Wednesday, May 5^th 2021
A Weekday Emailer from
Matt Matthews
 
To Members and Friends of 
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois

Dear Friends,
 
Allergic Reaction
A story about Church 
by Matt Matthews
 
            As Thomas cinched his tie, he leaned into the medicine cabinet mirror and examined the zit on his nose. It was large enough to have its own moon. He had cut grass for two hours in full sun and had come indoors to get ready, sneezing non-stop. Earlier, at noon, he had taken the tiny pill, his first dose, from his brand-new allergy prescription, and now, showered and shaved, his eyes still watered, ropes of snot twisted down the back of his burning throat, and that terrible pimple blinked like a traffic light. He reached into the cabinet for the eyedrops and one more of those fast-acting, not to exceed one-a-day allergy pills. On any other evening, he would have surrendered and pulled on his pajamas for BBC World News. But this was Holy Thursday. He had practiced his sermon on the riding mower. Now the time was nigh for the actual preaching of it. No calling in sick. The service started in an hour, and he wanted it to go well. Rev. Thomas Maxwell usually looked fit and trim in a black suit and purple tie. Tonight, not so much. His swollen head had taken the shape of a pale gourd, allergens commanding a beachhead on his puffy face, ears aflame with sunburn.
            
            “Come on,” he called out to wife. “We’ll be late.”
 
            “No,” she said from the nearby kitchen. “We’ve got time to get a burger on the way. You look good,” she said as he grabbed his keys from the hook near the microwave.
 
            “I look horrible,” Thomas said. “Horripilated. Bad. And look at my nose. And my poor eyes. My head is swelling. My face is shrinking. My brain is being crushed. I might not survive.”
            
            “Yes, you will,” she said. “And I was talking about the suit.”
 
            There were only a few cars in the church lot when they arrived with their greasy sack of food. She dabbed a broiled chicken tender into honey-mustard. He wolfed down a double swiss burger with bacon and extra onions, fries, and a giant Dr. Pepper. The sun cast the last rays of burnt orange into branches loaded with spring buds. This night deserved scallops, risotto, sorbet, and leisure. The westerly brick wall of the old church glowed. He shoveled in his last bite.
 
            They liked their new hometown, but they missed their four daughters, all grown. Their youngest would graduate from library school five states away in Virginia. Funding for libraries, though, like churches, was waning. And this daughter, Thomas had openly joked, was their last hope that one of his offspring would fund his early and comfortable retirement.
 
            Never mind. All the girls had landed on their feet, teaching and guiding non-profits and, otherwise, paying off college loans and making rent. Lambourghini would be in no one’s future, and his retirement, early or late, would be adequate but not lavish.
 
            “What are you thinking,” she asked.
 
            He looked blankly at her, a wad of fries composting in his mouth.
 
            “Me too,” she said. “I miss them, too.”
 
            She could practically read his mind. He dabbed at his mouth and weepy eyes with a napkin. “Damn allergies,” he muttered. Holy Week was a big deal. He wanted the service to go right. “Of all nights.”
 
            “You’ll need this,” she said, handing him a single peppermint. The gift seemed anemic, but as with all things, she gave him all she had. He didn’t deserve this devoted partnership, but who ever deserved one good thing? “And this.” She gave him a name scrawled on a scrap of paper. For such a prim, ordered woman, she wrote like a Viking. “Don’t lose it,” she cautioned. “Mrs. Pool called and asked that you include her grown son in your prayer tonight. Erectile dysfunction.”
            
            “Is that his name?” he asked, “or his condition?”
 
            “Neither,” she laughed. “Gallbladder problems,” she said, “which’ll wreck one’s libido, all the same.” She patted his hand. “Got your sermon?”
 
            He reached into his jacket like Napoleon. “If somebody shot me in the chest, all this folded paper would stop the bullet.”
 
            The entire front of the sanctuary was covered in potted Easter lilies in full bloom. He had never seen so many in one place. The pulpit bobbed above the flowers like furniture from a shipwreck floating in a green sea foamy with white caps. He had forgotten to warn the church flower guild that he was allergic to that very flower, but he figured now that his allergies tonight couldn’t possibly get worse, and his medicine would kick in eventually. Besides, this service was a briefer-than-usual service. They’d be out with some twilight to spare, in 45-minutes, tops. 
 
            When the steeple bell rang the hour, he wove through the flowers like Peter walking on water and stood at the pulpit taking the expectant congregation in. They were flowers, too, of another sort, and to these souls he was not allergic but glad, glad to see their upturned faces catching the muted light from century-old stained glass. He knew nothing in the world as beautiful as a congregation at worship. 
 
            The body often rises to the occasion, doing what you need it to do when you need it done. He didn’t feel strong or good, but capable. He greeted his flock with a few sentences of scripture. About a quarter of the membership came out. Most had a member of the family in the large choir, which sang “Let Us Break Bread Together” with great feeling, even as each verse lagged slower and slower than the first. This happened from time to time when the organist had an unexpected drop in blood sugar, which is why the music director kept a candy dish of wintergreen mints in the choir loft, ostensibly to stem choral halitosis, but really to keep his classically trained organist alive. What better time, Thomas thought appreciatively, to fall out of tempo than during Holy Week.
 
            Thomas stood up to preach as one comfortable and in command. It didn’t come naturally, but with preparation: three-quarters of a day in his study writing, an hour drawing circles in the lawn with the John Deere, and pacing around the house, manuscript in hand, talking to the empty recliners. He noticed the raspy gurgle in his voice, proof his allergy medicine was a dud. He rested his voice by pausing in the right places, asking his listeners to imagine that night in that upper room where Jesus washed the feet of his astonished disciples.
 
            The propeller of his voice sputtered, then locked. He had four paragraphs to go, plus the whole second half of the service. It was those lilies, the final straw, his Waterloo. He should have warned the guild. There was no way he could get through the service with just one lily, much less 121 of them—one for each year the church had served this sleepy, college town. He didn’t stand a chance. 
            
            “Preach often,” Saint Francis of Assisi was alleged to have said. “If necessary, use words.” Thomas knew God didn’t need his voice or his earnest words from that double-spaced sermon manuscript. God didn’t need Thomas. But the flock waited for his next word.
 
            Thomas salvaged his sermon—which was by now filled with so much silence as to constitute an intermission—by croaking out his summary of the whole faith: “As He loved us, let us love others.” His voice was now completely gone. After another pause, and like Lincoln at Gettysburg, he sat tiredly down. What he needed to do was walk out for fresh air, but he sat down instead, and the choir rose up like a forest for their next anthem featuring a swoony solo by an elderly soprano. The rest of the singers oohed and aahed along like the sound of pipes groaning in an old house. The sounds fit together though not, necessarily, in a strict musical sense.
 
            Lilies were everywhere. He had never seen such an assemblage of them, perhaps worth a half-year of car payments. Their drained faces dusted in yellow pollen looked at Thomas with the indifferent gaze of perfumed corpses. From the ashes we have come, of course, and to the ashes we shall return.
 
            As the choir sang, both the music and the odor of lilies enveloped him like the cloud of transfiguration. He went clammy. The burger knotted in his stomach, turned over all elbows and knees, and yawned. He should not have drunk that whole 64-ounce soda, which now seemed intent on not staying down. He relieved the pressure in his gut with a discreet belch. The fragrance of onion, sugar, flowers, and the slightest hint of peppermint bubbled up invisibly, he hoped, towards the high ceiling. The smell of flowers filled his head like warm soup. 
 
            Beyond the pulpit, the flock sat contentedly. The choir in the loft behind him finished their lovely amen and rattled down into their chairs with a creaky plop and the rustle of purple, Lenten robes.
 
            Thomas didn’t stand right away, though it was his turn. In normal services of worship this pause created dramatic tension. Tonight, it bought him time. But time for what? His plan required a voice. Without one of those, he had no Plan B. He could think of no next step. He knew that no amount of preparation covers every scenario. But this?
 
            Your body sometimes lets you down. His sneezing, hours ago, was the warning he could not heed. Now the skin on top of his sunburned ears and neck and shoulders began to curl and fleck off. Everything itched. His swollen face burned with the sickly coating of lily dust. A sharp pain stabbed his left breast, unguarded by his folded sermon manuscript. It could have been a sniper’s lone bullet, a panic attack, a heart attack, a double-bacon cheeseburger. He allowed the pain to dart through him and pass. It mercifully did not rebound.
 
            When he stood and approached the Communion table to administer the Sacrament, ash filled his throat. Now what?
 
            In what many in that congregation would later say was the most meaningful enactment of the Lord’s Last Supper since the real thing, Thomas simply took the bread and lifted it up before them like Mufasa lifted Simba. He lowered the loaf, broke it, then lifted the chalice in his left hand and tipped in a stream of juice from the pitcher lifted, higher, in his right; it was a bartender’s trick for Presbyterian preachers. Not a drop splashed out of that silver cup onto the new carpet. He set the elements down, beheld the table like some manger, and pointed to the elders who, after a pause, gathered around and took the trays of cubed bread and tiny cups of juice to the awaiting congregation, mesmerized in their pews.
 
            What did they make of their mute pastor, he wondered from his chair, as Jesus mingled through the congregation row by row? Did they think, This new pastor has new-fangled ideas. Did they think that he didn’t say a word at the table because they already knew the words by heart? Did they worry he was a lunatic and they had made a mistake inviting him to follow in the footsteps of previous esteemed pastors? On a good day, he didn’t measure up, but he had learned to fake it until you make it. There was no faking this. Everything had been stripped away. A preacher without words was—well, he didn’t know. He had never been forced to find out.
 
            But now—now he was finding out.
 
            The allergy medicine seemed to have kicked in, or his adrenalin had drained away, or both, because, when he stood, his body felt suddenly heavy. His extremities had started to go numb. The itching became a tingling, which ignited flame that covered his flesh like oil.
 
            As the elders returned to the Communion table with the trays, he served them in silence. After a settled moment of repose, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. They paused before returning to their families in their seats, standing like curious children gathered around a flattened frog on a neighborhood street, their first real blush with death. They seemed to be waiting for something, a bus, a paycheck. A blessing? They lingered, breathing in, for them, what may have been the pleasant perfume of the flower that represents the One with whom they so sincerely sought such holy communion. Not knowing what the moment required, Thomas embraced each of them, but since his arms didn’t work, the hug was awkward or subtle, depending on one’s perspective. He simply leaned his head lightly into the shoulder of each, arms hanging like Judas, the great betrayer. One by one they rejoined their families.
 
            Thomas now stood alone. His face felt like it had been stung by a thousand mosquitos. Skin chaffed beneath his clothing, puckered in hive upon hive. Lifeless limbs were slathered in Novacane. He could do nothing but stand there—stand there and ponder what ought to happen next but couldn’t.
 
            He couldn’t offer a spoken prayer for Mrs. Pool’s grown son, for the healing of erectile dysfunction, gallbladder stones, broken hearts, human tangles and estrangements. Nor could he utter a word about the awe and gratitude he always felt when people bowed for prayer. The ache of all the world’s woe, the searing headlines, our allergic reaction to the gospel, the sad absence of those we love, the anticipation of what lies ahead and who, our heart’s restlessness calmed only by the One was says, peace, peace, would all go unmentioned. Thomas had offered no spoken Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, could pronounce no benediction.
 
            By now, many in the congregation were attending to their own watering eyes and sniffles. The choir sat like an army awaiting the bugle to sound the charge. Children had stopped their fidgeting and stood up to get a better look at what was happening in the roar of all this silence. Thomas felt their stares. The tingling itch of lily-toxins seeped into the microscopic apertures of his flesh. 
 
            One word. Just one word. If he could muster one word, what should it be? A Rolodex of possible religious words flashed upon the windscreen of his mind. Grace, peace, potluck.
 
            Even the best words fall short. Every preacher confronts the limits of language each week, aspiring to capture the essence of God in a well-crafted three-point sermon and a stolen poem. Nothing shall be added, Kohelet wrote two-and-a-half millennia ago. Or taken away. Trying otherwise is wasted effort, hot air, vanity. And yet.
 
            Thomas stepped to the center aisle and looked to the choir, then into the faces of his congregation. They had called him earlier this year from a congregation in the South. They had welcomed him with immediate friendship, helping them unpack, pounding them with gifts, flowers, heart-felt notes. He looked at each face. He found his wife’s at the back of the sanctuary. She would meet him at the door and together they would make their escape. She beamed support and love and something steely and strong, a sheer will, some determined transcendence. He saw this look in her eyes when she bore each of their children, when they miscarried the twins, the night his father died, when she led the way, a child in each hand, into the gates of Disney World that summer when all of them were young. She exuded an all-knowing. 
 
            She knew her husband’s allergies had gone haywire, or that he was having a small stroke, something. She knew. A space alien had crash-landed in his brain. Food poisoning, which, really, describes all fast food. The sobering realization that he dared declare anything at all about the Almighty God—her very own Zechariah coming out of the holy of holies unable to say a word because of what he saw, because of what he dismissed with a laugh, with unbelief. He knew she knew.
 
            He left her gaze for theirs. He looked at their faces. It was a shame to make it almost to the end of the service and not be able to cross the finish line. They never once talked about this possibility in his training decades ago at the seminary. 
 
            For his mute benediction, he was able to raise one arm. This motion riveted everyone’s attention. He hoisted his arm like the stoic Statue of Liberty except he had nothing in his hand, only fingers he could not feel. With love in his allergic eyes, he lifted his arm like Moses, with a great reach, for he was, indeed, reaching, reaching with his remaining might for something, for some gift just barely out of reach, his final act of faith, reaching.
 
            He tried to speak. He mouthed a word.
 
            People doubled forward to hear, listening.
 
            And, from somewhere, somehow, he managed not one word, but four.
 
            “Love,” he whispered. “Love, love, love.”
 
            When he closed his hand and lowered his arm, the organist intoned the choral benediction, and Thomas began the trek down the center aisle towards the doors. He didn’t think he’d make it this far. He still had a bit to go. A dozen or so steps. Nothing in life is certain. One can’t prepare for every vicissitude. He wasn’t finished yet.
 
            In the distance from the pulpit to the doors, perhaps in the space of twenty paces, a preacher is swept up with relief that the service is less than a musical measure away from being over. Sometimes her ego confuses relief with success. She feels tall and satisfied and necessary, in league with Old Testament prophets and sainted martyrs. The service unfolded more or less by the book thanks to her masterful planning and professional execution, or, even better, things took a turn, usually accidentally, for the sublime or glorious. And sometimes the preacher is sure her beloved congregation was confused, even injured, by her ruinous preaching and now all of Christendom totters on some brink. This, too, is a malfunction of the ego. 
 
            It is impossible for the minister to sort this out right away—or ever—certainly not in the span of steps from the front of the church to the back. It is best just to walk to the doors, one foot after the other, as the postlude erupts behind you and the crowd stirs to its feet, and the choir streams single-file towards the side door, and old friends consort about gardens and grand kids and how the Cubbies did at Saturday’s double-header. Old men brush away tears. Some saints sit back down in another world, heads cocked at strange angles, or bowed, listening to the music. Ancient couples squeeze each other’s hand, helping the other up, then out of the pew, straightening spines curved by the weight of life, testing unreliable joints. Nowadays, attending to church and traipsing off to doctor appointments comprise their only outings. And the children are told not to walk on the pews, but they dart around, anyway, like they own the place, like it’s theirs, as if church were home, a field of play, a place to be glad and rambunctious and happy. Thank God for the little children. Suffer little children, Jesus said, and forbid them not to come unto me: sliding around in sock-feet bringeth spasms and spasms of joy. For of such is the kingdom of heaven.
 
            Thank God for the children. Thank God for everybody. Gracias, Senor. Te deum laudamus. That’s what a good preacher carries with her. Gratitude. Always gratitude.
 
            As the congregation joined the choral amen in sigh-like reverie, Rev. Thomas Maxwell strode down the center aisle like a man fortified with purpose, looking sharp in a black suit with a purple necktie, their new pastor, an emotional man of few words, who, as it turned out, had a flair for the dramatic. 
 
            In fact, he was a man infested by stinging ants and peeling skin, resisting the compulsion to hop and skip and swat and claw at his itching body, steadied and willed by his wife’s tractor-beam blue eyes, making a beeline from that sanctuary to his bath tub at home, to soak up to his chin in oatmeal and cool water, with bags of frozen peas nested upon his allergic eyes that smoldered like stars.
 
 
 —Finis—
 
Much love to you all.
 
PEACE,
 
Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church
 
* * *

Remember to contact the church office (217.356.7238) by noon on Fridays if you want to attend church on Sunday.

* * *

NO Sunday in the Park this Sunday, May 9th.   It is Mother’s Day!