Relative Comfort

Sitting in the comfy chairs up front, I thought briefly about the architecture of what had once been a church that had become a synagogue. I considered all the ways that this spot, this antennae to God, had been used. A sanctuary. A place to commune with the spirits that pretend to listen, or we pretend to care if they listened. A sacred place because of of its construction or because of all that communing. I thought about all the voices raised from that spot and how much easier it would be to hear them crying out if they were only concentrated in that one specific location during very specific hours of the day. Preferably on the weekend.
I recognized that the building itself did not have to go through much change, but those comfy chairs up front were a revelation. The Methodist church I attended in my youth was all about those wooden pews. Sitting through a service was doing penance. As a kid, I would much rather have been lashed to a log in a sawmill than stuck on those right angled benches while the hereafter was discussed. The only thing that got me through was the envelopes for tithing and the pencils next to them next to the hymnals. My parents let me draw on them until they ran out. I had enough discretion not to scribble in the margins of the psalmody. I knew that God could see me squirming and groaning without a lick of attention paid to the sermon but I was not fool enough to deface church property.
It wasn't until much later, after I had been excused from church for a decade or two, that an art history class afforded me a chance to consider the layouts of all of these houses of God. The steeples and spires. The nave. The transept. The narthex. It put me in mind of the body parts of an insect. Only much, much holier. There was math and precision to all that construction of cathedrals. And even though the neighborhood house of worship was never so ornate, there was still a sense of purpose to the layout. You should be able to tell from the outside that this was a place where believers would gather to send their pleas and thank-yous to whom or whatever might be looking down.
Back in that comfy chair, I wondered where the pews had gone before they had been replaced with something much less restrictive. I wondered if there was ever any confusion up in the sky switchboard when the prayers started coming in on Saturday instead of Sunday. What sort of permitting process would be involved?
Or maybe my dad was right: Church was where you found it. Where you made it. It was his insistence that standing under the sky in the mountains of Colorado, looking up, you could see God. Or someone like him. You didn't have to get up early, or cram the family into the station wagon, or sit in those forsaken pews. You just had to be with that thing, whatever you chose to call it. Whenever you chose to call on it.
The somewhat unfortunate irony was that my father found himself, sometime after he left my mother, heading back to a place he could call a church. It didn't have its own building. Its congregation met in a beer bar located behind a shopping center. No pews there. Just the harsh light of the morning after. The whole thing makes me feel uncomfortable.
All over again.