan’s creatures. Bella never gave me reason to regret that decision, though I look back on what mischief she witnessed us getting up to at those house parties sometimes and cringe.
I attended another prayer group in college, and while nobody asked me about my background or accused me of consorting with serpents, it turned out that four years and change wasn't quite enough to wash the bad taste from my mouth. I availed myself of a muffin and sang some familiar hymns and very carefully didn't give out my phone number so I couldn't be invited back a second time.
I don’t remember exactly when my family started attending Valley Haven Church, but the congregation moved into a larger location when I was seven, or maybe eight, and that’s the building that comes to mind whenever I think back on my spiritual upbringing. There had been another before it, with dingy brown carpeting and sloping popcorn ceilings and high, narrow windows, where we were relegated to the balcony more often than not because my sister and I could never be coaxed out of bed early enough to secure the good seats.
The new church was bigger, brighter, done up in soothing blues and crisp whites and soft dove greys. There were digital projection screens at either side of the sanctuary and another directly behind the pulpit, camouflaging a baptismal pool on a raised dais. The stage was wide enough to accommodate the choir on one side and the band on the other, with room left over for Pastor Davies to prowl and perform as he liked to do while he delivered his sermons. The stage descended down onto the congregation floor via an array of shallow, carpeted steps. After the sermon, Pastor Davies would invite any member of his flock in need of personalized prayer to kneel on those steps, and he and his two sons—college-educated pastors in their own rights—would walk amongst them, bending low and close and seeing to their spiritual needs.
More often than not, there would be a woman laid out in the aisle between the pews and the steps, supine in her Sunday best with her spit-polished heels twitching against the carpet as she thrashed in the throes of religious euphoria. Not a single, specific woman, but a rotating cast of them in ankle-length skirts and color-coordinated blouses, being carefully guided to the floor by the surrounding church-goers so they didn’t injure themselves in their ecstasy.
My step-mother never fainted, but she knelt on the steps sometimes. So did my father, on rarer occasion, and so did I, once, because we’d just received news that an uncle on our mother’s side had a brain tumor, and supplicating oneself in times of illness was how good Christians helped to heal. My sister must have been with me—we were young enough at the time that there was very little we didn’t do together—but I can’t remember for certain. It felt like a solitary experience, like standing under a spotlight on opening night when you haven’t rehearsed enough and can’t remember your lines.
Pastor Davies came by and put his hands on our shoulders, benevolent and fatherly. He ducked his head in close and led us in prayer, and I tried to believe that I could feel the gift of the Lord’s healing like a light in my body. I wanted to carry it into the hospital and shine it over my uncle where he was nursing a six-inch suture in his skull, drive the Devil’s shadow out and the cancer along with it.
There was a woman just last week, Pastor Davies had said, whose family had all gathered on the steps and basked in the glow of God’s grace long enough to reflect it onto their grandmother like the sun off the moon’s face. She had been healed.
I prayed with all the power in my skinny limbs that my uncle might be due the same miracle.
My uncle recovered, but it was a grueling process that took years of chemotherapy and more additional surgeries than I can accurately recall. I couldn’t say whether God had a hand in it or not, but I do know that I walked out of the hospital and back into church the next weekend certain that, unlike the rest of the favored flock in our congregation, I was a dim bulb.
A few years after the cathedral upgrade, my parents and the rest of their Bible study group decided that Pastor Davies had made some misstep in the theological politics of congregational leadership and agreed to begin attending services at the home of some of the Bible study members. The particular reasoning was never explained to me, as I was only twelve at the time and had no need to concern myself with those sorts of matters. It was simply announced one morning that we would no longer be attending Valley Haven Church, but would instead be participating in a smaller congregation with Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda, who I had known up until that point as simply Tom and Linda Fordham.
Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda had a house in a nicer part of town, architecture not quite up to the standard of a McMansion but yearning toward it. Floor-to-ceiling windows cut swathes of morning sun across the marbled floor and interior water fixtures burbled between lush arrangements of tropical plants in huge, glazed pots. The faint scent of wet earth lingered on the air, overpowered by the cloying chemical vanilla of commercial candles and the sugar-stink of the spread laid out across a nearby counter—an array of baked goods in flimsy plastic containers, procured last-minute from the local supermarket because Pastor Linda didn’t cook, and neither did my parents, or most of the other attendees milling about the kitchen.
She didn’t tend the plants either, I learned when I asked later. Hired help came through to pluck, and prune, and nurture. It made sense when I considered Pastor Linda’s style. She was a thickset woman, which suited her, and she flattered her figure with a variety of flowing clothes—gauzy floral dresses and elegant monochrome pantsuits and sweeping shawls in vibrant animal prints. Her shoes were always sharp and her nails always at least an inch and a half long, painted with stark cherry reds or rich royal blues and dotted with rhinestones. She wore her hair nearly shellacked to her head, curled in finger waves like a starlet from a silent film, and a month or two before I started high school my parents sent me off with her for spiritual guidance.
I sat in the passenger seat of Pastor Linda’s banana-yellow Humvee, enjoying a frozen coffee as she explained to me that if I wanted the other kids at school to take me seriously, I needed to invest in a designer handbag and better shoes. Going on thirteen, and with a sense of humor still in desperate need of refinement, I joked that I was planning to wear a different cat shirt every day of the first week. That would cement my personality as well as a designer handbag, I reasoned, and seeing as half my wardrobe at the time consisted of cat shirts, it seemed a more affordable method by which to make a statement.
Pastor Linda’s lip curled when she told me I didn’t want to do that. She had been blessed with the gift of prophecy, everybody said, so I figured she must be at least a little right. I didn’t buy the handbag—if God wanted me to have one, I reasoned, He would send me a check—but I compromised on the cat shirts.
A little while after that, my parents quietly started taking us back to Valley Haven Church. They never addressed why, specifically, but I got the feeling that the shine had rubbed off of whatever penny Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda had used to lure them away from Valley Haven in the first place. Before we left their congregation, Pastor Tom delivered a sermon where he talked about doing things by halves. It was meant, I think, to energize the audience, to instill in us the fortitude to enact great workings of faith. He stuck for some time on the phrase "hell in a hand basket."
It was misleading, Pastor Tom said. Certainly the feckless heathens of the world weren't content to traipse down to hell in a measly little hand basket. They were committed to the decline of this country, and the world, and they wouldn't settle for traveling in a dainty wicker number, no matter how many festive ribbons were tied around its handle. They were dragging America to Hell in something with a V10 engine and four-wheel drive. We Christians, he reasoned, need to match their fervor.
"If you're going to Hell," he said, presumably speaking from the perspective of one of our mortal enemies, "don't do it in a hand basket. Do it in a Learjet!"
Alright, I thought, fifteen and angry, glaring past my heavy black eyeliner from the row of folding chairs at the back of the living room. If you insist.