Pew

by Catherine Lacey

It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church—so vast, so many rooms—to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building.

What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.

They really found you in a church? I was sleeping, I said. Yeah, not much else you can do there but sleep. They take me every week. My whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding. Must have been some other guy.

It Is Well with My Soul.” It’s just all about how no matter how hard things get, no matter if Satan tests you or everyone you love dies or something else, you just have to keep your head up, you have to keep your eyes on the Lord.

How lucky we are to have the moon. It seemed that hardly anyone ever saw the sky anymore. Had we all forgotten it was there? All this time below it, we forget. Maybe the sky will leave us someday, then we will be able to realize what it was.

that the family you were born into didn’t mean anything, that you couldn’t even have a name. You had to give it all up. You had to truly be nothing. He said that’s what Jesus was really teaching and all these people had it wrong. You had to be nothing.

they found the kid sleeping in their church and they take it upon themselves to be the saviors, to take the kid in and try to figure something out on their own—don’t even alert child services or nothing, which I know because I know some people who work over there and I looked in on it—then they give up once it gets too complicated, that is, when half of them start saying maybe the kid’s not white or not white enough and then what happens, huh? What do they do then? They want to make it our problem. They think it’s time we did something about it.

Taking care of others. It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

It can’t scare you if you know it’s going to happen. But then there’s all kinds of things we don’t know that are going to happen. And so it’s scary sometimes, I think it is, scary to have to go around out there.

I felt so sure then—of course I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then—and the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?