Do Unto

One time I moved my family to a small town for a couple of years. We took them to church right away; we picked a liberal denomination with a large church downtown and a pastor who I kind of liked personally, though my wife suspected he was an alcoholic. But soon after we got there, on a Saturday right before Halloween, a car rear-ended me out near the Wal-Mart where they were having a pumpkin sale, and when I got out of the car to inspect the damage, I realized it was the pastor’s wife who had done it.

She was devastated, an emotional wreck, and the damage to my car was also greater than it seemed, and made me re-evaluate whether I’d gotten whiplash or not. I hadn’t. It was a pure rear-end collision, clearly her fault, and though she was bawling into her hankie she assured me that she would pay for all the damages, and there was no need to call the police, she was good for her word, and all that. She was, after all, the pastor’s wife, and his reputation was at stake, and they were both what, about sixty, considerably older than I was, so I just did as she wished and took the car over to the shop and left it there for a few days. This wasn’t a problem for me; my wife was gone for a few days anyway, so I had access to another car.

But here’s the strange thing: the following Sunday, the pastor assured me, again, that his insurance would take care of all the damage that was done on Monday night. An intense man was with him at the time, and they were both bearing down on me and shaking my hand. Afterward, I thought to myself, wait, that accident happened on Saturday night. But I hadn’t said anything. He was the pastor, after all. Respect is an important part of these relationships.

Now my kids are in their Sunday School, and that’s what I really like about the place; in a small town, you want lots of people to know and love your kids so when they get in trouble, they have someone on their side. I don’t care what they teach them, it’s usually not too bad, and it’s like school, the parents have to help them make sense of it anyway. I tell you this to let you know, I’m not so interested in the whole dogma of it. Places where they are on you about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I don’t care for that so much. My personal relationship is mostly listening to whatever the pastor has to say about him. And I mostly go along with it, I don’t have an argument with it, and I’m glad our denomination is a little more easy-going than most, which is to say, people aren’t constantly checking to be sure you have the same relationship they do. I’m not sure I want everyone to be all interested in that anyway; I feel like they have to give you some leeway there and not make you talk about it all the time, so I talk about it as little as possible, and let them teach my children whatever they want. That’s how I look at it.

A few days later I got my bill for the car, and it was quite substantial, and I dropped it off at the church where, again, the pastor maintained that it would all be taken care of, and I wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Somehow as I looked at that pastor, in his ordinary clothes, as it was a weekday, I got the impression everything wasn’t just normal. But I only knew part of the story, and besides, they came through with the money, fairly quickly too, so that I could get that car back on the road as soon as possible, for after all, my wife was back, and they didn’t want to have me driving some rent-a-car around. The pastor was acting like he wanted me to just be really happy, have a nice fresh rear end on my car, and forget the whole thing as soon as possible. And meanwhile, I didn’t see his wife anywhere; you’d think she’d be there or make a point to communicate with me about how much it was and how it would be paid. No, she was in the background, and everything went through him. The insurance agent, I found out later, was also in the congregation. He wrote the check and I had the car back pretty quickly.

I still went to that church; I went there for a long time, and I’ll tell you why. Sometimes you’re in the hospital, and it’s really scary, like you think you’re going to die or something, and they ask you if there’s a pastor you’d like to contact to come and pray for you as you die or as you’re about to have surgery. At that moment, and this is a moment I think about a lot, even though it’s never happened to me, it’s got to be someone who doesn’t offend you, someone who’s not going to pry about your personal relationship, or at the very least, someone whose prayer isn’t going to seem to you like the epitome of hypocrisy. This one pastor in town, he had a little too much access to young boys, and there was this long and lurid scandal that dragged out for years, and he wasn’t even Catholic, he was from one of those more dogmatic churches, but I sure wouldn’t want him praying over me. It’s unrelated to dogma, really, I think, except that twisted people are actually attracted to those kinds of positions, just because maybe they think they can talk themselves into getting better, who knows? In the Catholic Church in this town, they had saved a few thousand dollars for some trip to the Holy Land, and one of the priests just up and took it, and went there himself, and disappeared, and they had trouble finding him, it took years. I’m not trying to say that all these holy people are actually some kind of crooks or something, they’re human just like the rest of us, and these things happen, and besides in a small town these stories tend to get embellished and you never know quite what to believe. What I’m saying is, you need someone you can believe in, and for the most part they are ok, and you can believe in them, and when the chips are down you have to believe in the one you just most naturally believe in the most anyway. For me, it was still this pastor.

But it wasn’t until I got some of the paperwork later, and signed off on it all, that I realized that they actually had changed the date on the accident, from Saturday to Monday. And there could be only one reason for it, which was that they didn’t have insurance on Saturday, but they did on Monday. They fully expected me to not care, as long as I got my money, and they were basically right, on some level; I took the money and left them alone. But it haunted me for years, because I did care, and I wondered about that insurance agent, and whether he was in on it or not. Sometimes, during a sermon, I’d picture myself dying, and this old pastor would be blessing my soul, and I’d say, it was Saturday, not Monday, and he would just blame it on his wife like it was all some miscommunication or something. But it never got to that point; we left town, eventually, and I never saw him again. Or his wife, for that matter, who I ‘d really never seen all that much to begin with.