The Fourth of July arrived. We’d stopped celebrating American Independence after the September 11 attacks—dispositive evidence that our nation was fully and finally doomed—but we still got the day off from work. Grace and I had volunteered to spend some of ours painting the basement walls in the home of our friend Jayme, a new church member, so we changed into old clothes after the noontime pickets. We headed out into the afternoon heat, across the street, down the path of stone steps that led through the shade of my aunt’s front yard and then my brother’s, and into the dark house that sat three doors west of ours. The basement’s dim lighting felt especially depressing after the blinding sun outside. We lined the floor by the walls with garbage bags, and I poured white paint into an empty cottage cheese carton that Grace held out to me. Neither of us spoke. I connected a portable speaker to my phone—the new album by Blind Pilot, another of C.G.’s recommendations—and pressed play.
Grace had misjudged again, and she’d received an ultimatum from the elders: one more wrong move and she would be excluded from the church. This time, my sister’s crime had been failing to turn Justin in for reaching out to her. He’d used Twitter to send her a private message asking how to fix the situation his family was in. Justin and Lindsey seemed baffled by and resentful of the isolation that the church had imposed upon them—an obvious and entirely reasonable response, as I’d argued to my mother just days before. Instead of reporting Justin’s message to the elders, Grace had sent a brief response explaining that she couldn’t talk to them, and to please just talk with our parents. He’d followed up with an email, and Grace had called him to repeat the same message: Talk to my parents.
After a couple of guilt-filled days, she’d turned herself in.
The elders considered Grace’s actions depraved enough to warrant abridging the biblically mandated disciplinary process, jumping directly to the final step before exclusion. And just as with our cousin, they’d made the decision without even meeting with the rest of the church. I knew that Grace should have reported Justin without hesitation, the way the rest of us had learned to do—for they watch for your soul—but in answering her mistake with more clear violations of Scripture, the elders continued to abuse the authority of their office. I had no idea if anyone else felt the same, because addressing grievances with other members—instead of one’s elder—was not permitted.
I stared intently at the basement wall as I moved the brush over the deep purple stripes we were meant to cover. I watched the bristles leave their trails of white, but no matter how thickly I coated the brush or how many times I went over it—again and again and again—the darkness was still visible underneath. My mind spun through its familiar circuits, the same objections and doubts that had been brewing for over a year, grasping for something that would return order to the chaos. The futility of it all had been a heaviness in my mind for months, but it had taken on a physical dimension now, and it was suffocating—the dank chill of the basement and the shadows cast in the dim light and the impossible melancholy of the notes seeping out of the stereo. The weight of my arm and of the paintbrush seemed to grow with each stroke until I could hardly bring myself to lift them. An insurmountable burden.
I had never seen a member of my immediate family subjected to church discipline before, but it wasn’t special family ties that made the situation untenable. It was the fact that for the first time in my life, the accused were people I lived with and knew most intimately. I had direct, firsthand knowledge of their daily lives and habits, and I knew that the judgments leveled by the elders were wrong. They were wrong about my mother. They were wrong about my sister. And I strongly suspected they’d been wrong about my cousin, too. I could not acquiesce to their conclusions the way I’d done with so many others before. I could no longer blindly trust the judgment of these men.
My arm continued to drag the paintbrush up and down, but my pulse and thoughts were racing. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. I couldn’t