losing my religion: part II
religion of place: my city, my idol, my religion
Sometimes, a place becomes your religion.
The religion of place is risky business and can play you like a fiddle if you do not keep vigil over your heart strings. Places, like gods, change with time, and at the hands of people who project deity. They gentrify, become weathered by earthquakes, tsunamis, and great fires, they are pillaged by conquerors or transplants looking for their next fix, they are keepers of secrets, harbingers of self-fulfilled prophesies, they are cribs of life, birthrights, they are home.
The poet, Carl Sandburg, knows a thing or two about the religion of place and he preaches the defense of a great place that I once called home — Chicago. He understands that when you claim Chicago as home turf, you must defend its grit with glamour, and vice versa, lighting candle wicks and setting necklaces of marigolds and trays of treacly cakes aside its shoreline, idolizing its perfect watery eastside, while embellishing territory west of Western Avenue with tales of wild scrapes. Yes, Sandburg the Poet gets my indulgence in the sacred sin of idolatry for the sake of distinguishing city from suburb, splicing holy ground to ordinary place. As a part of his 1916 collection of poetry titled “Chicago Poems,” he penned the epic poem, “Chicago,” daring readers to find another city like it. He taunts:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities.
I’m not sure other Chicago natives specify they are from the inner-city, but I do. As a one-time believer in the religion of place, it is important for me to differentiate between the bold slugger and that large metropolitan expanse of suburbs that unfolds like a bolt of shiny, synthetic fabric from the city’s dense core.
People in Chicago’s distant suburbs like in the town of Kankakee, the place where I was born, often say they’re from the city when talking to people who only know the Midwest as flyover country, a large ribbon of land you cross to get to the coast. Neither Chicago nor Kankakee is perfect, both have their share of racial divisiveness, rich and poor polarities and love-hate relationships between place and people. Having lived in and frequented both places, I know that Kankakee is not Chicago. Chicago is not Kankakee. Kankakee represents the base and southern end of a dotted stretch of urban sprawl that reaches a slender finger north toward the Windy City, almost touching the city limits but not quite, much like the lingering finger of the first man in Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam, suspended mid-air waiting to receive the spark of life from God.
In 1999, Kankakee was named America’s worst place to live by Places Rated Almanac. Months after the rating, David Letterman gifted the city with two white gazebos in a satirical attempt to culture the place. “America’s worst place to live can market itself as home of the world-famous twin gazeboes, now,” Letterman said on national TV. Sixteen years later, a jaunty, though agitated group of high school students who were ready for the joke to die, hacked the gazebo into wood pieces, made a rocking chair, and shipped the upcycled furniture to the Late Show as a retirement gift for Letterman.
I like to imagine myself decades younger, rallying with the Kankakee teenagers in the early 2000s, salvaging what little pride was left by then in our manufacturing- and retail-drained town, a loyal protector of any place I call home. But who knows what side of Kankakee’s history I would have found myself. I was four years old the day my family left that place.
In another memory of religion, my family is leaving our house on Kankakee’s South Poplar Avenue to move to Chicago. God told Dad he should plant a church in the city. It is Halloween and I leave the worst town in America dressed as a princess in a yellow, chiffon dress from the thrift store. The garment’s hem line is trimmed, straggles of thread hang loose, red rouge is rubbed into the apples of my cheeks, and a plastic tiara with beveled glass gems sits atop my head. On this All Hallows’ Eve I imagine church planting with a mysticism inspired by the wraithlike holiday — Dad sows a seed in the earth, and brick and mortar emerge from dirt to form a giant sanctuary that stretches toward Heaven, cradling Chicago’s black monolithic skyscrapers in its shadows. I recite a poem Mom taught me like a chant, using hand motions to puppet what I thought church planting would look like. “First comes the church, then comes the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.”
Prior to our move, Dad was the senior high youth pastor at a prestigious church in Kankakee. It was prestigious because it was new, smelled like cedar, and had colorful stained-glass windows in the sanctuary. It was called the Kankakee First Church of the Nazarene and it boasted a large congregation. Eventually, Dad would be asked to leave this First Church for reasons Mom summarized as “pushing the envelope.”
“I didn’t believe in sugar coating the failings of the church,” my Dad explains to me during a recent visit to my east coast home in Baltimore. Typically, I am separated from him and my mother by 681 miles — me in Maryland’s Charm City, them in the Midwest. These days, when we find ourselves in the same room with each other, I can’t help but shovel my way into the past — their past, my past, our family’s past — in hopes of unearthing some decayed memory that can be resurrected to breathe new meaning into the present. For so long, it was religion that connected us. But that has unraveled like the hairs of a frayed rope. One by one, each of us experienced a loosening in our knotted beliefs about the church and God in order to find a version of the truth that didn’t feel like a noose around our necks. It’s a funny thing about religion. Even when it is wound so tight around you that breathing becomes a chore and rope-burn a constant, when you cut yourself some slack and massage the braids apart, the early feelings of freedom and air are nothing short of terrifying. Here you are now, suddenly suspended in the universe with nothing but your breath to tell you this — this world — is more real than you could ever imagine. A noose, yes; but that religion was also an intricately woven safety net for your conscious to fall on when life was unorderly and impossibly painful. Now, you’re moving in new ways that you couldn’t before and the atrophied mental and spiritual muscles that had been deprived of oxygen all that time begin to ache as they come back online. Yes, with my own religion dismantled and my family’s reconstructed with materials and beliefs that differ slightly from one kin to the next, we learned to lean on Chicago’s broad shoulders. This place would unify us, even if our eternal beliefs could not.
Until we all moved away. And now what? And now we have our memories and plans for future meet-ups, and the present, where we labor to hold space without our fussily curated lives boxing out one another. We have each other. We always have each other.
On this particular visit with my parents, I am excavating stories of their home life, and their religious past. I am looking for something, but I won’t know what it is until I find it. Or lose it.
“I wanted the young people to know that humans may have failed them, but God would not. It was taboo to talk about the underbelly of the church, and the senior pastor didn’t like that too much, I guess,” Dad says. He chuckles. His blue eyes begin to water, and his shoulders bounce up and down, as they do, when he’s having a good laugh.
It is funny now, in the way that serious injuries are often doted on with humor once the injured proves capable of standing on their two feet. We can laugh at home videos of kids plunking their siblings on the head with plastic bats, because we know — or assume — that if we’re watching it on the boob tube then the kiddo that sustained a solid whack on her bonce, grew up without brain damage.
Dad did not escape the church unscathed, but we still laugh, in spite of the damage sustained.
Dad’s envelope pushing at the Kankakee First Church of the Nazarene had been more than the senior pastor could tolerate. Rather than exact a confrontation, Pastor Belittle told my dad that his talents would be best served in a different place, in the “inner-city” Chicago. The ‘ol barney of right religion, wrong place. They commissioned him, like a fledgling artist, green and inexperienced, to earn his big break — start a new First Church in the gentrifying neighborhood of Lincoln Park on the city’s north side.
There was a sendoff. People of the First Church laid hands on us during a special Sunday service and prayed for the Lord to protect us and guide us through the inner city’s concrete jungle. Everything about Chicago was foreign to them, and to my parents. These days, I understand this, but for a long time I assumed my Mom and Dad knew how to live in a place that was as wily as an unrestrained hound hunting fox. They had no fucking clue.
Dad obliged to God’s call like King David — a man after God’s own heart. In 1987, like Jesus turning water into wine, or Beyoncé turning lemons into lemonade, he turned the obligation to move to a new place into a celestial calling. This place, Carl Sandburg’s Chicago, “the hog butcher for the world” with “big shoulders,” this place with “marks of wanton hunger,” this would be the place that would breath meaning into our lives with its “terrible burden of destiny” tittering between wheezy pants.
Because the monetary compensation offered by the church to support our family’s divine and requisite move to Chicago was underestimated, Mom immediately found a temporary job in the city. She was an elementary school teacher in Kankakee and would need time to adjust her certifications for the Chicago Public School System. She worked as a receptionist at a French furniture store named Roche Bobois, which she enjoyed pronouncing “roch-ie boobies.”
In the early years of our move, my Dad presented a request to the Kankakee First Church of the Nazarene’s board members for additional compensation. The cost of gas, milk, bread, transportation and general living was more expensive in the inner-city than in Kankakee, even with the pastor’s wife, my mom, working a full-time job; in addition, of course, to leading Sunday School and singing during church services. It was getting tough to make ends meet.
“The senior pastor followed me outside, after the board meeting, and told me, ‘Don’t ever ask for more than what you’ve been given,’” Dad said.
But he did. Dad went back time and time again to the church demanding they do more — not for him, or his family, but for the city, this place that the church adorned on their leaflets, and prayer lists, and ministerial resumes, yet neglected to nurture its marginalized masses unless there was the promise of upping the headcount at Sunday services.
It is hard to say which came first — Dad’s resistance to the church, or the church’s resistance to Dad. I do not know a version of my father that is complicit, apathetic, and at ease with the world as-is. I do not know a version of my father that is without a passion for place. I do not know a version of my father that is without a church. The church has been his world.
I am my father’s daughter, though non est ecclesia. Like the bullish Greek goddess Athena, I emerged from my father’s head with his wisdom and ready for war, dressed in breastplate and helmet with a sword twice the size of my torso. I do not know a version of myself that is without fire in the belly, clinched fists, and a bleeding heart worn on my sleeve. I do not know a version of myself that bought into a religion of things or ideas. I do know I bought into a religion of place — Chicago. I followed its ordained honorary mayor, Dad, with fierce loyalty. And like Sandburg the Poet, those that sneer at this my city or deny my father love, “I give them back the sneer.”
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