Time Travel with Tears

I went to church today. It wasn't my usual church here in Stockton Springs, but my first "real" church down in Bath. I went to get a table, and a cross, and a hymnal, and I left with a heart full of sorrow and of joy.

When I was a child, we walked to a huge gray gothic church, where the wisest, kindest, smartest, everythingest minister I have ever known, Rev. Ellis Eaton, guided our congregation through life and faith.

In the late 1960s, we realized we could no longer sustain the old, drafty, creaky, stunningly beautiful building, and began making a plan for a new space. We loved the old church, with its balconies and organ and choir loft and stained glass windows and fellowship hall, but God had another plan for it, and for us. We purchased some land in the woods on Congress Ave., and began saving to build. As soon as we could secure a mortgage, we broke ground.

During construction, I was in high school, and deeply involved in youth fellowship, choir, Bible study, committees, you name it. Our church was our family. My current pastor said recently that when he was young, if the doors of the church were open, he was there. That's the way it was in Bath, and not because it was our duty to be there, but because it was our joy and desire to be.

The ultra-modern new building featured a 30-foot glass wall at the rear of the sanctuary, anchored by a cross cut from a tree from one of our member's woods. Inside, the spare, Danish pews felt shockingly comfortable for their lack of cushions. Wide wood beams held up the soaring ceiling, directing our prayers to God.

While a professional crew did some of the major construction initially, our new home was mostly built by its inhabitants. After school or work, weekends, vacations, we all pitched in at whatever task we could.

Rev. Eaton and the others at that church, taught me, showed me, the meaning of true faith. During those years, I came to a personal relationship with my Savior that has been, and will always be the center of my life. I learned to love God, and that He loved me, passionately and without reservation.

That relationship and the church, were about joy and fellowship and love and prayer. It was about Advent Events with ginger snaps and hot cider and tromping around in the woods to gather each year's greenery for the building, then gathering for dinner in fellowship hall, exhausted and thankful and happy. It was about caroling through the streets of Bath every Christmas. It was about sunrise Easter services and confirmation classes and adult baptisms in the Atlantic ocean and prayer meetings and prayer life.  It was about tremendous support in times of tremendous sorrow, and exultant celebration in times of joy. Most of all, it was about serving God, learning His will for us, listening to that still small voice.

My youth fellowship friends and I grew up and moved away, to college, jobs, marriages, nearly all in places away from Bath. Some of us came back, and found the church much as we had left it -- vibrant, spirit-centered, growing.

Yet as the years went by, things began to change. After several years back in Maine, I moved away again. Family and friends told me attendance was down, the mission changed. My mother relayed her experience of receiving a form letter telling her she was being dropped from the enrollment lists for lack of attendance, without even a phone call to see if she was ok. (She wasn't, in fact; she was in a deep depression following the sudden death of my father.) A FORM LETTER??????? Without even her name typed in at the top?

In recent years, Mom has been attending a book club at the church, made up mostly of women from the old Women's Fellowship there. The congregation, she said, had shrunk to 40 or so members, and they were having a hard time keeping the heat on.

In August, I read the building would be sold. The remaining congregation, now focussed on social justice issues, would move to a boarded up storefront downtown.

Last week, Mom called to tell me that the church was selling the remaining furnishings, and told me who to call if I were interested. I was, and immediately called Jane, whom I had not seen in 30 years or more. She told me what was available, including a table and a cross.

Today David and I went to Bath. The front door of the church was locked, so I went in through Fellowship Hall. Immediately, waves of memory washed over me, along with an entire ocean of tears.  There was the spot where I gave Rev. Eaton a huge hug at his retirement celebration. And the place where we sewed Gloria into her dress (broken zipper) at my sister's wedding. The building was shabby from deferred maintenance and neglect.

In the sanctuary, I found my table, in which we had kept the attendance count forms (usually over 400) and on which we put the bulletins for the ushers on Sunday. On it rested the large brass cross from Fellowship Lounge, where prayer meetings and youth fellowship and bridal preparation had taken place. Jane also left four of the blocks we had made from leftover wood from that huge, blessed cross. The once-beautiful table was rickety and covered in cobwebs, and the cross pitted and unpolished.

Over lunch, Mom and I shared a good cry over the fate of the place we had loved so much. At one point I asked her, "What do you think Rev. Eaton would say?" And suddenly I knew. He would say that the church was not the building. The church was the family within it, and that the Christian works and Christian love of our church family had gone out into the world and multiplied by a factor we would never know. He would say it was ok. It was a building.

He would be right.

Several hours into polishing that dear cross, I realized that the building was like a wedding dress, all beautiful and special when it was new, now faded and worn with age. But the church itself represents the marriage -- created with vows before God, and sanctified forever. We'll remember the dress and the building, but we live the church, the marriage, every day.

My artifacts, especially the cross, feel as dear to me as my wedding ring.