Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-Ernest Hemingway
Saturday morning we busied ourselves with chores and cooking. Friends were coming over, and we'd gotten it in our heads to cook something we'd never tried, Posole, a Mexican pork and hominy stew. The recipe seemed pretty simple, a lot like the chile colorado I make from time-to-time, but we grossly underestimated the time to pull it together. As our commotion in the kitchen entered its third hour, I slipped off to change the flag flying from one of the front columns.
For a couple months now we've had Peg's religious diversity flag flying out there, the one with all the symbols of the different religions. It was mostly black and orange, so I figured it looked about right for the Halloween season. This past Saturday, still trying to absorb the meaning of the Rittenhouse verdict, I unfurled the lovely, colorful flag Peg bought from the Bitter Southerner a few months ago, the one that proclaims "Abide No Hatred."
"Why the gay pride flag?" Peg asked, emerging from the kitchen in an apron dotted with red Mexican soup spots.
"You think it's a gay pride flag? I guess. I just like the sentiment."
I took a photo, the one above, and posted it on Facebook. Oversharing again.
That evening Tommy, Anne Marie and the girls were over for supper and football. My Trojans stunk it up, but the soup was pretty wonderful and it was great having little kids running around the house.
Right after they left I noticed a piece of paper stuck under one of the pumpkins on the porch. We get these from time-to-time, flyers advertising maids or handymen mostly. When I unfolded it, I quickly figured out its author had another message for us.
For those of you who haven't yet committed King David's songbook to memory, here's what our fundamentalist friend wished to convey to his new neighbors:
But the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he sees that his day is coming.
Peg and I were stunned, angry, and a little afraid. We came here in part to escape from those people, but one of them felt emboldened to come onto our property, while we were home, and leave us a warning. But why? What did we do or say, exactly?
Our first thought was maybe an ex-spouse was behind this: we both have them, and both revile us to the point of distraction. One fairly recently drifted alongside in another failed attempt to get money, for naught. But it's a hell of a long way from their Southern homes to here, the handwriting didn't match, and neither knows squat about the Bible. So probably not an aimed shot from one of them.
This neighborhood is full of flags and signs proclaiming Black Lives Matter, Science is Real, and other "controversial" messages. Our little "love lives here" sign has been out front for months. So what triggered Bible Boy this particular evening?
It's that flag--Peg's right that a passer-by might think it's a rainbow flag, and that means Mike and Peg are suggesting we shouldn't tolerate hating gay people. If there's ever a sentiment that will make a fundamentalist Christian blow a gasket, I reckon that's it. That's why the lefties on either side of us with their signs encouraging racial harmony weren't targeted.
Our evening ruined, we settled into an angry little family meeting to decide what to do about this latest development. We'll report it to the police, but let's be honest: they're mostly Trumpers as well, and probably agree with the sentiment of the anonymous author of our note. Nothing's going to happen. We thought about leaving the country altogether, then realized there's no place to go that isn't awash in revanchist hatred of the society that is coming into being from Moscow to Mexico City to Hanoi. There is no geographic solution out over the horizon.
Sure, we'd buy a gun, except we're not NY residents and therefore can't buy a gun here. Nor would a Florida concealed carry permit be honored here--a lawyer acquaintance of mine found that out the hard way at the baggage carousel at LaGuardia a couple years ago. But we'll eventually find a way to tuck a pistol someplace handy downstairs, in a community where we weren't locking our doors until two nights ago when our innocence, or maybe naivete, was shattered.
The funk carried over to Sunday morning, accompanied by regret that I posted a photo of the threatening note on Facebook. My fundie friends assured that it was all a misunderstanding, because they'd found a sunny translation of the Psalm that felt a little less wrath-ie. Others questioned why I assumed it was someone on the political right who'd done this, as if there are a bunch of religious progressives roaming the neighborhood threatening their neighbors for, what, not being progressive enough?
I determined to exercise my right to brood and to start drinking early when Peg asked if we were still planning on going to church in Binghamton.
Damn. We did promise to do that, didn't we? Or, more accurately, didn't Peg?
A few nights ago at the Corning Country Club we sat with a couple, a little younger than us and relative newlyweds. He was a soft-spoken, heavily tattooed ex-infantryman who'd fought in Somalia; she was a round, jolly daughter of Armenian carpet merchants who'd grown up in Elmira Heights but now attended church on Sundays at St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Apostolic Church in Binghamton, a little over fifty miles to the east. I told her I thought it was really cool that they had an Armenian church right down the road--did she know they were the very first kingdom to adopt Christianity as their state religion? That their liturgy is unique in all the world, with elements of both the western and the eastern orthodox traditions?
"You should come visit. How about this Sunday?"
A little too much beer and cab led to an exchange of cell numbers, and we soon had plans for Sunday.
Okay, so maybe both of us were to blame that morning when we had to decide whether to make the trek or make an excuse to stay home and pout. We pulled ourselves together, Peg gathered up the pumpkin cheesecake she'd made for the occasion, and off we went in the soft milk-bowl light of late fall in New York toward Binghamton.
We were almost there when I started scrolling through internet sites about the Armenian rite and found guidance that women were to wear dresses and cover their heads. Peg was in leggings and boots, tresses exposed for all the world to see.
"Guess we're going to brunch instead," I observed. But when P texted her apologies to our friends about our sartorial gaffe, she was assured the church was casual and there would be women in pants, including our host. We drove on to the service.
The exterior of the church surprised us a little, tucked in a working class neighborhood and looking for all the world like a Presbyterian Church.
This would be, I suppose, because it was originally built as a Presbyterian Church before they all moved down the hill in the 1920s and this corner of Binghamton began to fill with refugees of the Armenian genocide.
Inside the service had already started, and there were maybe ten folks in the pews. The priest wore a crown like the lady on the Imperial Margarine commercials in the old days, and he crowded onto the space in front of the altar with a deacon, two elderly acolytes, and a thurifer.
Folks sort of wandered in and out--our friends didn't arrive until the service had been going on for nearly an hour, and there didn't seem to be a plotline you'd miss by wandering off in search of a bathroom or a cup of coffee.
The liturgy was quite long--they use a prayer book like ours in the Anglican communion, and their Sunday service runs nearly sixty pages. It's mostly sung by the priest, an endurance exercise I can't even imagine.
And it's all in Armenian. We understood nothing, although the prayer book has an English translation on one side.
The themes were of a very old religious tradition--you could hear anathemas proclaimed against Arians and all sorts of long-lost Christological heresies nary recalled outside the walls of some seminaries. The confession of sin goes on for several paragraphs--like the Russians, the Armenian Church requires a full confession followed by absolution before communion (we do that as well, but sometimes it feels sort of phoned in. The Armenian liturgy is pretty specific about our badness).
As communion approached the sanctuary began to fill with mostly women and their kids--the dads were apparently all home watching the Bills prepare to get trounced by the Colts later. We didn't take communion because I wasn't sure if it was allowed, and didn't want to make a scene if we came to the front and were waved off by the now shoeless and crownless guy (he strips these off early in the service, then puts them back on before the sermon) handing out the body and blood.
The whole thing was, well, beautiful. Liminal. Spirit-filled.
And although we obviously weren't Armenians, sitting in the back looking clueless, they welcomed us afterward like long-lost kin. As it turns out, this was their annual pre-Thanksgiving fundraiser dinner, cooked by the men of the church, and as a reward for making it through the service we soon found ourselves digging into plates heaped with stuff grape leaves and rice and lamb meatballs and fried eggplant. Our wine glasses weren't allowed to remain empty. Two ladies who'd come here from over that way, one from Istanbul and one from Armenia itself, donned native pillbox hats, grabbed the microphone at the front of the parish hall, and led the crowd in Armenian folk songs. There was even a little native dancing thrown in for good measure.
The priest drives five hours from Providence, RI every other week to conduct the service. He and I struck up a conversation about the liturgy and what it's like to take care of a flock that's not right next door. He made me promise I'd come back when he was in town, so we could get together and talk more about our shared experiences. I promised, and this time I was sober, more or less.
Finally the party started to ebb, but P and I didn't want the day to end. We drove into downtown Binghamton, which was far cooler than we expected, and sidled up to a bar where the Bills were on the big screen, down by 17 points already, and the wine list was surprisingly okay.
The bartender, it turned out, was an Episcopalian. We heard him telling the guy next to us how the prettiest church in town, prettier even than the Catholic church, was the Episcopal church right next door. It even has secret spaces where they used to harbor fugitive slaves when this place was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
I went outside to snap a photo of the sign behind the old stone, Gothic church.
Oh yeah. The forebears of these folks were really nice people who sheltered the ones my ancestor in South Carolina kept in line with the lash. This Sunday, which had begun under such a pall because of one of God's misguided followers, now glowed with God's love as illuminated by his people at their best.
The Armenians, sojourners who escaped a crime against humanity in a homeland they still long for but most will never see, welcomed these two wanderers and treated us like family when just hours before I promised to no one in particular that I'd never again set foot in a church. And this place has presented open arms to refugees for centuries.
God's not leaving hate notes on our doorstep then slinking away. He's watching with loving eyes as we feast on foreign delicacies and bask in the warmth of Christian hospitality as it should be.
Abide no hatred. Let's stick with that sentiment for now, even if it drives the religious right bonkers.
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