last week on my drive to olean I found a tiny out of the way mennonite church near port alleghany and decided I'd attend sunday service there. the birch grove mennonite church was sparsely attended--I counted 22 people--but they were 22 nice, friendly people. it's a newish building in the outback of the thick along a road called "two-mile." in conversation with some members afterward I found that their membership numbered about a hundred in the mid-90s, but when the majority opted to build the new building, the others left en masse, and death and moving away took care of the rest.
what I noticed immediately was the smell. it was the pleasant smell I've always associated with old abandoned farmhouses in this part of the country. the smell of old worn wood in a hot room takes on the odor of cinnamon and nutmeg--perhaps it's the resin leaching from it. the backs of the pews had been dark as the rest at one time, but were now bleached blond by generations of hands gripping and sliding along them. the walls were plain and whitewashed with a single brilliant stained glass window above the pulpit, the ubiquitous image of jesus praying over thorns in the garden at gethsemane. (interestingly, all examples of this image I've located online show jesus facing the left, while the example at birch grove shows him facing the right: perhaps it was installed for the benefit of people on the outside rather than in.)
the building had an east-west orientation so that the window caught the late morning sun and lent luster to the stained glass. jesus' robe was a deeper red, the greens of plants a denser green. there were plastic flowers on the alter and the organ and at each of the open windows. the pastor's message, an otherwise cliched and bland perfunctory sermon that was instantly forgetable--was punctuated by birdsong. the minister, an interim who'd been there he told me 7 years, was missing most of the fingers of his left hand but didn't hesitate to shake mine. the theology wasn't lacking a humanistic bent, except for the usual xian attribution of every event as "the lord working," and its point--that we are all 1--was something I could agree with.
but what really impressed me was a man I spent most of my time there talking with. born and raised in port alleghany, neil has a day job with the borough operating machinery and side work as a volunteer prayer minister ("I specialize in healing and talking ministry"). his wife who substitutes at the local high school is from northern california, but neil has never spent appreciable time away from the area. he'd been a hippie and had even lived in a local commune--it started, he said, as a drug commune but the members eventually "accepted jesus" in one place or another and rejiggered the place as a vegetarian religious community. the place burned to the ground when he was 26 and he met and married his wife in the next year and had lived his life "like a regular guy" since then. they have 2 sons and a daughter--the younger son was at church with them and was obviously bored and humiliated at his parents' spirituality and willingness to talk about themselves, and so neil gave him the keys to the car and I offered to drive them home. on the drive we talked about the counterculture as it'd been experienced there and the way it ebbed and flowed over time--many of the local businessmen had at one time or another opened head shops and vegetarian restaurants and health food stores before moving on to tanning salons and video stores and computer repair--as if this little town in the thick was a microcosm of america.
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