High holy roller...

High holy roller, I've spent long stretches of my life in a church. White doves, holy Bible, Psalms on Sundays, then Tibetan bells on Tuesdays. Same church, different teacher. God, an idea I had when I was born.

I wanted to be a preacher, standing crisp in some black and white spats, my pleated trousers, deep they were, these pockets filled with gold. "Come to the Lord!" I would holler, tip-top dance across the hot Alabama linoleum, the jello's been spilled and cleaned to spit-shined linoleum. "Put your faith in God, in Jesus, in the Lord!"

But then I read and read and found outside the sacred scriptures two curious things.

The first, that I was not a flame-throwing, gorgeous, shining-on-sweat preacher man. And the second, that God and Jesus and the Lord, the Lord himself, was not what I had been taught.

I liked churches and temples and synagogues, the sounds of bells clamoring as if they themselves could reach the light with their banging, their gong, their drone.

I liked pink punch and shitty plastic cups, ladies in floral dresses who eat too much pie and do not trouble themselves with buttons or zippers or proof. I like the kindness in a good-hearted people's eyes who seem for real as if they want so little. Baby Johnny's scoliosis to correct, enough for him to walk, Laura to find a good job, Bill to return from war.

I like churches for how the light bounces off the stained glass as if to say, "I have been here forever, for centuries, always this dulled yellow, this umber, this glow."

I like temples and yarmulkes and the Torah, rolled out in all its particular parchments, so stately, the worshippers with hat and shawl, me with a skirt below my knees and a desire to understand Hebrew so that I could translate, so that I could weave the tale.

Church is where AA opens its hearty arms like a big tent with no sides and says you're welcome here.

Where I picked myself up from the slutty gutter dribble and rose to the occasion, the high holiest of days, this one, here, to be alive again, to be new, as if it were enough for each of us at last to play the second coming of Christ.