A backwoods girl congregates | Ammi Midstokke

I have long said that my church is the one with mountains as disciples and trees as parishioners. After a childhood of cultish exposure to faith, in which righteousness and scripture were used as tools of justification for the unjustifiable, it has always been nature that I found most miraculous, most promising of power and purpose greater than one’s own misunderstood life.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself in a pew this weekend. It was Saturday afternoon, and the community had gathered to hear something like scripted dialogue about the importance of the separation of church and state. Dialogue and free soup are about the only things that would land me in a House of God – along with art – not because I’m repulsed, but because of the very slim statistical likelihood that I’ll be struck down by lightning.

I suspect it is higher in a church than on a mountaintop, for a number of reasons not fit for newsprint.

A panel of people sitting on the stage, all wearing different outfits that looked more or less like what a hand-puppet might wear, but with that white square at their throat I assume is symbolic for the purity that exits their mouths. Or like me, they get food on anything white, and it’s the only part of their wardrobe considered safe from spaghetti sauce. The Quaker, of course, was wearing a bandana and tie-dye, and I assume got his training following the Grateful Dead through most of the Seventies.

Someone was talking, and I was thinking, “Okay, maybe I could at least be a Quaker …” as I shoved my hand into the brown paper bag I’d picked up at the bakery. I wasn’t sure food was promised at this event, so I sourced myself a giant square of something dripping in apples and caramel that was proving to be difficult to eat discretely. Particularly because my paper bag was so loud.

I was in mid-fistful of pastry, hand stuck in the bag, when someone said we were all lowering our heads in prayer. This, I had not signed up for. My head happened to already be lowered, and my mouth was wide open because I was planning to deposit some amount of cake and four sticky fingers into my face. Someone said something about asking the lord, so I asked, “Lord, let me extract my hand from this bag quietly.”

It had been rather an effort to break off that corner of crumble-fritter-frosting, so I wasn’t about to let go of it. Nor was I about to let my bag scrape off all the good stuff on the top of it. While the praying continued, I hoped everyone would just think I was really committed as I ducked my head as close as possible to my paper bag. The plan was to wait for someone to holler a hallelujah, at which point I expected the church to erupt in unison, and mask the crinkling. I was ready.

But these were Methodists and Presbyterians, so all they let out was a docile “amen,” as I clawed my hand free from the grip of crunching paper. This blasted bakery bag doubled in a Hollywood sound effects studio as a forest being crushed by giant machinery.

By the time everyone’s heads turned to me – and they did – my hand had been salvaged and I was knuckle deep in what turned out to be about half the pastry, which I was now manually arranging with my fingers in the pockets of my cheeks for safe keeping. The good news was that I had enough to eat for a while, though much of it was lost in crumbs on my sweater. I spent the rest of the presentation looking for prizes of streusel in the folds of my pants.

For the rest of the event, I did a lot of nodding, because these were reasonable reverends and pastors and preachers, all of them speaking in the singsong of conviction sprinkled with love. And as the dialogue came to an end, I had a burning question I wanted to ask them. I waited patiently for the moderator to signal with a change in tone, and then I courageously thrust my hand up in the air.

No one else raised a hand. I looked around the room, wondering why anyone would be afraid to ask a question of these nice folks, when I realized the pastor was praying again. There I was, in the middle of a crowded church, a singular eager student with a hand raised, like I had the answer before anyone else.

The pastor looked right at me. I know what he was thinking: “Oh don’t worry child, we are praying for you.”

I’m not sure what church etiquette is in such circumstances. Could I just raise my other hand and wave it real slow back and forth? Then I worried I might start speaking in tongues or let a snake bite me. There was no telling what I would submit to for redemption at that point.

In the end, I let my hand slowly descend, as if the real danger of notice would be sudden movement, and buried it back in my bag. Then I vowed to save my soul later along the trails, where I am only slightly less likely to embarrass myself.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com