There was a fire at our church, a terrible fire sent down by Satan as a warning and a punishment to all us members of the Angelic Church of the Broken Heart of the Infant Jesus. Our small church is perfect in its proportions, in its classical design, a miniature copy of a church the architect, Joshua Underfoot, one of our distinguished parishioners, so painstakingly copied from a googled rendering of a church in Rome. It is more of an influence than an actual copy, of course, we not having the walls of white marble or the carved pillars holding up our pediment. Ours is a modest but true rendering, clearly influenced by the Roman church seen in Italy itself. Our kitchen and most of our social hall were badly damaged, rendering them too dark with soot and smoke to be salvageable. The sanctuary, thank the Lord, was spared, although it would need a good scrubbing down and white washing . The fire department has stated that lightning was the most likely source. We all agree, as it is the way of Satan.
I am writing this rendering of our suffering because I have for many years been the scribe, having spent eighteen years in this essential position. Our small church is of an infrequently seen Catholic-like congregation we call The New Hope Evangelist Catholic Revivalist Revolutionary Church. It is once or twice removed from orthodox American Catholic churches, being the first and only of its kind, at once a church of Revolutions, and also a church attuned to a more Southern Baptist type of Catholicism, more closely aligned with evangelism, a small town offshoot, as it were. We are not in revolt against anything; the revolutionary part of our name refers to the Bible book of Revelations which at our beginning we mistook for revolutions and as the name was registered with the state, the name remained as stated. We are a tax exempt church of Revolution and also ours is a southern church. and an American church, so our name honors both areas of North American land masses, The Confederacy and the United States, both of America.
After a week and when I had been able to pull myself together, as it were, with help from Our Lord, I walked tentatively into the burned-out ruin of our kitchen and social hall which had been well cleaned up, although left for dead in darkness with a lingering smoky smell. In a corner were several pieces of colored stained glass, leaning against the wall; they’d been saved from the small cathedral shaped window in the social hall, a window which we all faced with grace during every after-church social and even some weddings, the window lit up at night by outside lighting, so that day or night, the colored rendering of a lamb flanked by pure green leaves of fern, and a purple sky was always there as inspiration and comfort only an innocent lamb can impart.
I picked up a purple glass pane and placed it in my purse, without a second thought, leaving the other glass panes leaning against the wall for others to find comfort in. I guess I took the little stained glass pane as a memento, a relic, although at the time this was not on my mind. My mind was frozen by a feeling of inertia and fear, sensing I was in the presence of evil. I had learned about the Devil and about evil from my father’s numerous stories about his childhood. I hurried away.
I am the most qualified person to tell you of the history of our little church because I was there at the founding. I was not yet born, merely a soul awaiting my newest emergence, when my Southern Baptist lay-minister father, Dave Moranity, (later known as Father David) married my lapsed Catholic mother, Minifor Macon Galoopy, or Minnie, formerly of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dave was ready to establish his third evanlgelistic church, the previous two lasting two and three years each and neither he realized later, fulfilling his lifelong quest to find his ministerial destiny (to fight the Devil he left home to escape). He and my mother, who took on the name of Mother Minnie the Sanctified, launched the church when my mother was pregnant with me, so in essence, I was there from the beginning. The church initially met in our house and then rotated to other houses as the membership grew. The new congregation met the second year of the church’s founding to officially decide the type of religious denomination to follow and give the church its name. They were already collecting funds to hire an architect.
Joshua Underfoot worked as a draftsman for a local builder by the name of Hometown Sweethearts: “ We Build the Home to Keep Her At Home.” Mr. Underfoot had taken quite a lot of courses online pertaining to designing and building all types of structures, and he agreed to make an exhaustive study of well known churches. If we hired him to design our new church, he would, of course, charge only for his time making the exhaustive study and drawing the architectural renderings, then getting them through the county’s exhaustive approval processes. He was appointed by all exhausted church members present.
The growing congregation turned next to the type and name of the new church. Most of the discussion consisted of robust public discourse between my parents, as I was told. My father decided he would not make the same mistake three times. He wanted a more innovative-type church than merely having one more evangelistic Southern Baptist offshoot. Minnie had suddenly refound her roots in her lapsed Catholic upbringing and suggested a Catholic-like church be merged with a Southern Baptist-like belief system, and Dave immediately saw the genius of the proposal. He quickly worked out the details in his head, perhaps in the seconds it took for the congregation to hear Minnie’s proposal and various members to shake their heads yes or no, and Dave jumped up and waving his arms in the air in jubilation, cried out that he was receiving a revelation from above and the group grew silent, with Minnie looked up up at Dave, a question on her face followed by a smile.
That is how the church got its foundation. Father David would donn a white satin vestiment with a white satin cap. He wrote out the church’s book of worship on his Samsung computer, taking various verses and songs from his old evangelical books while adding sections from a book he borrowed from the local Catholic church, blending together a rather short rendering for weekly church services with a sprinkling of Latin words. He sometimes walked down the aisle shaking a bottle of smoking incense, appearing to make up various Latin-sounding words, such as” “Dommina, Dimmohno, Domminughh.” He came up with the religious denomination’s name and the church’s name he thought would be most descriptive of the service beliefs, yet different enough to distinguish the church from all others. The religious denomination became known as the New Hope Evangelist-Catholic Revivalist Revolutionist Church and the church’s registered name was: The Angelic Church of the Broken Heart of the Infant Jesus.
The church was not a rebellious church. I have told of how the church doctrine acquired its revolutionary name. Accidents happen and can be providential. In any event, our newly built church quickly became known as the Broken Hearted Jesus Church which, for us, was close enough. It attracted many of the dejected, depressed, dispirited, down-and-out people living in our parish. They were many and we grew and we prospered.
I wrote the official church history for an article in the local paper’s biweekly religious section last fall. I told how the new church’s members spent two years fundraising for the new church building, using all the traditional southern-town methods, plus a home-grown lottery which became quite well known for seventy miles around, as far as Baton Rouge, my mother’s old hometown. The lottery was continued well after the church was built and stopped when the state voted to allow steam boat gambling in the water outside several big cities.
The church is modest in size but mighty in effect and in appearance. It stands at the edge of town, on Olde Andrew Jackson Street, where a rotting livery stable had stood for generations. The new building is a wooden structure with a medium tall steeple, the building’s walls clad in vertical boards painted bright white, with two large windows rising in the front, each topped by rounded cornices. Above the large double doors was a wooden triangle covered by a copper roof, a small pediment whose roof quickly turned a beautiful green. The triangle was held up by two Roman columns. The steeple I mentioned is flanked on all four corners with slim Roman columns matching the ones flanking the doors, only of smaller circumference and topped by elongated football shaped wooden elements, stylized finials we found in a local salvage yard, adding a community element to the classical design. You walked up three front steps to reach the imposing doors which were painted different colors every few years; they were dark red at this time. Behind the church, the social hall and the kitchen jutted out to the right, those structures to suffer mightily from the devil’s fire. Even though our architect forgot to put a cross in his external design, everything knows we are a church. A unique church at that.
I live in a building on my parent’s property which once housed the horse and buggy stable. To me, it is a more elegant building than the main house my parents inhabit, for on its roof it has a perfect, petite white wooden structure with a large finial on top of a little onion shaped dome. I have researched this design element and found it to contain an Oriental influence, certainly unique in our part of the country. I have painted my door a bright yellow which is a joyful color, as I have been told by numerous people over the years. I live a contented life with my cat, Doug, and my other cat, Dolly, and my little dog, Brutus. My parents have always professed to abhor pets, citing their numerous allergies and their tendencies toward narcissistic endeavors. I lead a simpler life of routines, schedules, daily excursions to the church, my walks and my occasional movies and dinners with friends. The years go by at their pace.
I value my independence and my privacy and so when I graduated high school, I immediately made plans to capture for myself the right to live in my own self-contained home. I have my set of friends, mostly girls I went to highschool with, and one male friend who teaches dance and theater at the community center. He is known as Chipper, Chipper Southlander. He is one person who has grown into his name, for he is my ideal of the Southern Gentleman. We both enjoy Champale, po boy sandwiches, PBS television shows, novels by southern writers, and walking our dogs along the Piciaducas River pathway, I leading Brutus, on one leash and he leading his dog, Maryann, on another. We stop at the small waterfall halfway up the pathway to drink from our water bottles. He always carries a different colored bottle; he must have twenty of them. He once admitted it was his passion. He and I have hugged and we have even kissed. Sometimes while walking along the river we hold hands.
The church held a fund-raising dance at the community center, a grand gala with many guests from other churches, even the Almighty Marching Saints Catholic Church, all of our congregation, and over twenty of the Jewish persuasion from the Torah Temple. Everyone dressed to the nines; we had cocktails available to buy, and red and white wine served at the tables, festooned with white linen and wildflowers picked from the abundantly flowering hills outside town, especially near the river. They gave the festive party a home-spun look, to keep the festivities grounded. The food, donated for a moderate fee, was supplied by Roland’s Food Truck and Catering. It was memorable in several ways.
We had dancing and a silent raffle in a room lined with a variety of goody baskets and restaurant visits and services from almost all the businesses in our town and other parts of the parish as well. We raised $20,235 for the new social hall/kitchen. And then two of the Jewish businessmen, partners in owning The Lower Louisiana Mercantile Mart, the parish’s number one department store, stood up to speak. One of them, Herman Bicarb Needleman was his name, talked a little about neighbor helping neighbor and then announced that the store was donating an additional $18,265 to our needed total of $38,500, putting our fundraising over the top of our goal! Everyone stood up and clapped and yelled for the Jews. After everyone had left, an exhausted Pastor David said to his wife, Sister Minnie Exalted: “we are lucky our Jews are on our side. They are God’s chosen people and they chose us this time. The Pope would be proud of his special people, who he for so long has supported in their looking for a homeland. I hope they find one soon.”
Joshua Underfoot designed a different plan for the new social hall/kitchen. It was larger than the old social hall and had a massive window taking up an entire wall, designed by the ever-talented Chipper Southlander, and the painted-on glass depicts several lambs sinking in a swamp, braying to the heavens, like they want to be saved from the swamp. This is a metaphor. It is awe-inspiring and lends an aura of religiosity to our parties and social gatherings, leading us to not stray too far in our pursuit of gaiety.
Our little denomination has grown, yet we retain our primitive view of good and evil. Every sermon preached by Father David includes warning us of the Devil’s ways. Every sermon mentions grace and the need to do good deeds, and to remember the golden rule, and finally each sermon gets us back to the Devil again. Father David sees the Devil in his dreams. He does not add that his daydreams sometimes feature battles with his father, epic battles he always loses. My mother once told me in her daydreams she was dancing at the Cotillion on her sixteenth birthday, her pink crinoline skirt flowing down to the dance floor and she was elected Cotillion Princess, and she was allowed her first drink of Champale. I daydream about packing my suitcase, walking out the front door and over to the train station to catch the 5:25 to New Orleans. I do not turn back, but I know that Chipper is right behind me.
I keep the little purple stained glass pane in my room. I am always looking for something to use it for, this relic from when our church was threatened. I sometimes put it up to my sunlit window and stare through the purple hue, dreaming other dreams of other lives, and for short moments, I am unnerved, filled with unknown joy and unasked questions. At those times I feel my mind expanding outward into the sky on a trip toward the heavens, my heart beating with hope, but then I reign myself in, pulling the image back inside. I put the purple glass pane carefully in its place on my dresser and get ready for my walk with Brutus, Maryanne, and Chipper.
