The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,21

lights on stage start to flare. In the old Quaker meetinghouse I remember from my youth, everyone sat in the round with no front or back. You stared into the faces of other people, or at the ground. Deedee’s parish faces forward, including the priest at times. He does some of whatever he does with his back to the audience, as if there were someone behind him looking down on them all. Not us. We march in and the band plays and the screen fills with soulful faces and lifted hands and swaying bodies, our own images reflected back to us, all but unconscious of the symbolism.

“Beth,” she says, seeing my eyes fixed on the screen. “Feeling sorry for yourself?”

“It’s what I do, Holly.” The on-screen service starts to come alive. “You know what? I’m going to go. I think I need it.”

“I’ll go with you, then.” She smiles. “It was a good sermon. I don’t mind hearing it again.”

We sit side by side on the extreme right edge of the auditorium, right under a suspended speaker pumping out the bass notes. A high-pitched vibration rides along with the sound. I can feel it between my teeth. Like the middle-aged woman I am, I cast my eyes back over a sea of worshippers toward the centrally located sound booth, willing them to turn the noise down. Next to me, Holly seems oblivious to it. Buttoned up as she is, Holly’s a kinetic worshipper, a side-shuffling, clap-your-hands Jesus freak the moment the music starts. She sings and closes her eyes and, if everyone else does, raises open palms to heaven. All the while I watch her from the corner of my eye, acting like she’s a bride dancing at her wedding. We are not sisters in this regard, not at all. More evidence that opposites attract.

The poison rages in me. I glance around and it all seems so fake, so false.

You’re projecting, Beth. You’re assuming the condition of your own heart is the condition of everyone else’s. I know, I know. I’m sitting in the seat of the scornful, and I’ve brought my cushion.

Up on stage, the vocalists trill into their microphones and the lights up above throb in prearranged patterns. I try to tune everything out, to make it all go away. I clear enough space in my mind so I can offer up a prayer.

Confession: I don’t pray much, not these days. Not for a long time, actually. I might offer up the random request, like my supermarket wish not to run into church people, but as far as deep, heartfelt communication, not so much. Sometimes I tell myself God and me, we’re like an old married couple, so much in sync that they don’t really have to say anything. Only I don’t know any old married couples like that. Other times I worry what this two-way silence signifies.

Nothing happened that I can remember, no telling trauma. I simply fell out of the habit. Now, when I try to pick it back up again, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m just talking to myself.

I have shared this with no one, not even Holly. Certainly not Rick.

Sometimes Rick will switch on a television preacher and watch a few minutes of snake oil. As the toll-free prayer line crawls across the screen, he chuckles at the craziness of it all, the blue-haired old ladies who sign away their life savings to men in shiny suits wearing gold nugget rings and improbable comb-overs. One of these charlatans, banging his Plexiglas pulpit on the subject of prayer, berated his audience for not letting God get a word in. “You pray and you pray and tell ’im this what you want and that what you want—but do you listen, praise Jesus? Not at all! You do all the talking, then you say God don’t listen! Brothers and sisters, are you lis’nin? That there’s the problem!”

So I heard this, and I stopped doing all the talking. I left pauses for God to fill. The pauses remained empty. I told myself I was foolish to listen to a TV preacher—but doesn’t God use the foolish things of the world to confound the wise? I mean, if he can use a Chick tract to speak to somebody, he can use anything, right? But he wasn’t speaking to me, not anymore.

I started to wonder if he ever had.

Yes, he did. It happened once, if only that. He spoke without using his voice. He spoke with his