Joyce Hinnefeld
The Mysteries True
According to the lore of my family, as a very young infant I screamed the moment my parents entered the church my family attended, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in the tiny farm town of Brownstown, Indiana. Me in my mother’s arms.
Years later a therapist I saw told me that obviously my mother didn’t want to be there. And her grip on me conveyed that.
She stayed home with me, for a time. My eminently embarrass-able father was no doubt mortified by my squalling. Perhaps this gave my mother a reprieve. Perhaps she nudged my three older brothers to dress in their shirts and ties, their polished dress shoes, for my father to take them to the church, four blocks from our house. And then perhaps she and I had time together, alone, in the quiet.
Eventually I went to church without complaint. But I remember feeling, often, that I needed to leave the sanctuary during the service, needed my mother to take me downstairs to the bathroom. Always such fear of an accident; I don’t know why. Or maybe that wasn’t really it. Whatever the reason, we’d have time together again, my mother and I, in the quiet of the women’s restroom. Or rather the girls’ restroom, though the prim letters stenciled on the polished wooden door actually spelling the singular “Girl’s.”
A room for a single, solitary girl. Or a room that, like the entire church, sent many coded and not-so-coded messages about what a “girl is.” (Women could not serve as elders for that congregation when I was young; to my knowledge, that’s still the case.)
Inside the stalls had low doors, the toilets were small and low to the ground. This from the days when the church basement housed the “Lutheran Central School,” grades one through eight, before the new school building was built the year before I began first grade. Sunlight poured through a high window. There was a wooden chest with a green vinyl seat, where my mother sat to wait for me. I’d sit inside the low stall, kick my legs, waiting, no longer needing to go.
In church there were paper fans with advertisements for a local funeral home to cool ourselves on hot days. Everyone dressed up, even in the heat. We sang hymns and the Lutheran liturgy. Sunday School was downstairs, first in the children’s room, then in the bigger social hall.
I liked singing the hymns. I took note of what people wore when they went up to the front of the church for communion, even though I knew we weren’t supposed to do that; we weren’t supposed to care how people dressed (but we did). I was fascinated by a woman, single and still living with her parents, probably in her thirties when I was a child. Always very neatly attired, every hair in place, a buttoned-up pale blue coat. Later, probably in college, I would think about how she represented everything I was afraid I might become. Everything I seemed on track to become, as a girl.
You couldn’t make one wrong move. Have one hair out of place. Whisper during the sermon, fail to join in the hymns. Wear pants or sneakers. Laugh, except when you were expected to.
*
Kindergarten was at the old public school, a short block from our house. I was often alone, my brothers off to school, my father teaching, my mother busy with endless household tasks. I played alone, inventing worlds within our backyard. And I remember walking to kindergarten alone. A day when the sun hit the branches overhead in a particular way, forming a ladder-like shadow on the street, the sidewalk. I stopped to watch it tremble when the wind blew. I remember a strange sensation of being both inside and outside myself somehow at that moment as I watched the shadow, then looked at the familiar scene around me—old brick school building to my left, houses with steep steps up from the sidewalk to my right. I remember an unfamiliar silence, a strange sort of falling away of the self.
Somehow, though I couldn’t have named this then, I believe I recognized God in that morning shimmering, that sense of having vanished, having become one with the clear, clean air.
There were other fleeting moments like this in the years that followed. Deep in the woods of the state forest on my bicycle, the dappled light through tall trees overhead, the view of green rolling hills from the peak of Skyline Drive and then the reckless thrill of the brakes-free ride down Sligo Hill, back into town. Or riding to the tennis courts in the cool, dewy early morning, to meet my friends and play before the heat of summer descended on the town.
*
The pastor who arrived when I was in third grade shook things up at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church when he arrived. He was originally from Philadelphia, from “the East.” He had new ideas, though not remotely progressive ones. He canceled the church’s annual fall festival, an event everyone loved, because people sold craft items there with the proceeds going to the church, and he considered this improper.
The fall festival was held in the church basement social hall. I remember the hot chicken sandwiches, the pies, the jello salads. The clean white kitchen. All the church women, my mother included, in their pressed aprons tied neatly at their waists. The smell of coffee brewing in the big urns. The dartball target on the wall, the shuffleboard court on the floor.
And I remember the blond wood of the pews in the sanctuary, the altar and candles, the massive organ, the choir loft to the right of the right-side pulpit, where scripture was read; the sermon was preached from the bigger pulpit on the left: stage-right. It was definitely a kind of stage, once the new pastor came. He sometimes sang in German, songs like “O Tannenbaum” at Christmas time. Eventually he won people over. Some of us become acolytes of a sort. His daughter was my good friend, and I spent a lot of time with the whole large family. They took me along on vacation when I was twelve, to Philadelphia and then Ocean City, NJ. It was the first time I saw the ocean.
As a young teen I felt coerced into joining the Young Ambassadors for Christ, a Lutheran youth organization that this pastor had connected us with. We spent weekends at other churches, sleeping at congregants’ houses, and during the days went around proselytizing, knocking on people’s doors to ask if they were saved. I hated being a part of the Ongoing Ambassadors for Christ. Those weekend events made me miserable.
“Just imagine Jesus is holding one hand and I’m holding the other,” my mother told me before one OAFC outing that I was particularly dreading, probably when I was around 14. Shortly after that I stopped going, and the pastor’s daughter and I drifted apart.
For confirmation class we had to turn in notes from this pastor’s sermons. Once you got the hang of it, it wasn’t hard. He always gave the general outline at the beginning—the overall topic or theme, and then three or four sub-points he’d be addressing. There was a Bible passage to go along with it. You could get all that down in your little sermon notebook and then basically zone out. Though I tried not to. I tried hard to pay attention. If I didn’t, I felt I would be sinning. Sin was still quite real to me then; it would feel real, and frightening, for quite some time.
*
I came to fear my father. His temper, his occasional rages and irritable retreats into silence. I felt myself grow mildly, then more powerfully resentful, of my mother’s need for me to please and appease both her and my father. Yet I followed through on my confirmation at age thirteen, whatever questions might have started burning through in my mind.
The pastor had his moments of barely suppressed anger also. I saw these at times when I was at my friend’s house, there behind the veneer of his smiles and jocularity. Eventually I’d come to feel that possibly all men were this way—difficult, demanding, tamping down a barely controlled, simmering rage. At least all men with authority.
My assigned confirmation verse was John 15:5: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.” Before long, by high school and then, definitively, in college, I’d begun to feel that those vines were choking me.
“Without me ye can do nothing.” I felt like I’d been cursed, not blessed, by this passage from the Bible. But many years later I would come across these lines from a poem by H.D., called “The Mysteries Remain”:
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.
Eventually I’d find a different way of understanding those vines and branches. The falling away of the self. A unity of earth and air, flesh and spirit.
“I keep the law, / I hold the mysteries true.” By the time I came upon that poem I could feel the vines loosening (they’d been loosening for a while by then), the air clearing, a very different but also kindred spirit speaking to me. I was set on a different path finally, one where I could breathe, one that meant rediscovered spirit, God, encircling love, the power but also the ultimate limitations of words.
I’d found it in the absence of an angry patriarch at Quaker worship.
In the dissolution of the self in sunlight, in shadows, in silence.
In the vine, the branches, you, and you.