After six months Winnie asked to be excused from the confirmation ceremony following the completion of her religious instruction class. Her teacher was “cut to the quick,” he said, because she was, he said, his best student. But she did not think any legitimate sanctification could be granted solely on the basis of affirming belief, because, she said, a person could be filled with the Holy Spirit and still not believe, in the same way that someone could be electrocuted but not believe in electricity. Professed belief was an insufficient agency between God and woman.
She of course wanted to accept the things her teacher insisted she must, but as long as there remained the slightest wanting on her part, surely it couldn’t be faith. True faith kept no treasure in wanting. True faith wanted nothing to make it whole; it simply was, and grace could only be called “sufficient” when the Grace of grace was present, and no one, she told her teacher, could say that grace was always present because that would make living outside of Grace impossible. And if one never lived outside Grace, one could never know the experience of living under its benevolent rule. After all, Grace was not just a word for which a meaning could always be assigned and a definition found. Grace was something real that made all the difference, something that could be experienced, and because of this it had to be admitted that it could also not be experienced, and if it was not experienced it could not be sufficient.
And as far as the Holy Trinity was concerned—this was of course a wonderful idea so long as you did not worry about the need for All to be One rather than All to be Three, but what Scripture, exactly, was it based upon?
Her teacher placed his head in his hands, looked at her through the spaces between his fingers, and called her a “bad girl.”
After leaving church, her foster parents took her home and whipped her until she bled, but this was expected, because suffering at the hand of others, she had come to believe because of many resounding examples in the Bible, was a sign of having true beliefs.
Within the month, she was taken to another foster home.
That was a long time ago, she reflected on her way back to the parsonage behind the Words Friends of Jesus Church. Now she was no longer a child and did not expect other people to share her thoughts or beliefs. It wasn’t necessary. The Holy Bible Theological Seminary had taught her that. There were hundreds of Christian denominations and all of them had different practices and different shades of belief. They talked about believing the same things, but when it came right down to it, they didn’t. Whatever unity there was came from a shared agreement to not be very specific about what those beliefs entailed. And only odd ducks, like herself, bothered to look very deeply into them.
The congregation she currently served belonged to the Society of Friends. She had known little about this denomination but studied up before coming for the interview.
Their mid-seventeenth-century founder, George Fox, had experienced the living spirit of Jesus Christ, in England. Convinced that such personal encounters constituted essential Christianity, Fox attracted a number of equally convinced followers, and they openly criticized established religious and governmental practices. They called themselves Friends and suffered appalling persecution from other Christians for their iconoclastic beliefs.
Friends came to the New World as many others, seeking religious freedom. Their numbers in Pennsylvania once comprised a majority and their views on pacifism, plain dress, alcohol abstinence, and the shunning of music and dancing were well known. William Penn had been a prominent member of the group. They worshipped in “meeting houses,” in silence, seeking direct communion with God, the males on one side of unadorned rooms, females on the other. There were no paid pastors or priests among them, as they rejected the idea of spiritual intermediaries. Each individual believer, they thought, enjoyed the same direct connection to the Deity. Their nickname, Quaker, currently used to advertise breakfast cereal, mocked the way some members’ untrained voices quavered when they delivered inspired messages to the rest of the meeting. They advocated for better treatment of mental patients and criminals, and the Society of Friends included many women who were instrumental in spreading the early faith. In later years, Friends contributed to the abolitionist movement. The Underground Railroad was believed by some to have been engineered by them.
In the late nineteenth century, the Great Awakening, also known as the holiness movement, swept across the United States in a wave of evangelical tent meetings led by charismatic, European-trained ministers. The movement owed much of its emphasis to John Wesley and profoundly influenced Quakerism. Soon, an acrimonious dispute over practice and doctrine divided the Society. Afterwards, there were many Friends congregations that to an untrained eye resembled Wesleyans, except for omitting water baptism and other rituals relating to the sacraments, which were rejected in favor of less demonstrative forms of devotion. Gone were the plain clothes and peculiar speech—replaced with collection plates, organs, pianos, and singing. In time, evangelical Friends came to depend upon the services of paid pastors and even called their local meetings “churches.” The Words Friends of Jesus Church was one of these.
Winifred Smith lived in the little parsonage behind the white church. The roof leaked and the toilet flushed with the kind of diminished enthusiasm that often precedes serious septic difficulties. She had a forced- air oil furnace with no air-conditioning, the majority of windows were painted shut, and the floors were covered with linoleum and flowered carpets. The downstairs served as office space for a copy machine, Sunday school library, donation center, and church answering machine. Even the refrigerator was best regarded as communal property, with pictures, calendars, notices, and articles held to its front and sides with magnets glued to pieces of painted, colored clay, made in Vacation Bible School. The upstairs, where Winnie actually pictured herself living, like a swallow in an attic, consisted of two small bedrooms with partial ceilings.
The majority of her congregation, gray-headed and stoop-shouldered, lived under the continuing influence of Depression-era memories. They could easily recall events—and spoke of them in earnest detail—that occurred before electricity, telephones, and interstate highways. Many had spent their entire lives (excepting, in some cases, military service) in the same geographical area, and every hill, valley, road, and building held familial volumes of association.
These frail, dignified ladies and gentlemen formed the core of her church, supporting it with near-sacrificial fervor. Though many were living on Social Security or the dwindling income from the sale of their farms, their generous giving provided the lion’s share of her salary. Their attendance at church functions bordered on fanatical, and their views on how the church should operate were tantamount to ancestral codes. As one member said during a heated business meeting, “I care more about this church than about anyone in it.” And while he possibly would have eventually conceded that the church was the people in it, he nevertheless had hit upon a significant truth.
People, Winnie discovered, related to organizations, and those institutional relationships were often more meaningful than the fleshly kind because they could be sustained over longer periods. People came and went, but the local church and its unchanging programs remained, and her duty was to uphold them.
Winnie Smith cherished her new position as guardian of traditions that were not her own, even though she feared that her acceptance was tentative, a little like the welcome extended to a poor relative. She suspected she might present something of an enigma to people whose lives rooted in family, where the first question asked in getting to know someone was not “What do you do?” but rather “Who are you related to?”
Still, she did not intend to fail.
Winnie conducted two Sunday services, one in the morning—with the largest attendance—and a less formal one in the evening. Both included announcements, a sermon, prayers, and hymn singing accompanied by Betty Orangles, an octogenarian pianist with snow-white hair, a soft pedal foot, and a narrowly construed sense of rhythm. Sunday school preceded morning worship, where Winnie taught grades two through six (three children). On Tuesday afternoons she met with the Women’s Missionary Union in the church basement, participated in a noon potluck, and helped make blankets for people needing a “touch of sympathy.” On Wednesday night she led Bible study. Thursday nights were